Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  “This is stalking!” she threw at him from her place on the steps. “You can’t hunt me down at my home. You don’t have any right!”

  Before Rafael could reply, a streaking shape shoved past her and would have hurtled itself down the steps and into the chaos had Lily not reached out and grabbed it.

  Not an it. A boy. A small one.

  “I told you to stay inside no matter what,” Lily told him sharply.

  “Arlo is barely five,” the older woman said from somewhere off to the side where, Rafael was dimly aware, she’d managed to move all the dogs into a fenced-off pen. But he couldn’t look away from Lily. And the boy. “He doesn’t get ‘no matter what.’”

  The little boy looked at the older woman, then angled his head back to look up at Lily, who still held him by the collar of his shirt.

  “Sorry, Mama,” he said, angelically, and then he grinned up at her.

  It was a mischievous grin. It was filled with light and laughter and the expectation that his sins would be forgiven in an instant, simply because he’d wielded it. Rafael knew that smile well. He’d seen a version of it on his brother’s face throughout Luca’s whole life. He’d seen it in his own mirror a thousand times more.

  His heart stopped beating. Then started again with a deafening, terrible kick that should have knocked him to the ground. He couldn’t quite understand why it hadn’t.

  “You don’t have the right to be here,” Lily said again, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glittering, and Rafael didn’t know how he could want her this badly. He’d never understood it. And it was back as if she’d never been gone, a yearning so deep it was like an ache inside him.

  But it didn’t matter any longer. None of that mattered. The little boy didn’t resemble the fair woman he’d called Mama at all. He had Rafael’s dark curls and the Castelli dark eyes. He looked like every picture Rafael had ever seen of himself as a child, scattered all over the ancestral Castelli home in northern Italy.

  “Are you so certain I don’t have the right to be here, Alison?” Rafael asked, amazed he could speak when everything inside him was a shout again, long and loud and drowning out the world. “Because unless I am very much mistaken, that appears to be my son.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THEY LANDED AT the private Castelli airstrip, high in the far reaches of northern Italy in the shadow of the towering Dolomites, just after dawn the following morning. Daylight was only beginning to stretch out pink and crystalline over the jagged spires and craggy, snowcapped heights of the sharply imposing mountains on either side of the narrow valley. Lily stared out of the window as the plane taxied down the scenic little runway, feeling as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

  She’d never imagined she’d see this place again. For years now she’d told herself she didn’t want to see it or anything else the Castellis owned again, including those wine bottles with their distinctive labels in the liquor store—yet there was no mistaking the way her heart leaped as the private jet touched down. There was no denying the fact that this felt a whole lot more like a homecoming than it should. Certainly more than was safe.

  Last night had been the second-worst night of her life, all things considered.

  She’d known on the long drive home from Charlottesville after she’d left Rafael in that café that he wasn’t likely to simply disappear. Not Rafael. He might have been spoiled rotten when she’d known him, a being created entirely out of wealth and privilege and more than happy to exploit both to serve his own ends—but he’d always gotten what he’d wanted. Lily being but one in a long line of things he’d taken because he could.

  She’d sped along the dark country roads, hardly seeing the cold winter beauty of this place she’d come to call home. Lost in that kiss again. Lost in him. If it had been only her, she would have left then and there. Just kept on driving until she became someone else, somewhere else. She’d done it before. She knew exactly what it took to disappear without a trace.

  But she wasn’t twenty-three and desperate any longer, and there was Arlo now. Her beautiful, magical little boy. She’d turned it over and over in her head all throughout that drive, but she couldn’t see how she could legitimately uproot Arlo and make him act like he was in the witness protection program for the rest of his life simply because she didn’t want to deal with his father.

  His father.

  It still made her shiver to think of Rafael that way.

  She could remember when she’d confirmed she was pregnant as vividly as if it had happened last night out there on those lonely country roads. She’d been dead for six weeks by then. Every day that she’d stayed away from her old life had been easier than the one before, because it was that much harder to go back. Too much time had passed. A day or two’s worth of confusion, maybe a couple of weeks—she could have explained that away in the wake of her accident. But six whole weeks without so much as a scratch on her? That indicated intent, she’d thought. They’d know she’d disappeared deliberately.

  Lily had looked at the coverage of her car accident from a library computer in Texas once, early on, but that had been a mistake she hadn’t repeated. Seeing the people that she’d loved grieving for her loss had made her feel like the lowest kind of worm. A truly despicable human being. How could she walk back into their lives having caused them so much pain? What could she say?

  Oh, sorry, everybody, I thought I wanted to make a clean break from all this and making you think I died horribly in that accident seemed like a good idea at the time...

  After a few weeks of feeling strangely thick and deeply ill in turns, she’d taken a pregnancy test in a truck stop bathroom near the Missouri-Arkansas border. She could remember every detail of that winter morning. The sound of the big rigs outside. The chill in the air that seemed to have crept deep into her bones in the unheated little stall. The way her stomach had sunk down to the dirty floor and stayed there as she’d stared in an unmitigated horror at the positive test in her hand for what might have been whole years.

