‘What are you smiling about?’ questioned Dante as he came in from the shower, rubbing his hair dry.
Willow shifted a little on the bed. It was weird how your life could change so suddenly. One minute she’d been someone who knew practically nothing about men—and the next she was someone watching as one headed towards her, completely naked.
Don’t get used to it, she thought. Don’t ever get used to it.
‘My thoughts are my own,’ she said primly.
‘I suspect you were thinking about me,’ he drawled. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘That’s a very...’ His shadow fell over the bed and she looked up into the glint of his blue eyes. ‘A very arrogant assumption to make.’
He bent to trace a light fingertip from nipple to belly button, weaving a sensual path which made her shiver. ‘But you like my arrogance,’ he observed.
Willow shrugged as guilty pleasure washed over her. ‘Sometimes,’ she murmured. ‘I know I shouldn’t, but I do.’
I like pretty much everything about you.
He smiled as he sat down on the edge of the bed and slid his hand between her legs.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘I think you know the answer to that question very well, Willow Hamilton.’
She tried telling herself not to succumb as he began to move his fingers against her, because surely it would be good to turn him down once in a while? But she was fighting a losing battle. She couldn’t resist him when he started to touch her like that. Or when he brushed his lips against her neck. And suddenly it was not enough. It was never enough. ‘Come back to bed,’ she whispered.
‘I can’t. I’m expecting a call from Paris. There isn’t time.’
‘Then make time.’
‘And if I say no?’
‘You’ll say yes in the end, you know you will.’
Dante laughed softly as he lay down beside her, smoothing his hands over her body as he drew her close. He stroked her breasts and her belly. He brushed his lips over her thrusting nipples and the soft pelt of hair between her thighs. For a while the room was filled with the sounds of breathing and kissing and those disbelieving little gasps she always gave when she came and then in the background the sound of his work phone ringing.
‘I’ll call them back later,’ he murmured.
Afterwards he fought sleep and dressed, though he had to resolutely turn his back on her, for fear she would delay him further. He pulled on a shirt and began to button it, but his thoughts were full of her and he didn’t want them to be. He’d told himself time and time again that now Talia’s show was over, he needed to finish this. To let Willow go as gently as possible and to move on. It would be better for her. Better for both of them. He frowned. So what was stopping him?
He kept trying to work out what her particular magic was, and suddenly the answer came to him. Why he couldn’t seem to get enough of her.
It was because she made him feel special.
And he was not.
He was not the man she thought him to be.
He stared out of the window at the lake and felt the swell of something unfamiliar in his heart. Was this how his twin had felt when he’d met Anais—the sense of being poised on the brink of something significant, something so big that it threatened to take over your whole life?
‘Dante, what is it?’ Willow was whispering from over on the bed, her brow creased. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
He turned around to face her. Perhaps he had. The ghost of his stupid mistake, which had led to the severing of relations with his twin brother.
He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing.’
But she was rising from the rumpled sheets like a very slender Venus, her blond hair tumbling all the way down her back as she walked unselfconsciously across the room and looped her arms around his neck.
‘It’s clearly something,’ she said.
And although she was naked and perfectly poised for kissing, in that moment all Dante could see was compassion in her eyes and his instinct was to turn away from her. Because all his life he’d run from compassion...a quality he’d always associated with pity, and he was much too proud to tolerate pity—he’d had enough of that to last a lifetime. He’d seen it on the faces of those well-meaning psychologists his grandfather had employed after the fatal crash which had left them all orphaned. He’d seen it etched on the features of those matrons at boarding school, where they’d been sent when Giovanni had finally admitted he couldn’t cope any more. They’d all tried to get him to talk about stuff and to tell them how he felt. But he had clammed up, like those mussels he sometimes ate with frites in France—the ones with the tight shells you weren’t supposed to touch.
Yet something about Willow made him want to talk. Made him want to tell her everything.
‘You know I have a twin brother?’ he said suddenly.
Cautiously, she nodded. ‘But you don’t talk about him.’
‘That’s because we are estranged. We haven’t spoken in years.’
He untangled her arms from his neck and walked over to the bed, picking up a flimsy silk wrap and throwing it to her, disappointed yet relieved when she slipped it on because he couldn’t really think straight when she was naked like that.
He drew in a deep breath as he met the unspoken question in her eyes. ‘The two of us were sent away to a fancy boarding school in Europe,’ he said slowly. ‘And after we left, we started up a business together—catering for the desires of the super-rich. Our motto was “Nothing’s impossible,” and for a while nothing was. It was successful beyond our wildest dreams...and then my brother met a woman called Anais and married her.’
There was a pause. ‘And was that so bad?’
