The Return of the Di Sione Wife

by Caitlin Crews

Anais returned to the couch and tried to get back to the work she’d been doing, the work she needed to get done tonight, but it was no use. She was too...stirred up. Too uncertain and off balance, still.

  He’s Damian’s father, a countering voice reminded her, as if she was likely to forget it. You owe Damian this, not Dario. Hammering out some kind of solution here helps him, and that’s what matters. It’s the only thing that matters.

  Anais hardly slept that night.

  She couldn’t get comfortable in her own bed. She checked on Damian more times in the night than she had since he was a newborn and she’d been terrified he might stop breathing if she relaxed her panicked vigilance even a little bit. He’d been so tiny and fragile for such a massive, lifetime responsibility and the blinding shower of love she felt every time she looked at him. She’d come to the conclusion that maybe she was the one who’d stopped breathing during those first, overwhelming months.

  She hadn’t been entirely alone, thank God. Her elderly aunt and uncle had been the only bright spot in her family tree her whole life, and nothing had changed when Anais had come here to Maui with the shards of her marriage clinging to her like broken glass. They’d taken her in without question, the way they had back when she’d been a girl, desperate to escape her warring parents for a school holiday here, a summer there. When she’d finally admitted to them that she was pregnant, they’d taken that in stride, too. They’d helped her get on her feet and figure out a way forward as the single mother she’d never planned to become. And they’d been a steadfast, dependable presence in Damian’s life since his first breath.

  Compared to some women, Anais knew, she had it good.

  She reminded herself of that the next morning, when Damian woke up in his holy terror mode, in the full fury of all his five short years. She got his things ready despite his protests, wrestled him into something resembling an appropriate outfit for school, then had to cajole and threaten and bribe him into the car for a miserable ride all the way to drop him off.

  She released him to his school with a muttered apology for unleashing a Damian in his most unreasonable and mutinous state upon them. Then she went into her law office where she was a senior associate for the single named partner and disappeared behind the mountain of paperwork on her desk. She told herself that she had no idea if she planned to go and see Dario as commanded. She told herself that repeatedly. But when her aunt called in the afternoon and asked if Damian could have one of his sleepovers at their house the way he did from time to time, it seemed like a sign.

  “A sign that you should use the night to catch up on work,” she muttered to herself, scowling at her cell phone after she tossed it back down on the nearest case file. “Not gallivant about with the dangerous past.”

  It wasn’t until she was back home that evening and finally able to clean up the evidence of Damian’s morning tantrum that she started to rethink that stance. She imagined Dario had visions of some appropriate movie child in his head, all serene smiles and quiet playtime with noninvasive toys under someone else’s cheerful supervision. That was a lovely daydream of a perfect little angel. She’d shared it herself before she’d become a mother. But it wasn’t reality and it definitely wasn’t her son.

  She found she couldn’t wait to tell Dario so—and even a guilty look at the stacks of files waiting for her on her coffee table failed to sway her. The man who she suspected had sheets of ice where his heart should have been couldn’t possibly want a child, no matter what he might have said on her doorstep. Hadn’t he said so a thousand times when they’d been together? There was no reason that should have changed in all the time since. And Damian deserved more than a father who would, sooner or later, begrudge his very existence.

  Anais had lived that bleak, miserable life. She wouldn’t condemn her own son to it. She wouldn’t.

  The front desk was expecting her when she finally made it through the last of the summer traffic down through bustling Kihei and into Wailea, then followed the unobtrusive signs into the parking area of the exclusive resort. A staff member announced that Mr. Di Sione was waiting for her in one of the resort’s private, waterfront villas and proceeded to lead her there as if one or the other of them was visiting royalty.

  Of course. Nothing but the best for Dario.

  But if she was honest, wasn’t that part of the reason she’d found him so fascinating? He’d been a shot of controlled recklessness. Bright color in the middle of her black-and-white life. He’d been raised wealthy and indulged, and then he and Dante had made their own, personal fortunes while they were still in college. It had meant neither one of them had to pay any attention to the kind of boundaries other people had no choice but to obey.

  And Anais had been feral, more or less. She’d raised herself in the crossfire of her parents’ endless wars, and she hadn’t had the slightest idea how to have fun, or fall in love, or be silly for absolutely no reason—all the things Dario had taught her.

  Taught her, then taken away, as if all those things belonged to him and had only ever been on loan to the likes of her.

  Anais got more and more furious as she walked, following the diffident staff member across one of the most stunning hotel grounds on Maui as the sun dropped toward the water, all sweeping views juxtaposed with sleek, modern designs that somehow evoked ancient Hawaii in the gathering dark—not that any of it registered. The truth was, she was lucky. She’d been an attorney for years now in one of the most beautiful places in the world. She liked her job, her clients and the life she’d built here. Practicing law was comfortable and it allowed her to take care of Damian and help out her aunt and uncle, too, when she could.

  She was damned proud of those things. This was the life she’d built all on her own. Her parents had stopped even the pretense of any obligations to her the day she’d turned eighteen. Her husband had abandoned her seven years later, right after she’d finally learned to trust him. Yes, her aunt and uncle helped her as best they could and that had been everything to her at times, but ultimately Anais had made herself by herself.

