Page 192 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

It didn’t take a genius to put these things together and come up with the implacable presence of a man made of stone in my bedroom.

Not to mention, I knew my father well enough to suspect that, as usual, he believed that he was the smartest man around.

Based on nothing more than his belief that he ought to have been.

I sat there with all these facts and puzzle pieces spinning around and around inside me, and I could feel the urge to react emotionally. To let that churning in my stomach turn into something far more precarious and nauseous, and let that tip over into the sort of sob that might blow out the walls—

But I didn’t.

I breathed myself calm again, which was pretty much my superpower. Growing up the way I did, controlling my own reactions was often the only thing I had to hold on to in any given bad situation.

As I got older, I recognized it for the armor it was, too.

I decided I could use a little of both, here in the middle of my very first kidnapping. The one that might very well turn into my very first—

Well. I didn’t really want to think about that.

If this was all the life I had left, I wanted to focus on living it.

Right now that meant my breath. It meant keeping my hands from going to sleep. It meant moving just enough to keep my muscles happy. It meant letting the silent room soothe me.

And it did, though I suspected that wasn’t the point of it. Some people spent their whole lives running away from the thoughts in their own heads, and for them, I’d bet sitting in an empty room with nothing but the quiet would drive them mad.

I could tell that this room had been built to contain noise and let nothing in from the outside. I decided that meant that it had been made to be some kind of a media room. Because I didn’t want to think what other sorts of rooms people built like this, with no windows save that one in the bathroom, but I was pretty sure wouldn’t have budged even if I’d had a sledgehammer.

I sat. I breathed. At first, I tried to recite the long prayers we’d been forced to memorize at the convent, because I knew exactly how long each one of them took. But I grew bored with that, because I kept getting distracted by the memory of kissing Jovi. By the whole of this night and all of those moments that should have been awful, but hadn’t been.

I decided, then and there, that there was no point in asking myself what was wrong with me.

The answer was nothing.

All things considered, I thought that I was stunningly healthy in the middle of what could best be described as a deeply unhealthy situation, none of it of my own making.

And I was considering how best to congratulate myself on all that robust mental health when the door opened.

I wanted to say something flippant about the room itself. How the silence was so intense it seemed more like humidity, pressing in against every nook and cranny of my skin, until I was certain I could feel it like a touch.

But something in the way Jovi was frowning at me as he strode toward me, no longer wearing his suit coat, stopped me.

It was so forbidding.

It was also, I fear,hot.

It made everything in me…humitself to life again, if I was honest.

I said nothing as he came and stood before me, not even when he seemed to take too long gazing down at me, as if he was memorizing my face. As if he needed to memorize it, because—

When he reached out his hands, I ordered myself not to flinch. I didn’t.

But no flinching was necessary anyway, because all he did was unlock my wrists from those cuffs.

And just like out there in the garage, he stood there for a moment and massaged them, one and then the next. Making certain that all the blood came back and was moving properly.

I knew that in my books, they called itaftercare.

But I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and opted not to tell him that.

Jovi studied my face. When he muttered something under his breath, some kind of curse, I wondered what he saw.