And her gaze seemed to get darker then. Harder. She seemed to reach across the bed and tear him wide open when he knew she hadn’t moved an inch. He could see she hadn’t moved at all.
“It’s when you get bored with this game. When you remember that you’re Dario Di Sione and you have computer accessories to build and adoring customers to wow. When you throw him back where you found him and forget all the dazzling promises you made him. That’s what concerns me, Dare. Because that’s when you’re going to break his heart.”
“I’m not going to break his heart. I’m not going to break anything.”
But he didn’t believe that even as he said it.
“You swooped in and spirited him away. You’re mysterious and fancy and you haven’t disappointed him yet,” she said.
And she didn’t look fierce any longer; that was the part that punched at him, like a fist to the gut. She looked sad. Terribly sad.
“But you will. He’ll think it’s him, that there’s something he could have done to make you stick around. That’s what children always think.” She shook her head, and looked even sadder, if that was possible. “It would have been kinder to let him keep imagining you as the perfect hero who saves him from bad dreams. Not the real, live man who hates his mother and doesn’t have time for him. That’s a very common, very boring story. I think he’d prefer to keep you magic. Keep you his.”
“Are you talking about him, Anais?” he asked softly. “Or you?”
The way her mouth curved then made him feel scraped raw.
“I gave up on magic a long time ago,” she said in the same tone he’d used. “And you were never mine.”
He should never have said such a thing. He should never have opened that door, because he didn’t like what was behind it. At all.
“I’m not going to do any of those things.” He gritted it out, not sure why he felt so defensive. So...exposed, as if he was the one with the dirty history of letting people down instead of her. “None of that is going to happen.”
And Anais laughed softly then. Still so sadly, as if it had happened already. As if she knew the bleak future before them, no matter what he said.
“Come on, Dare,” she said quietly, piercing him straight through. “You can’t help it. It’s who you are.”
CHAPTER NINE
DAMIAN WOKE UP the next morning fully restored, as if he hadn’t had any kind of fever at all.
“He was sick,” Dario said flatly over coffee, while Damian chased his own shadow around the expansive roof deck that surrounded the penthouse’s lowest level. “I felt his forehead myself.”
“Children are mysterious,” Anais replied with a shrug.
And so was everything between the two of them, she couldn’t help thinking. She expected him to throw her out. She’d been expecting it since she’d woken up this morning, curled up with her squirmy child in a narrow twin bed. But Dario merely sat at the outside table where his housekeeper had served breakfast as if he had nothing on his mind at all. He read the stack of tabloids that had been waiting for him, with ancient pictures of the two of them splashed all over the front pages right there in front of her, but aside from directing a particularly blue look at her now and again, he said nothing about them.
So Anais said nothing in reply, and told herself it wasn’t avoidance, exactly. It was strategy. She drank his excellent coffee and she sampled his housekeeper’s miraculously fluffy omelets, and she told herself it didn’t make her weak or compromised that she didn’t try to beat his head in with the serving utensils after what he’d done. Damian was fine, and she was with him again. That was what mattered.
She told herself that was the reason she held her tongue.
When Dario left for work later that morning he asked her where she’d been staying and she braced herself to be tossed out—but he only nodded when she told him the name of the unremarkable hotel in Midtown she’d found at the last minute, then was on his way.
And he wasn’t even there an hour later when a courier arrived at his front door with her bags. Or when the housekeeper very efficiently whisked them away and set Anais up not in a room in the guest wing near Damian, but in the room directly opposite the master suite on the top floor.
She should protest all of this, she knew. She should have taken Damian and raced off the moment Dario had left the house this morning. Or at least she should have demanded that they discuss things now that they were all together instead of hurling insults at each other in a conference room or through the papers. She told herself she’d do so the moment he returned from the office. But the nanny took Damian out to the park and left Anais to her work. She made her usual calls and caught up on all the things she’d let slide since Dario had turned up on the island. And when Dario came home in the evening to the meal the housekeeper had prepared for the three of them, it seemed much easier to simply roll with that.
And then keep rolling, one day into the next.
The less they discussed the serious issues that hung between them like so many shimmering veils—the less they talked about what was happening between them, or the dark past they’d never agree on, or what had led them to end up in this penthouse together with the child they’d made—the easier it was to keep right on rolling.
As if this was their real life. As if this was who they were, this...family unit.
Every night, weather depending, they would eat dinner together out on that roof deck. The three of them, together.
Like a real family, Anais thought every time, and she knew how dangerous that was. She knew that the dream she’d succumbed to that one night in Hawaii was nothing next to this one, and that single night had put only her heart at risk, not Damian’s, too. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself from indulging.
She thought Dario felt it, too—the insistent, beguiling tug of the sweet life that wasn’t theirs.
But it could be, that seductive voice whispered inside of her, night after night. It could be exactly like this...
It was a treacherous landscape to navigate, and every day it got a little bit harder.
