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There had been exactly one other time in his life when he’d wanted to deny the truth in front of him this much. When he’d felt precisely this sleepless and out of his depth and furiously incapable of processing what was happening. And this, six years later, was worse. Much worse. The world went white around the edges. Or maybe he did.
“How?” he heard himself grit out, not looking at her. He didn’t touch that photograph and he didn’t trust himself to look at her. Every muscle in his body was so tense he thought he might rupture something where he stood. There was a storm building inside of him and he thought it might simply blow him to pieces right here—a thousand jagged, broken shards of him, until neither one of them was left standing.
It took him a minute to recognize that storm for what it was.
Fury.
Pure and undiluted and directed straight at this woman and her betrayal of him.
Again.
“I’m sure that if you think about it, you can figure out how,” Anais was saying. He wouldn’t call that tone of hers amused, exactly. It was far too crisp and pointed, and she still managed to sound so distant besides. That made it all worse. “I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t a stork.”
He was still reeling. Dario pushed back in the chair and onto his feet, leaving the photo where it sat as if it was poisonous. He raked his hair back with both hands, and then he got a hold of himself.
It was painful.
“And how,” he asked, his voice rough and his gaze probably a lot worse than that as he finally looked at her again, “do I know this is my child and not Dante’s? We’re identical. I can’t even take a DNA test to find out the truth.”
She stiffened as if he’d struck her. Then her dark eyes blazed—and damn him, he preferred that over the chilliness.
“Then I suppose it will have to remain a mystery,” she threw at him. “What a shame. Damian and I will have to continue doing just fine without you, you incredible jackass.”
He didn’t process what was happening until she was almost through the great, open doorway that was the length of the pulled-back wall. That she had thrown that bomb at him and was now walking away as if it didn’t matter.
“Where the hell are you going?” he demanded. “After dropping that kind of thing on me?”
Anais stopped walking, and the stiffness of her back told him that was a battle. She turned slowly. Very slowly. He thought she looked pale, and her lips were thin, and he didn’t understand why he even noticed that. Why he cared at all.
You do not care about her, he snapped at himself. You care about this lie she’s telling.
“I’m going to carry on with my life,” she told him when she faced him fully, in that overly precise way of hers that indicated the raging temper inside of her. He remembered that, too. He could even see the faint hint of it in her eyes. “What did you expect me to do? Stand here and cry? Beg you to believe me? I’ve already been down that road. I’m well aware it’s a dead end.”
“Then why bother with this conversation at all?” he gritted out. “Unless you just wanted to throw a few grenades around. For fun.”
That smile of hers was much too sharp. One more blade stuck deep in his gut, a match for all the rest.
“The only difference this conversation makes to me is that I no longer feel any sense of responsibility about the fact you’re too much of a sulking child to have picked up the phone and found this out years ago.” She leaned forward slightly, as if some unseen hand was keeping her from hurling herself at him, holding her back from attacking him with those fists he could see bunched up at her sides. “Thank you, Dario. Truly. I needed the reminder that you’re absolutely useless. And, worse than that, cruel.”
She turned to walk away again, and he should have let her. He should have cheered her on. He couldn’t have a child. He couldn’t have a child. Not him. He’d never wanted one, not after his own disastrous childhood, and he certainly didn’t want to test that theory with the woman who had betrayed him so horribly with his own brother.
This can’t be happening.
Maybe that was why he found himself across the patio without knowing he meant to move, wrapping his hand around her smooth upper arm to pull her back around to face him.
“Don’t walk away from me.”
And it was a mistake to have touched her. It was a terrible mistake, because touching her was what had caused all of this in the first place. His uncharacteristic loss of control when he’d first met her. His astonishing decision to marry her—and who cared if he’d lied to himself and told himself it was to secure her a visa to stay in New York? That wild, nearly ungovernable fury when he’d discovered her deceit. He knew better. It had all been about this.
This touch. Her skin. The wildfire he was horrified to realize still raged between them that easily, that unmistakably, even now.
