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Dario climbed out of the Range Rover, unable to keep himself from taking the kind of deep breath that let perhaps too much of all that dizzy sunshine into his lungs. Fog clung to the mountain above him, draping the hills in ribbons of smoke and navy, the mist seeming to dance a bit as he looked at it. It made it hard to keep hold of his impatience, but still, he managed it.
Pretty wasn’t going to run his company for him, and no matter that the sun felt good on his face after the mad crush of the past few weeks and a long plane ride. He glanced at his watch to see that it had just come noon here, as his secretary had arranged with Fuginawa’s representatives. There was no reason he couldn’t get the damned earrings for his grandfather and get right back on his plane. He could be back in New York by the start of the business day tomorrow. He certainly didn’t have to stay in this odd place any longer than necessary.
Dario raked a hand through his hair and followed the path down toward the impressive, faintly Asian-inspired front door, his own footsteps seeming unduly loud in all the quiet. Even the door itself opened soundlessly as he approached.
He was beckoned inside by a smiling member of staff, who then led him through the graciously appointed house. It was all high ceilings with silent fans to move the air about, and shockingly expensive, highly recognizable art on the walls. The inside spaces blended seamlessly into outside spaces with walls that rolled back to let in the air and light, making the house wide open to the elements in a manner Dario found...reckless. Very nearly disturbing, especially given the priceless paintings on the walls—but what did he care? It wasn’t his art at risk. It was only his time he was wasting here, nothing more. The staff member invited him to sit in one of the outside areas, tucked beneath an overhang wrapped with blooming vines, offering sweeping views out toward the deep blue Pacific Ocean and the winding road he’d just driven up.
It was still so quiet Dario almost thought he could hear the ocean waves crashing into the rocky black shore down below, when he was sure that couldn’t be possible this far up the side of the mountain. He thrust his hands into his pockets. If he’d had to traipse this far off the beaten path into what appeared to be the distant edge of the middle of nowhere, he supposed a view like this made it almost worth it.
Almost.
He heard a step on the stones behind him and turned, itching to get to the actual point of this absurd journey so he could get back to New York as quickly as possible. He wasn’t a hobbit en route to Mount Doom, and no matter if that mountain above him was actually the side of a dormant volcanic crater. He was a very busy man who didn’t have time to waste gazing at the view on the back end of the world—
But then Dario froze.
For a stunned moment he thought he was imagining her.
Because it couldn’t be her.
Inky black hair that fell straight to her shoulders, as sleekly perfect as he remembered it. That lithe body, unmistakably gorgeous in the chic black maxidress she wore that nodded to the tropical climate as it poured all the way down her long, long legs to scrape the ground. And her face. Her face. That perfect oval with her dark eyes tipped up in the corners, her elegant cheekbones and that lush mouth of hers that still had the power to make his whole body tense in uncontrolled, unreasonable, unacceptable reaction.
He stared. He was a grown man, a powerful man by any measure, and he simply stood there and stared—as if she was as much a ghost as that damned Hawaiian wind that was still toying with him. As if she might blow away as easily.
But she didn’t.
“Hello, Dare,” she said with that same self-possessed, infuriating calm of hers he remembered too well, using the name only she had ever called him—the name only she had ever gotten away with calling him.
Only Anais.
His wife.
His treacherous, betraying cheat of a wife, who he’d never planned to lay eyes on again in this lifetime. And who he’d never quite gotten around to divorcing, either, because he’d liked the idea that she had to stay shackled to the man she’d betrayed so hideously six years ago, like he was an albatross wrapped tight around her slim, elegant neck.
Here, now, with her standing right there in front of him like a slap straight from his memory, that seemed less like an unforgivable oversight. And a whole lot more like a terrible mistake.
* * *
Anais Kiyoko had been dreading this moment for six years.
Dreading it, dreaming it. Same difference.
And still, nothing could have prepared her for this. For him. For Dario, her Dario, in the flesh.
