Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  Lily felt scalded. Turned pink and raw from even that much fully clothed contact—but all she could seem to do was stare up at him, her lips parting on a ragged breath, his own dark need like a physical presence she could feel as well as her own.

  She knew she should have done something—anything—to lighten the moment, to wrench herself away or to conceal how she shook at his touch, at that predatory, possessive look in his dark eyes, but she didn’t.

  She didn’t do a thing. And for a moment they only stood there, staring at each other. Stock-still as the dance wove and swirled around them, as if they were the center of a carousel, and the only thing Lily knew for that moment—that endless eternity—was that they were touching at last. After five long and lonely years, she was in his arms again.

  Where you belong, some suicidal part of her whispered. Where you have always belonged and always will.

  And then Rafael began to move.

  Lily felt as if she was floating. She had no sense of him, of her, as separate entities—there was only the glory of the waltz and of his masterful touch, the way they flew across the floor as if they were all alone, the way his gaze wrecked her and remade her with every step. She forgot where she ended and he began. She was too close to him, her hand gripping his hand and her fingers digging deep into his shoulder, and his palm against her back was a revelation.

  Around and around they went. And it was like falling. It was like flying.

  It was all the poetry she’d never written, step by well-executed step, pooling in the white-hot space that was barely there between them.

  And then the song blended into something else, something far more Christmas inspired than sweepingly romantic. Lily blinked as if a spell had been lifted. Rafael slowed, muttering out what sounded like one of his fanciful Italian curses beneath his breath.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, but she was too dazed still to worry overmuch. Besides, she felt everything. The press of her fine clothes against her heated skin. The warmth of the great room, of his hard, hot hand in the small of her back, flirting with the upper swell of her bottom. The way he held her against him, his strong thigh too close to that wild, wanton place that hungered for him the most.

  She was molten and he was steel and she wanted. God help her, how she always wanted this man, no matter what.

  Rafael didn’t respond to her halfhearted question, and Lily didn’t care. The look on his face was stark, almost pained, and she exulted in it. Because she knew exactly what it was—what had happened to him in the course of that waltz. It was the same thing that always happened, no matter what they did. It was this thing of theirs that had destroyed them so many times already it hardly bore tallying up any longer. But here, now, at a fanciful pageant of a Christmas party in the depths of December in this city of light and magic, she couldn’t manage to care about all that the way she knew she should.

  It was as if that dance was inside them now, insistent and elegant, elemental and demanding.

  He made a sound that was more that wolf in him than the genteel and civilized man he was playing tonight, and Lily felt her nipples go hard against the constriction of her dress’s bodice and her toes cramp up in her impractical shoes. Then Rafael was moving again, not dancing this time, but striding through the crowd. Pulling her with him as he went, weaving in and out of the dancing couples and then propelling them down a dimly lit corridor off to the side of the main hall, where ancient oil paintings featured dour and scowling men on the ornately paneled walls while smaller doors led off into the bowels of the palace.

  “I don’t think this is open to the public,” Lily said dubiously, looking around with a frown. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be back here. Do you?”

  “I cannot imagine caring about anything less than that,” Rafael muttered. And then something else in gruff Italian. “Mi appartieni.”

  Or that was what she thought he said, it was so fierce and low. You belong to me. And then he swung her around so her back was against the nearest wall. She had a glimmering moment to take in the nearly savage look on his dark face, and then his mouth was on hers.

  And all hell broke loose.

  This wasn’t a moment of shocked surprise on the street. This was nothing but need, pure and greedy and entirely, exultantly mutual.

  Lily couldn’t pretend otherwise. She didn’t bother to try.

  This was fire. This was passion. Their history and that electric perfection that charged so hot and bright between them, an instant conflagration. Lily burned. She wrapped herself around him, she forgot herself completely and she let him set them both alight.

  Rafael kissed the way he did everything. With sheer, uncompromising ruthlessness and devastating skill. He took over her mouth, tasting her again and again, shoving her back into the wall and using it to keep her exactly where he wanted her. He made a low noise as he kissed her, over and over, as if he couldn’t get enough. As if it would never be enough.

  As if there was no word for enough in either one of their languages.

  He held her face between his hands, and he angled his head, blasting the kiss straight into another level of sheer, dizzying sensation. Lily felt her knees go weak and her whole body seem to shake, and still she met every thrust of his tongue, tasting him and taking him in her turn, each kiss as drugging and impossible and wildly delirious as the next.

  She must have dreamed the taste of him a thousand times since she’d walked away from that life, from him, but the reality was better. So much better.

  Rafael shifted, his hands moving from her face to test the shape of her breasts through the smooth fabric of her bodice, and she knew from the appreciative noise he made precisely when he found the stiff peaks. But then it was her turn to cry out when he covered them with his palms and pressed into them, rough and greedy and infinitely knowing, making her throw her head back and arch into his touch for more of that delicious pressure.

