“Of course it did,” she said, frowning at him. “If I couldn’t provide for him myself, I wasn’t going to keep him. I had it all planned out.”
“Adoption?” he asked, almost indifferently, though she didn’t quite believe that tone of voice.
“No,” she said. “You, Rafael. Of course, you. I figured I’d leave him on your doorstep or something. It seemed like a miracle that women hadn’t already done that a hundred times, when I thought about it.”
He absorbed that for a moment.
“But in no version of this story were you planning to come back,” he said, when the silence began to feel much too thick between them. “Is that what I’m hearing?”
Lily hadn’t expected that. She tried to read that closed-off look on his face, or the oddly stiff way he sat there at the foot of the bed. But either she’d lost her ability to see through him, or he was doing a far better job of hiding himself. She felt both possibilities as a loss.
“No, Rafael,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t coming back. Why would I?”
He met her gaze then, and she caught her breath. He looked haunted. Wrecked. She didn’t understand why that made everything inside her seem to shatter like so much glass.
Lily wanted to go to him. She wanted to hold him, touch him—anything to make that terrible look on his face go away. Anything to make it better.
But she didn’t move. She didn’t dare.
“I can’t think why you would,” Rafael said into the dark, into what was left of the night. Straight into that heart of hers that Lily thought should have been healed by now, but was, she understood, still broken. “Not one single reason.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RAFAEL FINALLY EMERGED from his offices on Christmas Eve, long after the sun went down and entirely lacking in anything approximating seasonal good cheer.
It had been years and it was still the same, Lily had said. It wasn’t going to change. We weren’t going to change.
He hadn’t been able to get it out of his head since she’d said it. Tonight it was even worse. It had echoed inside his head, louder and louder, merging into some kind of ringing sound until he thought it might actually drive him mad. He’d been in his office, furiously working on projects no one would glance at until well into the new year, and he’d thought for a moment that he’d finally tipped over the edge into that madness that had so beguiled his own mother.
It had taken him long moments to realize that was not Lily’s voice, but the sound of actual bells. Sleigh bells, if he was not mistaken, which had been curious enough to send him from his office and through the halls of the old house in search of the source.
He found his staff engaged in decking the old house even farther than they had already, despite the fact he’d informed them that his father and new bride would be in the Bahamas and Luca had decided to attend a house party abroad. And the decorating was being performed with significantly more enthusiasm than he recalled from previous years, which Rafael had no doubt had everything to do with the overexcited five-year-old who was all but turning somersaults in the grand front hall.
Rafael stood there, apart from the bustle down below. He leaned on the railing from the floor above and looked down at servants he’d never seen smile in all his life beaming at his son.
His son.
Arlo, who was like sunlight. Arlo, who emanated sheer joy like a homing beacon.
Arlo, whose mother had hated Rafael—or had despaired of him, and Rafael couldn’t say he’d been able to discern the difference—so much that she’d gone to tremendous, all but unimaginable lengths to get the hell away from him. She’d walked away from a horrific car crash. She’d hitchhiked out of state. She’d found herself pregnant and penniless, and even then her plans had centered around what might be best for the baby, but never, not once, had she considered returning to Rafael.
And he couldn’t argue about a single point in that story she’d finally told him. He’d been in that bed, with that nameless, faceless woman, not that he’d imagined for a moment that Lily might have seen him. He’d been the man Lily had described in every regard—the one who’d laughed at her, cheated on her though he’d claimed they had no formal commitment, and he had always, always assumed she’d come back to him.
How had he convinced himself that if she’d lived, she’d have been his? When he’d done everything in his power back then to make sure they would never, ever be together?
Lily had decided that she’d rather let everyone she knew think she was dead than play those terrible games any longer, and Rafael couldn’t blame her. It was time he told her that, he thought then, watching his son laugh and jump up and down on the floor below. He had no business making ultimatums when the truth was, he was the one who ought to—
“How nice of you to emerge from your cave at last.” Rafael turned slowly at the sound of that bone-dry voice. Lily stood in the gallery that functioned as a kind of upper-story foyer in this part of the house, her arms crossed over her chest and a scowl on her face. “The self-flagellation cave, presumably. I was beginning to think we’d have to break you out with dynamite. I was leaning toward throwing some at your head.”
Rafael blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
Her scowl deepened, and he couldn’t help but feel that like any other woman’s sexiest come-hither glance. It slid along his spine and pooled in his groin, licking him with the sweet flame of it. She was wearing nothing but a pair of loose trousers and a soft, dark sweater, with all of her hair piled up on the top of her head, and still, he wanted her. Deeply. Utterly. Desperately.
The more she scowled at him, the more he wanted her. And the more he hated himself for it.
“Arlo thinks you’ve been sick,” Lily told him, sounding unaccountably furious. “Because guess what, Rafael? When you’re a parent, you don’t get to flounce off whenever you feel like it and lie about like an opera heroine until you feel like coming back. You’re a father all of the time, not just when it’s convenient.”