Nothing ever had. She’d never seen him coming. Not when she’d met him on an otherwise ordinary winter afternoon, not when he’d turned into a stranger in the middle of their marriage, accused her of the worst betrayal and then left her. Never. Today, Anais thought, she’d take control. She wouldn’t be blindsided by him again.
She just needed to recover from the sucker punch of seeing him again first. She’d assumed she never would.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he growled at her.
That same voice, rich and low, kicked at her, leaving a shower of sparks behind. It was definitely him. She’d expected him, of course, but some part of her hadn’t thought he’d really show after all these years. After the way he’d left things. After all this cruel, deliberate silence.
But it was him. It was really, truly him.
Dario stood there before her on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai, the rolling green pastures of the remote Kaupo district’s countryside behind him, the ocean a bright blue far below, like something straight out of her fantasies. And despite her many fervent prayers over the years, time had not smacked him down the way she would have preferred.
The way she’d prayed it would, more than once.
He was not a troll. He was not disfigured by his own cold, black heart and his dark imaginings the way he richly deserved. He was not stooped with loss or rendered appropriately hideous by the things he’d done.
Quite the opposite.
Unfairly, Dario Di Sione was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life. Still. He exuded that intense, brooding masculinity of his the way other, much less intriguing men smelled of aftershave or cologne. He wore the kind of seemingly casual jeans only very rich, very powerful men could make look like formal wear, and one of those whisper-soft shirts of his that clung to the glorious planes of his chest, the sleeves rolled up to show off his golden skin and the sheer strength of his forearms. She knew that behind the aviator sunglasses he wore, his eyes would still be blue enough to rival the Hawaiian sky all around him, always such a dizzying contrast with the black hair he wore a touch too long and what looked like a day or two’s growth of beard on his perfect jaw.
Damn him.
And damn her for being just as susceptible to him as she’d always been. Despite everything.
“I asked you a question.”
Anais blinked, trying to shove aside her wholly unwanted reaction to him. But her fingers dug into the leather folder she carried, and she didn’t think she was fooling anyone. Least of all herself.
“I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the place,” she said, as if this was a normal business meeting, the kind she carried out as Mr. Fuginawa’s lawyer, his first line of defense and his preferred method of communication with the outside world, all the time. “The road is a little bit tricky.”
Dario didn’t move. And yet she felt as if he’d reached across the distance between them and snatched her up in his fist. She had to force herself to take a breath. To stop holding the last one in as if letting it out might hurt her.
Especially when he slid those sunglasses from his face and focused all that furious blue attention on her.
“Really, Anais?” His voice was as mocking and withering as it was harsh, but she didn’t recoil at the sting of it. She was tougher now. She’d had to be, hadn’t she? “That’s how you want to play this?”
Anais didn’t look away. “Should we pick up the conversation where we left off six years ago, Dare? Is that what you want? The fact you cut me off without a word back then suggests not.”
“Was that a conversation?” His voice took on that same lethal edge she could see in the tense way he held himself, and it made her stomach ache. “I would have chosen an uglier word to describe the scene I walked in on.”
“That’s because your mind is a gutter,” she replied, still trying to keep her voice cool and professional, despite the topic. “But I’m afraid that has nothing to do with me. It never did.”
He laughed. Not the laughter she remembered from when they’d first met, when she’d been a third year at Columbia Law and Dario had been finishing his MBA. The laughter that had made the entire city of Manhattan seem to stand still around him, lost in that rough sound of pure male joy. This was not that. Not even close.
“I don’t care enough to ask you what you mean by that.” He looked around, his gaze as hard as that set to his jaw. “I came here for a pair of earrings, not to play Ghost of Christmas Past games with you. Can you help with that, Anais, or was this whole thing a setup so you could ambush me?”
By some miracle, her jaw didn’t drop at that.
Because she realized he meant what he said. She could read it in every hard, belligerent line of his body and that bright blaze of temper in his gaze.
“You knew this meeting was with me,” she managed to make herself say, though she couldn’t pretend she still sounded calm or in control. “We’ve been emailing for weeks.”
