Page 191 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8

‘Talk?’ she prompted, with a small half-smile.

His eyes bore into hers. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Charlotte, that will just be for starters. I don’t even want to think about how you might have spent the night if I hadn’t happened to be here.’

She drew in a deep breath. ‘You think I would have gone home with him?’ she asked, incensed by the assumption.

‘It sure as hell looked like that was his plan for the night.’

‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t mine,’ she huffed out. How could he even think such a thing?

‘Then you’ll have no problem with me making it very clear to him, and anyone else who might have been on your radar?’

‘Making what clear?’

‘That you’re mine, Charlotte. At least, when it comes to this, anyway.’

And before she could ask him was ‘this’ meant, he dropped his head and claimed her mouth in a kiss that was as harshly angry as it was passionately, addictively hot...

Chapter Four

Charlotte couldn’t thinkof a single time when they’d driven in silence. Usually, they at least went through the motions of making small talk, of going over one another’s days, their current projects, some acquaintance or other they had in common. Never anything too deeply personal, just surface level information that acquaintances might swap at a dinner party.

They usually ran like a well-oiled machine, until the moment they stepped inside his South Kensington home and ripped each other’s clothes off.

But this trip was deathly quiet. As if they were each holding their breath. Or maybe, in the case of Dante, trying to take back the agreement they’d just forged with the kind of kiss that would be all anyone talked about for days, because it had been so intimate and so...steamy.

Yesterday, he’d been as completely and utterly opposed to marriage as any human being possibly could be. And now? Now, he’d practically insisted on it.

She glanced across at him, her mouth going as dry as the desert as the reality of their situation slammed into her for the first time. Until then, it had been almost hypothetical. She’d been so focused on the idea of finally being able to avenge her mother, to tilt the scale of justice back in her favour, that she hadn’t really thought about what it would be like to be married.

His legs were wide set, his thighs thick and masculine. Beneath the expensive fabric of his suit trousers, they were roughened by dark hair and deeply tanned. His chest was taut and muscular, which she knew was courtesy of the martial arts training he’d done for years. He had a gym in his place equipped with all the necessary accoutrements. She’d gotten him to show her some self-defence moves one morning, but the exercise had quickly devolved into them making love on the gym floor.

Her cheeks flushed at the memory, and at that exact moment, he turned to look at her, his eyes like onyx, darkly glittering and mysterious. His face, all chiselled and angular, with that square jaw and stubbled chin, looked every bit as tautened by tension as it had back at the charity event.

‘You might want to rethink the way you’re looking at me, Charlotte.’

Her lips parted. ‘How am I looking at you?’

‘Like you want me to finish that kiss?’ He glanced at her. ‘Believe me, that’s on the agenda. But first, we need to talk about this.’

She bit into her lip. ‘What’s to talk about? We’re getting married.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, no mention of it being ‘provisional’ now. ‘But getting married, having sex, living together. That’s a lot of potential for blurred lines, which I know we are both keen to avoid—,’

‘Living together?’ she interrupted quickly. ‘That hadn’t even occurred to me.’

‘Hence the conversation we’re about to have.’

‘Right,’ she nodded, glancing at his face. ‘I mean, yeah. We could live together. Your place is big enough for us to be able to keep to ourselves.’

He nodded once. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

And she hated that. She hated acquiescing so easily to him, letting him call all the shots. Even when he was doing her a favour, she still resented his easy authority.

‘You were right, yesterday. I have my reasons for wanting this to work.’ He glanced out the window, then back at her, his lips a grim line. ‘It is imperative that my grandmother believes I have fallen in love and decided to throw myself into the whole concept of a happily ever after.’

She ignored the way something in the region of her heart clutched in response to his obvious concern for hisNonna.

‘This has to seem real,’ he said, the words almost dragged from him against his will.