Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  Just one more time, she told herself, almost wistfully, as she looked up at him.

  But she knew that was the biggest lie of all.

  “Don’t kiss me,” she whispered then, too quick and too revealing. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”

  Rafael’s stern mouth was so close then—so close—and that look in his eyes was enough to raze whole cities, and there was no disguising the way it made her tremble, too. She didn’t try.

  “Speaking of lies,” he said, and drew closer still, his arms moving around her to hold her there in a parody of a lover’s embrace.

  Or perhaps it was no parody, after all.

  She braced her hands against his chest, though she couldn’t have said if she was pushing him away or, far more worrying, simply holding him there. “It’s not a lie just because you don’t like it.”

  He studied her for a moment, and Lily forgot where they were. What continent, what year. What city. There was nothing but that dark gold brilliance in his gaze, the riot deep inside her, and her ever more fragile resistance. He shifted, raising one gloved hand to smooth over her cheek, the leather both a caress and a punishment, as it was not the lick of heat his bare skin would have been.

  She imagined he knew that, too.

  “Relax,” he said, and he sounded far too amused, then. As if she was the only one torn asunder by this. The only one so affected. “I’m not going to kiss you here. It’s far too cold.”

  “You mean public.”

  There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “I mean cold.”

  “I don’t understand what the temperature has to do with it.” She sounded far more cross than was wise. Rafael’s mouth curved.

  “The next time I kiss you, Lily, I won’t be as thrown as I was on the street in Virginia. There will be nothing but our usual chemistry.” He shrugged, though the hand against her cheek tightened, and she knew then that he wasn’t nearly as unaffected as he seemed. “And you know what happens then.”

  She did. A thousand images surged through her then, one brighter and more sinfully wicked than the next. A messy, slick tumult of his mouth, his hands. The thrust of his body deep into hers. The taste of his skin beneath her tongue, the hard perfection of him beneath her hands. Salt and steel.

  The ache, the fire. The impossible, unconquerable fire.

  “No,” she gritted out, glaring at him no matter how much emotion she feared was right there in her eyes to make a liar of her. “I don’t know what happens.”

  He dragged his thumb over her bottom lip, his mouth cruel and harsh and no less beguiling, because he knew exactly what it did to her. The thick heat that wound tight and dropped low, nearly making her moan. Nearly.

  “Then you’ll be in for quite a ride.” He looked at her as if he was already inside her. Already setting a lazy, mind-wrecking pace. “It’s uncontrollable. It always has been.”

  Lily jerked her head back, out of his grip, much too aware that he let her. That he could have stopped her, if he chose. His hand dropped from her face and she wanted to slap that deeply male, wholly satisfied look straight off his face. She had to grit her teeth to keep from doing it.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she told him, her voice as frigid as the air around them. As the dark, mysterious waters of the canal behind him. “I feel certain I don’t want to know what it means.”

  His dark eyes were hooded as they met hers. He still looked like they were already having sex. As if it was a foregone conclusion. As if this was nothing more than foreplay—and every part of her body burst into jubilant flame at the sight.

  “It means I kiss you, then I’m inside you,” he told her, in a voice straight out of those wild, feverish dreams she lied and told herself were nightmares. She’d been telling herself that for years. “Always.”

  “I will take that as a threat,” she threw at him and stepped back, as if that tiny wedge of space could make what he said less true. His mouth shifted, and she thought she’d never seen him look more like a wolf than he did then.

  And she didn’t think she’d ever wanted him more.

  “You may take it any way you choose,” he told her, all dark intent and certainty. “It is a fact, Lily. As inevitable as the dawn after a long, cold night. And as unavoidable.”

  * * *

  Rafael thought she might run.

  He set footmen at the door to her bedchamber and found himself rather more grim than he should have been as he considered what pointless attempt she might make to escape him this time. Yet despite his dark imaginings as the hours crept by, no alarm was raised.

  And when the clock struck the appointed hour, Lily appeared at the top of the grand stair inside the palazzo like every last one of the fantasies he’d conjured up over the past five years.

  He’d planned this well, he’d thought. He’d had the gown shipped in from Milan, had dispatched servants to tend to her hair and her cosmetics. He’d thought he’d prepared himself for the inevitable result.

  But it was one thing to imagine Lily, his Lily, alive and well and dressed like a member of the scrupulously high-class Venetian society they would mix with tonight. It was something else to see her again with his own eyes.

  Rafael had never been so glad of that long staircase that swept down from the upper floor of the palazzo to the main level where he stood.

  It gave him time to compose himself. Lily moved like water, grace and beauty in every light step, as she made her way toward him. Her honey-colored hair was piled high on her head, held fast with a series of glittering combs, just as he’d asked. The dress he’d had crafted to her precise measurements cupped her gorgeous breasts and then swept in a wide arc toward the floor, managing to hint at her lithe figure even as it concealed it in yards upon yards of a deep, mellow blue-green that made her seem to glow a pale, festive gold.

  He’d never seen anything more beautiful.

  And then she stopped at the foot of the stair, this perfect goddess with her heart-shaped and heart-stopping face that made his own battered heart ache within his chest, and scowled at him.