“Take your hand off my arm,” she snapped at him, her voice not quite as cool as it had been, and he was the little man she’d called him, wasn’t he? Because he derived far more satisfaction from that than he should. “Now.”
Dario hated the fact it was hard to let go of her. That he didn’t want to do it. But he forced himself to release her and he took a perverse pleasure in the way she rubbed the place he’d touched her with her other hand, as if she could feel the same lick of fire that leaped in him, too.
Chemistry had never been their problem. Never that. It was only honesty and fidelity that had tripped them up, or her stunning lack of both, and he needed to remember that. He needed to remember that no matter what his body agitated for, wild and loud in his blood just now, he knew who she really was.
“You kept my child from me for all these years. Six years. Is that really what you’re telling me?”
“Please spare me the sob story you’re making up in your head,” Anais bit out, jutting her chin out as he stood over her, and whatever shoes she was wearing put her almost exactly level with him. That mouth of hers, right there, and what the hell was the matter with him that he could think about something like that now?
Especially when she was talking to him as if he was the person at fault, when they both knew better.
“You refused to take my calls. You moved all of your things out of our home while I was at work. You barred me from your new apartment building and you instructed the security people in your office to call the police if I tried to get in—which I know, because they did.”
He shouldn’t have been fascinated by the spots of color that bloomed on her gorgeously high cheekbones, shouting out her temper in unmistakable red. It was as if her betrayal and the six years between them had never happened. The fact his body didn’t care about any of that made that fury in him burn brighter. Colder. As if he was complicit in his own betrayal here.
Against his will, he remembered the confusion of those first days after he’d discovered Anais and Dante together. How the stress from the work decisions he’d had to make had fused with the terrible blow he’d suffered and had made him waver. He’d considered going back on his decision. He’d considered a thousand things in the even more sleepless nights that followed, just him and his bitterness and the messages he deleted unread and unheard from both his twin and his wife. There’d been a certain comfort in knowing that nothing could ever hurt him as much as they had then. He’d built his new life out of that certainty.
It had never occurred to him that he could have been wrong about that.
“My emails bounced back and you disconnected your cell phone number,” Anais was saying. “I watched you rip up a letter I left on your car, unread, with my own eyes.” She lifted her hands and then dropped them again as if what she really wanted was to use him as a punching bag. He almost wished she would. “So what exactly was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to tell you? I tried. But you were too busy licking your wounds and hiding yourself away behind all the wealth and privilege you could stack around you like stone walls. That’s not my fault.”
Dario concentrated on his temper as if it would save him. He had the sinking feeling it was the only thing here that could.
“You’re talking about a child,” he said very distinctly. “If you’d really wanted to tell me, you’d have found a way. This is just another game. You never run out of them, do you?”
“I told you today, the very first time I’ve seen you since you walked out on me,” she said icily, but there was nothing cold in that furious gaze of hers. “There’s no game.” She shook her head when he started to speak. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to this. Your feelings about the child you could have known all his life if you hadn’t deliberately hidden yourself away aren’t my problem. I didn’t tell you because I want something from you. I told you because it was the right thing to do.”
“Anais...”
“And now I’m leaving,” she interrupted him, her dark eyes glittering with emotions he couldn’t name. He shouldn’t want to name them. He shouldn’t believe they existed at all. “I don’t really care what you do with this information. Go lick your self-inflicted wounds some more. Pretend you still don’t know. Whatever lets you feed that persecution complex of yours, I’m sure you’ll do it.”
He couldn’t bear it. There was that fury in him and something much darker and deeper and worse. Much, much worse. Raw and aching and terrible. She eyed him as if she was looking for something on his face, but then her gaze shuttered and she started to turn away again—and he really couldn’t bear that.
So he did the only thing he could think of to do.
Maybe he wasn’t thinking at all.
He reached out, slid his hand over her delicate neck to cup her nape and pull her close and then he took her mouth with his.
It was the same madness he remembered. That same wild burn that sizzled through him, lighting him up and making him crazy, eating him alive. She still tasted sweet and perfect, the way she always had, as if no time at all had passed.
