Page 200 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

His eyes were still dark, but I imagined that I could read them better now. There was that intensity that I assumed was simplyhim. But there was more now. Something else that I very much wanted to call…care, maybe?Affectionseemed like an overreach. And yet.

“Must I?” I asked, because I didn’t feel like I had anything even faintly resembling an appetite—

Yet the moment I thought that, I was suddenly aware that my stomach felt hollow. That I wasn’t simply hungry, I wasfamished.

“You must,” he said shortly.

He switched off his tablet and set it down. He turned, and as I watched with a sort of astonishment that made every beat of my heart feel jarring and strange, he began to pull food out of the refrigerator. Not food,ingredients.

And then, with only a fulminating glance in my direction, he proceeded to prepare me a meal.

Eggs with vegetables and meat. A bit of a salad. Fruit.

When he was finished, he slid the plate across the counter, and pointed at the seat in front of it that he wished me to take.

I was still standing there at the door to the bedroom in my half-opened pajama top, staring at this man I knew to be perhaps the scariest on earth.

Who had just prepared me a cheerful-looking brunch, from scratch.

“What if I don’t like eggs?” I asked, and I didn’t even know where the question came from, because I liked eggs just fine.

In any case, he only lifted a brow. “I did not ask what you liked. I told you to eat. I cannot have you fainting away, Rux.”

“Is this like fattening up the calf for slaughter?”

But even as I asked that, my stomach was grumbling. I moved over to the counter, took the seat he indicated I should, and tried my level best not to fall upon the meal he’d made me like a wild animal.

“I will almost certainly kill you tomorrow,” he said, almost offhandedly. The way he had once already. “But in the meantime,baggiana, I have a lot of extremely physical demands I intend to make of you. You will need to keep up your strength.”

I froze, my fork halfway to my mouth. “What do you mean byextremely physical demands?”

I cautioned myself that he could mean something unpleasant. But my entire body was certain he meant something deeply pleasant indeed.

He jutted his chin toward my plate. “Eat, Rux. Now.”

So I did the only thing I could in a situation like this.

I ate.

When I was done, I went to wash my plate but he took it from me. He waved me away, and even though I suspected that he would have preferred it if I stood there quietly and waited for his next command, I couldn’t do it.

“Why do you know how to cook?” I asked.

He wasn’t looking at me, and still I could see affront all over his body. Along with scars and smooth muscle on his sculpted back. “What kind of question is this? I am Sicilian.”

“I was under the impression that most Italian men—”

“I am Sicilian,” he corrected me, with an edge in his voice. But when he turned to face me, I could see that his eyes were gleaming in that way that I was pretty sure was his version of laughter. “I am only Italian second, and under duress, you understand.”

“I thought most men from your region had a collection of grandmothers to do all the cooking for them. Or mothers, in a pinch.”

“There are always women to cook meals,” he said, but there was something about the way he said it that made me frown at him. He shrugged. “My mother died a long time ago and my grandmother only cooks sometimes, these days. There are many other women in my family, and it is true that they can also do these things, and they do. But I am not always in Sicily. And when I am not, I prefer to cook for myself.”

I considered that. “Well. You’re very good at it.”

“Do you know how to cook?” he asked me.

I laughed. “Boris Ardelean’s only child, no better than a kitchen drudge? Certainly not. My father believes that common domestic tasks are below him, and therefore, below me. Though, confusingly, he also believes that a woman’s role is to be silent and decorative and obedient. Just as long as her hands are soft and she remains appropriately slender and docile at all times, he thinks this is the epitome of all that is classy.”