Her mouth was hot and wet, a benediction and a prayer, and he lost himself in the slide and the suck, the small humming noises she made, the way she rocked herself as she moved over him as if she was as carried away by the sensation as he was.
It was heaven. It was too good. It was so good he thought he might lose his head completely.
He pulled her off him, his jaw clenched tight as he fought to bring himself back under control. He dealt with the condom swiftly and then he was rolling them both over and bringing her beneath him to thrust himself home at last.
She cried out at his slick possession, and then, at last, he began to move.
And there was no skill in this tonight, no mastery. It was raw and intense, wild and hot. A stripped-down taking. A claiming, elemental and fierce. She wrapped herself around him and dug her nails into his skin, and he pounded into her with all the fury of this thing between them in each and every deep, perfect stroke. He lost himself in the fit of her, so gloriously right beneath him and around him, as if they’d always been meant for this.
And for a while, there was nothing but this.
But then Dario could take no more. He reached down between their bodies and pressed against the center of her need, making her throw back her head and cry out his name. Then she bucked against him, writhing out her pleasure, and he hurled her straight over the side of the world.
And he followed right behind her, her name on his lips all the while, as if those long six years had never happened.
* * *
Dario knew Anais wasn’t in the bed when he woke up the next morning.
He knew it in the same instant he opened his eyes and blinked in the morning sunlight, long before he turned his head to see the wide mattress as empty as it always was. As if her presence here last night, her body tucked against his as they’d finally drifted off to sleep together, had been nothing but a dream.
If it was a dream, he’d have stayed in it awhile longer. He’d have made it last, made it count.
But he knew he hadn’t dreamed a single second of it.
He swung out of the bed, pulling on the nearest pair of trousers he could find and leaving them low on his hips. He pushed his way out of the master suite to find the penthouse oddly, strangely, quiet all around him. The door to Anais’s bedroom was wide open, showing him it was empty, so he jogged down the wide steel stairs that brought him to the second level. It took him a moment to realize that he couldn’t hear Damian. Normally there’d be the usual clamor and howl of a young boy in the house, but not today. That was why it was so quiet.
The nanny must have taken him out, he thought absently, poking his head into one of the small reception rooms on the second level, the one Anais had claimed as her office while she’d been here. It, too, was empty. Not even her laptop open on the small, elegant desk in the corner.
Dario made his way down to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, then took it into his home office. The penthouse was still oppressively silent all around him, and there was a certain agitated sort of sensation brewing beneath his ribs. He couldn’t quite identify it. He rounded his desk and sat down, frowning at the large brown file folder that hadn’t been there last night, he was certain.
He picked it up and glanced inside...
And then everything seemed to turn to sheets of ice. Freeze solid, then shatter.
He understood in an instant that what had been bothering him wasn’t the absence of Anais’s laptop in that second-level room, but of everything else. The stacks of documents, the soft-sided briefcase she’d kept at her feet, the tangle of power cords. Or the suitcase that had sat at the foot of her bed in that bedroom across from his.
He should have realized at a glance that it wasn’t her laptop that was gone. She was.
Because he recognized the document in the file folder. It was the stack of divorce papers he’d left for her in his hotel room on Maui.
A dark, terrible thing was unfurling in him, deep and wide and thick, but he made himself flip through the papers to see if she’d signed it. She had. Of course she had. Her signature was just as he recalled it, somehow perfectly French and perfectly her at once, and he thought a bullet to the chest might have been easier. Better, maybe.
He heard a sound at the door and he looked up, somehow unsurprised to see her standing there, dressed head to toe in what he knew, now, were her lawyer clothes. Cool and gorgeous and sleek.
Her armor.
He didn’t beat around the bush. “Why?”
Something moved over her face, too quick for him to categorize it.
“You don’t trust me,” she said simply. “You’ll never trust me.”
“This can’t possibly—”
“Dario.”
He stopped, though he thought it might have broken something inside him. He didn’t know how there could be anything left to break.
“I can’t live like that,” Anais told him, that same raw thing he’d seen in her gaze last night there again, and in her voice besides. “I grew up in a house of hatred and contempt. Terrible accusations were thrown about like they were nothing. I won’t raise my son that way, surrounded by suspicion and fury at every turn.”
Dario was reeling. Unmoored and untethered, and he remembered this feeling all too well from six years ago. The sick thud in his stomach. The noise in his head.
The great black pit of loss that yawned open beneath him and wanted to swallow him whole.
Last time, he’d let it. He’d jumped right in. He’d stayed there for years and called it realism. He couldn’t bear the thought of sinking into it again. He couldn’t imagine there was any way out a second time.
“And last night? What the hell was that?”
“I wanted to say goodbye,” she said, and her cool tone slipped a bit. He heard the rawness. The pain. And it didn’t make him feel any kind of triumph. It was no victory. It only made him hurt. “I didn’t want to walk out on you.”
The way he had, without a second thought or a backward glance. She didn’t say that. She didn’t have to say it.