Dario moved closer, slid his hands onto the thick fall of her hair, then tugged her mouth into a better angle beneath his and kissed her deeper, harder.
And she kissed him back, the way he remembered she always, always had.
She met him, a tangle of tongues and need while the fire between them raged, and their whole history seemed to dance between them in the flames. It was as raw as it was hot, as greedy as it was painful, and Dario knew this was the worst idea he’d had in a long, long time.
But still he kissed her, over and over, as if he could glut himself on her. As if he could block out not only what she’d told him and all the accusations she’d thrown at him, but the six years since he’d touched anyone like this or let himself be touched in turn. He hadn’t wanted anyone near him. He hadn’t wanted anything that resembled intimacy, with anyone.
And yet here, now, with that damned soft breeze still dancing all over him, and Anais’s perfect mouth hot and demanding beneath his, he couldn’t seem to remember why that was.
She wrenched herself away. He heard the small sound of distress she made and he hated that it lodged itself in his chest, like one more bullet in this strange afternoon bristling with them. She stumbled back a step until her back hit the wall, and she stared at him.
She looked as shaken as he was. He hated that, too—the idea that she could actually be affected, that she might not be acting...
Of course she’s acting. Everything about her is an act.
He hated everything about this. This wild, untamed place. That insidious breeze that was messing with his head and making him feel restless and edgy. Anais and her lies and her deception, six years ago and today, and the fact she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever beheld only made it worse. He hated that he could taste her now. That he could feel her again, as if her perfect lips were some kind of brand and she’d marked him. Changed him.
And he hated that she’d made him feel again, when he’d tamped that down and shut it off in those tortured days following the end of their marriage. He hated that most of all.
“While we’re on the topic,” he said, not even sounding like himself, because that was what she did to him, still, “I want a divorce.”
Dario wanted nothing more than to make her feel as ripped wide open as he did, to take all the hurt and the fury and that spinning in his head, that unacceptable need that still surged in him, and make her feel it, too.
So he grinned while he said it, to make sure she got his point. To make sure it was painful. And because it was true and there should be a record of it. “On the grounds of your infidelity, of course. With my brother as the named third party.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE KNOCK ON the front door of Anais’s little house in Kihei, a few blocks up the hill from the ocean in a strictly residential, tourist-free neighborhood, came after nine o’clock that same night.
Anais scowled at the door as if it had transformed into a snarling monster.
Her comfortable two-bedroom house was arranged in a breezy open plan. That meant she didn’t have to get up from the living area’s couch where she had files spread out on the coffee table before her to see that the figure standing on her front step and visible through the panes of clouded glass in the door could not possibly be her aunt or uncle or any of her friends.
He was too tall. Too solid. Too obviously him, and besides, that knock had been brusque and demanding, not anything like friendly.
She gritted her teeth and wished she hadn’t changed into her comfortable evening-at-home clothes after she’d put Damian to bed hours ago. Yoga pants and a tank top didn’t seem like adequate armor against Dario. Not here in her own home. Not when she could still feel his mouth against hers from earlier, the way he’d tasted her and tempted her and taken her over, leaving her with nothing but that fire she’d convinced herself over the past six years had been entirely in her imagination.
Her imagination was pretty vivid, it turned out. So vivid her breasts seemed to swell at the thought of him now, and she felt that deep, restless ache low in her belly that only Dario had ever brought out in her.
Anais got to her feet reluctantly. She threw a glance over her shoulder toward the half-closed door to Damian’s room, but she knew her little boy could sleep through a rock concert. And she also knew enough about Dario to realize that if he’d tracked down her home address and shown up at this hour, he didn’t plan to wander off quietly into the night simply because she hadn’t answered his first knock.
He knocked again, louder, and she blew out a breath as she crossed the room. She smoothed a hand over her high ponytail and wished she really was the cool, practical woman she’d gotten so good at pretending she was. The kind who could take anything in stride, including the reappearance of her son’s father on her doorstep. The kind who wouldn’t spare a single thought for how she looked under the circumstances.
