Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  “Arlo doesn’t know you from a can of paint,” she snapped at him.

  “And whose fault is that?”

  The silky rejoinder stopped her short. She could feel her temper pounding in her temples, her throat, down in her gut, goading her on. When she knew the very last thing she could be around Rafael was out of control in any way. Temper would take her down as fast as passion. Faster. At least if she was kissing him, she couldn’t run her mouth at the same time.

  Lily blinked. Where had that come from?

  But of course, she knew. She was in a small room, alone with Rafael. Five years ago he would already have been inside her. There would have been no hesitation, no hands thrust into his pockets and that wary distance. He’d once hitched her up on the back of the deep leather sofa to her right and had her biting her own hand within seconds of closing the door behind them.

  She went and sat on that same sofa now and saw a gleam of something edgy and very male in his gaze as she did, telling her he was remembering the same thing. She toed off the short boots she wore, pulled her legs in their warm leggings beneath her where she sat and wrapped her arms around her middle and the oversize tunic of a sweater she wore, with the great big cowl neck that was perfect for drafty old European halls like this one.

  “So, tell me your theories,” she said, with a calm she didn’t feel at all.

  Rafael stood where she’d left him, over near the wall of books. He didn’t cross over and sit down in the chair across from her. He only studied her.

  Looking for weaknesses, she thought, and tried to steel herself.

  Because she was well aware that Rafael didn’t buy her amnesia story for an instant.

  “What theory would you prefer to hear?” he asked after a moment. “I have so many.”

  This angle, staring up at him from below, was unsettling. It was impossible not to be entirely too aware of every hard plane of his perfect chest, or that ridged abdomen of his. It was hard not to lose herself in the stark male lines of his fine, athletic form, much less that ruthlessness he’d always exuded. But where it had been purely sexual five years ago, now it was tempered. Steelier. Harder. More focused and intent. It made him that much more devastating.

  And Lily had to find a way to ignore it. All of it. When she’d never managed to do so before.

  You’re an addict like any other, she told herself now. Like her mother. Hadn’t she sat in those meetings from time to time in those first days on the run, pretending it had been something else that had overtaken and ruined her life so totally? You know how to do this. One excruciating moment at a time.

  Though heroin didn’t talk back, she imagined.

  “What do you think happened to me?” she asked him then. “If I’m this Lily person, why do I think I’m someone else?”

  His dark eyes glittered, and she knew he was biting back the urge to tell her there was no if about it. That she was Lily Holloway, whether she liked it or not. She could practically hear him say it—but to his credit, he didn’t.

  “What did you think when I asked you about your tattoo in that café?” he asked instead. “Didn’t you think it was odd that a total stranger could describe it so perfectly when, according to you, we’d never met before?”

  “Of course I did. But I thought everything about you was odd.”

  “That was it? It didn’t cross your mind that what I was saying might be true?”

  “Not at all.” She eyed him, hoping the tension in her arms as she hugged her legs closer into her chest wasn’t obvious. “If I walked up to you and said, oh, hello, your name is actually Eugene Marigold and I know you from our days in Wisconsin, would you believe me?”

  His eyes gleamed with a hint of golden amusement that danced down the length of her spine, making her shiver deep within. “It would depend on the evidence.”

  She shrugged. “I’m here to tell you that the evidence doesn’t help. I guess I thought you must have seen my tattoo before.”

  “You often parade around with it showing, do you?”

  Lily stilled. She knew that tone. Possessive. And darkly thrilling to her in a way that felt physical, when she knew she should have found it appalling. The only appalling thing here is you, she snapped at herself.

  “I wear a bathing suit at the lake sometimes, if that’s what you mean by ‘parading around.’”

  “A rather skimpy bathing costume.”

  “In America we call them bikinis.”

  He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and then he moved toward her, which made her throat go dry in an instant and every part of her body go stiff—but he only dropped down in the chair across from her.

  And that suddenly, Lily was tossed back in time. It was the way he lounged there, so surpassingly indolent, as if nothing on earth could ever truly bother him. She remembered that too well. This was the Rafael she’d known. Provocative. Sensual. Even now, with that considering sort of gleam in his gaze that told her he wasn’t the least bit relaxed no matter how he happened to be stretched out in that chair, her body reacted to the memory.

  More than simply reacted. She burst into long, hot, blistering flames. They shuddered through her, one lick after the next, making her want to writhe where she sat. But she didn’t dare move. She hardly dared breathe. And she had to hope against hope he thought she was blushing about the mention of bikinis. Or from the crackling fire in the nearby grate. Who was she kidding? He knew exactly why she’d flushed red, and she knew he did, too.

  But none of this was about what Rafael knew. It was about what he could prove.

  “How did you come up with the name Alison Herbert in the first place?” he asked, much too quietly, after another heavy moment dragged by, leaving furrows of stone deep in her gut. “You had a very specific biography at the ready. Where did it come from?”

