Page 99 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

No. Of course she didn’t. Why should she have a need to be special? Special was... It wasn’t important. Special didn’t signify. Not if this was just a ruse. Something to help them pass the time.

“You’ve probably never been celibate before,” she said.

He chuckled. “You don’t think that I was a late bloomer?”

“Somehow no.”

“You would be wrong.” His dark eyes searched the vicinity of the table, as if he was making sure no one was eavesdropping. “I was my father’s minion, remember. My behavior was above reproach. Until it wasn’t. I stayed away from the pleasures of the flesh until I was twenty.”

That was like a small hand grenade thrown into the center of the table. She had imagined he’d been a libertine his entire life. Yet, she’d known that there were parts of him that didn’t match his exterior and this gave her a window into that which almost felt...wrong to have. Illicit in a way.

It made her mouth dry. It shouldn’t.

It was just the subject of sex. When she wanted him, no matter how she tried to pretend she didn’t.

The subject of virginity when she knew full well the status of her own.

“Wow,” she said. “I would never ever have guessed that you were a virgin until you were twenty.” She shifted in her seat, being a virgin at the ripe old age of twenty-five and feeling quite rude for calling him out for holding on to his virginity for a mere two decades.

“Twenty-one,” he said. “I didn’t immediately jump into bed with a woman in the throes of my grief.”

“And you spent all the years after making up for lost time?”

“I don’t know that I would put it that way. What I did, I suppose, is decide to be different. In every way. From what I had been before. From what my father had tried to make me.”

His eyes were dark and sharp, and they collided with hers. She felt something grow taut in her stomach, at the same time her limbs began to loosen.

She wanted him. It was outrageous. They were sitting here talking about their lives. Having a fake date that felt more real by the moment.

She shouldn’t be thinking about sex. It was a performance. But she wanted this man. This man whose father had wounded him so deeply it had scarred him forever. This man who had fashioned himself into a libertine as a form of revenge, not because it was who he was.

This man who, she had known from the beginning wasn’t what he seemed, because she had just...known.

Because she knew what it was like to have the potential for who you could have been stolen from you by life, by tragedy. Even when it wasn’t something another person did to you on purpose, she knew.

She could never know who she would have been if she hadn’t had a sick mother.

She could never know what she might have done if she’d been born into a happy, carefree life. Maybe she wouldn’t be here. Maybe she wouldn’t be a virgin at twenty-five.

But she was. And she was here.

She’d said she wouldn’t sleep with him. She’d promised her friends.

She wanted to break her promises. Because for a moment she just wanted to be Auggie. Stripped down to her deepest, most basic needs. And she wanted to have those needs satisfied.

She had stopped being careful around him that day in Barcelona. She wasn’t going to be careful now.

She was going to ask for what she wanted.

“Do you want me?” She had to know the answer to that question.

His dark eyes flickered over her. “You’re very beautiful.”

“You’ve been with a lot of beautiful women. Beautiful women that I’ve seen. More beautiful than me. So if that’s the only thing that matters...”

“You fascinate me,” he said. “And that is the very reason that I should tell you I don’t want you. I cannot afford fascination. Nor do I want it. I don’t need a woman to be special. I treat her like she’s special, and in that moment she becomes my world. But when I decide that she is no longer my world, I walk away. I create the intrigue. I do not succumb to it. You intrigue me. Without my permission. And I’m not quite sure what to do with that.”

She loved that. That she was destroying his shields in the same way he did hers. That she wasn’t alone in this.