“My secretary has been emailing for weeks,” he corrected her. He shook his head, impatience etched across his features. “I’ve been busy with things that actually matter to me. And don’t flatter yourself, please. If I’d known you were going to be here, I wouldn’t be.”
And his voice was precisely as cutting as she remembered it from that horrible day when he’d walked out of their marriage, and her life, without warning and without a backward glance.
As if no time had passed. As if nothing had changed.
As if he really did think she was the cheating whore she still couldn’t quite believe he’d so easily, so quickly, so utterly accepted she was based on one easily explained and wholly innocent moment with his awful brother. Just as she couldn’t believe he’d never stuck around for that explanation—or even a fight. He’d simply...left.
Which meant all her silly expectations about this meeting today were nothing more than the same foolish dreams she’d nurtured all this time, all the while pretending she’d gotten over him and his shocking betrayal. That maybe he regretted what he’d done. That maybe he’d finally put aside his pride. That maybe he’d come to his senses at last. It was bad enough that she’d entertained such fantasies. It told her all kinds of uncomfortable things about how pathetic she was, how desperate and sad.
But much worse than her own hurt feelings and obviously messed-up heart, it meant that he still had no idea.
He still didn’t know about Damian.
He really had come all the way to this remote corner of Maui for a pair of earrings, not for her.
And certainly not for their son.
CHAPTER TWO
“HAVE YOU LAPSED into a coma?” Dario asked, the silk and menace in his voice hitting her like a lash and cutting deep. “Or is this remorse at last?”
And Anais hadn’t entirely realized how much hope she’d allowed herself to feel in the weeks leading up to this meeting with him, after all these years of silence, until now. When he took it all away again.
She should have known better.
“Remorse?” she echoed. She moved farther out onto the lanai, dropping the leather folder on the table between them and ordering her legs to stay steady beneath her when they felt like one of the palm trees being buffeted this way and that by the relentless trade winds. “For what, exactly? Your extended temper tantrum six years ago? I have a lot of feelings about that actually, but remorse isn’t one of them.”
Dario’s mouth moved into a hard, cynical sort of smile that made her stomach clutch. She’d had no idea he could look like that. So etched through with bitterness. She told herself he deserved it, but still. It made her ache.
“It’s good to know you’re as shameless as ever,” he said. “But why change? It got you what you wanted.”
“Yes. How silly of me. You storming off into the ether was exactly what I wanted. It’s like you read my mind.”
“My mistake, of course. Maybe you were angling for a threesome? You must have read too many tabloids. You should have asked, Anais. I would have told you that I don’t like sharing anything with anyone, least of all my twin brother.”
“I see you’re still hell-bent on being as insulting and disgusting as you were back then. What a happy reunion this is. I’m beginning to understand why it took six years.”
After the way he’d treated her, after the way he’d acted as if she’d never existed in the first place—refusing all contact with her and barring her from entering his office or apartment building as if she was some kind of deranged stalker—she couldn’t believe that, deep down, she still expected Dario to be a better man. Even now, some part of her was waiting for him to crack. To see reason. To stop this madness at last.
Anais told herself it was because of Damian. She wanted her son’s father to be a good man at heart, even if that took some excavating, like any mother would. She wanted his father to be the man she’d once believed he was, when she’d been foolish enough to fall in love with him. Because that would be a good thing for her child, not for herself.
Or not entirely for yourself, whispered that voice inside of her that knew exactly how selfish she was.
But life wasn’t about what she wanted. She’d learned that as a child in Paris, the pawn of two bitter parents who had never wanted her and had only wanted each other for that one night that had created her and thrown them together, like it or not. Life was about what she had. Like her cruel, flamboyantly unfaithful French father and the embittered Japanese mother whose name she’d taken when she’d turned eighteen because she’d been the lesser of two evils, those two things had never matched. It was high time she stopped imagining they ever would.