  He followed her mouth with his, as if he was unwilling to lose her taste for even a moment, and she didn’t know which one of them strained toward the other. Who moved, who touched. Who took, who gave. It was all a wild, brilliant tangle of sensation. Need and longing and their age-old ability to drive each other mad, like an explosion that kept going off. And off. Without end.

  She had to pull away from that hard, clever mouth of his for a moment to breathe, or at least to try. The hall they stood in was still as dark and deserted as before, but the lights and music beckoned just there, just out of reach through that far-off arch, so many people right there who could walk in on them at any moment—

  The way it had always been. Desire and the risk of discovery, all knotted together and hidden away where only they could see it, feel it, succumb to it.

  And then she forgot about their past, about the party and the people and the whole damned world, because his hands were on her long skirt and then beneath it, and he was urging her leg over his hip with those sure, hard hands, his mouth an open fire against her neck.

  Lily didn’t think. She burned.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and she gripped him with her leg as he reached between them, and then his gaze found hers. Dark and wild. She felt her mouth drop open. She saw his jaw clench tight as he dealt with his trousers. And then his fingers were moving her panties to one side and the thick, blunt head of his hardness was probing her entrance.

  She shook. Everywhere. She shook and she shook and she’d forgotten it, this glorious shaking from the inside out. She’d forgotten how visceral this was, how necessary. Like breath.

  Only better.

  “I told you,” he gritted out. “One kiss. That’s all it ever takes.”

  And then he thrust deep inside her. Hard and deep and true.

  Perfect and Rafael, after all this time.

  Lily fell to pieces, shattering into a thousand fragm
ents at that glorious fit, and only then did he move. Each thrust wilder and deeper than the last. The fever of it, the wild and glorious dance, catching her up when she would have come down and winding her tighter and tighter all over again.

  As if all of this need was new.

  As if they were.

  He slid a hand down to her bottom to lift her against him, pulling her higher until she crossed her legs around him and gripped his shoulders, and then he leaned her back against the wall, braced them with his other hand and hammered himself into her.

  Lily loved it. She more than loved it. It was coming home, drenched in fire. It was Rafael. It was them.

  Again. At last.

  And when she threw back her head and came apart again, biting her lip to keep from screaming though her throat ached, he groaned out her name against the side of her neck and followed.

  * * *

  Rafael had no idea how long they stood there like that.

  His breath came so hard it almost hurt, he rested his forehead against hers while he tried to catch it and he understood that he had not felt this rightness in so long he’d begun to think he’d imagined the whole thing. Her. The way they moved together, the sheer and blazing poetry of their lovemaking that had been the only thing he’d thought about some years.

  If anything, he’d minimized her effect on him. Her power over him. The beauty of this wild flame that still danced so brightly between them.

  He was already hardening again inside her, and he moved his hips experimentally, but it was still the same. That desperate heat. That wildness like a thirst, that all these years later he still had no earthly idea how to quench. He still didn’t want to do anything but drown in it. In her.

  Lily had never been anything but a revelation to him. That hadn’t changed.

  But she pushed against him. Then again, harder, and he realized she’d gone stiff in his arms.

  “Let me down,” she said, her voice thick and something like dangerous, edgy and tight.

  Rafael angled himself back, little as that appealed, and then helped her lower her legs to the floor. He bit back a satisfied smile when she sagged slightly, then gripped the wall, as if her knees were precarious beneath her.

  But he felt his amusement fade when he met her tormented gaze.

  “Lily,” he began, reaching over to brush her cheek, not entirely surprised that she was trembling uncontrollably. He could feel it like a series of earthquakes, rippling over her, through her. He felt the same in him. “Cara, surely—”

  “I can’t do this again!” she threw at him. She made a sharp sound as if she was in pain, or as if she hadn’t meant to speak. Her eyes were much too dark, and he tucked himself back in his trousers as he studied her expression, as she splayed out a hand over her middle as if she ached while her dress fell back into place all around her as if they’d never touched at all. He found he hated it. “I can’t do this!”

  “Lily,” he said again, but it was as if she couldn’t hear him. As if there was a storm enveloping her where she stood, only a few inches away from him and yet somewhere else entirely.

  “Look where we are!” she hissed at him. She slashed a hand in the direction of the party down the hall, her face contorted and moisture leaking down her cheeks from behind the demimask she still wore. “We might as well have put on a show in the center of the dance floor! Anyone could have seen us!”

  He made an impatient noise. “No one did.”

  “You don’t know that. You hope that. And it’s as childish and immature and irresponsible now as it was five years ago—except worse, because what happens to Arlo if our sexcapades make the tabloids this time?”

  Rafael started to speak, to reassure her again, but then stopped. Froze, more like, into a column of sheer and solid ice where he stood. He felt something like light-headed. As if the great stone palazzo had turned on its end and landed square in the center of his chest.