Dario rose then. He didn’t know what he meant to do. If anything.
“Don’t do this.” He wanted to sound fierce, sure. Instead, he sounded broken. Maybe, this time, he really was. Or maybe that was the point she was making—that he had been all along. “Don’t. What do I have to do to keep you here? Name it.”
But Anais’s expression didn’t change. If anything, she looked sadder and more resolute at the same time. And he had the strangest sense of foreboding as she opened her mouth.
“Talk to your brother,” she said softly. “That’s what you have to do for me to stay.”
“No.” He gritted the word out, every part of him tense and furious and still reeling closer and closer to that great black pit. “Why would you ask such a thing? Did my grandfather put you up to this?”
And he saw the way her face crumpled, just slightly, before she blinked it away. He saw the way she clenched her hands into fists at her sides. He saw that terrible sadness in her eyes.
“The fact that you don’t know is why I’m leaving.” She waved a hand, taking in the room, the city, maybe. Him. “This only works if we pretend the past never happened. If you make an effort to act as if it never happened.”
He didn’t understand this at all. “I’d think that’s a good thing, considering.”
“Dare.” That nickname only she had ever used, but in that hard, hurt voice, and it was worse than a kick to the gut. “I won’t live my life as a hostage to a history that you’ve been getting wrong for six years. How can we ever move forward if you can’t look at the past and see the truth?”
“This has nothing to do with that.”
“There is no this without that,” she corrected him. “Because that never happened. I don’t need your forgiveness and I refuse to spend my life trying to convince you to trust me when I never broke your trust in the first place. You know what my parents were like. The screaming fights, the ugly names
, the endless horror of it. I won’t raise Damian like that. I don’t want him to think that kind of war is love.”
“It’s not like that. We’re not like that.”
“You can’t even imagine calling your brother. Your twin. You can’t imagine it.”
“Dante has nothing to do with us!” he thundered at her.
“I know,” she said sadly. “And he never did. But I don’t think I’m the one you need to hear that from. And I can’t waste my life hoping you see the light and repair what you broke so we can all move forward. I won’t.”
She was really going to do this. She was really going to leave him, after everything. After they’d made it through what should have been the darkest place. He could see it on her face, in the gleam of moisture in her eyes.
He could feel it in that terrible constriction in his chest.
“Anais...”
“I’m taking Damian back to Maui,” she told him, straightening in the doorway, her tone measured. As if she’d been planning out what she would say and was delivering the news to him as calmly as she could. “I’m not taking him away from you and I won’t keep him from you. You can see him whenever you like. I’m happy to talk about a formal custody arrangement as we work through the divorce, but informally, I’m perfectly fine with whatever works for you.”
“Those are the same papers as before,” he said, unable to process this. Unable to understand. “The ones that claim you were unfaithful and name Dante as your lover.”
“If that’s what you need me to say in open court, then I’ll say it,” she told him.
And Dario understood that he should have viewed that quiet statement as his most decisive victory yet. But all he could seem to feel was a crushing sense of defeat. Of incalculable loss. Of nothing but grief, rolling on in all directions, forever.
She merely shrugged, and somehow that made it worse. “This needs to end, for all our sakes. I don’t care if it takes a lie to do that, as long as it’s over.”
“Anais. Damn it. This is...”
“Dario.” Her voice was hard then. Cold. Very serious. She waited until he met her gaze, and he knew then. He was already in that dark pit. He’d never climbed out. He never would. “You have to let me go.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT TOOK DARIO less than a day to determine that he was not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. He refused to throw himself into that darkness and hope his work might save him. Not this time.
By the end of the day she left him, taking Damian with her, Dario was fully resolved. He stood on the roof deck without her, staring off into the hectic muddle of the city he hardly saw without her in it, and knew exactly what he wanted.
And Anais had named the single obstacle standing in his way.
Of course, he told himself then, he needed to call his damned brother.
But it took him a little bit longer to actually do it. He’d been so furious at his twin for so long. It was hard for him to let go of that.
Maybe too hard, he thought a few hours later as he waited on the same roof. Maybe some breaches were supposed to be there.
He didn’t have to turn around to know that Dante had arrived. That same intuition that had seemed like magic to those around the two of them, dormant for six long years, prickled alive instantly. He knew the very moment Dante stepped out onto the roof.
He didn’t simply know it. He felt it.
He took his time turning, and his brother was there when he did. It had been six years, and yet it felt...right.
“This is anticlimactic,” he said, eyeing the man standing across from him. It was still like looking into a mirror. It was still as if Dante was an extension of himself. This is right, he thought again. “I thought you’d at least have the good grace to be horrifically scarred or stunted in some way.”
“I could fling myself off the balcony in a show of dramatic atonement,” Dante replied in his usual easy manner, though Dario could see the wariness in his eyes. “Of course, that would likely kill me instantly. Much less suffering for me that way, which I’d think would defeat the purpose.”