  There’d been no going back. She’d understood several things with a rush of clarity in that badly lit bathroom in the middle of nowhere. That, despite everything—like the memorial service they’d held for her in Sausalito a few weeks after the accident—she’d believed until that moment that she might go back someday. That she’d pretended it wasn’t an option for her while holding it there in reserve, tucked away in the back of her mind.

  And that the fact she’d been pregnant with Rafael’s child meant that door was forever closed to her.

  It had been bad enough that she’d had a relationship with Rafael for all those years, no matter who else he’d been seeing and no matter how badly their families would have reacted to it if they’d known. It had been twisted and it had been wrong, given the fact her mother had insisted on referring to Rafael and Luca as your big brothers at every opportunity. How could she bring a baby into that gnarled, sick mess? Not to mention, she’d had no idea how Rafael might behave in the face of real adversity. Would he deny he was the father? Would he order her to terminate the pregnancy?

  How had her life come to this? she’d wondered. That she’d felt she had no option but to walk away from everything she knew—only to discover that she’d made a new life with a man she obviously didn’t know at all if she had so little idea how he might react or what he might do.

  She’d vowed then and there that she would raise this child better than this squalid little beginning in a truck stop bathroom. That she would give her baby a fresh start in a new place where her sick need for Rafael—like her own mother’s varied addictions that had marked Lily’s own life so deeply—was no longer a factor. Where the child could come first, and not her—the very opposite of how she’d been raised.

  And she’d done a good job sticking to all of those vows, she’d thought last night as she’d pulled up in front of th
e farmhouse. Arlo had come hurtling outside as she’d parked, heedless of the wintry weather the way he always was—as excited and bouncy as the dogs who romped along with him. She’d caught his hot and squirmy little body against hers in a hard hug, and had poured all her regrets and apologies into the way she squeezed him tight until he wriggled free.

  Because she’d known it was only a matter of time, and sure enough, they hadn’t even started their usual nightly dinner with Pepper when the car had pulled up outside. She’d tried to hold back the inevitable that little bit longer—but there had been no stopping it. On some level, she’d known that since she’d looked up and seen Rafael on the street.

  And it had been even worse than she’d imagined.

  She’d known that Arlo took after his father, of course, but it had been one thing to know it and another entirely to see it in the flesh. It had made her heart flip over in her chest and her eyes prickle with heat...

  But then Rafael had turned that frozen, astonished glare on her, his eyes so dark they’d made the deep December night around him seem bright by comparison. And while it hadn’t been as terrifying or dramatic as that car crash five years ago, Lily had known that it amounted to the same thing.

  One life was over. A new one was beginning—whether she wanted it or not.

  It had all been very cut-and-dried. There had been no mistaking the connection between father and son. It was written on both their faces, as obvious as the sun. And though Lily had valiantly stuck to her Alison story, which included a part about a drug dealer boyfriend who’d conveniently died after helping make Arlo, Pepper had been involved in the conversation this time.

  Pepper, who’d confirmed that yes, Alison had that exact tattoo that Rafael mentioned, which had made Rafael’s mouth curve in a way that had in turn made Lily’s heart kick at her. And no, Pepper had said when pressed, she’d never met a single person from Alison’s life before Charlottesville. And therefore, no, there was no corroboration to any of the Alison stories at all.

  Only what Lily had told her.

  “I told you what I know,” Lily had said at that point, and she’d worried that the lies were like tattoos she wore on her face. That they were that bright, that indelible. “Everything I know.”

  Lily had been involved in a serious car accident on the winding California coastal road five years ago, Rafael had said—for Pepper’s benefit, presumably—and Luca had confirmed. Her body had never been found. Now they knew why.

  “How can you explain the fact that I’m here and don’t remember you?” Lily had demanded, as Pepper had stared at her from across the table as if looking for the truth on her face. Or those terrible tattoos Lily was sure she could feel stamped across her cheekbones. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t know how a woman could go over the side of a cliff on the Sonoma Coast and yet turn up unharmed five years later on the other side of the country, with a memory of a completely different woman’s life and a child who is inarguably mine,” Rafael had said, a seething fury in his voice and in his eyes though he’d sat at Pepper’s table so easily. So calmly. As if he was a friend instead of a foe—but Lily couldn’t accuse him of that if she was pretending she didn’t know him, could she? Maybe a stranger wouldn’t be able to read him as well as she could. “I only know that you are the same woman. That means it happened, whether it makes sense or not.”

  And the truth was, there had been no need to trot out all the old pictures Rafael apparently kept cached on his mobile and ready to show, because this game had ended the moment Pepper had seen Rafael next to his son.

  His son.

  “This is a good thing,” Pepper had whispered fiercely, hugging Lily as the Castelli brothers had led them away from the only home Arlo had ever known. “Everyone should know who they really are, honey. And that little boy needs his father.”

  Lily had questioned whether anybody needed Rafael Castelli, especially the child she had no intention of allowing him to corrupt, but she’d known better than to say that out loud. And it had been out of her hands. She’d been utterly outmaneuvered. The only card she could possibly have played was a demand for a blood test as some kind of stalling tactic—but to what end? She already knew what it would say.

