Page 207 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

I didn’t tell him that, either. I held it as close to me as he was holding me.

I breathed out and let myself…melt into him.

He held me there as the birds called to each other up above us and the sun fell into patterns of light through the tree’s leaves. I could feel his heart beating, as if it was a part of me. I could feel mine doing its best to match his rhythm.

For a few moments it felt as if we were one. The very same person.

My trousers floated over his hard thighs, tugged back and forth by that sea breeze. I could feel his cock against my back, nestled in tight between us. I could feel the heat we made and the warmth of the sun. I could smell the rich, deep green of the tangled garden behind us.

I had never felt like this before. I searched for the right word and when I found it, my heart seemed to stutter.

Content.

Even though, something in me understood thatcontentmentwas a mirage. This was Sicily. The men who wanted me dead as a lesson to my father lived here. There was nothing about my presence here that wasn’t poised on the edge of a knife.

I blew out a shaky breath. “This is a beautiful house.” I tried to focus on the sprawling old building that rose up before us and preened in the light without a care for how its cracks showed. Or how the creeping vines that had spread all over one of its walls looked like they might actually tear it down. On the one hand, I thought these details made it even more magnificent.

But then I thought about all those rooms I’d wandered through, filled with only light. “Though it looks…lonely, don’t you think?”

I could feel his body tense, if only slightly, below mine.

“This is nothing more than a graveyard,” he replied, shortly. But he didn’t put me off him. He didn’t let go. If anything, I thought he held me a little bit tighter.

I wished that I could see his face when he’d said that.A graveyard.I wondered if he meant that literally, and I was happy that he couldn’t see my expression as I doubted that I was keeping it under control.

But I was certain that if I asked him too many questions, he would tell me even less.

I bit my tongue, and I felt him shift—slightly—beneath me. “After the consequences for my family were carried out, I went to live in my uncle’s house.”

He said that with no inflection. As if the consequences that were carried out were practical and acceptable. But if that was the case, there would have been no need for him to live with someone else. It didn’t take any particular, deep insight to understand that what had happened here had been terrible. Brutal.

I suspected that when he said this was a graveyard, he meant it. But I still didn’t speak.

“This house stood unattended for a long time,” Jovi told me, quietly. Almost as if he was talking aloud to himself. “No one would dare loot it, given its connection to my uncle, but it became kind of ghost story in its own right.Come to the villa, see if you can spend the night, that sort of thing.”

“There are ghosts here,” I said softly. “That’s clear.”

“There are ghosts,” he agreed, and he sounded…not exactlyhappyabout that. Resigned, maybe. “And I know all their names.”

“Jovi…” I whispered.

“They came in the night,” he said, his voice a low ribbon of sound, almost a ghost itself. “They wanted it to be terrifying, like a nightmare, and it was.” I could feel some kind of tremor go through him. “You know how these things go. There are prices for betrayal. My parents paid. My sisters paid.” I could have sworn I heard a catch in his voice then, but I couldn’t look back to see any evidence of it on his face. “I paid in a different way.”

“Are you still paying?” I whispered.

“I will pay until the day I die,” he told me, in that same resigned voice he used before.

It broke my heart.

But he still didn’t let me turn around. He held me against him and even put his chin on the top of my head. And I felt certain that I was not the only one basking in what felt like the only bit of tenderness I’d ever known. Something almost healing.

As long as I didn’t look him the eye, I thought that maybe it could last forever. Maybe this beautiful day would turn into always, like dreams always seemed to do.

I didn’t pinch myself, because I didn’t have to. I knew it was real.

I also knew better than to believe inalways.

“The first two years at my uncle’s house were an adjustment,” Jovi continued after a while. “But adjusting was what was required of me, so I did it. And when I came of age, he gave me this house and all its contents. Everything my family had left behind. I sold it all off, as fast as I could.”