She regarded him from across the table now, watching the way the light from the flickering torch flames caressed his beautiful face and made him seem that much more like the many dreams she’d had all these lonely years. That much more the man she’d begun to think she’d made up from the start.
They’d talked about everything and nothing over their meal. She’d talked about Damian—who he was, funny things he did, the sort of stories that highlighted what a delightful little kid she thought he was, most of the time. Dario had talked about the work that clearly consumed his life, in a way that made it clear he was doing exactly what he should. He’d asked her about practicing law and how she enjoyed it all these years into it. She’d asked how he liked becoming so well-known in his own right, having nothing to do with his family. They talked as easily as they ever had, in and around all the submerged rocks and treacherous undercurrents that lurked between them, dancing over the surface of things instead of slamming into the obstacles.
It was all real enough, she supposed. Even...nice. It was lulling her into what she knew damn well was a false sense of security. What she didn’t know was what she could do to make her traitorous heart pay attention to warning signs and potential alarms when all it saw—all it wanted to see—was the only man she’d ever loved here with her at last, treating her the way he had when she’d imagined he might love her back.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked softly.
“Eating dinner?” He leaned back in his own chair. “I try to do it at least once an evening. It’s an odd personality quirk of mine.”
“No.” And it terrified her how much—how strongly—she didn’t want to do this just then. How terribly she wanted to simply drift off into this fantasy world where there was nothing but faint Hawaiian music on the sweet night air and where Dario, still her husband, looked at her as if he’d never hated her and never could. As if the six years of separation had been the dream, not what had preceded it. “You know what I mean.”
He didn’t answer. He stood instead, smoothing a hand over the front of his soft black shirt, and Anais’s heart sank. She’d ruined it, hadn’t she? Would it have really mattered all that much if she’d let this keep on going for another few minutes? An hour? If she’d let herself bask in this no matter how much of a dream it was? Who would it have hurt?
But she already knew the answer to that question. Not Damian—she’d protect him with her last breath. Only her.
Only and ever her.
And yet there was something about the sweet night air that made her imagine she could take it. That a few stolen moments with Dario would be worth whatever pain followed.
Dario stood beside her chair and she braced herself for him to say something hideous and cutting, to slap them both back down to that place they’d been in earlier. His face looked harder than before, no trace of that laughter of his that still split the night open with its rough joy and was clearly where Damian’s came from, but she made herself hold his gaze no matter how difficult it was. She owed herself at least that much.
His hard, beautiful mouth moved as if he meant to speak, but he didn’t. Instead, he held out his hand.
And Anais knew better. Of course she knew better. She’d been a single mother all this time, while he’d been off building empires and never looking back at all to see what destruction he’d left in his wake. She could have recited the reasons why this—any more time spent with him, especially time spent touching—was a terrible idea the same way she could rattle off pertinent case law when necessary at work.
Here, now, none of that seemed to matter.
Nothing seemed to matter except the way he looked at her over his outstretched hand, as if he’d command her to take it if he could but was instead waiting for her to do what he wanted because, deep down, he knew she wanted it, too. She had the strangest feeling he knew exactly what battles she waged inside her head.
And worse, she thought he could see straight through her and deep into her chest, where her poor, battered heart felt swollen and broken at once, all over again—as if this was all something new, these things he conjured up in her.
Anais took a deep, shuddering breath, and then couldn’t seem to keep herself from slipping her hand into his.
She didn’t gasp out loud at the instant electric surge, at that hot touch as his hard fingers curled around hers, but she thought he felt the jolt of it as it seared through her. He tugged her to her feet and she went to him willingly, and for a moment they stood there with barely a whisper of the sultry summer air between them.
Her shoes were high enough to put her almost at eye level with him, and that made her veins thrum with something that was half music, half delight. His blue eyes looked much too dark, especially when they dropped to her mouth, and she felt that same wild current in him, too, lighting her up from the place their hands were clasped together.
Dario stepped back, though he kept hold of her hand. There was a rueful curve to his mouth and a hard hunger in his gaze, and then he started to walk, pulling her along with him so she fit there at his side.
It took Anais much too long to realize they were weaving their way through the tables of the restaurant she’d forgotten was there. She felt as if she was walking through a dream, or as if the only real thing in the world was the way his fingers held hers tight and their palms touched. As if everything she’d ever felt about this man was boiled down into that tiny little touch, almost innocuous, and yet...not. At all.
The band kicked into a typical Elvis cover, syrupy and deeply Hawaiian, and Dario stopped walking when he reached the line of high palms that rustled there on the outskirts of the restaurant. The singer spoke of wise men and fools, and as Dario tugged her around to face him, Anais knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was very much the latter.
“I can’t help it, either,” he said in a low voice as he took her in his arms, and it took her a moment to realize he was responding to the famous song, not the words she didn’t think she’d said out loud. “I’ve never been able to help myself when it came to you, Anais.”