  Where indeed, Lily thought darkly. The truth—that she’d bought that driver’s license off a girl she’d vaguely resembled in a truck stop parking lot with a week’s worth of tips, and had helped herself to that same girl’s hastily told life story, too—was obviously out of the question. And she had to bite her tongue against the urge to overexplain and overcomplicate, because that could only make this harder.

  She shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

  “I think you can do better than that.” A crook of his sensual lips when she frowned at him. He propped up his head against the fingers of one hand like some emperor of old and didn’t shift his hard gaze from hers for a moment. “Do you remember your childhood as this Alison?”

  She’d had a little more than a week to prepare for this particular performance, and had thought of little else in that time. So she scowled at him now, bristling a bit where she sat.

  “Of course.” He waited when she paused. She made herself breathe in, then out. Count to ten. “I mean... I think I do.”

  “Ah.”

  Lily didn’t understand how he could steal all the air from the room when she was looking straight at him and could see with her own eyes that he hadn’t moved at all. She frowned harder in his direction, though it didn’t seem to help. If anything, she found it harder to breathe.

  “I don’t see the point in talking about this,” she said then. She jerked her gaze away from his, sure he could read entirely too much on her face, and scowled down at the cuff of her sweater as if it contained the answers to these mysteries. She picked at it with her other hand. “Obviously, what I remember or don’t remember is irrelevant. You have the blood work.”

  “I do.”

  “And that’s why we’re here.” Lily swallowed, then lifted her head again to meet his gaze. This time, she held it. “But what about you?”

  “Me?” He looked faintly amused, or as amused as anyone could look with so much thunder in his gaze. “I know exactly who I am.”

  “But you
were my stepbrother,” Lily said, and tilted her head slightly to one side, hoping she looked curious rather than challenging. “How did any of this happen?”

  * * *

  She looked fragile and something like otherworldly tonight, Rafael thought, with her thick strawberry blond hair piled high on her head. It only called attention to the delicate elegance of her fine neck, something he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention to five years ago. Here, now, he couldn’t think of anything else. She was swallowed up in that oversize sweater, which he imagined was the point of it. The bigger and baggier the sweater, the less of her he could see.

  He doubted she realized that without the distraction of that lithe, intoxicating body of hers that still drove him mad, he had nothing to do but parse every single expression that crossed her face and every last telling look in her lovely eyes.

  Rafael didn’t believe for one moment that she couldn’t remember him.

  And if she didn’t remember him as she claimed, then she couldn’t remember what had actually happened between them, and he could paint it any way he liked. If she could remember him, well, it was up to her to interrupt and set the record straight, wasn’t it?

  After all, this was the woman who had failed to tell him he was a father, that he had a son, for five years—and had certainly not come clean about it on her own. If he hadn’t seen her on that street in Virginia, would she ever have told him about Arlo? He doubted it. He would never have known.

  He almost wished she really did have amnesia. For her sake.

  Rafael smiled at her then and felt rather more like a wolf than was wise.

  “It’s really a very sweet story,” he said. He was sure he saw her stiffen. “You were an awkward sort of teenager when our parents got together, ungainly and shy. You hardly spoke.”

  “What?” She coughed when he looked at her, and she managed to look so guileless that he almost doubted that he’d heard that sharpness in her voice then. Almost. “I’m sorry. Did you say ungainly?”

  “Many teenage girls have those rough patches,” he said, as if he was trying to be comforting. “But I think being around Luca and me helped you a bit. Smoothed out the edges.”

  “Because you were both such excellent brothers to me?” she asked, and wrinkled her nose in that way he’d always liked a little too much. He still did. “That pushes us straight into icky territory, doesn’t it?”

  Rafael laughed. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. We more or less ignored you.” He waved a languid hand in the air. “Our father is always marrying various women, the more broken the better, and sometimes they come with children we’re expected to treat as family for a while. We all know it’s temporary. A form of charity, really.” He smiled at her, and there was a bit more color on those remarkable cheeks of hers than there had been before. Though that could also have been the cheerful fire that crackled away beside them. “No, I mean that Luca and I dated a wide selection of very elegant, fashionable, socially adept women. You idolized them, of course. It must have been a master class for a girl like you, from such different circumstances.”

  She returned her attention to the sleeve of her sweater and fiddled with her cuff. “Were our circumstances so different?”

  “I’m really talking more about a certain polish that some girls have. They’re born with it, I think.” He eyed the growing flush on her cheeks, certain it was her temper and not the fire this time, and kept going. “I hope my honesty doesn’t upset you. If it helps, I think European women are better at achieving this polish than American women. Perhaps it’s cultural.”

  “How lucky that I had all of the many women you dated to help me overcome my Americanness,” she said evenly. He hoped she was remembering the women he’d dated back then, all of them about as polished as mud, and that her even tone was painful for her. But she only flicked a look at him, her blue gaze unreadable. “Is that what happened? These paragons of womanhood made me one of them and you found you had to date me, too?”

