Page 102 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

Then, he could hold back no longer. He closed the distance between them, bringing his mouth down hard on hers. She whimpered. And froze. He could feel that she wasn’t an expert, but she was soft, and she tasted like magic.

Sex had long ago lost any sort of magic. He enjoyed it. But it didn’t feel like this. It never had. He could remember his first time, which he had gone about grimly. Because it was time. Because he was trying to strip off the last vestiges of what he had been. Of who he had been.

Because he was trying to learn to be the playboy. Sex for him had been a series of scourings. Of stripping back layer after layer of who he had once been, to make something new beneath it.

But this didn’t feel that way. This felt like something singular. Something real.

He could not quite fathom it.

So he kissed her. He poured everything into that kiss. All the need, all the darkness that he suspected she saw. She gasped, and he took the opportunity to take the kiss deeper, to slide his tongue against hers, and make her his.

He kissed her. Again and again.

He wanted her. He wanted this.

“I am going to take you,” he said. “Just as you demanded. But you must be very certain that it’s what you want. Because you’re right, I don’t degrade women. Unless they ask.”

Her cheeks were bright and flushed, her eyes glittering. “I don’t even know what to ask for.”

“Then I shouldn’t have you. I shouldn’t have anyone so innocent that she doesn’t even know what she wants.”

“Everyone has to start somewhere, don’t they?”

Maybe that was the magic. That she was asking him to help be the one to reform her. To shape her sexuality. To make her his. Maybe that was it.

Because for all the experience his jaded palate had tasted, this was unique.

He had never experienced this.

Not ever.

Maybe it was the novelty.

And it would wear off. But not tonight.

“Will your friends be consumed with worry if you don’t contact them?”

“I’m a grown woman. I can take care of myself.”

“Some would say that you’re perhaps doing a very bad job of it right now.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But some would say that I’m doing a very good job.”

He chuckled. “A good point.”

“After all, you have to think that sex was inherently dangerous to think that I was putting myself at risk.” He rubbed his thumb over her cheekbone. “The way that I do it can be quite dangerous.”

“I need you to show me. Otherwise I’m going to be convinced that you’re all talk.” She was so bold. She always had been. But then, he imagined that she would have to be. To build this business out of nothing. To take the sorts of chances that she and her friends had when they were so young. When she had come from nothing. It was easy to believe that it wasn’t a skill to stand in the background. Easy to convince oneself that it was the wealthy who had succeeded through their cunning and prowess, but this woman came from nothing, and had created from that so much.

Of course she was brilliant. Singular. And very, very brave.

“You don’t fear much, do you?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“No, not much,” she said.

But she was afraid of things. Of course she was, everyone was.

But there was no room for that now. And thank God.