And God help him, he’d felt it in her kiss.
He still did.
The truth was, Dario didn’t know how to handle any of this. He understood the life he’d lived for the past six years because everything had been in neat, if painfully bleak, boxes and there was none of this blurring of long-drawn lines. In a way, the boxes were easier. There were no surprises, ever.
He didn’t understand how his grandfather, who had once told Dario he intended to beat death at its own game by living forever, could possibly be dying this time—no matter how old he was, or how sick. It seemed impossible. Just as he didn’t understand how the woman he’d married so quickly, met anew in Hawaii when he’d least expected it, then lived with again these past, peaceful weeks, could be the same woman who had betrayed him so thoroughly.
He wanted this, he thought then. That was the trouble. The real truth beneath all the rest of it. He wanted this woman in his house, making pancakes because she felt like it or because it made a little boy smile. And he wanted that little boy. For the first time since Anais had dropped the news of Damian’s existence on him on Maui, Dario didn’t care that no genetic test could prove who the real father was. That went both ways. No one could prove Damian wasn’t his.
And if his grandfather was, in fact, dying, if this really was the end of the only family Dario knew—however inadequate it had been over the years—he knew that what he really wanted was for the old man to meet this small, wild boy with a Di Sione face and his mother’s eyes. Even if it was only the once.
“What is it?” There was a frown in Anais’s voice, if not on her face, as she slid the last pancake onto Damian’s plate and then directed him to the kitchen island to eat. “You look as if there were ghosts out there on your run.”
“No ghosts,” he said, still not sounding like himself.
Or maybe it was that he’d known exactly who he was for six long years. He’d reveled in that definition and he’d convinced himself it was the truth of not only who he was, but who he could ever become.
And now he had no idea how he’d ever been happy with that.
Because he understood, standing there sweaty and thrown in the room in his home he used the least, watching a domestic scene that should have turned his stomach, that he’d never be happy like that again. That it hadn’t been happiness, that in-between state he’d lived in all those years.
Everything had changed that day in Hawaii. Everything was different.
Him most of all. “Not just yet.”
CHAPTER TEN
ANAIS HAD ONLY the vaguest memories of the Di Sione estate out in the Hamptons from her scant few visits way back when, but the old man who was the center of the family and the great house’s patriarch had remained larger than life in her mind all this time.
Giovanni was exactly as she remembered him, if significantly more frail. He sat in an armchair in one of the drawing rooms of the grand old house, covered in a thick blanket, though the September day outside was warm. And he smiled as they walked in to greet him, that same old glint Anais remembered making his eyes seem much too bright for a man said to be on the brink of death.
“I should have told the world I was dying thirty years ago,” Giovanni said, his voice more feeble than Anais remembered it, making the possibility of his death seem much more real, suddenly. “It brings you all running.” His canny gaze shifted to Anais, then down to Damian in front of her. “And with such gifts.”
“This is Damian,” she said, smiling at the old man who she could never remember being anything but kind to her, no matter that her relationship with his grandson had been a mad little whirlwind with an unhappy ending. Then she smiled down at her son, taking her hand from his shoulder as she did. “Damian, this is your great-grandfather.”
She thought her heart might burst wide open when her self-possessed little boy walked right up to the oldest man he’d likely ever seen and held out his hand, very much like the man she knew he’d one day become. And this time, there was someone to share that sort of wild maternal pride. This time, she caught Dario’s eye and was sure he saw the same thing she did—maybe even felt it himself.
That unexpected moment of communion shook her, deep and hard, making her bones ache.
“It’s nice to meet you, young man,” Giovanni said with an extra bit of solemnity in his voice, as if speaking to the future man instead of the current boy. But he looked at Dario when he continued, and that glint in his eye seemed more pronounced. “Very nice indeed.”
“Behave,” Dario told him as Anais took a seat on the couch opposite Giovanni. Her stomach flipped over and she realized it was because there was actual laughter in Dario’s voice. It made him sound like a different person. It made him sound alive. It made him sound like that young man who’d chased her out of the Columbia University library on a gray winter’s afternoon and had talked her into having coffee with him when she’d been convinced he was playing a trick on her. “Or I won’t give you the earrings you sent me halfway across the planet to fetch for you.”
“Ah,” Giovanni said, sounding not in the least bit worried that Dario would do anything but what he’d asked. “My lovely Lost Mistresses are coming back to me at last. Tell me they still sparkle the way I remember them.”
“Of course they do, old man,” Dario replied, still with all that rich amusement in his voice. It was mesmerizing. It seemed to wrap around her and pull taut, like a slipknot she feared she’d never work loose. “They’re made almost entirely of diamonds. They make the night sky look dull in comparison.”
The old man smiled and then coughed. And coughed. So hard his whole body shook and his hands trembled, and that was when Anais understood that this wasn’t some kind of merry joke. Giovanni was truly ill. The force of his personality couldn’t change that. Nothing could.
