Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  But that didn’t seem to matter now, in a fairy tale of a bedchamber in this magical city, while the snow kept falling and the fire danced, and he was right there in front of her and far more beautiful than she’d let herself remember.

  She’d been nineteen that New Year’s Eve. She’d taunted him and he’d taken her and then they’d walked back into their lives and pretended nothing had happened. He’d played the attentive boyfriend to whatever silly girlfriend he’d had then. She’d pretended to be as disgusted with him and the entire Castelli family as she always had been.

  Then the holiday had passed, and it had been time for her to head back to Berkeley, to carry on with her sophomore year of college. He’d caught up to her in the grand front foyer of the château as she’d headed out toward her car with her bags. His girlfriend had been laughing it up in the next room with the rest of their families. They could have been discovered at any moment.

  Rafael hadn’t spoken. He’d hardly looked at her since New Year’s Eve. But he’d held out his hand like this, and she’d met it. And it had felt a lot like crying, that heaviness within, that constriction and that ache, all bound up in such a simple touch. But they’d stood like that for what had felt like a very long time.

  Now, all these years later, Lily understood it better. This was their connection in its least destructive form. This touch. This thing. It still arced between them, tying them together, rendering all the rest of what they were unimportant beside it.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he said quietly, so quietly she almost thought she’d imagined it. But then his dark eyes met hers and held. “I thought you were gone forever.”

  The sheer brutality of what she’d done hit her, then. She’d understood she’d hurt him, yes. She’d hurt a lot of people. She’d told herself she’d accepted that, and that Arlo was worth it. But she’d never thought about this. The warmth of his flesh against hers. This connection of theirs that defied all thought, all reason, all efforts to squash it. What would she have done if she’d thought he’d died? How could she possibly have lived with that?

  Her throat was too tight to speak. She didn’t try. Instead, she leaned forward and pressed a kiss in the center of his chest. She felt his breath rush out, but she didn’t stop. She pushed him back against the bed, aware that he let her move him like that, that she couldn’t have shifted his powerful frame if he hadn’t allowed it.

  She still couldn’t speak. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t apologize in her way.

  Lily poured her sorrow and her regret all over him, making it into heat. He leaned back on his hands and she crawled over him, pressing kisses down the strong column of his throat, over that strong, hard pulse that she knew beat for her, then lower, to celebrate the sheer masculine perfection of his chest. She let her hair slip this way and that as she slid down the length of him, tasting him and celebrating him, pouring herself over him like sunlight until she unbuckled his trousers, pulled them down, then shoved them out of her way.

  She paused then, flicking a look at him as she took his hard length in her hands. His gaze was black with need, his face set in stark and glorious lines of pure hunger, and apology merged with simple desire as she bent and sucked him deep into her mouth.

  Rafael groaned. Or maybe that was her name.

  Lily sank down between his legs, reveling in him. The taste of his hardness, salt and man. Satin poured over steel, and he trembled faintly the more she played with him, the deeper she took him.

  He sank his hands in her hair and held her there as she taunted him with her tongue then took him deep yet again. He murmured Italian phrases that sounded like prayers but were, she knew, words of sex and need. Encouragement and stark male approval.

  “Enough.”

  His voice was so gruff she hardly recognized it, but she understood it when he pulled her from him and lifted her against him, rolling them back and onto the wide bed. For a moment she thought he would simply take over, but he rolled once more, settling her there on top of him so he nudged up against her slick folds.

  His gaze was like fire, or maybe the fire was in her. Maybe this was all fire.

  She reached between them and took him in her hand. She felt his swift intake of breath, or perhaps it was a curse, and then they both groaned when she shifted and took him deep inside her.

  Naked, she thought, as if the word was an incantation. Or a prayer.

  They were both naked. This wasn’t a coatroom, an alcove outside a dance or any of the other semipublic places they’d done this over the years. This was no illicit hotel room when they’d both claimed to be somewhere else. No one was looking for them and even if they were, it wouldn’t matter if they were found.

  This was simply them, skin to skin, at last.

  And then Lily began to move.

  That same fire burned high, but this was a sweeter blaze. The pace she set was lazy. Dangerous. Rafael lay beneath her, his hands at her hips, his gaze locked to hers.

  Perfect, Lily thought. He has always been perfect.

  And then she rode them both right off the side of the earth, and into bliss.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LILY WOKE TO find herself all alone in that great bed, the sheets a tangle below her and the canopy like a filmy tent high above.

  For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was.

  It came back to her slowly at first, then with a great rush. That quick plane ride down from the remote lake in the Dolomites yesterday afternoon, then the boat that had whisked them through the eerie, echoing wonder of the Venice canals, past winding, narrow byways and under more than one distractingly elegant bridge. After which she’d spent hours getting ready for a ball she hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place, surrounded by servants like some kind of latter-day queen, finding herself less and less averse to the night ahead the more she liked the way they made her look in the beveled mirror in front her.

  There was the most unpalatable truth of all: that she really was that vain.