  “What did you say?” He realized he’d asked that in Italian and translated it into clipped English, his pulse like a clanging bell in his temples.

  “I can’t do this!” she hurled at him, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know exactly where this leads. Me, alone on the side of the road, with no choice but to run away from my entire life. You’re heroin and I’m little better than a junkie and everything between us is toxic, Rafael. It always has been.”

  And then she whirled and threw herself back toward the crowd, not seeming to notice or care that she was still unsteady on her feet. The mad, elegant whirl was still carrying on just on the far side of the nearest archway, bright and loud, and she lurched toward it as if she might fall over in her haste to escape him—as if she wouldn’t much care if she did.

  While Rafael stood there in the dim hallway, as stunned as if she’d clubbed him over the head. She might as well have.

  She remembered. She knew.

  It had been one thing to suspect she remembered. It was another to have her confirm it.

  He heard a low, inarticulate noise and understood he’d made it. That it had welled up from deep inside him, from that dark place where he’d locked these things away—

  Then, feeling blinded somehow by the intensity of what pounded into him in waves, blinded and yet focused and understanding that was as much the force of his temper as anything else, he went after her.

  He caught up to her on the steps of the palazzo, outside near the canal. She whirled around before he could take her elbow, as if she’d heard him coming and had known it was him by the sound of his feet against the stone, and she dashed moisture from her cheeks with her hands clenched in fists.

  Rafael told himself he didn’t care if she cried. That the very least she could do, after what she’d done to him, was shed a few tears.

  It took him long moments to recognize that the moisture on her face was not tears at all. It was snow. It fell all around them, soft and silent, disappearing as it met the water of the canal, the dock at their feet, the lovely bridge lit up in the distance. It was possibly the only thing in the world more beautiful than this treacherous liar in front of him, and he couldn’t bring himself to care about that, either.

  “You lied.” He hardly sounded like himself, and he didn’t dare reach for her. He didn’t trust himself to touch her just then. She had finally admitted the truth. That she had betrayed him so terribly he could hardly make sense of it, and in that moment he was so hollow and so desperate he didn’t know what he might do. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know himself at all. “You lied all this time. You hid from me, on purpose. You deliberately kept my son from me for five years. Then you lied even more when I found you.”

  He didn’t realize, until he heard the echo of his own voice on the water, that he was not exactly speaking softly. Standing on the steps of a Venice palazzo in the snow with a woman long presumed dead, who had been his stepsister when alive, was not exactly discreet.

  But she didn’t cower. Lily—and she was wholly Lily, his Lily, and she had never been anything else, goddamn her—laughed. There was nothing like joy in it. It was a terrible sound, as wretched as he felt, and he thought it must have hurt her. He hated that he cared about that. That her pain mattered to him when his clearly did not register with her at all.

  “Which glass house should we throw stones at tonight, Rafael?” she demanded, her voice as awful as that brittle, broken laugh, as his own had been. “This is what we do. This is who we are and who we’ve always been. We hurt each other. Again and again and again. What does it matter how?”

  “You faked your death!” he roared at her, through the snow and the cold and the echo of the music pouring out from inside the grand palace that rose up behind them in all its Christmas finery. Then he checked himself, though it cost him. “How is anything I did to you equivalent?”

  “I didn’t fake it.” She was bre
athing so hard it was as if she was running, but she was standing still, just as he was. As if they were both frozen together here in this horrid moment of truth. As if there could be no escaping it, no avoiding it, for either one of them. “I simply didn’t come forward and correct anybody when they thought the worst. It’s not the same thing.”

  He didn’t recognize the harsh, nearly violent feeling that rushed through him then, nearly taking him from his feet. He took a step back, and the world rushed back at him, reminding him again that they were standing outside, in public, in view of most of Venice and half the world, airing laundry so dirty he thought exposure to it could contaminate the whole of Italy.

  He had to contain this. He had to lock this down before it consumed him whole. Before he looked behind the stunned fury that worked in him and truly let himself feel what lurked there on the other side—

  But that was for another time. Another place. Rafael whistled for his water taxi, and his driver appeared from the shadows so quickly he couldn’t help but wonder how much the man had overheard. He couldn’t do anything about that, so he took Lily’s arm again instead.

  He thought the sheer audacity of her betrayal might have dimmed his raging, timeless, insatiable lust for her—but it was the opposite. The moment he touched her, he hungered for her as if he hadn’t just had her. It was almost as if he wanted her more, knowing what she’d done to him.

  You’ve never been anything but wildly obsessed where she was concerned, he told himself then. Why should this surprise you?

  “Not here,” he bit out at her, and he didn’t let himself look at her. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep himself from snarling at her—or worse, kissing her until all of this ugly truth faded away. “I think we’ve put on quite enough of a show for one night.”