  And anyway, Rafael had anticipated that move.

  “We will take the helicopter back to Washington, DC,” he’d told her in that cool way of his, at such odds with her memories of his tempestuousness and that ferocious gleam in his gaze. “Where a suitably discreet doctor is waiting to perform the necessary blood work. We will know the whole biological truth before we land in Italy. If there has been some mistake, I promise you that the Castelli family will see to it that you and your son have a lovely holiday in Italy before we return you back here to your home, safe and sound.”

  “Wonderful,” she’d retorted, baring her teeth in some approximation of a smile. “I’ve always wanted to see Venice. Before it sinks.”

  The jet rolled to a stop on the Castelli airfield, jerking her back into the wholly unwelcome present. Arlo was already bouncing up and down in his seat beside her with his usual boundless energy, and she could hardly blame him for taking off at a dead run once the plane’s door opened and the cold, crisp mountain air poured in.

  She took her time, but there was only so much dawdling she could do before she, too, had to step off the plane and climb down the metal steps. Putting her well and truly back in Italy. The truth of that felt like a blow. And it was even more beautiful here than she remembered it, so stunning it actually hurt—the soaring heights of the Alps dressed up in their winter whites, the blue sky with hints of pink and coral from the exultant dawn still fading away as she watched—and the man who waited for her at the foot of the steps as darkly gorgeous and even more dangerous than the view.

  Rafael slid his mobile into his pocket as she stepped onto the solid, frozen ground beside him. Lily refused to look at him, and then despaired of herself if something so small and pointless was her only potential rebellion. Pathetic. She could feel her heart in her throat, and for the first time in her entire life, thought it was within the realm of possibility that she might faint.

  Don’t you dare! she snapped at herself. And not because fainting was a weakness, though it likely was and she didn’t want to show any weakness here. But because she knew Rafael would catch her and the very last place she needed to be, ever again, was in his arms.

  She kept her gaze trained on Arlo, who was chasing his uncle up and down the otherwise empty runway, kept as it was for the family’s use alone. A gleaming black Range Rover waited at a discreet distance, poised to sweep them all down to the grand old house that lounged across several acres at one end of the crystal-blue mountain-rimmed alpine lake the locals called Lago di Lacrime.

  Lake of Tears, Lily thought darkly, glaring in the direction where she knew the lake waited, out of sight behind the nearest wall of alpine rock. How appropriate.

  “I’m afraid the results of the blood tests are in and allow no further room for debate,” Rafael told her then, his voice quietly triumphant in a way that made her skin feel shrunken down too tight against her own bones. “You are Lily Holloway. And Arlo is very much our son.”

  She should feel something big, Lily thought then. Panic. Desperation. Even the polar opposite of that—a pervasive sense of relief, perhaps. Or perhaps of homecoming, after all these years of hiding.

  But what she felt, instead, was profoundly sad.

  Our son, he’d said, as if they were like other people. As if that was a possibility. As if they hadn’t ruined each other, down deep into their cores, so comprehensively that even the past five years hadn’t healed it or changed it at all.

  Lily didn’t think anything ever could.

  They stood there together in one of the most gorgeous and remote spots in the world. The thrust of the fierce mountains was exhilarat
ing, the sky bluer by the moment while the crisp wind danced through her hair and moved over her face like a caress, and it was beautiful. It was more than beautiful. And yet all she could see was the dark, twisted past that had brought them here. Her terrible addiction to him and his profound selfishness. Their dirty, tawdry secrets. The awful choices she’d made to escape him, as necessary as they were unforgivable.

  This was no new start. It was a prison sentence. And the only thing she knew for sure was that while Rafael was responsible for her son—the single greatest thing in her life and, as far as she could tell, her singular purpose on this earth—Rafael was also the reason she’d had to burn down every bridge and walk away from everything she’d ever loved.

  And Arlo was worth that. Arlo was worth anything.

  But that didn’t mean she had the slightest idea how she would survive proximity to Rafael again now.

  “I don’t know how to respond to that,” she told him, long after the silence between them had grown strained and awkward and possibly revealing, too. That was what made her tell him as much of the truth as she could. “I don’t feel like Lily Holloway. I don’t know who that is. I certainly don’t understand who she was to you.”

  “Never fear,” Rafael said, his voice soft but somehow containing all the might of those mountains looming up above them, solid rock and sheer, dizzying magnitude, and all of that dark heat besides. “I’ll teach you.”

  * * *

  Rafael had no idea what to do with himself now that he’d brought Lily and her son—his son—back to Italy.

  It was a novel, distinctly unpleasant sensation.

  He heard his brother walk into the cozy, private study he used as his office in the great old house, but he didn’t turn away from the window where he stood. He’d been there some time, still gripped in the same tight fist that had held him fast since Virginia. Before him, the pristine alpine lake stretched off into the low afternoon mists that concealed the small, picturesque village that adorned its far end and the tall mountains that thrust up like a fortress behind it, as if to protect it.