Damian loved Dario. Instantly and wholly. That much was clear, and it made Anais feel a little bit bruised inside that he’d had to do without his father all this time. It wasn’t that the life she’d given him hadn’t been good, it was only that this life—this make-believe fairy tale of a shining existence complete with a mother and a father all for him—was that much better.
She’d loved Dario six years ago and she despaired of the fact she loved him still, but she thought she hadn’t really known what love was at all until she’d rushed through that door to find him cradling their sick son in his lap. Or when she’d watched him read Damian a bedtime story, doing all the voices. Or the many times he let Damian beat him at the video games the five-year-old adored and the grown man clearly enjoyed just as much.
Anais had always thought love was about tempestuous romances followed by years of emptiness and loss, recrimination and regret. That was what her parents had taught her, in their sad, angry marriage. It was what she’d learned in her own. She’d only started to understand the complexities of different kinds of love these last few years in Hawaii, with Damian and the steady support of her aunt and uncle.
But watching the man she’d loved since very nearly the moment she’d met him take care of the child they’d made together was like watching a new sun dawn on a brand-new world. She certainly couldn’t rip Damian away from it. She hardly knew how to contain the joy of this thing she’d barely dared to dream inside herself.
She wasn’t sure she managed it at all. She wasn’t sure she tried very hard, come to that. And she knew, deep down, it would be one more thing she paid for in the long run.
One night they’d followed their usual pattern. They’d had a carefree family dinner, one marked by their usual easy conversation that never strayed from their preferred path of light, airy, unobjectionable topics, just like every other night since she’d come to stay here. And if there wa
s a growing part of her that hated that—that wanted to dig down into this thing and see what was there beneath the surface, if anything—there was an even larger part of her that would have done absolutely anything to keep from rocking that boat. So she’d smiled and laughed. She’d meant it, the way she did each time, and then they’d put Damian to bed as if they’d been working together like this, like a perfect team, since the day he’d been born.
Anais couldn’t control the rueful little laugh she let out at that notion, as Dario pulled the door to Damian’s room shut behind him and they started back down the hall. She remembered going into labor all by herself entirely too well. It had been Team Her for a long time, no matter the show they were putting on now.
“Is something funny?” he asked.
She should have shrugged it off. Dario looked deliciously rumpled, the way he always did in the evenings. He’d shrugged out of his jacket the moment he’d stepped into the penthouse’s foyer after work, leaving the cuffs of his dress shirt rolled up over those strong, muscled forearms. He’d raked his hands through his dark hair a thousand times or more over the course of their family evening, leaving it in that marvelously disheveled state, and his jaw sported its usual shadow at the end of the day.
Surely she shouldn’t find all of that quite as delectable as she did. Surely she shouldn’t even notice it any longer, much less after all the things he’d done to her. Anais kept waiting to grow used to Dario. To his undeniable appeal, all that tousled black hair and electric blue eyes. To find him a part of the scenery, nothing more. To stop being so...aware of him the way she always was.
It hadn’t happened yet.
Maybe, she thought now, his eyes were simply too blue.
“Nothing’s funny,” she said. “Not really.” Damian’s door was closed and all three levels of the penthouse were quiet, hushed and still. And yet her heart was beating loud and hard against her chest as if it knew things she didn’t. And she suspected it had more than a little to do with the way he stood there, watching her, an expression she couldn’t quite read on his beautiful face. “We make a good team, it turns out. I suppose that surprises me.”
She didn’t say, the way we congratulated ourselves for being years ago, before we’d ever been tested. She didn’t ask him if he remembered how sure they’d been that their cool version of marriage, spiced up by those long, hot nights, could handle anything and everything.
It was one more thing to hang in all the shadows between them and pretend she couldn’t see.
Anais thought he’d change the subject instantly, pretend he hadn’t heard her, steer the conversation back to safe ground. But he only stood there, the light from farther down the hallway playing over his features, making him seem something other than hard as she looked up at him. Something other than the avenging angel he’d been playing for six long years, without ever relenting at all. Something she might have called wistful, had he been a different man.
She told herself she was imagining it.
“I’m no good on a team,” Dario said after a while. Almost as if it hurt him to say it out loud. “I’m much better on my own.”
“You don’t seem better on your own, Dare,” she said without thinking. Without paying attention to the precipice it seemed they were standing on suddenly, when she’d thought they were on solid ground. When she’d hoped they were. “You seem alone.”
He moved as if he meant to reach out to her, then he slipped his hands in the pockets of his trousers instead, and she thought the sheen in his gaze then was much too close to misery. It echoed that feeling inside her own chest too well.
“I am alone.” He shook his head when she started to speak, and Anais didn’t know if he was trying to keep her from arguing with him or if it was himself he feared. “I prefer it that way.”
“You’re an island all your own?” It was an effort to make her voice dry, to try to sound more amused than shaken. “When you used to be a package deal? That seems a strange evolution.”
