Page 151 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

He thought memories made the most sense, especially considering his two-year isolation from exactly that, drowning memories of his family and his loss in physical labor. But it was not the same kind of active pain that being around Amelia —and from keeping his hands to himself.

He deserved that pain, that suffering. The active kind. The kind that reminded him exactly what kind of man he was. How little he deserved to be alive. He should be seeking out real punishment because she had not been fully wrong. Some of his punishments had been weakness hidden under the guise of pain.

So he moved through the house, ghosts of every Christmas season he’d ever spent here as a child in every nook and cranny, and then found her in the kitchen.

She was at the oven, her back to him. She wore a silky skirt that clung to the curve of her ass, flirting there at her knees. Her sweater was the color of the Christmas bows that seemed to be everywhere in this damn house. Christmas music swelled softly from somewhere, but his eyes were transfixed onher.

She moved gracefully, humming, her honeyed-blond hair pulled back and swaying with every move. And then he watched as she bent over, carefully placing a pan inside the oven, the skirt stretching over the sweet shape of her, filling him up with a sharp and potent andinstantbolt of lust. Lurid andwrong.

But he could picture it so easily. Having her. It would only take moving over to her. Whispering a few words meant to entice, a few well-placed caresses. He had already seen her reaction to him, perhaps as effortless and violently organic as his own. It would take no time at all to seduce her, lifting up her skirt, finding her wet and willing, and sliding home. He would have her writhing in pleasure, begging him for release in seconds.

He stood at the entrance to the kitchen, hard and pulsing, trying to get a handle on some center point of himself that knew this was wrong.

His body was simply reacting to a lack. Foryearshe’d glutted himself whenever he’d wished. Then he’d cut it off completely. For two years. Swearing off pleasure was simple enough, or close to it, when you removed all temptation. But refusing temptation was the true punishment.

He should thank her for this opportunity, because little up in that cabin had been as physically torturous asthis.

She turned then, and clearly could not read the electricity in the room or the pained denial in him.

“Oh, you’ve finally appeared. Fantastic.” She smiled at him with a kind of cheerful welcome that wound around all the sharp edges of sexual need inside him and warmed. Making all those feelings far more complex than they had any right to be.

“We are baking cookies,” she announced.

We.

He took in the kitchen. Pans and bowls and little jars full of colorful things. Baking cookies? What on earth was she on about? “No. It appearsyouare baking cookies.”

“Well, then you could watch me do it. Would you like to help decorate them? Maybe you’d like to be the official taste tester.”

Nothing she was saying or doing made sense. She was all but infantilizing him. Suggesting he decorate and taste cookies? It left him with only automatic rejections, even if he’d meant to be more open to all the different types of pain she could inflict.

“No, I would not. If this is some strange show-me-my-childhood attempt, you’ll find my mother did notbake, nor did anyone expect us to be in the kitchen fiddling with sugar.”

“Well, that is a shame. Because my mother always had me make Christmas cookies with her, and it’s one of my fondest Christmas memories.”

“Yet neither are here, are they?” It was a cold kind of statement. The type he was used to making in his own mind to remind himself of what damage he was responsible for.

Amelia did not deserve the same, but it was such habit that it had simply fallen out of his mouth. Hung there between them like a wound that needed tending.

But men like him deserved no tending.

And Amelia didn’t look hurt or harmed. She studied him, head cocked, as if he were a strange specimen. As if, should she look deep and hard enough, she’d unearth all those wounds inside of him and tend them against his will.

“My mother is dead, yes,” Amelia agreed. The words were simple and matter-of-fact, but tinged with a kind of empathetic warmth he had yet to figure out what to do with.

“As is yours. We’ve dealt with our grief in opposite ways, I think. I have no wish to forget my mother, punish myself for her absence. Instead, I wish to remember her and honor what she was to me. So when I do the things we did together, she feels near. That is both sad, I suppose, but more a great comfort. Because I cannot bring her back from death, of course. It’s the closest I can come though.”

The idea of comfort made him recoil. This idea that grief could have two sides to it. Pain and comfort. Happiness and sadness.

That was a luxury for the guilt-free, he supposed. “You make no sense.”

“Do I not make sense, or do you simply refuse to see the sense I make?” She shrugged as if the answer made no difference to her. “Guilt is quite the crutch you’ve built for yourself. I have no such crutches.”

For a moment, he could not form a word or a thought. It was now the second day in a row she’d cut him straight through with some kind of accusation that didn’t feel like one. Her accusations felt like observations.

Observations that twisted everything he thought he’d been doing into a question. When he knew…he knew what he was doing was right. Maybe sometimes he faltered at choosing the best punishment, sometimes he fell into habits that were no longer painful enough, but punishment was what he deserved.

“You consider my guilt a crutch?” he demanded. Suffering and penance…acrutch?