She tapped her fingers on the leather folder. “These are the contracts. Please sign them. Once you do, the earrings are yours, as promised.”
“Are we back to doing business, Anais?” he asked softly. She didn’t mistake that tone of his. She could hear the steel beneath it. “I might get whiplash.”
She allowed herself a careless shrug and wished she actually felt even slightly at her ease. “Business appears to be the only thing you know how to do.”
“Unlike all the things you know how to do, I imagine. Or should I ask my brother about that? He was always the more adventurous one.”
Anais would never know how she managed to keep from screaming out loud at that—at the unfairness and the cruelty of it, from a man whom she’d once believed would never, ever, say the kinds of things to her that her parents had hurled at each other all her life. She felt a vicious red haze slam down over her, holding her tight, like a terrible fist. But somehow, she beat it back. She thought of Damian, her beautiful little boy, and stayed on her feet. She managed, somehow, to keep herself from screaming like some kind of banshee at this man she couldn’t believe she’d married.
Not that he didn’t deserve a little bit of banshee, the way he’d acted back then and was still acting now. Still, that didn’t mean she had to give him the satisfaction of acting insane.
She met his condemning gaze with her own.
“I have nothing to be ashamed about,” she told him. Icily. Distinctly. “I did not sleep with your brother. I don’t care if Dante has spent the past six years telling you otherwise. I didn’t. He’s a liar.”
“I wouldn’t know what he is,” Dario said with cool nonchalance. “I haven’t spoken to him since I found him with you in my bedroom. Don’t tell me you two lovebirds didn’t make it. How heartbreaking for you both.”
That shocked Anais in a way she’d have thought was impossible. The Di Sione twins she’d known had been inseparable. Until you, she reminded herself. Dante hated you on sight. She tried to blink it away.
“The fact you thought anything happened between us—and still think it, all these years later, to such an extent that you feel justified in hurling insults at me—says more about what a vile, dark little man you are than it could ever say about me.”
Dario seemed almost amused by that. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be comfortable there in your fantasy world. But the truth is the truth, no matter how many lies you pile on top of it. So many it looks like you’ve convinced yourself. Congratulations on that, but you haven’t convinced me.”
If he’d been thrown by her appearance here, he was over it now, clearly. This was the Dario she remembered. The stranger who had walked into their home that awful day and had inhabited the body of the husband she’d adored a whole lot more than she should have. This cruel, mocking man who looked at her and saw nothing but the worthless creature her parents had always told her she was. As if that twisted truth had merely been lurking there inside of her, waiting to come out, and after their wild year together, he’d finally seen what they’d always seen when they’d looked at her.
Dario had done a great many unforgivable things, many far worse than how he’d looked at her that day, but that had been the first. The shot over the bow that had changed everything. Anais found she still wasn’t over it.
At all.
His lips thinned as he looked at her and he reached for the leather folder, pulling out the stack of documents. Then he acted as if she was another piece of furniture. He ignored her. He pulled out a chair and sat down, then proceeded to read through the dense, legal pages as if he was looking for further evidence of her trickery.
Anais thought sitting down with him at the table as if this was a normal, civilized meeting might actually break something inside of her, so she stood where she was instead. Calmly. Easily. On the outside, anyway. Letting the breeze toy with the ends of her hair as she stared out at the water and pretended she was somewhere else. Or that he was somebody else. Or that his being here didn’t present her with a huge ethical dilemma.
She didn’t want to tell him.
He didn’t deserve to know.
What if he turned this cruelty, this viciousness, on his own son?
But even as she thought it, she knew she was trying to rationalize her dilemma away instead of addressing it head-on, the way she should. Because he kept hurting her feelings all these years later, not because she truly believed Dario would ever do anything to hurt a child.
Not telling him now would change everything. She recognized that. Up until today, the fact that Damian didn’t know his father had been entirely Dario’s own fault. He’d made sure Anais couldn’t contact him, and she hadn’t seen how taking out an advertisement in the papers—as her aunt had suggested one night after a few too many of Anais’s tears and rants to the heedless walls—could help her child. By feeding Damian to the hungry tabloids? By making his life a circus? No, thank you. And she’d have eaten a burning hot coal before she’d have called Dante for any help, that manipulative bastard.
