Billionaires: The Rebel

But it was amazing how different the game looked to him when it was dressed like this, all womanly curves and that mouth of hers he could still taste against his.

That didn’t exactly bode well for what he had to accomplish here. But Dario ignored that with the ruthlessness that had allowed him to come into ICE and change the company from the ground up over the course of the past six years. He’d made it his. That was what he did.

“How does this work?” His voice was low, smooth. Appropriate, for a change. He was trying to make it seem as if he’d had time to calm down. To get his temper and his emotions under control.

To accept that this woman had kept his child a secret from him for five years.

Five years.

He told that tiny voice inside of him that knew he’d blocked her every attempt at contact, that knew he’d made contacting him impossible, to be silent. The point wasn’t what he might have done—he hadn’t had all the information she had. The point was what she’d done, and hadn’t done, when she’d been the only one who knew everything.

She took a sip of her wine, then smiled at him. Almost politely, as if they were cordial strangers at a cocktail party. “Because, presumably, I’m the expert on paternity issues?”

He eyed her a moment and reminded himself this was a game. That he needed to win it—and that meant controlling his temper. “Because you’re the lawyer.”

“How this works is, we talk,” she said. She stood on the other side of the marble bar that separated the sleek kitchen from the expansive teak-and-glass living area and gazed back at him. And if she was even remotely chastened, he couldn’t see it. “Rationally and reasonably, if we can manage it. We come to mutually acceptable arrangements.”

Dario was contemplating how much he loathed the fact that she still seemed so unaffected by all of this—and particularly by him, if he was brutally honest—when she tilted her head to one side.

“Do you think you can handle that?”

That sweet tone of hers with all that bite beneath it was better. It told him exactly where they stood. On the same uneven ground.

“If he’s mine...”

“If you say if one more time, this conversation is over. For good.”

He wanted to ignore that, but something in the way she watched him just then made him think better of it. Would she really walk out on him? He didn’t want to believe she could. And he really didn’t want to investigate why he thought that.

“I don’t know what you want from me, Anais,” he said after a moment. “You can claim the moral high ground. You can tell yourself that the fact I blocked your access to me is the issue here. We could argue about that for years.”

“I’d rather not.”

“It doesn’t change what I saw.”

He saw something flash in her dark eyes then, he was sure of it.

“You saw a man walk out of your bedroom buttoning up a shirt.”

“I saw my brother walking out of my bedroom with my wife,” he gritted out. He slammed his wineglass down on the counter, and he’d never know why it didn’t shatter and send red wine and glass everywhere. “Shrugging his half-naked body into one of my shirts.”

It took him a long moment to realize that while she did nothing but glare at him, with that otherwise unreadable expression on her face, she was trembling. Fury? Shame? Anger at being called out on her unfaithful behavior all these years later? Something as complicated as what surged in him—as much desire as what he desperately hoped was distaste? He didn’t know.

“Yes,” she said, after a minute. “That’s what you saw. You didn’t see Dante and me naked and writhing around. You didn’t even see us touching. You saw your brother changing his shirt, and you ended our marriage on the spot.”

But Dario had been angrier with Dante by the day back then. Dario had walked in and seen what he’d seen and it had all made so much sense. That tension between Dante and Anais that Anais had assured him was dislike. The distance between the twins where their business was concerned, that Dante had claimed was about different philosophies. All such lies and misdirection. This is the truth, he’d thought then, like a death knell inside of him. All his late hours, all his work, all the responsibility he’d been carrying—it had all been a ruse, to keep him out of the way, so these two people who supposedly loved him and hated each other could meet. In his bedroom.

It still made him furious, as a matter of fact, when he should have been over it years ago.

He thought she could hear it in his voice when he spoke again. “Is this where you think I’m going to beg you to tell me what was really going on that day? So you can spin some fairy tale for me?”

“Or tell you the truth.”

He didn’t quite laugh. “That’s never going to happen. Don’t be so naive, Anais. Or do I mean self-absorbed?” Dario shook his head. And though it wasn’t an entirely fair representation of what had happened, he continued. “Do you really believe you’re the first woman Dante poached from me?”

She swallowed hard enough that he could see it, and it didn’t help matters to focus on the delicate line of her throat and the sheer perfection of that collarbone he’d spent many a night exploring with his own mouth. It didn’t help at all.

“Damian is your son,” she said after a moment. “I’m not going to argue about it. You either believe that or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s no reason for us to bother talking to each other.”

“Then what we need to talk about is what any parents in these situations talk about,” he said casually, as if this was an academic discussion with no painful personal history behind it. And as if he hadn’t spent entirely too long today on the phone with his own lawyers, running through various scenarios. “Visitation. Custody. Child support. The usual things.”