  Anais had never had Dario’s kind of money, however, and she never would. She’d spent a long time telling herself she was glad of that—that it was all the money he and Dante had made while they were still in college that had ruined him, in the end. It had made him expect too much from the world and everyone in it, as if he could make everything he looked at what he wanted it to be, simply because he wanted it that way. It had also trained him to see the very worst in people, as they schemed to get close to him and use him for their own ends.

  She’d been arrogant enough to think she was the antidote to that, but it had turned out that once a man was poisoned, that was how he stayed. Unless the man in question wanted something different for himself. Dario had pretended he had, but he hadn’t.

  In the end, he hadn’t wanted anything he’d claimed he did. Particularly not Anais.

  And for some reason the exquisite four-bedroom villa that would have been more than suitable for a king and the whole of his royal court seemed to press that fact deeper into her as she found herself knocking at his door, the staff member having long since melted away into the exultant, flowered shrubbery festooned with torches and dancing with real flames against the sunset.

  She knocked with a wide-open hand, loudly and rudely, and of course Dario didn’t rush to answer her. It gave her far too much time to stand there and think better of this. To wonder what she thought she might gain from acquiescing to his demands no matter what her reasons might have been.

  And worse, what she stood to lose.

  Nothing with Dario had ever been straightforward. They’d skipped regular dating altogether—having fallen hard into something far more intense neither one of them had dared name. Then they’d gotten married much too fast, each telling the other and maybe themselves it was a cool, rational decision based on Anais’s immigration status as a French citizen instead of that insane fire that had consumed them both in bed. Dario had told he
r very little about his family, except that his twin was the only one he truly cared about at all—and yet Dante had been openly suspicious of her from the start. She’d tried to ignore that, too swept up in her first year of law practice and the head-spinning reality of her first lover who was also the husband she didn’t dare admit she’d fallen head over heels in love with.

  Maybe it wasn’t surprising that it had taken exactly one year for it all to fall apart.

  There was nothing good to be gained by poking her fingers into those old wounds, she told herself then, scowling at the villa’s front door.

  This is for Damian, she reminded herself. She chanted it a few times, just to make sure she was listening to her own words, and knocked again. Louder.

  And this time Dario swung the door open and took her breath away.

  It only made her that much more furious with him. She kept telling herself that, too, with even less success.

  Dario wore nothing but a loose pair of linen trousers that hung low—much too low—on his lean hips and made it impossible to do anything but gape at that remarkable chest of his. She’d assured herself that he couldn’t possibly be as good-looking as she remembered, as perfectly formed, like something that ought to have been carved from marble and propped up in a museum. She’d had six years to decide she’d built him up in her head.

  She hadn’t.

  If anything, he was far, far better than she remembered, all flat planes of muscle and that ridged abdomen, smooth olive skin and a dusting of dark hair that arrowed down beneath those low-hanging, decadent trousers. Even his bare feet were gorgeous, big and inescapably male, and she hated everything about this.

  Mostly, she hated that terrible yearning that ripped through her, tearing her wide open and making it impossible to lie to herself about it. She wanted him. She’d always wanted him. That connection between them had been everything to her, for a time.

  There had never been anything as huge or powerful or all-consuming in all her life, until she’d held Damian for the first time in the hospital.

  She’d been silly enough to think that connection was what had forged the true bond between them, back then. That their marriage had been conducted for all the practical reasons they’d agreed upon in their analytical way—for Anais’s green card, because Dario had liked the idea of a lawyer in the immediate family to handle the company he and his brother ran, etc. It had all made such sense on paper.

  But the truth of it, the truth of them, had been what happened in the fire that raged between them. Always. At the slightest touch. At the ways they tore each other apart and put each other back together, night after night. The things they talked about in the cold light of day were their cover, their pretense. The nights were their truth.

  That was what she’d told herself. It was what she’d believed. What she’d felt, deep inside, in that cold place no one else had ever touched.

  Until he’d smashed it all into a million little pieces when he’d walked away from her without a backward glance.

  “I hope you didn’t undress just for me,” she said, smiling faintly at him as if she found his bare chest—truly, one of the great wonders of the world, to her way of thinking, and she hated that she still thought it—embarrassing. For him. “I wouldn’t touch you again with a ten-foot pole covered in all your wealth and status. Look what happened the last time.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “STARTING RIGHT IN with the lies?” Dario asked.

  And because she hadn’t let him into her house last night—which annoyed him a lot more than he cared to admit, and had gotten under his skin the more he’d thought about it—he blocked the doorway to his villa now. She could see how she liked it, and if there was a part of him that was ashamed at his own childishness, he ignored it.

  He ignored a whole host of unfortunate truths, many of them making themselves known physically, as he gazed at her. “Touching me was never the issue, as I think we both know.”

  She looked at him as if she pitied him, which made him want to...do all kinds of things he wouldn’t let himself do.

  Yet.