“It suits me.” His voice took on an edge then. “Surely you realized that six years ago.”
“Six years ago I was so in love with you I couldn’t see straight.” Anais regretted it the moment she said it—particularly like that. So casually. Almost as an aside. He shifted, an arrested expression on his face, and she had no choice but to keep going. “I’m not sure I realized anything but that, to be honest.”
And this time, the silence between them was anything but comforting. Anais was sure she could see the same old accusations right there between them, dancing in the light and landing hard on the floor. She waited for him to strike out, to knock her down with one of his well-placed barbs, to make her wish she’d never said anything at all. She already wished that.
She’d spent these strange days poking at this odd little peace they’d made, waiting for it to shatter around them, and now she wanted nothing more than for it to carry on forever.
But the look he gave her was shuttered, not cruel.
“It turns out that I have an affinity for solitude,” he said in a low voice. “It’s what I do best.”
And that statement swelled inside of her, like a sob trapped in her chest. Only she didn’t know what to cry for. The way their marriage had ended? The years Dario would never get back with his son? Or the way he stood before her now, so obviously lonely and broken and fierce, claiming he liked it that way?
Anais didn’t know what she felt, what that sob was. What good her tears would do even if she dared let them fall. And she knew, somehow, that if she gave in to that great sobbing thing pressed so hard against her heart, if she let it burst open and drown them both, it would end this strange peace between them as if it had never been.
So instead she closed the distance between them, went up on her toes before she could think better of it and kissed him.
It wasn’t a long kiss, or even a particularly carnal one. She pressed her lips to his and felt him jolt at that, felt the usual fire sear through her at that electric, simmering bit of contact. She put one hand to his rough jaw and she let the kiss linger, drinking him in, aware all the while of the way he stood too still, too tense.
When she stepped back, his blue gaze was nearly black with need.
“What the hell was that?” he growled.
“I don’t know.” She didn’t put her hand to her mouth, though she wanted to, to see if she’d tattooed herself somehow. That was how full her lips felt, tingling with almost too much sensation. “You looked as if you needed it.”
“I didn’t.” He bit that out, but she didn’t believe him. And more, she didn’t think he believed himself. “I don’t.”
And then he stalked away, leaving her to stand there with that great big sob still trapped in her chest, the brand of that damned kiss on her mouth and no idea what on earth she was doing here.
With him.
Playing games neither one of them could win.
* * *
The call came a few mornings later while Dario was out on his morning run. Only his secretary’s personal cell phone was programmed to come through the Do Not Disturb setting he used while he ran his daily lap around Central Park, and she knew better than to use it without a damned good reason.
Before today, she’d used it maybe three other times that he could recall. Dario took his morning run—and his peace and quiet—very seriously.
“It’s your grandfather,” Marnie said when he answered. “He’s taken a turn for the worse. He wants to see you.”
After he ended the call and ran the last mile hard to get home faster, Dario realized he had no idea if he’d responded to that or if he’d simply hung up in a daze. Not that he should have been in any kind of a daze at all, he told himself sharply as the elevator rushed him up toward the penthouse again. Giovanni Di Sione was a very old man, even without the leukemia that had beset him this past year, adding insult to the laudable injury of having lived ninety-eight long years. The amazing thing was that the old man was alive at all, he
assured himself, not that he’d finally met the thing that might have a chance at killing him.
It was funny how that didn’t make him feel any better, the way he’d told himself it had before.
He strode into the penthouse, sweaty and agitated, and stopped when he heard Damian talking. Heedless and excited, the way Damian always seemed to be—because this child had no inkling of the possibility that anyone alive might not find him utterly delightful.
Dario remembered his own childhood. His parents’ sick dependence on each other, the wildness and unpredictability that had haunted every moment of it before they’d died and the sadness that had wreathed it afterward. He’d had nothing to cling to in all the world but the twin brother who would grow up to betray him with his own wife.
His wife.
He found that word didn’t infuriate him the way it had for years. Quite the opposite, in fact. He liked it.
He moved quietly through the entry hall and through the great living room, still following Damian’s voice. He found the little boy in the kitchen, standing on a pulled-up chair so he could watch his mother make pancakes on the great stove Dario had never personally used.
“We have a housekeeper for that,” he said, aware of two things even as he said it.
First, that his voice was all wrong. Ragged and much too dark. It revealed entirely too many things better left hidden.
And second, that he’d said we. As if the fact he hadn’t divorced her yet, or the fact they’d been living here together as if nothing that had happened between them mattered, made them some kind of unit they’d never been.
Six years ago I was so in love with you I couldn’t see straight, she’d said that strange night in the hallway. Then she’d kissed him, sweet and devastating, in a way he could still feel inside of him. He’d spent the time since convincing himself it had been nothing more than Anais up to her usual tricks. He’d almost come around to believing it, too. The only trouble was, he’d seen that raw look in her eyes. He’d heard it in her voice.
The Return of the Di Sione Wife Page 12