And it would have taken a far colder and harder woman than she was to pull away from him then. She didn’t even try. Anais had never been the glacier she thought she should have been with him, not even all those years ago when she’d known she should have resisted him and hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she had it in her.
Certainly not when Dario was so close to her in the late-summer dark, his strong arms closing around her as he pulled her flush against him.
It was the middle of the night, she told herself, and she was pretending to be the kind of woman who had dinner with a man like him at all, much less at a stunning resort like this, and who cared if she’d actually married him in a different life? Those quick, painfully bright and deeply hurtful years seemed as if they’d happened to someone else. Surely nothing that happened in the lush dark here, on an island tucked away in the Pacific Ocean so many miles from anywhere, counted.
And she’d been alone so long. So deeply, profoundly alone. Before her marriage and after it. She’d been strong and she’d been brave. Too damned much of both, because she’d had to be to survive her childhood, her lonely early adulthood, the end of her marriage and her new role as Damian’s mother and sole source of support. Her whole life had been a series of had to be.
Anais wasn’t an idiot. This man had abandoned her. The likelihood was he’d do it again, probably before dawn. But she wasn’t the naive creature she’d been back then, so shocked and destroyed when he’d turned on her, and the only good thing about that was that he wasn’t likely to surprise her with that kind of betrayal a second time.
She didn’t have to trust him to want him.
And she’d always wanted him. He was the only man who had ever touched her, the only man she’d ever let close to her, the only person she’d ever let inside. No matter how many dates her aunt and uncle and well-meaning friends had sent her on, no matter how many nice men had said nice things to her, no ma
tter how many times she’d told herself that she wasn’t really married despite the fact she also wasn’t divorced—she’d never been able to bring herself to let another man close. She’d never let them know her at all, much less put their hands on her.
She missed it. She missed him.
He’s still your husband, a dangerous voice inside of her whispered, as seductive as the whole of this long, perfect evening. Whatever else happened between you, you loved him once. Maybe he loved you, too. Maybe nothing else matters but that.
So she swayed closer to him and told herself it didn’t matter what happened later. Tomorrow, two weeks from now, whenever. Nothing mattered but this. Here, now, where nobody could see them and no one would know.
She was so tired of being so alone. Maybe that made her weak. She decided she didn’t care what it made her. Not when he could make it all go away.
He could. She knew he could. He’d made whole cities disappear with a laugh, the whole world with a kiss. He was far more magical than he deserved to be. She just wanted to taste a little of that oblivion again.
Hell, she’d earned it, hadn’t she?
Anais reached up and wound her arms around Dario’s neck, angling herself against him. His hands moved up and down the length of her spine in a lazy rhythm, tracing her. Relearning her. Sending a wild heat spiraling all through her until it pooled between her legs, a swollen, delirious ache.
And she was the one who lifted herself up and pressed her mouth to his.
She kissed him with all those dreams she’d kept pent up inside her across so many long years. She poured all the rants she’d aimed at her reflection instead of to him into it, all the tears and the fear and the loss. She kissed him with her broken heart and her new mother’s terror. She kissed him and she kissed him, lonely and resolute, as strong as she was afraid, two sides of the same coin.
Finally, all these years later, she kissed Dario goodbye.
And he let her.
He slipped a hand around to the nape of her neck and he met her, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, what this was.
Anais was shaking. That might have been a tear that scraped its way down her cheek. She didn’t care. This was a bloodletting. A ritual of loss and leaving, six years overdue.
And when she was finished, she pulled back, not exactly meaning to rest her forehead against his as she gasped for breath. But she didn’t pull away when she realized she was doing it.
“Better?” he asked in a rough voice that hardly sounded like his.
It didn’t occur to her to tell him anything but the truth, as if the Hawaiian night that brushed against her skin was its own kind of confessional. “No. Not really.”
“Good.” A small laugh, entirely male, snaked its way down her spine and made her shiver. “My turn.”
And then he hauled her mouth back to his, and took control.
* * *
Dario should have felt triumph wash over him. He should have been wild with his victory, with a sense of accomplishment. He’d set out to seduce his errant wife and he’d done it.
But all he could concentrate on was the taste of her mouth beneath his, and better, the way she pressed her sweet body against his. Her breasts underneath that soft cream silk were like torture against his chest. Her arms were around his neck as she arched into him and it still wasn’t close enough.
He couldn’t get close enough no matter how he kissed her, and he couldn’t pretend what he was feeling then had anything to do with revenge.
Dario shoved that unnerving truth aside and threw himself straight into the lightning storm instead.
He took her mouth with a ruthlessness that might have concerned him if he’d let himself consider it too closely, but he was lost in the storm. The electric burst of sensation between them. There was nothing but this slick perfection, the tangle of her tongue with his, the sensation of Anais in his arms again at last. It didn’t matter why or how or what needed to happen next.
It only mattered that he possess her, totally. Now.
Forever, some traitorous part of him whispered.
Before he lost her all over again.