Dante looked into her clear grey eyes and it was as if he’d never really considered the matter dispassionately before. ‘I thought it was,’ he said slowly. ‘I was convinced that she wanted Dario’s ring on her finger for all the wrong reasons. Women have always been attracted to the Di Sione name in pursuit of power and privilege. But in Anais’s case, I thought it was for the sake of a green card. More than that, I could see that she had her hooks into my brother. I could tell he really cared about her—and I’d never seen him that way before.’
‘So what happened?’ she said, breaking the brittle silence which followed.
Dante met her eyes. He had done what he had done for a reason and at the time it had seemed like a good reason, only now he was starting to see clearly the havoc he had wrought. He suddenly realised that his dislike of his twin’s wife went much deeper than suspecting she just wanted a green card.
‘I didn’t trust her,’ he said. ‘But then, I didn’t trust any woman.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Life is complicated, Dante.’
His mouth twisted. ‘It’s not a story I’m particularly proud of, but when we were at college, I was sleeping with a woman called Lucy. She was quite something. Or at least, so I thought—until I discovered she’d been sleeping with my twin brother as well.’
Willow stared at him. ‘That’s terrible,’ she whispered.
He shrugged. ‘I laughed it off and made out like it didn’t matter. But it did. Maybe it turned her on to have sex with two men who looked identical. Or maybe she was just after the family name and didn’t care which brother should be the one to give her that name.’ He hesitated. ‘All I know is that, afterwards, things were never quite the same between me and Dario. Something had come between us, though neither of us acknowledged it at the time. And after that, I always viewed women with suspicion.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Willow, and her hand reached up to touch his jaw. ‘But after what had happened, it was natural you would be suspicious and examine the motives of the woman he eventually m
arried. You were obviously looking out for him—you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.’
But Dante shook his head, forcing himself to look at the situation squarely for the first time. To see things as they were and not how he’d wanted them to be. And Willow needed to hear this. He didn’t want her building up fantasies about him being the kind of caring brother who was just looking out for his twin. She needed to hear the truth.
‘It wasn’t just that,’ he admitted slowly. ‘The truth was that I wasn’t crazy about Dario’s new wife. I didn’t like the power she had once she had his ring on her finger. She was so damned...opinionated and I hated the way Dario started listening to her, instead of me. Maybe I was just plain jealous.’ He gave a ragged sigh. ‘When he was out one morning I went round to confront Anais about her real motives in marrying him. I accused her of using him to get herself a green card and we had one hell of a row, which ended up with her throwing a glass of water over me. I guess I deserved it. We both backed down and that might have been the end of it—in fact, we’d both started talking—had Dario not walked in and found me walking out of his bedroom, buttoning up one of his shirts. He thought we’d been having sex.’ He looked into Willow’s widened eyes. ‘He asked whether we’d been having sex.’
‘And what...what did you say?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Dante slowly. ‘I didn’t say anything. I used my silence to allow him come to his own conclusions, only they were the wrong conclusions. Because even though we’d both slept with Lucy, there was no way I would have ever touched his wife. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I felt this fierce kind of anger that he had accused me of such a thing. I thought that their relationship couldn’t be so great if he thought his wife would jump straight into bed with his brother at the first opportunity. I thought the only way for things to get back to normal would be for them to break up—and they did. The marriage imploded and Dario cut all ties with me. He held me responsible and I couldn’t blame him for that.’
‘And did you...did you ever try to make amends?’
He nodded. ‘At first I did. I was eaten up with guilt and remorse. But no matter how many times I tried to contact him, his mind was made up and he wouldn’t see me, or speak to me. It was like trying to smash my way through a concrete wall with nothing but my bare hands, and in the end I gave up trying.’
He waited for her judgement. For the shock and outrage he would expect from a woman whose innocence he had taken and whose total tally of sexual partners was just one. Wouldn’t she be disgusted by what he had done? Wouldn’t she want to walk away from him, no matter how good he was between the sheets?
But there was no judgement there. The concern had not left her eyes. And for the first time in his life he was finding compassion tolerable.
‘Why don’t you go to him?’ she asked.
‘Because he won’t see me.’
‘Couldn’t you at least...try? Because...’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Dante...one thing I learnt when I was so ill was just how important family are. They should be the people you can depend on, no matter what. And you never, ever know what’s around the corner. If something happened to Dario and you were still estranged, you’d never forgive yourself. Would you? And it’s not too late to try again.’ Her words became urgent. ‘It’s never too late.’
He shook his head, because hadn’t he grown weary with being stonewalled? And all these years down the line, surely rejection would be all the harder to take. But as Dante looked into Willow’s face, he realised he needed to be bigger than his pride and his ego. He thought about all the things she’d been through—things she hadn’t wanted to tell him but which eventually he’d managed to prise from her. He thought about how she’d minimised her sickness with a few flippant sentences, making it sound no more inconvenient than a temporary power cut. Despite her slight frame and ethereal appearance, she was brave and resilient and he admired her for those strengths.