  He actually grinned at that and saw the reaction in her clear blue eyes before she dropped them again. But the heat he’d seen there licked over him like wildfire, and his voice was huskier than it had been when he continued.

  “You wrote me daily poems, confessing your girlish feelings to me. It was adorable.”

  “Poems,” she echoed flatly. “I find that...amazing. Truly. Since I haven’t written a word in as long as I can remember.”

  “We haven’t established how long that is, have we?”

  “And how long did I attempt to woo you with teenage poetry?” she asked, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You must have found the whole thing embarrassing.”

  “Very,” he agreed. “You were so bad at it, you see.”

  “Were it not for the existence of Arlo, I’d think this story was heading in a very different direction,” she said dryly.

  “On your eighteenth birthday,” he said, as if recalling a favorite old story instead of making it up on the spot, “you stood before me in a white dress, like a wedding gown, and asked me if I would grant you one wish.”

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Like a fairy tale. Did you say I was eighteen or eight?”

  “Eighteen.” His voice was reproving, and it was hard to keep himself from laughing. “You were quite sheltered, Lily.”

  “But not by you, because then the fact that we actually did get together would surely be gross.” She smiled faintly at him. “I’m guessing.”

  “You were sheltered by the strict convent school you attended,” he lied happily. She’d been nowhere near a convent in all her life, to his recollection. “You entertained some notion of becoming a nun.”

  He could almost hear the crackle of her temper, like water against hot metal, though she only swallowed. Hard.

  “A nun,” she repeated, her gaze narrow on his. “I wanted to become a nun.”

  He smiled with entirely too much satisfaction. “It was cute.”

  “And yet somehow we produced a child,” she prompted him, a touch of acid in her voice, though her expression was impressively impassive. “Despite the fact I was, apparently, an eight-year-old wannabe nun with no greater ambition than to live in a fairy tale. A poetic fairy tale.”

  “On your eighteenth birthday you asked me for a kiss,” he told her, sitting back farther in his chair and enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time in the past five years he’d enjoyed himself quite so much, in fact. “‘Please, Rafael,’ you begged. ‘I want to know what it is to be a woman.’”

  “Oh, come on. No one says things like that. Not in real life.”

  He shrugged. “And yet, you did. Or do you remember it differently?”

  “I don’t remember it at all,” she murmured, and he saw that mutinous light in her eyes. His stubborn girl. “Though that sounds a little bit dramatic, if I’m being honest.”

  “You were a very theatrical teenager, Lily. The despair of your mother and a trial to all your teachers, or so I was told at the time.”

  She rubbed her hands over her face. “And yet somehow all this drama led to a secret relationship? That strains belief, doesn’t it?”

  “That was your call,” he told her without a single qualm, watching her for a reaction to what might have been the biggest lie of all, but she only stared back at him. “You begged for a kiss, which, of course, I refused.”

  “I can’t say I blame you. I’d question the man who looked at a gawky teenager in a makeshift bridal gown who’d seriously considered taking up the veil and thought, I want some of that.”

  Rafael had no idea how he kept from laughing. “I told you that I couldn’t possibly kiss such an innocent. That you would have to prove yourself a woman if you wanted me to kiss you like one.”

  “You felt this was the right approach to an obviously confused teenager?�
� Lily sniffed. “I wonder if a kind word or two might have been a little more helpful. Or the number of a good therapist.”

  “I thought you would run screaming back into your sheltered little world.” He didn’t know when he’d slipped from his fantastical story into something a lot like the truth, but he knew he didn’t like it. Rafael stretched out his legs before him and eyed her across the accent rug, where she’d once slipped to her knees and taken him in her mouth while his father and her mother had talked loudly in the hallway on the other side of the door. He remembered the heat of her mouth, the sweep of her tongue, as if it had happened yesterday. So did the hardest part of him. “I thought you were all bark and no bite.”

  “Let me guess,” she said softly. “I bit.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Rafael remembered that kiss on New Year’s Eve. He remembered the taste of her flooding him, and the weight of her thick, wild hair against his palms. He remembered the press of her breasts against his chest and the silky-smooth expanse of the sweet skin at the tops of her thighs, where he shouldn’t have reached in the first place. “You decided you needed to prove yourself a woman.”

  “Was there a series of tests?” Lily asked in that same soft voice, yet with something far edgier beneath it. “A gauntlet of fire, one can only hope?”

  “Do you really want the details?”

  Her gaze was too hot when it met his. She looked away—but it took a moment. “No.”

  “You insisted we keep it a secret. You demanded I date other women in public so no one would know. You were determined.”

  “And you, of course, acquiesced.”

  “Of course. I am nothing if not a gentleman.”

  There was a long silence, then. There was only the sound of the fire. The far-off noises that all old houses made, the shift and creak of settling. The moody December weather on the other side of the old glass windows.

  His own heart, beating a little too hard for a simple conversation like this one.

  “Can I be honest with you?” she asked.

  “Always.”