He didn’t know how he managed to pull his mouth from hers when it was the last thing he wanted. He hardly heard the band as they rolled easily into another song. He barely knew where they were and he didn’t much care. He only knew he needed her naked and that no matter how accommodating the resort had been so far, they’d likely take a dim view of it if he stripped her here and lost himself in her against the nearest palm tree.
Which meant they needed to go somewhere else.
Immediately.
Dario swept her up and into his arms without a second thought. He begrudged every step he took as he held her high against his chest and strode down the path toward his villa. Every second that he wasn’t deep inside her, braced above her, wrapped around her the way he ought to be, was torture. The weight of her against him wasn’t enough. The way she looped her arm around his neck was little more than a tease. The way she tipped back her head to watch him with that solemn expression that did nothing to hide the stark, unmistakable need in her gaze made the hunger inside of him threaten to take him to his knees.
It wasn’t until he’d shouldered his way back into his villa, striding across the living room and into the sprawling master suite, that he faced the fact that he wasn’t acting according to his hastily hammered out plan at all. This was no deliberate seduction, designed to tear her into a thousand pieces and leave her inert and destroyed and unable to lift a finger to stop what happened afterward. This was mutually assured destruction, and he had no idea what the hell he was doing.
He knew he should back off. Stop this right now. He set her down on her sleek red shoes at the foot of his platform bed and forced himself to let go of her. This was the perfect moment to rethink. Regroup. He wasn’t in control here and that was unacceptable.
But he couldn’t seem to care about that.
Because all these long years after he’d given up imagining any way it could ever happen again, Anais was standing there before him. Her smooth perfection was once again marred by his own hands, and he was so hard it bordered on pain. He reached over and dug his fingers into her thick, black hair, pulling on the bun so the pins scattered everywhere as it all tumbled down to swirl around her shoulders. Her lips were full and lush and faintly swollen from his. Her soft blouse looked crumpled against her breasts.
He still loved it as much as he always had. He was the only one who’d ever seen her like this...
No. A cold voice in his head stopped that line of thought. Not the only one.
And the fury that rose in him at that was nothing new, but the way it wound itself around all that need and hunger was. It rolled and twisted all over each other, becoming something new. Something darker and wilder.
He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to reason it through.
He just wanted her.
God help him, but he’d never stopped wanting her.
As if she could read the turmoil inside of him like a book, a faint shadow moved over her lovely face and a line appeared between her brows.
“Dario?”
He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t know the difference anymore between his hunger and his fury, his sense of betrayal and his mounting need; he only knew that there was a single cure. He didn’t want to think about the implications. He told himself that it didn’t matter what he felt while this was happening, as long as in the end it achieved the desired result.
Dario had never believed that the ends justified the means—hadn’t he learned that when he’d uncovered all the shifty practices his former silent partner in ICE had signed off on before he’d started there?—but here, now, there was no other way. He refused to allow himself even a moment of regret.
He realized he was staring holes through her when Anais shivered slightly, but the truth of things was the way her nipples poked hard against the soft silk of her top, telling him every
thing he needed to know about her own need. Her own hunger that had always matched his own. Dario concentrated on that now. He moved closer to her, indulging himself. He traced the stiff little peaks with his fingers, rubbing the silk against her own flesh and smiling slightly when she let out a moan.
Anais let her head fall back, and another beast roared in him then. Pure lust. Sheer desire. He stopped trying to pretend there was anything else inside of him—anything else that mattered. He buried one hand in the fall of her hair and got his lips on the line of her throat, tasting her. Testing the firmness of her skin. Reveling in the scent of her, as delicate and uniquely her as he remembered. With his free hand he tugged at her blouse, until he was forced to let go of her hair to tug it the rest of the way over her head.
Her arms were still up in the air when he put his mouth back on her, and he felt as well as heard the way she shuddered into him with a ragged sound. Her small, perfectly formed breasts were as exquisite as he remembered them, and he was delighted to find she still didn’t bother with a bra. That meant it was as easy as a memory to hold her where he wanted her with his hands curved over her shoulder blades, and then to get his mouth on one dark-tipped breast.
Then he sucked. Hard.
Anais made a tiny noise that Dario hadn’t realized had haunted him for years, that small sound of greed and yearning. And the taste of her was impossibly addicting, sweet musk and a hint of salt against his tongue. He moved his mouth to her other breast to be sure, using his tongue and the hint of his teeth until she was moaning out loud with her head thrown back, her hands gripping his biceps as if she wanted to leave her fingerprints behind on his skin.
He stepped back, then spun her around, so she was braced against the foot of the bed with her bottom in the air. She was still as beautifully formed as he remembered her, and he told himself that wasn’t a stab of something like pain he felt. It wasn’t loss. He focused on the silken line of her back, the indentation of her spine and the flare of her hips. He couldn’t stand the obstacle of her skirt and reached over to unzip it, pulling it from her until it pooled at her feet and she was left in nothing but those wicked, cherry red shoes and a thong in the same bright color.
The Return of the Di Sione Wife Page 7