That woman does not exist, she told herself staunchly. That woman is nothing but other women just like me, faking it.
Then she steeled herself and wrenched open the door.
Dario stood there before her on the lower step, looking edgier and more dangerous than he had out on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai earlier in the day. It was dark now, a thick Hawaiian summer night that seemed to cling to the edges of things. It made Dario look as ruthless as he did powerful, somehow. He stared at her, unsmiling and intense, and she was unreasonably glad his hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans. As if that made him safer when she knew better than that.
He should have looked disreputable, in jeans and an untucked shirt. Instead, he looked like a particularly gorgeous object lesson in wealthy young scions who also happened to be world-famous CEOs of major companies at such a relatively young age. Not that she’d followed his many corporate exploits on the internet, or anything.
Anais folded her arms and stood in her doorway. She did not invite him in. And she didn’t particularly care if every last one of her neighbors on the small cul-de-sac was watching this scene from their windows right now. If anything, that gave her the courage she needed to handle this.
Like a glacier, she told herself. You’re cold to the core. Heat can’t touch you, even his.
“I don’t recall inviting you over for a nightcap,” she said coolly.
She’d invited him to go straight to hell, and she hadn’t stuck around to see if he’d taken her up on that. She’d driven so fast down Mr. Fuginawa’s drive and then back out the rustic Piilani Highway toward home that her car had bottomed out in the rutted road more than once.
It hadn’t slowed her down at all.
“Is this impolite? I’d hate to be impolite in a situation like this.” His voice was as thick and dark as the night all around him, and seemed to stick to her as if it was barbed. Anais felt goose bumps shiver over her bare arms and had to fight to keep herself from rubbing at them and giving herself away. “Maybe you can explain the etiquette of secret babies and hidden children to me. I’m not as familiar with it as you are. Obviously.”
“What do you want?”
“You claimed you had my son. What do you think I want?”
“Damian is in bed, the way small children often are at this time of night.” She made a shooing motion with one hand. “Go away.”
“I want to see him.”
Anais had to grit her teeth to keep from shouting loud enough to bring the entire island to her door. “You don’t get to decide that, Dario. You can’t show up here after being absent his entire life and spring yourself on him in the middle of the night.”
“I knew you’d use him as a pawn. Why am I not surprised that you’re precisely this shameless?”
“He is five years old. He wants a father more than you can possibly imagine. I’m not using him as a pawn. I’m protecting him.”
“From me?” If possible, his face got even darker. She thought his arms tightened, as if he was clenching his hands into fists in his pockets. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Anais couldn’t pretend to keep calm any longer. She couldn’t stay cool and smooth and hard. And she didn’t much care what he might make of that. She didn’t care about him, to be honest. Not when it came to Damian’s feelings. Not when Dario could crush her little boy so easily. And likely would.
“It means I know what you do to hearts.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She wished she’d bitten off her tongue instead, especially when he made that derisive sound that might as well have been a punch to the gut, the way it hit her.
“This is exactly the kind of crap I expected you to say and I don’t have time for it. I’m not going to participate in whatever great melodrama you have planned here, Anais. I want to see the child.” He shifted, as if it hurt him. Or as if maybe he wasn’t as hard as he seemed, either—but it was dangerous to imagine such things. She’d already made that mistake six years ago, and look what had happened. “My child, or so you claim.”
“Listen to me.” She stepped forward, out of her doorway and onto the wide top step, not caring that it put her much too close to him again, even raised to his eye level. She shoved her finger in his face and she wished it was something more substantial, like a kitchen knife. “This is not about you. I understand that you must be feeling all kinds of things right now. I’m not particularly sympathetic, but I understand. Still, Damian doesn’t know you. You’ve been missing in action his entire life. It doesn’t benefit him in any way to be woken from a sound sleep so that a strange man can brood at him. And if it doesn’t benefit him, it’s not happening.”
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