Dario had maintained his silence ever since that day back in New York. That wasn’t her fault.
But letting him leave here today no wiser? That would be.
She felt her hands bunch into fists and couldn’t quite make herself smooth them out again, even though she knew he’d see it. He could think what he liked, she told herself stoutly. He would, anyway.
“I have something to tell you,” she said woodenly, forcing the words out past lips that felt like ice and keeping her eyes trained on the sea. The beautiful Hawaiian sea that didn’t care about her troubles. The sea that washed them all away, or seemed to, if she stared at it long enough. The sea that had saved her once and could again, if she let it. Even from this.
Even from him. Again.
“I’m not interested.”
“I don’t really care if you’re interested or not. This might come as a surprise to you, but there are some things in this world that are more important than your feelings of persecution.”
He pushed back in his chair and looked up at her, and because he was Dario, he appeared in no way diminished by the fact that he had to look up to meet her gaze. Or by the fact she was standing over him, wearing three-inch wedges that made her nearly six feet tall. If anything, he appeared even more powerful than he had before.
She’d forgotten that. How easily he dominated whole rooms, whole cities, whole swathes of people, without even trying. How that beat in her like her own traitorous heart.
“I don’t feel persecuted, Anais. I feel lucky.” Dario even smiled, in that same sharp and bitter way that she worried might actually leave scars on both of them. Perhaps it already had. “It wakes me up at night, wondering what my life would be like if I hadn’t caught the two of you when I did. How many more ways would you have tricked me while I was so wrapped up in my work? How much more of a fool would you have made of me right under my nose? What if I’d never caught on?” He shook his head and blew out a breath. “I should thank you for being dumb enough to take my own brother into our bed. It saved me a world of hurt.”
It shouldn’t still cause her pain. None of what he said was a surprise to her. She knew what he thought. What Dante had stood by and let him think. Dario hadn’t bothered to ask her, his wife, to confirm or deny his suspicions. He’d walked into the house, seen Dante buttoning up a shirt in their bedroom and leaped to the worst possible conclusion. He’d believed the worst, instantly, and that was that.
And still, she felt that heaviness deep inside of her, a little too much like shame. As if she’d actually done something to make him think so little of her. As if she could have done something to prevent it. As if, despite everything, the things he’d done to her and the son he didn’t know he had was somehow all her fault.
She didn’t think she’d forgive him for that, either.
“I keep waiting for you to come to your senses, but you’re not going to, are you?” she asked softly. Rhetorically, she was aware. “This is who you are. The Dario Di Sione I met and married was the make-believe version.”
She’d believed in that made-up version, that was the trouble. Why did some part of her still wish that was the real Dario? She should know better by now, surely.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself.” He signed the last page of each set of documents and then shoved the stack of them toward her. “Can I have the earrings now? Or are there more hoops to jump through?”
“No hoops.” She did her part with the documents, slipping them back into the leather folder when she was finished. Then she reached into one of the deep pockets of her dress and pulled out the small jeweler’s box. She cracked it open and set it down on the table between them, watching the way the light danced and gleamed on the precious stones, perfect white diamonds and gorgeous emeralds. “These are the earrings. Note the size of the emeralds and the delicate craftsmanship of the diamonds. They’re extraordinary and unusual, and Mr. Fuginawa would not have let them go to anyone save your grandfather. He conveys his deepest respects, of course.”
“They’re earrings,” Dario said bluntly. He snapped the box shut as he surged to his feet, then shoved it in his front pocket. “Whatever tiny bit of sentimentality I had was beaten out of me six years ago, Anais. Old earrings are just old earrings. They don’t matter to anyone in the long run. My grandfather is a foolish old man who should be using his money to make his last days easier, not for this kind of nonsense.”