  But it had been worth it when she’d seen that stunned, famished look on Rafael’s face as she’d made her way down the long stair to his side. It had all been worth it.

  Looking back, Lily thought she could trace all the rest of her questionable decisions last night to that moment. The long walk down, her gaze fastened to his, while he looked at her as if she was the answer to a very fervent prayer.

  She sat up slowly now, the long night evident in the small tugs and pulls all over her body, unable to regret a single one of them. She imagined that would come. But in the meantime, she rolled from the bed and drew the coverlet around her as she stood. The fire was low in the grate, while the thin light of dawn made the air seem blue. Rafael was nowhere to be found and when she cocked her head to listen intently, she couldn’t hear him in the bath suite either. Outside, last night’s snow dusted all the boats moored along the edges of the canal and the tops of the grand palazzos opposite, making a particularly Venetian Christmas card out of the already lovely view.

  Lily placed her hand against the glass the same way she’d placed it against Rafael’s hand the night before, felt that deep ache in her heart, and understood entirely too many things at once.

  She was in love with him. Of course she was. She had always been in love with him, and it was as wretched a thing now as it had been when she’d been nineteen.

  Because nothing had changed. Not really.

  They were the same people they had always been and now the past five years were between them. And Arlo. And all the sex in the world, no matter how good, couldn’t change what she’d done or who Rafael was or any of the many, many reasons they could never, ever work.

  At heart he was his father, who married and remarried at the drop of a hat and believed himself deeply in love without ever having to prove it for too long. And she was entirely too much like
her own mother, who had disappeared into the things she loved, whether they were prescription drugs or men—until it had killed her. So selfish. So destructive.

  Running away in the way she had might not have been a particularly mature choice, or even a good one. Lily understood that. The pain she’d caused was incalculable. One night in Venice couldn’t change that. Maybe nothing could.

  She was no less selfish. No less destructive. But at least she was aware of it; she accepted the truth about her behavior, however unpleasant. Like everything else, she thought then, there was nothing to do but live with it. One way or another.

  She squared her shoulders and dropped her chilled hand back down from the window, feeling scraped raw inside. Lily decided that was hunger. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten something. She pushed her way out of the bedroom into the sitting room she’d glimpsed so haphazardly last night, sure there must be something to eat somewhere in a palace so grand.

  But she stopped short when she entered the sitting room. The fire in here was blazing, and there was an impressive selection of breakfast foods laid out along the side table as she’d expected, but what caught her attention was Rafael.

  He stood by the windows, looking out on what she assumed was the same view she’d left behind in the other room. She thought that was the sum total of who they were. Forever separated, forever lost to each other in pursuit of the same end. A wave of melancholy threatened to take her from her feet then, surprising her with its strength.

  She shoved it back down and blinked that heat in her eyes away.

  “It’s pretty out there,” she said, inanely, and it was worse because her throat was so raw. She coughed and pulled the coverlet tighter around her, cold despite the warmth of the room. “Though very raw, I think. With all that snow.”

  It had something to do with the way Rafael stood there, so remote, wearing nothing but low-slung trousers that showed off that powerful body of his. It was the set of his broad shoulders, or that sense that he wasn’t really there at all. That he saw something other than the snow and the canal, and the light of a winter morning turning the sky to liquid gold.

  “My mother was mad,” he said without turning around, as if he was wholly impervious to the cold on the other side of that window. Or in his own voice. “That is not the preferred term, I know. There were so many diagnoses, so many suppositions. But in the end, mad is what she was, no matter how they tried to sanitize it.”

  All it had taken was an internet connection to find the few articles about Gianni Castelli’s doomed first marriage, so this was not precisely news to Lily. She’d read everything she could in a fury when she’d been sixteen and less than pleased about her mother’s new fiancé. But she couldn’t remember Rafael ever discussing his family history before. Not ever, in all the time she’d known him. That he was choosing to do so now, unprompted, made her heart beat hard and low in her chest.

  “That is the excuse that was always trotted out in those years before she was taken away,” he said after a moment, when Lily didn’t respond. “That she was sick. Unwell. That she wasn’t responsible for her actions.” He shifted then, turning to look at her, though that wasn’t an improvement. That darkly gorgeous face of his was shuttered. Hard. Her heart kicked that much harder against her ribs. “As it turns out, it’s not much of an excuse when it’s your mother they’re talking about.”

  “What did she do?” Lily didn’t know how she dared to speak. She realized she’d stopped dead a step from the door, and forced herself to move again. She walked farther into the deceptively cheery room and perched on the edge of the nearest chaise, as if she couldn’t feel the terrible tension in the air.

  “Nothing,” Rafael said softly, his dark eyes bleak on hers. “She did absolutely nothing.”

  Lily swallowed, hard. “I don’t know what that means.”

  His mouth shifted into something not at all a smile. “It means she did nothing, Lily. When we fell. When we ran to her. When we jockeyed for her attention, when we ignored her. It was all the same. She acted as if she was alone. Perhaps, in her mind, she was.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lily didn’t know why he was telling her this story, and she couldn’t read any clues on his face. “That can’t have been easy.”