Dario’s smile faltered, but he caught himself. Visibly. Anais felt a lump grow in her throat as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the same little box she’d given him in Hawaii. When Giovanni was sitting upright in his chair again and his breathing was less labored, Dario cracked it open and placed it carefully in his grandfather’s parchment-pale hands.
“I wish Dante were here,” Giovanni said, gazing down at the earrings, a faraway look on his face. “He always has appreciated the shiny things in life just a little bit more than you. You always did think you needed to be the serious one.”
Damian chose that moment to stage-whisper his desire to go outside and play, but there was no mistaking the way Dario stiffened at the mention of his twin’s name, no matter Anais’s momentary distraction. Or the way that long-lost laughter disappeared from his blue gaze and the curve in his mouth flattened out into a line, as if both had been figments of her imagination.
“Why would you bring him up?” Dario asked tautly. “Is he here?”
His grandfather looked old then. Every inch of his ninety-eight years.
“I believe he’s out for the day,” he said with obvious reluctance.
“I’m not talking about Dante,” Dario told his grandfather gruffly. “Ever. And we don’t need you meddling, Grandfather. He doesn’t need to know I was here.”
Giovanni eyed him as if he was inclined to argue, but then merely nodded his head weakly before returning his attention to the open box in his lap. He ran a finger over the bright face of one of the earrings. Then he quietly asked Dario about ICE’s much-publicized launch a few weeks back.
While Anais sat frozen on the couch across from them, her heart in a thousand pieces all over the priceless carpet at her feet.
Through the windows she could see her beautiful little boy running in gleeful zigzags on the great lawn, as if the September sun shone for him alone. But here inside this room, an old man was dying after nearly a century on this earth and the man she’d loved for far longer than was wise or healthy was so closed up inside he might as well be dying, too.
Dario was never going to change. He didn’t want to talk about his twin to his own grandfat
her—or at all—even all these years later.
He was never, ever going to believe her.
He was fine with these make-believe spaces, these in-between times, when they pretended nothing was wrong. Meanwhile, the past festered between them. Where would it come out? It was one thing for Dario to periodically vent his spleen on her. Anais could take it, no matter how unjust it was. But what happened when he said the wrong thing one day and Damian heard it?
Because that would happen. It was inevitable.
And she couldn’t stand by and allow this man to break her son’s heart, simply because he didn’t have it in him to trust her.
It was high time she was honest with herself. Dario had never trusted her in the first place. He couldn’t have, or he’d never have misinterpreted the scene he’d walked in on that terrible day. He’d never have believed the worst of her, no matter what Dante did or didn’t say.
That was the truth she’d been hiding from all this time. Dario had wanted to believe the worst of her. He’d seized the opportunity to leave her and he’d made sure there was absolutely no way she could prevail upon him to reconsider. He’d seen an opportunity to get the hell out of their marriage and he’d taken it.
He’d wanted to leave her then; he’d done it with surgical precision, and he’d had no intention of returning to her. Ever. If she’d never had Damian, she imagined that scene on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai would have gone very differently. He’d have insulted her, she’d have returned fire and he’d have swanned back off into the ether.
You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, she told herself now, watching Dario laugh with his grandfather in a way she hadn’t seen him laugh with anyone in years. In a way she’d forgotten he’d ever laughed, even with her. Those stories you told the tabloids might as well have been the stories you told yourself all this time. That there was some grand misunderstanding. That left to his own devices, away from his brother, none of this would have happened.
It would have happened. He wanted it to happen. He made it happen.
She sat so still, while everything inside of her spun around too fast and made her worry she might simply fall over with the force of this realization.
And she couldn’t push this or any other truth on him. She couldn’t make him believe her. She couldn’t prove Damian was his and she couldn’t prove she’d loved him and she couldn’t prove there’d never been anyone for her but him, ever. He would have to take that leap of faith on his own; and here, now, in the lovely home where she’d been reminded of the man she’d fallen in love with in the first place, Anais understood that he was never, ever going to do that.
He was never going to trust her, or anyone, no matter what.
And that meant that despite what she felt and had always felt, despite what she still wanted, despite the things her traitorous little heart demanded even as it broke inside her chest, she had to end this.
She had to take Damian and go home.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS LATE that night when Dario gave up on trying to sleep in the bed he now found far too empty, when he’d never shared it with another soul. He found himself out on the great balcony that surrounded the master suite and the rest of the top floor of the penthouse. The September night was a warm caress against his bare skin, just the faintest hint of the coming fall in it, and he was glad he hadn’t bothered to pull on anything more than a pair of loose black trousers.
Manhattan stretched out in the dark before him, as exultant and bright as it always was, and it echoed deep within him. It played through him like a long, low note of music, altering everything it touched. Knocking apart those careful boxes of his and making him wonder how he’d ever lived in them. How he’d ever managed to survive like that, bound and minimized. For a long while he stood there, simply stood there in the night with the city beneath him, and did nothing at all but breathe.