  “I want a mask,” she said.

  Rafael blinked. And tried to wrestle his roaring, possessive reaction into some kind of manageable bounds. It wouldn’t do to throw her down on the stairs, to lick his way into her heat and taste the secrets she still hid from him. It wouldn’t do to rip that perfect gown into shreds where she stood, the better to worship the curve of her sweet hip and the lily tattoo that he knew danced there, out of sight.

  “Why?”

  He thought he sounded relatively polite and civilized, all things considered, but her scowl only deepened.

  “Do I need a reason? You said people wear them.”

  “So they do.” He couldn’t let himself touch her. Not until he was certain he could keep himself in check. “This is Venice. But I want you to tell me why you want one.”

  Lily tilted up that marvelous chin of hers and he felt it like a bolt of heat lightning, straight into his aching sex. Soon he would be unable to walk entirely, and those stairs would look that much better. He could pull her astride him, taking the cold floor against his back, and he could—

  He shook the vivid images away. Somehow.

  “I want to pretend to be one of the great Venetian courtesans,” she told him sharply, as if she’d read his mind. She eyed him, and Rafael was sure she had. “Isn’t that why you brought me here? So I could recreate history?”

  “Unless you’d like to recreate our own history right here on the hard marble steps,” he said with a quiet savagery, “I suggest you try again.”

  She looked at him, then away, though that proud chin remained high.

  “I don’t want to be recognized. I don’t particularly enjoy being treated like a ghost from beyond the grave.” He watched the elegant line of he
r lovely neck as she swallowed. “Especially when I can’t remember the person they’ll think I am.”

  “I will remember for the both of us.”

  He didn’t know where that pledge came from, as if he was a good man and this was that kind of situation. And then she looked back at him, her blue eyes lit with a kind of warm, wry humor that he thought might be the end of him right there. And she didn’t quite smile, but he felt it as if she did. Like a gift.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said.

  And Rafael found he couldn’t speak. He summoned the nearest servant with a lift of his finger and was glad of the few moments it took to produce a golden demimask, the perfect foil for her gown. For her lovely face.

  She reached out for it, but he anticipated that and ignored her. He stepped closer to her than was entirely wise and fit the mask to her face carefully, something like reverently. He ran his fingers along the edges and smoothed it over the top of her elegant cheekbones, and felt the sweet reward of that catch in her breath and then the shiver of it, just that little bit ragged, against his hands.

  “There,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “Now no one will know who you are but me.”

  Lily’s eyes met his through the mask, and he thought they were troubled. Too dark. Something like lonely.

  Or maybe that was him.

  “I thought that was the point,” she whispered, and her voice was as thick as it was accusing, with that undercurrent of something like grief besides. “I thought that was what you’ve been at such pains to show me. That no one but you does.”

  “Or ever will,” he agreed, more growl than vow.

  And he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, not then and there, so he did the next best thing. He took her hand and led her out into the night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THEY TOOK A water taxi to the party, which was being held in a stately Renaissance-era palazzo that appeared to genuflect toward the dark waters of the Grand Canal. As they came in toward the dock wreathed in holiday lanterns, Lily tipped her head back to gaze up at three full stories of blazing lights from every finely carved window. Music poured out into the night, folding in on itself against the water and the stone buildings of the city, and elegantly dressed partygoers laughed loud enough to spike the breeze.

  And Lily was finding it very, very difficult to breathe. At least she had the mask tonight, she thought. Not only would it conceal her identity from the rest of the world a little while longer, she hoped it might go a long way toward hiding her thoughts from Rafael, too. He read her far too easily.

  The thought of what, exactly, he might be reading on her face and in her eyes at any given moment—well. That didn’t exactly help her breathe any better. She tried to conceal that, too, as she slipped out of her warm cape and left it in the cabin of the water taxi Rafael had hired for the night, as directed.

  Rafael handed her out of the boat when it reached the grand palazzo’s guest dock, and Lily was proud of herself when she simply climbed out, as if touching him was nothing to her. Then he took her arm as they walked up the elegant steps toward the festive great hall, its doors flung open to the night as if the cold dared not enter and the dark had best submit to the blaze of so many torches. He was warm beside her, and something like steel, and Lily told herself her awareness of him was a warning, that was all.

  Beware. That was what her pulse was trying to tell her as it beat out a frenetic pattern against her neck. Be careful here. With him.

  Nothing more than a warning.

  Inside the open central hall of the magnificent palazzo, it was like a dizzying sort of dream. Like being swept up into a jewel-studded music box and meant to twirl along with all the gorgeous creatures who were already there in all their finery, moving this way and that across the marble floors and beneath the benign majesty of priceless glass chandeliers some two stories above. Rafael excused himself to go and do his duty to their hosts, his neighbors, leaving Lily to find her way to one of the great pillars and stand there, happily anonymous. She braced herself against the stout, cool marble as if it could anchor her to the earth. She didn’t know where to look first. A single glance at the scene before her and she felt glutted, overdone on sensation and stimuli.

  On this particular Venetian magic.

