Page 93 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

For some reason that made her face get hot. It should conjure up ridiculous images. Of Las Vegas and cheesy shows. But there was something about how he said it, how he looked at her when he did, that made it very clear he was talking about something else entirely.

Her body couldn’t help but respond. She hated herself then a little bit. For being so... Susceptible to him. Even while he was saying exactly what he was. Maybe that was the secret. There was no shame in him, and he was exactly what he appeared to be. Every woman who got involved with him knew exactly what she was getting. It was well-publicized.

“Is that your secret?”

“What exactly?”

“You don’t promise women anything. You are actually quite honest in some ways.”

“In a sense,” he said.

Of course, she also knew that he hid his intensity from everyone. She had seen it. It was a force. The kind that... That was the thing that could trap a woman. That intensity. When he played easy and affable, it was easy to believe that nothing else was there. That there was nothing deeper to him. That he was only the very shallow puddle he pretended to be, and that made it easy to think of him as a jungle gym that a woman could climb on and leave behind.

Not her, necessarily, but a woman. One who had experience of that kind of thing.

She had seen the intensity.

Just then, the car pulled up to his penthouse, delivering her from her thoughts. The building was beautiful, well appointed. She had been here before, but had never gone inside his residence. Just to the lobby. Which was all gold and marble elegance, ostentatious and fitting a jackdaw. A man who put brightly colored feathers over his plumage to disguise what he really was.

“You’re the Scarlet Pimpernel,” she said.

“Excuse me what?” he asked as he opened up the elevator that led to his floor.

“I was just thinking. You disguise your true nature behind a façade that allows people to underestimate you. It’s a book. About a nobleman during the French Revolution who pretended to be an empty-headed fop in order to escape detection as a man who was helping people escape the gallows. It is also a movie, one that my mother liked quite a bit. So, I can pretend that I read the book, but I didn’t.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“Yes. Essentially. It suits you to have people underestimate you, but only on your terms.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling wryly, “only on my terms.”

They arrived at the top floor, and the elevator doors opened, revealing the grand scope of his penthouse. It was filled with people. She was trying to take in the opulent details of the room, but was distracted by the crowd that immediately rushed around her. “Jewel tones, I think,” said one of the men. “Matching manicure,” said a woman.

“I think perhaps a champagne-colored diamond.”

She was being made over.

And she had no choice but to surrender.

CHAPTER SIX

MATIASTOOKHIMSELFto his study while his team went to work on Augusta. She had looked deeply irritated with the whole thing, and he thought it best to let nature—by which he meant his well-paid team of experts—take its course.

He decided to make a phone call to his father.

“Hola,”he said.“Como estas?”

“Is that you, Matias?” his father asked in Spanish.

“Si. I had wondered when we might connect again. What a shame it has to be under these conditions.”

“The conditions that you have been stealing from my company?”

“A neatly fabricated fairy tale,” Matias said.

“I do not think the information the whore sent to me is wrong.”

Matias bit back a growl of rage. “No Father, don’t hire a woman to do a job and insult her because she did it well.”