He’d spent more than forty-eight hours wrestling with his guilt, his shame and all the self-loathing that went with it, and it turned out two seconds in Lily’s company was all it took to slice right through it. He tilted his head to one side and narrowed his gaze as he looked at her.
“Am I Arlo’s parent, Lily?” he asked coolly. “Because I was under the impression that, blood tests aside, you had no intention of telling that boy who his father is.”
“I could have told him the entire history of the Castelli family over the past two days,” she fired back at him. “A hundred times over. And you wouldn’t know either way, because you’ve been locked up in your office feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself,” he grated at her. “I was feeling sorry for you. For having put you through this in the first place.”
That came out a little too rough and shimmered there between them, entirely too honest. Bald and naked in the shadows of the gallery where they stood.
“Well,” she said, her voice a little less sharp than it had been a moment before. “There’s no need to retrace those steps. I did that for years. It doesn’t actually help.”
“Lily...” But he didn’t know how to say what needed to be said.
Her eyes were too bright suddenly, and that scowl of hers seemed fiercer and more precarious at once. “And you know what else doesn’t help? You demanding the truth and then running away when you get it, leaving me to deal with it. Again.”
“I am every last thing you accused me of being,” he said then. “More. There’s no pretending otherwise.”
“That’s very noble, of course,” she threw at him. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we have a son, and he doesn’t care if you’ve just discovered that the great and epic love story you’ve been holding onto for all these years is a sham.”
<
br /> “Don’t.” He didn’t mean to growl that at her. “Don’t say that.”
Her eyes were still too bright and much too dark at once.
“Come on, Rafael,” she said quietly, though there was that edgy thing in her voice, and the way she held herself, like broken glass that would never fit together again. “You know better. This was nothing more than sex and secrecy. Two kids playing games with dangerous and unforeseen consequences, nothing more.”
“You don’t believe that.” He shook his head when she started to speak. “If you did, you never would have run away. You certainly wouldn’t have raised Arlo on your own. ‘Two kids playing games’ isn’t a good enough reason for a deception of that magnitude, Lily, and you know it.”
She looked brittle in the mellow light, but that didn’t make her any less beautiful.
“I don’t want to marry you,” she told him, and there was something in her voice then that pierced straight through him, as if she’d broken apart where she stood. But she hadn’t. He could see she stood proud and tall, the way she always had. Maybe he was the one who was broken. “And I’m not leaving Arlo here with you and going off somewhere. I would tell you what I think you can do with your ultimatum, but you’ve already spent days brooding in your office. God knows what it would do to you if I really let loose.”
He studied her for a moment, while Arlo’s high-pitched voice, nearly a soprano tonight with all his excitement, echoed all around them. And this was wrong. He felt that, deep inside. This was all wrong. But he shoved his hands in his pockets instead of touching her the way he wanted to do.
He told himself that was what a good man would do. And once—just once—he would be the good man for her he’d never been when it counted.
“Consider the plane at your disposal,” he told her, and he thought he saw her shoulders sag, slightly, as if she’d wanted—but that was wishful thinking, and a second later, he was sure he’d imagined it. “It can take you wherever you want to go. I won’t fight you for custody. As you said before, all kinds of people figure out visitation. I’m sure we will, too.”
“I’m sure we will.” Lily’s voice was hollow. “How civilized, Rafael. I wouldn’t have thought we had it in us.”
And this time when she walked away from him, Rafael let her go.
* * *
Lily tried to sleep.
Arlo was so fired up about Christmas that he’d inevitably had a complete and total meltdown and ended up sprawled out on her bed in an exhausted heap of five-year-old tears. Lily had soothed him as best she could when the issue was too much sugar and the sheer injustice of it still not being Christmas morning until he’d finally fallen asleep. She’d crawled into bed beside him, flipped open a book and told herself that this was perfect. That this was the life she’d had for the past five years and it was the life she wanted. Her little boy and the little life they led together, somewhere far away from here. From Rafael. Books and dogs and absolute and total freedom. What could be better?
But she hadn’t been able to make any sense at all out of the words on the page before her, no matter how many times she reread the sentences. Eventually she’d given up. She’d cuddled Arlo’s flushed little-boy body next to hers and she’d shut her eyes tight, confident that she would drift off into sleep immediately.
Instead, she lay awake, glaring at the ceiling of this old house, growing more and more furious by the minute. And the more she tried to keep herself from tossing and turning, the worse it got.
It was after midnight when she finally gave up. She climbed out of the bed, taking care to tuck Arlo back in. She shoved her feet into her warm slippers and she wrapped a long sweater around her like a robe, and she found herself out in the dark, cold hallway before she could think better of it.
