Page 92 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

I didn’t know that about you.

You never really bothered to talk to me.

She had watched him be amusing, and witty. She had seen him be filled with a dark rage that made a sense of disquiet expand inside of her. But she had mostly been nothing to him. Nothing at all.

It was on purpose. How could it not be? But still, she realized that actually put her at a slight advantage. He didn’t know her.

She pondered that all the way to the ground floor, and then when she exited the building she saw a stark black car parked against the curb.

She opened up the door and slipped inside, and shrieked when she slid down the seat, and against his hard body.

“I didn’t know you would be in the car,” she said, jumping back like an angry cat.

“Well, that’s not going to be very convincing,” he said.

“You startled me. There was a whole human in the car I wasn’t expecting to see.”

“I gather that.”

She practically hissed and gathered herself into the corner of the car as it drove away from the curb.

“I have arranged for several stylists to come to my penthouse.”

“Oh. Do you need a makeover?”

He treated her to a grin that was a bit more to see than the one he generally showed the public. “I’m fine the way that I am.”

“Oh. So only the woman needs to be changed irrevocably to be acceptable. I thought you were supposed to be a progressive playboy.”

“If by ‘progressive’ you mean that I love and respect women, then I suppose I am.”

“Many people would argue that a man who is as promiscuous as you are doesn’t respect women.”

“That would only be true if you find sex inherently disrespectful. I believe that using another person for sex can be disrespectful. I believe that a man who acts as a selfish lover, who sees the woman that he’s in bed with as less than him, or as someone worthy of contempt because she has chosen to sleep with him, is a man who ought to be hanged.”

“Strong words,” she said.

“It contributes to that great, unsolvable problem created in the world by men, does it not?”

“Explain,” she said.

“Men want women to be sexually available. Yet judge them when they are. I have always found the standards of men to be unfair in that regard. And I have certainly never sought to perpetuate that sort of behavior.”

“An activist.”

“You said it, not me.”

“Your father was that sort of man,” she said, understanding then.

“Yes, he was. An exacting set of standards for others that he did not hold himself to. A hypocrite. I have no patience for hypocrites, Augusta. My sister was cruelly treated by a society that hates a rebellious woman. Who sees a spark of defiance in them is something to be crushed, not cultivated. What was a strength in me that could be reframed, was seen as a portent in her. I am a great many things, I have committed a number of sins in the pursuit of revenge against my father, and I have no doubt that I will commit innumerable sins more. But I don’t hurt women. I do not hold myself to different standards than I would anyone else.”

“And yet I’m the one getting the makeover,” she said, though not quite so sharply as she might have, because the mention of his sister gouged her a bit.

“I already had mine. I think perhaps you don’t understand exactly what I was back then. I might well have worn my suit as a military uniform. I was barely able to smile, let alone tell a joke. I could no more have amused a companion with a witty story than I could have pulled a rabbit out of the hat. I can do both, now, incidentally.”

“Cheap magic tricks?”

“Sleight-of-hand can be useful for many things.”