Dario had to catch himself then, because he almost laughed at that—and this was the trouble. This was his twin. He knew Dante better than he knew himself, in some ways, or he had. He was genetically predisposed to get along with him. These past six years had been torture—and he couldn’t understand how he’d managed to convince himself otherwise. How he’d believed his own lies.
You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, he thought then.
“You betrayed me,” he said starkly, and his brother stiffened. “That was all I knew six years ago. That was all I wanted to know. You hurt me. You, of all people.”
Dante only stared back at him, the way he had then, and said nothing.
“Now I want to know the details,” Dario continued. He realized he’d tensed every muscle in his body and forced himself to relax. As best he could. “Anais has a child. He looks just like us.”
He searched his brother’s face. His own face, at a distance, as identical as it had ever been. As children and teenagers they’d played each other for days at a time to see if anyone noticed the switch. No one ever had.
Dario forced himself to ask the question. “Is he yours?”
“No.”
The word was like a stone hurled from a great height, and it landed between them with the force of too much gravity. Dario was surprised the roof deck didn’t buckle beneath them with the wallop of it. He was surprised he didn’t.
Dante looked stricken and fierce at once. “No. I never touched Anais, Dario. I never laid a single finger on her. I never would.”
And Dario realized that he’d known this, on some level. He must have known this, or he wouldn’t have turned and walked away. He wouldn’t have cut Dante and Anais off so completely, leaving them no recourse, if he’d thought they’d really cheated on him, because why would he have cared what they said then? And he certainly wouldn’t have thrown his revenge aside, ignored the way she’d deliberately aired their private business in the papers, all for the sake of a few family dinners. Not if he’d truly believed she was trying to foist off his brother’s child on him.
Because there was only one way Anais could be so sure Damian was Dario’s. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Only one explanation.
This was what she’d meant, he understood now. This was what she couldn’t live with. It wasn’t only that he’d believed the worst of her. It was that he must have been looking for something hideous to believe about her as his way out, because look how quickly he’d taken it. Look what damage he’d done.
What he didn’t know was why.
“You let me believe otherwise,” he said now to the twin who was the lost part of him. How had he pretended all this time that he was whole when that was laughable at best? He didn’t care that his voice was too thick. “Deliberately.”
Dante moved then, closing the distance between them to stand nearer to Dario at the deck’s rail. He frowned down at the traffic on Central Park West, but Dario knew he didn’t see it.
He saw the past. Dario had lived in that past for too long. He wanted out.
He wanted to be free.
More than that, he wanted his family.
“I did,” Dante admitted. He shook his head. “I hated that you listened to Anais more than to me. I hated that she’d come between us when she was supposed to be nothing more than a business arrangement. You’d married her to give her a green card, not to install her as our third partner.”
Lies upon lies, Dario thought, and all of them his own damned fault. “I didn’t marry her to give her a green card.”
Dante let out a small laugh at that. “That became clear.” He shifted to look at Dario. “You were at that damned meeting with ICE. I thought she’d put you up to it, so I took the opportunity to drop by and get in her face.” He looked rueful. “She doesn’t back down.”
“Not usually,” Dario agreed. “As you’ve likely seen
in the tabloids.”
“She threw a glass of water at me.” Dante moved a hand in the air over his chest. “All over me. And that calmed things down. The irony is that we’d actually started talking to each other when you walked in.”
“On you. Coming out of my bedroom, half-dressed.”
“It didn’t even occur to me that you might read it the wrong way,” Dante said in a low voice, “until you did. And I realized you’d obviously never gotten over what happened in college.”
“It seemed like a pattern,” Dario said then. Though in truth, he thought it was the broken trust he’d never gotten over and never forgotten—and maybe that hadn’t been fair. It had been Lucy who had lied, not Dante. But he hadn’t wanted to consider that back then. It had all been a mess. ICE, their past, Anais... “But Anais mattered more. Much more.”
“I never meant any of this to happen,” Dante said fervently. “I never wanted to break up your marriage and I certainly never wanted you to cut me off. I assumed things would go back to normal after you’d had time to cool down. I assumed that, at the very least, you’d come after me. Yell at me. Fight with me. Hell, I thought you’d answer the damn phone, Dario.”
Dario blew out a breath. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I let a moment of silence ruin two relationships.” He looked his brother in the eye, then reached over and clapped his hand to Dante’s shoulder. “You might have done nothing to keep me from believing the worst, Dante. But I’m the one who believed it. That isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
The evening wore on then, but everything was different. Better.
They sat out on the roof and told each other the stories of their lives over the past six years, and while they were no longer finishing each other’s sentences the way they had as children, it was remarkably easy to get back in tune. To feel connected again. Whole.
Dario hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his brother, or how deeply he’d been fooling himself all this time.
“How did you end up in Hawaii, anyway?” Dante asked. “Didn’t you once claim you didn’t see the purpose of beaches?”
The Return of the Di Sione Wife Page 14