  “I was foolish and young back then,” she said in that prim voice of hers that had always, always, driven him crazy with lust and need. Today was no different, damn her. “I thought the package mattered a lot more than what was inside it. But people change.”

  “Selective memory isn’t change. It’s a lie you tell yourself.”

  “Happily, you don’t know me well enough either way.” She shrugged. If it bothered her that he hadn’t stepped aside to let her in yet, she didn’t show it. That, in turn, cranked up his irritation even higher. “I could have undergone a huge personal transformation. I could be lying through my teeth. Neither one has anything to do with the cold, hard fact of your paternity, does it?”

  Dario had woken up at eight in the morning New York time, which was six hours earlier than here in this lost corner of the world. He’d spent a couple of hours on the phone and another hour or so on his laptop, and then he’d dealt with the restless anger beating at him by going for a very long run on a dark island road that wound down to beaches made of hard, black volcanic rock. He’d greeted his first Hawaiian sunrise with a swim in the shockingly warm sea, and then he’d come back to his villa and banged out a hundred furious laps in the significantly cooler pool, just to make sure he had a handle on himself.

  Except he hadn’t.

  He’d spent the day on a series of calls and video chats with employees all over the world, and then he’d gone on a second, much harder run up into the hills, and even that hadn’t done a damn thing.

  Not when Anais appeared in front of him again.

  She looked as effortlessly sexy as she always did, and he bitterly resented it. He resented her. She’d been beautiful yesterday on that remote estate. She’d been ridiculously appealing last night in nothing but a tank top and stretchy pants that had clung to every inch of her long, shapely legs. And today it was worse.

  Much worse.

  She’d put her hair up into one of those complicated, seemingly messy buns that he’d used to love to watch her create with her clever fingers and a series of pins she shoved into the masses of her silken hair seemingly at random. She wore a deceptively simple blouse in a soft cream color that made her skin seem to glow, tucked into a pencil skirt in a warm camel shade that should have been illegal, the way it clung to her lean curves and made her look even more feminine and alluring than she already was. Some animal part of him hated the fact she walked around like this. That anyone could see her. Even the delicate red shoes that clung to her feet and wrapped around her ankles annoyed him, sleek licks of flame that anyone could lust after the way he did—and likely had.

  She looked elegant and cool and distressingly, achingly sexy. As untouchable as ever.

  And Dario wanted nothing more than to dirty her up, the way he always had. The way he had from the moment he’d first seen her, looking like a faintly irritated librarian, prim and disapproving and ridiculously gorgeous in hushed Butler Library on the Columbia University campus, where he and Dante had been making entirely too much noise one winter afternoon. He couldn’t remember what they’d been laughing about, only that someone had shushed them—and when he’d looked up, he’d seen Anais scowling at him from behind a pile of books.

  He’d had the sudden and nearly overpowering urge to mess her prim exterior up a little, get under her skin, see how straitlaced she really was. He’d wanted to peel back her winter layers and her offended expression and see what kind of woman lurked beneath.

  Something inside him, in that swirl of heat that unfurled in his gut, had whispered he already knew.

  He’d wanted to get inside her, badly. Right then and there. That longing hadn’t eased any, then or now.

  And he was aware that the urge had nothing at all to do with the child she claimed was his, and everything to do with the madness inside of him that had already claimed him once.

  “Be careful, brother,” Da
nte had said with great amusement when Dario had kept staring at Anais in that library, until she blinked and looked away, her cheeks flushing. “She’ll eat you alive.”

  Dario hadn’t liked that. His easy relationship with his twin had never been quite the same after an incident with a woman they hadn’t known they’d both been sleeping with at the same time when they were younger. They’d forgiven each other, if not the woman in question—but Dario hadn’t quite trusted Dante in the same way as he had before. It had bled over into their business. Dario had been overwhelmed back then, fighting to figure out the future of the company in that year before they sold—and he hadn’t felt that Dante had been willing to shoulder his half of the responsibility. It had made him want to punch his twin right there in the library for even looking at the same pretty girl in a way Dario didn’t like. He’d shoved it aside then, but he hadn’t forgotten it.

  Later, when Anais had packed up her things and headed out and Dario had made to follow her and chance an “accidental” meeting, his brother had outright laughed at him.

  “Don’t blame me when she ruins your whole life,” Dante had said. “Which I can pretty much guarantee she will.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Dario had shrugged on his coat. He had not punched his twin. “It’s like your own, personal perversion.”

  “A city full of women who would throw their panties at you if you smiled,” Dante had murmured, shaking his head. “They have. And yet you want to chase the one who disliked you on sight. Maybe I’m not the perverted one.”

  Dario blinked now, astounded that the memories he normally kept locked away and inaccessible had taken him over like that. He wanted to think about his brother about as much as he wanted to think about his marriage. Meaning, he didn’t. More blame he could lay at her feet, he thought furiously.

  He turned back into the villa and walked toward the kitchen area, where the hotel staff had left him a selection of fine wines. He heard her close the door behind her and follow him, those high red heels loud against the smooth floors, and he poured them both a glass. Red for him. White for her. The way it had always been, back then.