She made her way down the main stairs, where the Christmas decorations looked stately and quiet in the dimness. She stood there for a moment, at the foot of the stairs, but then whatever demon had spurred her out of bed kept her going. She found herself at the doors to the main library before she could talk herself out of it.
The room was a showpiece. The jewel of the house, she’d heard Rafael’s father say once. It was a huge library filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves accessed with the kind of rolling stairs and ladders that made Lily giddy with a book lover’s joy, though this was the kind of library that featured books that were better looked at than read. This time of year, that hardly mattered, as the huge Christmas tree dominated the far end of the room, where there was normally a larger sitting area done up in pompous leather chairs and blocky masculine accessories.
And tonight, Rafael stood at the fireplace, one arm braced on the mantel above it, his face toward the flames.
Lily stood there in the doorway for a moment, letting that great, yawning thing that was all her many and complicated feelings for this man take her over. It washed through her, buffeting her like a riptide, turning her over and over and over until she could hardly see straight.
Until she focused on Rafael, that was, and he was all she could see.
Maybe, she thought, it had always been that way for a reason. Maybe she wasn’t sick or twisted. Maybe they’d simply been too young to handle what had been there between them from the very start.
Maybe.
She was so damned tired of all these maybes.
“You did it again,” she said, and her voice sounded reedy and strange in the vastness of this formal, stuffy room. By the fire, Rafael didn’t move. It made her think he’d known she was there, and something curled up deep inside her at the thought. “You ran away. Right there in plain sight. You used to do it with other women. Tonight you did it with your supposed self-loathing and your noble gestures no one asked you to make. But it was still running away, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose we could have a competition to see who gets farther,” he replied after a moment, but at least his voice was dark and low again. Not that strained, polite voice he’d been using earlier tonight. At least here and now he sounded like Rafael again. He looked at her then, without straightening. “Have you packed, then? Or are you planning to walk back to Virginia as you are?”
The unfairness of that felt like another great wave crashing over her head, and the smart move would have been to turn around and leave—but she didn’t. Instead, Lily took another step into the room.
“What would it matter if I did or didn’t?” she demanded. “You don’t care either way.”
“I care.” His voice was a lash across the firelit room. “Believe whatever you must, but know that. I care.”
He straightened then, and it took her a moment to truly appreciate how disreputable he looked at the moment. Gone were the tailored suits, the casually elegant daywear. This version of Rafael seemed a good deal more...raw. His shirt was open, potentially misbuttoned. She didn’t think he’d shaved recently. And that look in his dark gaze...burned.
Lily still didn’t leave. She studied him for a moment while too many emotions battled it out inside her. Too many to count. Too many to name.
“You’ve convinced yourself that this is all some great love story, haven’t you?” she demanded. “It wasn’t.”
“No?” he asked, and he roamed toward her then, that stark, dangerous expression on her face thrilling her in a way she told herself she didn’t understand. But her body did, the way it always did. It flushed hot, then melted. Everywhere. “It should have been.”
“Things are only epic to you when you’ve lost them, Rafael, have you noticed that?” She didn’t know what made her more furious—him, or her body’s response to him, which had only intensified. If anything, that night in Venice had made it worse. “This can only be a love story if I leave you. That’s what you want.”
“I love you.” It was harsh and flat, and they both stared at each other as it hung there between them, dancing like an erran
t spark from the fire on the old rug, then disappearing. She thought he would take it back, but instead, he breathed deep and held her gaze. “I should have told you then. I should have told you every day since I found you again. I should have told you tonight. I love you, Lily.”
Lily stared back at him, stunned. Scraped through and emptied out. But then another wave hit, this one harder than the ones before, and she laughed. It was an ugly sound. She heard the harshness of it echo back to her, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t make it stop, not even when Rafael drew closer and stood there above her.
“Stop,” he said, and he made it worse with that look on his face, something like gentle, and the way his hard mouth softened. It nearly did her in. She jabbed at her eyes with hands that had turned into fists without her noticing. “You don’t need to do this.”
“Love doesn’t do anything, Rafael,” she threw at him then. “It doesn’t save anyone. It can’t change anything. It’s an excuse. A catchall. In the end, it’s meaningless. And, at its worst, destructive.”
He reached over and slid his hand around the side of her neck, holding his palm there. Over her pulse, she realized. As if he was checking in with her heart—and that, too, made everything inside her seem to lurch and then slide. She was finding it hard to stay on her feet.
But she couldn’t look away from him, either.
“You’re talking about what people do with love, or in its name,” he said. “But that’s people. Love is bigger and better than all those things.”
Lily shook her head. “How would you know? My mother’s shining example? Or maybe your father’s?”
She wanted to jerk her head away from him, knock his hand off her. But she didn’t, and she couldn’t have said why. Only that it was connected to that trembling knot inside her that seemed to get harder and bigger the more it shook.
“They’re people,” Rafael said. “Flawed and limited, like anyone.”
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