He sensed her approach in the moment before she appeared there at the rail beside him, her long black hair tumbling over her shoulders as straight and glossy as ever and her lovely arms bare. She wore a tank top and a pair of men’s boxers, the very same uniform she’d worn to sleep in for as long as he’d known her. Dario couldn’t have said why the sight of it tonight swelled inside him like a song.
He only knew he wanted to sing it so loud he woke the neighborhood. The whole city and all the boroughs. The world.
He settled for turning toward her instead, reaching out to trace a faint pattern down one slim, strong arm and taking note of the goose bumps that shivered alive beneath his touch.
“Life is so short,” he said, and he felt her tremble slightly at that beneath his fingers. “Too short, Anais.”
She glanced at him, then away, her gaze on the dark heart of Central Park below them. “I know. I can’t imagine the world without him.”
Dario hadn’t been thinking of his grandfather, or not directly.
“He’s wily,” he said. Because Giovanni always had been. Because he couldn’t conceive of anything getting the better of the old man, even leukemia. “He’s beaten a thousand enemies in his day, and is never quite as fragile as he looks. I wouldn’t count him out yet.”
She smiled. And she didn’t say what she must have been thinking then—what he knew he ought to be thinking himself. What he’d thought explicitly, in fact, even as he’d arrived in Hawaii and had found himself marooned in all that dangerously seductive tropical heat. That Giovanni was ninety-eight years old. That there was a natural order to things. That living too long must sometimes seem as much a curse as a blessing to a man who had once been so active and was now confined to a few rooms in a house.
She only smiled, this beautiful woman who was still, astonishingly, his wife.
His wife. That was the part that mattered. That was the only part that mattered.
“Anais,” he began, his voice serious, because this was long overdue.
But she surprised him. She turned toward him and she shook her head, and when he didn’t continue speaking she stepped closer and slid her hands up over the planes of his bare chest. Heat against heat.
And everything inside him burst into flame.
“I don’t want to talk,” she said, and there was something about her voice. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him, with that gleam of something he couldn’t quite read in her eyes. “I want to say a thousand things to you, Dario, but I don’t want to talk.”
And she was so close, after everything that had happened. And he wasn’t playing any games this time, the way he’d tried so hard to pretend when he was on Maui. Her hands were on his bare skin and she gleamed pale and smooth in the light from the city around them, and he was only a man.
“I think we can figure out a better way to communicate,” she whispered.
And Dario didn’t have it in him to refuse her.
He didn’t have it in him to try.
He swept her closer and she was against him then, all those sweet, lean curves pressed tight to him as he bent down and took her mouth the way he’d wanted to for days and days. A lifetime or two, by his reckoning. Every time she laughed, or was still. Every time she frowned at him, or simply breathed the same air.
He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted all of her.
The kiss was a lick of pure fire, of blinding need. And it wasn’t nearly enough.
He let the wild thing inside him loose, claiming her and marking her, tasting her deep. And as he kissed her he backed her across the smooth stone deck toward the glass doors that led inside his suite, pulling his mouth from hers only to tug the tank top up and over her head.
Her laugh as she lifted her arms to help him was better than the city’s bright gleam, and it moved inside him like the same restless song.
By the time they made it to the side of the wide bed he’d never imagined he’d share with anyone, they were both breathing much too heavily, their clothes strewn behind them in a trail.
“You’re perfect,” he told her, his voice a guttural
rasp against the dark. “You’re so damned perfect.”
“That sounds like talking,” she teased him, nipping at his chin.
And he worshipped her, this woman he’d never recovered from and never gotten past. This woman he’d never divorced, across all these years.
Some part of him must have known it was never over between them. It was never finished, no matter how it seemed. The hunger went on and on and on.
He knelt before her by the side of his bed and he relearned every inch of her gorgeous body, the way he had the night she’d trusted him with her innocence. From her marvelous collarbone to the exquisite arch of her narrow feet, he memorized her. He studied her and he adored her.
With his hands and his mouth and his gaze, he made her his and he made her come. Once. Again.
And the third time he threw her over that edge, this time with two fingers deep in her soft heat and his mouth a small torment against one perfect breast, she cried out so hard and so long he thought she might shatter his windows.
He almost wished she had.
“Enough,” she managed to say, spread out across his bed like a feast. “You’ll kill me.”
“You say that as if you’d mind.”
Her mouth curved dangerously and she rolled over, coming up on her knees beside him. “My turn,” she murmured.
And she took her time.
She tortured him, with an electric intensity that might have concerned him, had she not been making him feel quite so good. She marked him with her teeth and she indulged herself in him with her mouth, her tongue, the sensual slide of her palms against his skin. She lavished her attention on every part of him, each ridge of his abdomen, the flat disc of each nipple, the line of his neck and all along his jaw, before heading back down the length of his body.
She smiled up at him as she knelt between his legs, something particularly raw in her dark eyes. But before he could question her, she leaned forward and took him deep in her mouth.
He thought he might die. He swore he had. He forgot everything in the world but this. Her. Anais.
The Return of the Di Sione Wife Page 13