  “Eventually she was whisked away to a hospital in Switzerland,” he continued in the same distant tone. “At first we visited her there. I think my father must have believed that she could be fixed, you see. He’s always liked to put broken things back together. But my mother could not be repaired, no matter how many drugs or therapies or exciting new regimens they tried. Eventually, they all gave up.” He thrust his hands in his pockets, and though he didn’t look away from her, Lily wasn’t sure he saw her, either. “My father divorced her, claiming that was best for everyone, though it seemed it was really only best for him. The hospital started talking about her comfort and safety rather than her progress, and told us it was better if we stayed away.”

  Lily didn’t know what she meant to say. What she could say. Only that she wanted to help him, heal him somehow, and couldn’t. “I’m so sorry.”

  His mouth moved into a harsh curve. “I was thirteen the last time I saw her. I’d taken the train from my boarding school, filled with all the requisite drama and purpose of a young man on a mission. I had long since determined that my father was to blame for her decline, and that if I could see her alone, I could know the truth. I wanted to rescue her.”

  Lily stared back at him, stricken. The fire popped and crackled beside her, but Rafael didn’t appear to hear it. And she couldn’t seem to read a single thing on that hard face of his.

  “Rafael,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t have to tell me any of this.”

  “But I do,” he replied. He studied her for a moment, then continued. “The hospital wouldn’t let me see her, only observe her from afar. My memories of her were of her rages, her tears. The way she would go blank in the middle of crowded rooms. Yet the woman I saw, alone in her little room, was at peace.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “She was happy there, locked up in that place. Far happier than she had ever been outside it.”

  Lily studied him for a moment. “What did you do?”

  He shrugged in that supremely Italian way. “What could I do? I was thirteen and she wasn’t in need of rescuing. I left her there. Three years later, she was dead. They say she accidentally overdosed on pills she should not have been hoarding. I doubt very much it was an accident. But by then, I had discovered women.”

  Lily stiffened where she sat, and a harsh sort of light gleamed in his dark eyes, as if he could track her every movement. “I don’t understand why you’re sharing these things with me.”

  “I had no intention of becoming my father,” Rafael told her quietly. “I had no interest in becoming some kind of relationship mechanic, forever tinkering around beneath the hood of another broken thing. I liked a laugh. I liked sex. I wanted nothing but a good time and when it turned heavy, the way it inevitably did? I was gone. I never wanted to feel that urge to rescue anyone, not ever again. I wanted no complications, no trouble.” His gaze was hard on hers, bright and hot. “And then came you.”

  “You shouldn’t have kissed me,” she threw at him, as if this was a fight they were having instead of a quiet conversation in a cheerfully cozy room on a snowy December morning.

  “No,” he murmured, and she might have said it first, but she found she greatly disliked his ready agreement. “I shouldn’t have touched you. I had no idea what I was unleashing.” She thought he tensed where he stood. Maybe that was how he seemed to crowd out all the air in the room. “And I hated it. I hated you.”

  She couldn’t breathe. “You hated me,” she repeated, flatly, as if that would make it hurt less.

  “I thought if I could pretend it hadn’t happened, it would go away. But it kept happening.” That dark,
ruthless gaze of his tore her up. It made her shake. But he didn’t stop. “I thought if I could contain it, control it, diminish it or dilute it, I could conquer it. Keep it hidden. Choke the life out of it before it swallowed me whole.”

  “I didn’t ask you to tell me any of this,” she said then, feeling off balance. Something like dizzy, as if she was propped there on the edge of a cliff instead of an overstuffed chaise. “I wish you would stop.”

  “But then you went over the side of a cliff you shouldn’t have been near, in a car you shouldn’t have been driving, going much too fast,” he said, his voice hoarse, and she could see from that look in his eyes that he had no intention of stopping. “I knew perfectly well that if you’d been upset, the way they claimed you must have been to drive like that, it was my fault. They said it was an accident, that you’d lost control and skidded, but I wondered. Was it really an accident? Or had I made your life so bloody miserable that your only chance at any kind of happiness was to escape me the only way you could? Just like she did.”

  She was shaking outright then. “Rafael—”

  “Except here you are,” he said softly, and she wished he would move. She wished he would do something more than simply stand there like some kind of creature of stone, breaking her heart more with every word. “And you still make my breath catch when you enter a room. And I’ve long since understood that it was never hate I felt for you, but that I was too immature or too afraid to understand the enormity of it any other way. And you have my child, this perfect and beautiful son I thought I didn’t want until I met him.” He shook his head slightly, as if the reality of Arlo still overwhelmed him. “And I don’t hate you, Lily. I want you in ways I’ve never wanted any other woman. I can’t imagine that changing if it hasn’t yet. But you’re right.”

  His gaze was so bright, so hard, it hurt. And she’d been turned to stone herself.