Page 48 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4
He blinked at that, thrown off-balance, and he hated that feeling the way he always did.
But it was as if she knew it, because she moved closer, or as close as she could. She pressed into him, gripping his arms.
Alceu expected that she knew that she was the only thing anchoring him to this moment. To this planet.
“I can’t understand why this is so hard for you to comprehend,” he gritted out in a low voice. “I’m trying tosaveyou, Dioni. You keep bringing up my mother—but she is the object lesson here. Do you want to end up like her?”
“What on earth makes you think that I would?” Dioni shook her head as she looked up at him. “How dare you think you could be the ruin of me. Or that you couldsaveme. I am perfectly capable of saving myself, and have done so when necessary.”
“You are misunderstanding—”
“I do not need you to be noble on my account,” she told him, and that passion was still all over her face, but she was no longer speaking in such a fiery manner. And there was that steel again, right there in her gaze. “That is not what I need from you, Alceu. What I want from you, what Ineedfrom you, is simple.”
“Dioni.Camurria.” He felt more than off-balance now. He felt as if the marble floor was melting away beneath his feet. As if there was no solid ground. As if there was nothing but this woman who had come out of nowhere and wrecked his whole world. “Nothing about you is simple.”
“Because you’re in love with me,” she told him, her gaze intent on his. She did not smile, though there was the hint of that sunshine he craved in her gaze. “Madly, wildly, impossibly in love with me. What do you think would happen if you let go of that control you hold on to so tightly? I’ll tell you thatIthink it would be the worst of all things for a Vaccaro.” Her mouth cured then, only slightly. “You might actually be happy.”
Once again, Alceu felt that wild sea tug at him. It was sensation, emotion—too many things he did not wish to name, tumbling him over and over again. Like some kind of terrible riptide, snatching him away from what he’d always thought was the safety of shore, and hurling him out into open water.
Pitiless. Merciless.
Except Dioni lifted her hand and pressed her palm to his cheek. “A fate worse than death, I know.”
“And what if I am in love with you?” he managed to get out, his voice so hoarse it felt like he was lighting himself on fire. “Don’t you realize that I can think of no greater curse for you to bear?”
And Dioni laughed.
Sunshine and blue skies. Birdsong and deep green forests. That was what she sounded like.
That was how itfelt, that laugh of hers.
Like running down the mountain as a boy,alivewith a wild joy simply because he moved so fast. Simply because hecould.
And because he had been too small, once, to know anything about his family but that. The mountain. The castle. The long, jolting drive to the sea.
That and running until his lungs nearly burst, laughing that off, then running again.
Dioni’s laugh raised the sort of dead who should never have gone to their graves. It made him want to run again, to dance. To render himself breathless and then breathe only her.
Only her. Only this.
She sobered, wiping at her eyes and smearing her makeup, not that she seemed to notice.
“Then we will have to be cursed together,” she said, catching her breath when he ran his thumb beneath one eye, then the other. “Let’s take all of your mother’s dark prophecies and all of your family’s poison, then mix them up all together and make a life out of them. You don’t have to know how to do anything, Alceu. I don’t know myself. All we have to do istry.”
“Relationships require good models, and I have none,” he told her sternly. “I’m not sure you do, either. How can we be anything but a disaster?”
“We will decide,” she said, very surely and solemnly, her gaze on his. “You and I will decide right now. We will decide that no matter what, we will work it out. There will be no more running away. There will be no more ranting on aboutresisting temptation. There will be no more misplaced nobility, or tedious lectures, or pity. We will be done with that, you and me.”
He sighed, only dimly aware that there were still people all around them. That they were still in a ballroom. That her brother and best friend were not far. But how could he care when she was still speaking to him like this? Like sheknewhow it would go.
“I think you are optimistic,” he said, still much too gruffly, and perhaps he was afraid of the things he wanted. What if that had been the trouble all along? “But what if you’re wrong?”
“Then we get to be human,” Dioni said, her voice rougher than before. “We will try, we will do our best, and if we get it wrong we will start over again.” She blew out a breath. “Do you know what I’ve been doing on my visits down to the villages?”
“Taking up fishing, I presume.”
She smiled, but her eyes told a different tale, and one that made everything in him tighten.
