Page 213 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

But he had punished her all the same. He’d turned her over his lap, spanking her lightly to make her laugh. Then harder, to make her moan, before he’d thrown her over the side of the bed and taken her roughly from behind.

His reward for that had been the way she’d clenched all around him, trembling wildly and crying out her pleasure. And then again, when he’d flipped her over onto her sore ass and taken her again.

That was where they’d both discovered something he’d suspected all along. That what she really liked was discipline. That second time she’d started coming and hadn’t stopped, bright red everywhere with his name in her mouth while he’d pounded into her.

His beautiful Rux.

That ache in his chest hurt all the time now. He’d stopped concerning himself with it. If it was a mortal wound, he imagined it would have killed him by now. Like everything else that had tried, he intended to best it.

He didn’t pretend not to understand her question.How long do we have?

Both of them knew that whatever they were doing here, it was all on borrowed time. That fact—the truth of who he was and who she was and what that meant to people and organizations that extended far beyond a haunted old villa in Sicily—was inescapable.

And the longer they were not discovered, the more likely it was that when they were, the price they would pay for breaking all the rules would be that much higher.

He should have known that Rux was as keenly aware of this as he was.

“Your father is searching for you and he becomes more unhinged the longer it takes without any sign of you, as it reflects badly on his ability to control his little empire,” he told her, baldly. “He has enlisted a number of unsavory individuals to aid him in his search, but while he first suspected that you ran off with one of your guards—”

“I hope I am neverthat muchof a cliché,” Rux sniffed.

“—he has now come to think that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to your disappearance.”

He felt the pattern she was tracing across his chest, found her hand, and held it fast.

“This is because you didn’t do what you said you would do, isn’t it?” When he didn’t respond, she looked up at him. “Wasn’t I meant to beg and plead? Throw myself on his mercy? Make it all very clear what was happening?”

Things she had not done because she had cast her spell on him instead.

“Perhaps because he has been left to come up with his own theories, your father is starting to make wild accusations.” Jovi shrugged, though he was not nearly as unbothered as he wanted her to think. “This alone will cause him trouble.”

Her gaze seemed to pin him in place, as if she knew precisely how bothered they both were by the reality of their situation, no matter what they chose not to say to each other during their sleepy, sunny days. “He always thinks the Russians are after him. They never are.”

“More worrying is the inevitability that his search will make its way to Sicily,” he told her quietly. “And when.”

“Surely your uncle—”

But Jovi did not want to talk about his uncle. Not yet.

So he kissed her instead. He built up that heat.

He distracted them both as best he could.

It took a few more days for him to put certain precautions into place, and to finesse a few of the more tedious, bureaucratic issues in play. It was tempting to question why he was doing such a thing in the first place when it would be infinitely easier to stop. And to do what he’d been ordered to do.

But then every time he came back to the villa, he found he lost himself more and more in Rux. And the way she came running to meet him, once—at his request—she ascertained that it was actually him. He did not like to think what would happen if someone else came by and saw her here.

Some mornings she would wake before he did and he would find her out in the garden wandering in and out of the overgrown rows, as if she was familiarizing herself with all of that green, all of that bloom. Sometimes he would find her on one of the balconies that faced the sea, looking out at the birds flying high over all that blue as if she wished she could take flight herself.

As if she’d never seen too much of the world, just the cells that had held her.

He could not think on that too much or he might find a reason to return to that ugly fortress in Prague to express his thoughts on that to Boris Ardelean directly.

Jovi had come to accept, however begrudgingly, that while he did not enjoy surrendering himself to his feelings—having only recently accepted that he possessed them—there were some things that took him over, and she was one of them.

She was all of them, if he was honest.

One evening they were out in the garden. It was a mild night, and the sea air was soft against his face as he sat beneath his favorite tree, smiling—yes, actuallysmiling—because Rux was acting out her favorite movie for him.