Walking over to the writing desk, he picked up his phone, but when he saw the name which had flashed onto the screen, he felt a sense of disbelief as he scrolled down to read the message. He looked up, to where Willow hadn’t moved, a question darkening her grey eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s from Dario,’ he said incredulously. ‘And he wants to meet me.’
Her expression echoed his own disbelief. ‘Just like that? Right out of the blue? Just after we’d been talking about him?’
‘He says he heard I was at the house and decided to contact me.’
She gave a slightly nervous laugh. ‘So it’s just coincidence.’
‘Yeah. Just coincidence.’ But Dante found himself thinking about something he hadn’t allowed himself to think about for a long time. About the intuition which had always existed between Dario and him—that mythical twin intuition which used to drive everyone crazy with frustration. They’d used it to play tricks on people. They’d loved making their teachers guess which twin they were talking to. But there had been another side too. The internal side which had nothing to do with playacting. His pain had been his brother’s pain. Their joy and dreams had been equally shared, until a woman had come between them.
And maybe that was how it was supposed to be. Maybe he had wasted all that energy fighting against the inevitable. For now he could see that not only had he been jealous of Anais, he’d been angry that for once in his life he’d been unable to control the outcome of something he wanted. Because the little boy who’d been unable to save his mother had grown into a man with a need to orchestrate the world and the way it worked. A man who wanted to control people and places and things. And life wasn’t like that. It never could be.
He looked at Willow and once again felt that strange kick to his heart. And even though part of him wanted to act like it wasn’t happening, something was stubbornly refusing to let him off the hook so easily. Was it so bad to acknowledge the truth? To admit that she made him feel stuff he’d never felt before—stuff he hadn’t imagined himself capable of feeling. That she had given him a flicker of hope in a future which before had always seemed so unremittingly dark?
‘What does your brother say?’ she was asking.
‘That he wants to meet me.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as possible. He lives in New York. I could leave right away.’
‘Then shouldn’t you get going?’
The words were soft, and the way she said them curled over his skin, like warm smoke. Smoky like her eyes. He wanted to take her back to bed. To forget all about the damned text and touch her until he was drowning in her body and feeling that strange kind of peace he felt whenever they were together, but he knew he couldn’t. Because this meeting with Dario was long overdue. The rift was as deep as a canyon, and he needed to address it. To face it and accept the outcome, whatever that might be, and then go forward.
‘I shouldn’t be more than a few hours,’ he said.
‘Take as long as you like.’
His eyes narrowed. She was giving him a permission he hadn’t asked for and his default setting would usually have kicked against her interference. Because he hated the idea of a woman closing in on him...trapping him...trying to get her claws hooked right into him. Yet he would have welcomed Willow clawing him—raking those neatly filed fingernails all the way down his back and making him buck with pleasure.
He wondered when it was that his opinion of her had changed so radically. When he’d realised she wasn’t some overprivileged aristocrat who wanted the world to jump whenever she snapped her pretty fingers—but someone who had quietly overcome her illness? Or when she’d offered him her body and her enduring comfort, despite his arrogance and his hard, black heart?
He walked across to her. The morning sun was gilding her skin and the silky nightgown she wore was that faded pink colour you sometimes found on the i
nside of a shell. She looked as pink and golden as a sunrise and he put his arms around her and drew her close.
‘Have I told you that every time I look at you, I want you?’ he said unevenly.
‘I believe you said something along those lines last night.’
He tilted up her chin with the tip of his finger. ‘Well, I’m telling you again, now—only this time it’s not because I’m deep inside your body and about to explode with pleasure.’
Her lips parted. ‘Dante...’
He nuzzled his mouth against her neck, before drawing back to stare into her clear eyes, knowing now of all the things he wanted to say to her. But not now. Not yet. Not with so much unfinished business to attend to. ‘Now kiss me, Willow,’ he said softly. ‘Kiss me and give me strength, to help get me through what is going to be a difficult meeting.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AFTER DANTE HAD gone Willow tried to keep herself busy—because it was in those quiet moments when he wasn’t around that doubts began to crowd into her mind like dark shadows. But she wasn’t going to think about the future, or wonder how his Manhattan meeting with his twin brother was going. She was trying to do something she’d been taught a long time ago. To live in the day. To realise that this day was all any of them knew for sure they had.
She set off for a long walk around the grounds, watching the light bouncing off the smooth surface of the lake. The leaves were already on the turn and the whispering canopies above her head hinted at the glorious shades of gold and bronze to come. She watched a squirrel bounding along a path ahead of her and she listened to the sound of birdsong, thinking how incredibly peaceful it was here and how unbelievable it was to think that the buzzing metropolis of the city was only a short distance away.
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