Page 81 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

“I’m listening.”

“What would be the biggest thing. The biggest thing...”

She turned to him suddenly. “You have to get married.”

He stared at her for a moment, long and hard. “You’re right, Augusta. I have to get married. And I think I should marry you.”

CHAPTER THREE

FORTHEFIRSTtime Matias realized that he might have taken this too far.

He could have ruined his father in a variety of ways. He had decided to do it with a smile on his face. Because one thing Javier Balcazar had been very clear on when he was in the process of trying to bend his children to his will, was that you had to be ruthless to be successful.

You could not be kind. You could not give love. You could not receive love. You had to show no weakness, no happiness, no zeal for life.

So when Matias had made the decision that he was going to start a business competing with his own father and ultimately, absorb his father’s company, he’d made the decision to cultivate a public persona that was opposite to Javier in every way.

To prove he was, and always had been, wrong in every way.

That he was cruel because he liked it, not because he had to be.

That he could have been a good father if he weren’t a bad man.

Matias had thought that he was playing a game with his playboy persona. He had been certain of it, in fact. Auggie might call him the Pitbull, but he felt more accurately, biblically, even, he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Innocent until proven otherwise.

But he had gotten to the point where he had let his guard down, where he had lost himself so much behind the polished veneer of playboy that he had made the sort of miscalculation that meant he had allowed someone to gain access to information about him, then he had retreated further beyond the veil than he had imagined.

The path was set. He had walked it for so long he didn’t have to think about the destination.

Maybe that was the problem. This life, building wealth, acting like nothing mattered, taking a new woman to bed nearly every night, it was its own all-consuming endeavor. He never paused to think, because he never had to. He had, in the beginning. He had decided, after Seraphina’s funeral that he would be everything his father had never been. That he would take his father’s hallowed name and twist it into something different. That he would style himself as an entirely new man, and that he would exceed his father’s success by more money, and more notoriety than the other man could ever fathom. He had never stolen from him. He had never needed to. Whatever Charmaine had found... It wasn’t what she thought it was.

But he supposed that didn’t matter. Public perception was what mattered.

His legacy was what mattered. Not in the way his father saw it, no, quite the opposite. What he wanted was to prove the old man useless, obsolete. His methods an exercise in pointless cruelty, and if he or anyone else believed that he had achieved his success by stealing from a man he despised he would feel like a victory had been handed to Javier.

He would not allow it.

“Me?”

He looked at Augusta. She had been his assistant, his flight attendant, for the past three months. She had practiced utmost discretion in all things. He practically lived on his jet, and the person who attended him there was the one that he saw most of anyone in his life.

She was beautiful, but in an almost nondescript way. Though, this morning, there was something different about her.

Perhaps it was the high color on her cheeks, the way that she was breathing hard. Perhaps it was that her long brown hair was loose around her shoulders, and wild from her running up the driveway.

Perhaps it was that she had no makeup on. Usually, she had a full face of it, very natural, but very polished.

There was something intimate about seeing her like this. He imagined not many did.

That was unimportant.

Her beauty was secondary to everything else. Though, he did feel that if he was going to show up with a random fiancée, she had to be believably beautiful.

Also, he had spent so much time with her over the last three months, and that was well documented.

There would of course, be women who tried to sell stories of him sleeping with them on the plane. There was nothing he could do about that. He didn’t ask women to sign NDAs. Often, his treatment of them earned him respect even after they parted.