  Lily had certainly attended her share of fancy parties in the past. She’d even gone to a great ball in a Roman villa once, with the entire Castelli family and her own mother in attendance. She’d attended glamorous weddings in stunning locales international and domestic, exclusive charity events that had seemed to compete for the title of Most Over the Top, and had once danced in a brand-new year with most of Manhattan spread out at her feet in a desperately chic four-story penthouse on Central Park West. But all of that had been a long time ago, and none of it had been Venice.

  Tonight, everyone glittered the way the finest diamonds did, unmistakably well cut and intriguingly multifaceted. The women were nothing less than stunning, while each and every man was distractingly debonair. Was it the people or the place itself? Lily couldn’t tell. The air itself seemed richer, brighter. There were jovial feathers and the occasional masks, striking black tie and sumptuous couture. Gowns and jewels and sartorial splendor crowded the whole of the expansive first level of the palace, a gracious orchestra played holiday-tinged music from a raised marble dais that seemed to hover as if by magic just above the throng and the sleek marble dance floor in the center of the grand space opened up to the night sky above, yet was surrounded by so many clever little heaters that it was impossible to feel the mid-December chill.

  Lily shivered anyway, and she knew it wasn’t the temperature. It was the sheer, exultant decadence. This was a sinking city, a nearly forgotten way of life, and yet not a single bright and shining person before her seemed the least bit aware of any of those unpleasant realities as they danced and laughed and pushed back the night.

  Something inside her turned over too hard, then ached.

  “Come,” Rafael said, his mouth against her ear and the steel expanse of his chest at her back, and that ache bloomed instantly into something darker. Thicker. Infinitely more dangerous. “I want to dance.”

  “There must be hundreds of women here,” Lily replied, her eyes on the spectacle before her. It was overwhelming, yes—but he was worse. He was so much worse and infinitely more tempting. “I’m sure one of them would dance with you. If you asked nicely.”

  His laughter was a dark and silvery thing, light against her ear and then, deep inside her, a tectonic shift that sent tendrils of need shooting off in all directions, and she couldn’t bring herself to jerk away from him the way she knew she should.

  “I don’t want to dance with them, cara. I want to dance with you.”

  Lily wanted to dance with him in this magical palace more than she could recall wanting anything, ever, which was precisely how she knew she shouldn’t do anything of the kind. She pulled her head away from that sweet brush of his mouth against her ear, though it took her much too long and hurt a bit too much to break that connection. When she turned to face him, his gaze was trained on the upper swells of her breasts where they rose above her bodice, where she could feel the goose bumps from his proximity prickling to life. The truth of her reaction to him. Obvious and unmistakable, no matter what she said.

  Rafael took a long time raising that dark gold gaze to meet hers, and when he finally did, his expression was a molten, simmering thing that nearly made her moan out loud.

  “I don’t dance,” she told him. Quickly, before she could betray herself by saying nothing at all—by letting him simply sweep her along with him. He stood there, tall and darkly beautiful and wearing black tie as if it had been crafted specifically as an homage to his perfect masculine form, and she wanted to cry. Sob. Scream. Anything to break that rising tension inside her. Anything to break the hold he ha
d on her. Anything but what she felt called to do, down deep in her bones, and in that deep, lush throb between her legs. “I mean, I don’t think I know how.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t know what good it will do to tell me that, if I can’t remember and trip all over your feet and make a terrible scene. I doubt that’s the kind of spectacle you want at a party like this.”

  She only realized how snappish she sounded when he reached over and traced the lower edge of her mask with a single finger. It was pressure, not heat. He wasn’t touching her, not really, and there was absolutely no reason whatsoever that her pulse should speed up like that, or her breath should hitch. Noticeably.

  More evidence against her, she knew.

  “You don’t have to remember, Lily,” he said, his gaze much too bright and his voice a low, caressing thing that did everything his finger did and more, winding inside her and making her whole body clench tight and hot and needy. “You only need to follow where I lead.”

  Rafael didn’t wait for her answer, which she supposed was some kind of blessing. Or more likely, it being the two of them, a curse. He simply reached down, took her hand and led her out on to the floor.

  And Lily told herself she was blending in with the crowd here, nothing more. That she didn’t want to be recognized at all tonight, which meant she also didn’t want to draw any attention to herself by causing a scene. It was bad enough that Rafael was so gorgeous and so instantly recognizable—she could see heads turn as he cut through the crowd, something that was so commonplace to him, clearly, that he didn’t even seem to notice it as it happened. Lily told herself it was the right thing to do, to go along with him so obediently, so easily. That she was simply making sure she remained anonymous and unremarkable—just another well-dressed woman in a demimask, one of many here tonight.

  But then he turned and took her in his arms, and Lily stopped thinking about anything but him.

  Rafael.

  His sensual mouth was a grim line, but she could see that searing intensity in his eyes, and it made her tremble deep inside. She had no defense against that hand that wrapped around hers, or the one that settled low on her back, as if she was naked, as if the sleek fall of her dress was no barrier at all. He could have pressed a burning coal to her bare skin and she thought that might have affected her less. She swallowed hard as she slid her own hand into place, over the taut, corded muscles of his sculpted shoulder, and felt the bright hot heat of him blaze into her as if he was a radiator.