He thought she stiffened at that, or her dark gaze sharpened, but she only placed her wineglass back on the counter with a sharp clink and then folded her hands in front of her.

“Before you go too far down any kind of legal road, you should probably know that your name isn’t on Damian’s birth certificate.”

He hadn’t known he had a son a day ago, and yet hearing her say that made Dario want to howl at the sky. Break his glass and every other one in the villa. He didn’t know how he managed to keep himself from doing all of those things at once. How he sucked it all back in and tucked it away and managed to sound nothing but faintly icy when he responded.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you’d like to claim paternity,” she said calmly, though her gaze was hard, “you’ll have to first prove it, and then, of course, pay all the back child support you owe me since his birth.”

“How mercenary.”

“Not at all. If you want to claim your son, you need to do something to make up for the fact you’ve ignored five years of his life. You can’t go back in time and be less horrible to his mother, more’s the pity, but you can pay. Maybe that’s all you’re good for, and that’s okay.” She smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. “Damian deserves a robust college fund out of this, if nothing else. It’s not mercenary. It’s an insurance policy.”

“Other terms come to mind.”

“You’re filled with all kinds of unpleasant terms, aren’t you?” She shrugged again. Dario was beginning to think that shrug might be the most infuriating gesture he’d ever seen. “That’s not exactly a surprise.”

“I never called you names, Anais, and I could have.”

Her dark eyes glinted. “Don’t sell yourself short, Dario. Your nonverbal communication was deafening.”

“To be clear,” he said when he could speak in an even tone, “you claim you’re not using the child as a pawn, but you are perfectly prepared to hold him for ransom. Am I getting that right?”

“He’s just a concept to you, Dare,” she said after a moment, and he wondered if she knew she’d reverted to that nickname only she had ever used. He didn’t let himself think too much about why he’d noticed. Especially when she was looking at him as if it hurt her to do so. “But to me? Damian is everything.”

She shook her head at him as if she found him deeply lacking, and there wasn’t a single reason in the world he should care what this woman thought of him. What her opinion of him was. Not a single, solitary reason.

More than that, he wasn’t doing this to hash out things between them. He told himself he didn’t care. This was about the child she’d hidden from him. That was the only reason he hadn’t flown back to New York the moment he’d had those damned earrings in his possession.

He’d made a plan and he had every intention of carrying it out to the letter, and it didn’t make one bit of difference what she thought of him or what she called him or anything of the sort. None of that mattered at all.

Why was he finding it so hard to remember?

* * *

Anais couldn’t handle the way he looked at her then, so she turned away and walked toward the open doors that led out to his private lanai, with its gloriously unobstructed view of the sea and the fiery red sun sinking toward the distant horizon. He had his own beach if he wanted it, at the far end of a winding little path. She could see the white sand gleaming in the last of the daylight, and the waves rocked gently against the shore as if it was doing it for them alone.

And somehow, she managed to wrestle that great ache inside of her into something more compact as she stood there and gazed out at the water, the sunset. Something she could breathe through. Something that wouldn’t betray her even further.

Dario was quiet for a long time, but she didn’t turn back to see why. She felt him approach, though she wasn’t sure she could actually hear him move, and then he was beside her, buttoning up a shirt made of the same lush linen as his trousers. It was also in black, and she didn’t know what was worse. Him bare-chested before her like a thousand desserts she didn’t dare touch, or him dressed like some kind of debonair lover, conjured straight up from the darkest part of the dreams she pretended she didn’t have.

Both, maybe.

“I’m sorry,” Dario said, and that was so shocking she whipped her head around to see if he was pulling her leg. But his moody blue gaze was focused on the sea, not on her. “I didn’t mean for this conversation to descend to that level. That’s not why I wanted you to come here.”

“I imagine you wanted to beat me over the head a little bit with your might and glory,” she said, her voice more bitter than she wanted it. More obviously affected. But she couldn’t seem to control it the way she should. “This villa has to be at least five thousand dollars a night.”

“Are you concerned about how I spend my money? I’m touched, truly.”

“Only if it affects Damian.” She made herself smile, as if this was an easy little talk. Or as if she was in some way light and airy herself. “That’s the beginning and the end of everything, isn’t it?”

She saw something move across his beautiful face, ruthless and determined, but then it was gone. She didn’t think she’d imagined it, but she couldn’t work out what his game was here, so she told herself it didn’t matter either way.

“There’s no need for us to fight, surely,” he said, his voice low. Something like agreeable, which she found instantly alarming. “Six years is a long time. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have a calm discussion about what’s best for Damian. We were rational once. Surely we can be again.”

And that was exactly what Anais had told herself she wanted. That was more than she’d dreamed would ever be possible with Dario. So why was it she didn’t quite believe him?

