Page 203 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Instead, he moved me so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed and I was kneeling before him, deliciously caged between his legs.

“I’ve never done this before,” I whispered, my hands trembling as I held myself up with my palms on his thighs.

Something dark and fierce moved over his face then, and took root.

“You remember what I did to you last night,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. It was a demand, I realized. He wanted me to remember exactly what he had done. In detail. And so I did.

And as I did, I could feel myself ripen. I could feel that soft heat take me over as if he was licking into me all over again.

“It’s the same idea,” he told me. “Less a dish of ice cream, more a cone.”

I set myself to the task happily. I slid my hands up, reached into his boxer briefs, and pulled all of him out.

And he was beautiful. He made my mouth water. Everything about him was thick and long, hard and big.

So astonishingly big that I was intimidated.

But I thought about ice cream cones, and how a person didn’t go shoving the whole thing in her mouth at once.

So I started the way I would approach a cone. As if I was at a seaside, where I always imagined the best ice cream cones would be sampled, not that I’d ever seen the sea.

I licked my way over the tip first, humming a little as I went because he tasted so good.

He tasted like heat and our own wildfire. He tasted exactly as a man should, and though I had nothing to compare it to, I was confident no man alive could possibly taste better than he did. Just as no man was as beautiful.

I was enjoying myself, but the more attuned I became to his responses, the better I got. When I sucked him into my mouth, he groaned. When I wrapped my hands around the base of his shaft and took him as deep as I could into my mouth, he began muttering a string of filthy Sicilian curse words that I did not require translation to understand.

He let me play and experiment and what I got in return were the sounds he made, the way he dug his fists into my hair, and that molten heat between my own legs that had me squirming where I knelt.

And then, at a certain point, everything shifted. He sat up straighter and took his hands out of my hair so that he could grip the sides of my head instead, and that easily, that quickly, he changed everything.

He took control.

I could feel my whole body surrender to his mastery as he slid himself in and out of my mouth, using me as he would, making me soar.

I could feel a trembling start deep down inside me, and it almost felt like grief, because I wanted so badly to concentrate on him. To make this all about him, the way it had been all about me before.

But there was no helping it. It was out of my control, like everything else.

And this was what sent me skyrocketing over the edge.

I squeezed my thighs together and began to rock myself and his thrusts were a little bit harder. He went a little bit deeper.

And then, as I broke into pieces, I tasted the flood of him on my tongue—a deep salt heat.

I drank down every drop. I shattered while I did it.

And for a long time, we stayed like that. Me, spent, still on my knees with my face on his thigh. Jovi sat on the bed, propping himself up with one hand, as he played with my hair, my cheek. As he murmured things I wasn’t sure he even knew he was saying.

“We cannot stay in Prague,” he told me after some while, his voice gritty.

My eyes were closed and I was still trying to catch my breath, but the import of his words hit me. Hard.

Ifwewere leaving Prague, that meant he didn’t intend to kill me in this house.

It meant that things had changed.