“I’d like that,” she said. And then, despite that lingering sense that this wasn’t real, she tried to be the generous person she thought she ought to be. The one she thought her son deserved. “I’d like Damian to get to know you, of course. But you do understand that he’s an entire little person all his own, don’t you? He came into this world on his own schedule and he’s stubbornly stuck to it ever since. If you have some fantasy in your head about an angelic creature who will gaze at you and call you Daddy and serve as some kind of appendage to your whims, that’s probably not Damian.”

“It didn’t occur to me that I would ever be a father until you told me I had a son yesterday,” Dario said in a voice that sounded a little too close to grim for Anais’s peace of mind. “I have no expectations that require modification.”

She realized how close they were standing then, and worse, how obvious it would be if she leaped away from him the way she wanted. How he’d read into that and worse—how he’d be absolutely correct in what he read.

Anais didn’t want to be so close to him she could feel the heat he generated, the way she did now, as if that black linen was a radiator even here in the tropics in August. She didn’t trust herself.

Around Dario, she couldn’t.

The sad truth was that she’d fallen in love with him a very long time ago. Not quite at first sight, but not long after, and nothing had changed that since. Not the way he’d broken the lonely heart she’d only ever shared with him. Not the way he’d abandoned her so cruelly, as if she’d been unworthy of a backward glance. Not the way she’d tried to hate him in all these years since, and failed, again and again.

How could she hate this man when she saw so much of him in her little boy’s face? In that bigger than life laugh that was one hundred percent Dario in her son’s body? It wasn’t possible. She’d thought she’d come to a place of acceptance with that a long time ago. But of course, that had been when she’d never expected to see Dario again.

She still didn’t want to stand this close to him. It made her entirely too aware of her own, eternal weakness where he was concerned.

“Great,” she managed to say now, and she eased herself back and put a little more space between them, the better to look him in the eye, as if that would cut him down to size somehow. “Then when he throws a full-scale fit on the floor because he wants to wear a blue shirt instead of a red one the way he did this morning, I’m sure you’ll handle it calmly.”

Dario’s mouth curved, and that wasn’t helpful. It only reminded her all over again how susceptible she was to him. How badly some part of her wanted to believe that this—whatever this was—was real. God, how she wanted to believe that.

“If I can handle fractious board members and morally dubious CEOs, one small child shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’m glad you’re so confident.”

The air between them felt taut then. It shimmered like heat. Dario thrust his hands in his pockets in a way that suggested he wanted to do something else entirely with them, and Anais had to fight to conceal her delicious—and traitorous—shiver of reaction.

“I want you to come with me,” he told her. “Let’s eat a meal like civilized people. Let’s talk to each other.” That curve in his mouth deepened, and the truth was, Anais wasn’t strong enough to resist him. She never had been. And just then, with all his deep blue attention trained on her, she couldn’t remember a single reason why that should change. Why she’d want it to change. “Let’s do this the right way.”

CHAPTER FIVE

MUCH LATER THAT NIGHT, Anais pushed back from the table in the private corner of the resort’s outdoor restaurant and tried, yet again, to caution herself. To go slow, to keep her perspective—something.

The night had been perfect. Anais was a local, yet she felt like some kind of princess tonight, immersed in old Hawaiian magic on all sides. They’d been whisked to this romantic corner of the hotel restaurant, where there was nothing between them and the sea but a strip of volcanic rock, any other diners lost in the darkness behind them. Torches danced in the thick air all around, and the breeze tugged strands of hair free from her easy chignon to slide over her cheeks like a lover’s soft fingers.

But Anais had only ever had one lover, and his fingers were hard, tapered and demanding, no matter how soft his caress.

The meal had been exquisite. The typical Hawaiian fusion of unexpected flavors and marvelous tastes, artfully arranged and beautifully presented, and Anais tried. She tried to sternly keep her attention on her son, not on his father. She tried to withstand the insidious magic of all this grace and ease and quietly luxurious wealth, and the man who had made it happen. She tried her best to keep her walls high, to read nothing into any of this, to stay the glacier she should have been no matter how enticing each bite of food.

No matter the far more worrying beguilement of the man across from her.

Dario had undergone some kind of transformation during the walk from his villa to the restaurant. Gone was that harsh, unforgiving man she’d met at the Fuginawa estate yesterday. In his place was, if not the man she’d married years ago exactly, certainly the closest thing to him she could imagine after these six long years apart.

And what the sound of Dario’s laughter after all this time didn’t manage to do to her heart, the fine wine he kept pouring did to her head.

She regarded him from across the table now, watching the way the light from the flickering torch flames caressed his beautiful face and made him seem that much more like the many dreams she’d had all these lonely years. That much more the man she’d begun to think she’d made up from the start.

They’d talked about everything and nothing over their meal. She’d talked about Damian—who he was, funny things he did, the sort of stories that highlighted what a delightful little kid she thought he was, most of the time. Dario had talked about the work that clearly consumed his life, in a way that made it clear he was doing exactly what he should. He’d asked her about practicing law and how she enjoyed it all these years into it. She’d asked how he liked becoming so well-known in his own right, having nothing to do with his family. They talked as easily as they ever had, in and around all the submerged rocks and treacherous undercurrents that lurked between them, dancing over the surface of things instead of slamming into the obstacles.

It was all real enough, she supposed. Even...nice. It was lulling her into what she knew damn well was a false sense of security. What she didn’t know was what she could do to make her traitorous heart pay attention to warning signs and potential alarms when all it saw—all it wanted to see—was the only man she’d ever loved here with her at last, treating her the way he had when she’d imagined he might love her back.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked softly.

“Eating dinner?” He leaned back in his own chair. “I try to do it at least once an evening. It’s an odd personality quirk of mine.”

“No.” And it terrified her how much—how strongly—she didn’t want to do this just then. How terribly she wanted to simply drift off into this fantasy world where there was nothing but faint Hawaiian music on the sweet night air and where Dario, still her husband, looked at her as if he’d never hated her and never could. As if the six years of separation had been the dream, not what had preceded it. “You know what I mean.”

He didn’t answer. He stood instead, smoothing a hand over the front of his soft black shirt, and Anais’s heart sank. She’d ruined it, hadn’t she? Would it have really mattered all that much if she’d let this keep on going for another few minutes? An hour? If she’d let herself bask in this no matter how much of a dream it was? Who would it have hurt?

But she already knew the answer to that question. Not Damian—she’d protect him with her last breath. Only her.

Only and ever her.

And yet there was something about the sweet night air that made her imagine she could take it. That a few stolen moments with Dario would be worth whatever pain followed.

Dario stood beside her chair and she braced herself for him to say something hideous and cutting, to slap them both back down to that place they’d been in earlier. His face looked harder than before, no trace of that laughter of his that still split the night open with its rough joy and was clearly where Damian’s came from, but she made herself hold his gaze no matter how difficult it was. She owed herself at least that much.

His hard, beautiful mouth moved as if he meant to speak, but he didn’t. Instead, he held out his hand.

And Anais knew better. Of course she knew better. She’d been a single mother all this time, while he’d been off building empires and never looking back at all to see what destruction he’d left in his wake. She could have recited the reasons why this—any more time spent with him, especially time spent touching—was a terrible idea the same way she could rattle off pertinent case law when necessary at work.

Here, now, none of that seemed to matter.

Nothing seemed to matter except the way he looked at her over his outstretched hand, as if he’d command her to take it if he could but was instead waiting for her to do what he wanted because, deep down, he knew she wanted it, too. She had the strangest feeling he knew exactly what battles she waged inside her head.

And worse, she thought he could see straight through her and deep into her chest, where her poor, battered heart felt swollen and broken at once, all over again—as if this was all something new, these things he conjured up in her.

Anais took a deep, shuddering breath, and then couldn’t seem to keep herself from slipping her hand into his.

She didn’t gasp out loud at the instant electric surge, at that hot touch as his hard fingers curled around hers, but she thought he felt the jolt of it as it seared through her. He tugged her to her feet and she went to him willingly, and for a moment they stood there with barely a whisper of the sultry summer air between them.

Her shoes were high enough to put her almost at eye level with him, and that made her veins thrum with something that was half music, half delight. His blue eyes looked much too dark, especially when they dropped to her mouth, and she felt that same wild current in him, too, lighting her up from the place their hands were clasped together.

Dario stepped back, though he kept hold of her hand. There was a rueful curve to his mouth and a hard hunger in his gaze, and then he started to walk, pulling her along with him so she fit there at his side.

It took Anais much too long to realize they were weaving their way through the tables of the restaurant she’d forgotten was there. She felt as if she was walking through a dream, or as if the only real thing in the world was the way his fingers held hers tight and their palms touched. As if everything she’d ever felt about this man was boiled down into that tiny little touch, almost innocuous, and yet...not. At all.

The band kicked into a typical Elvis cover, syrupy and deeply Hawaiian, and Dario stopped walking when he reached the line of high palms that rustled there on the outskirts of the restaurant. The singer spoke of wise men and fools, and as Dario tugged her around to face him, Anais knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was very much the latter.

“I can’t help it, either,” he said in a low voice as he took her in his arms, and it took her a moment to realize he was responding to the famous song, not the words she didn’t think she’d said out loud. “I’ve never been able to help myself when it came to you, Anais.”

And it would have taken a far colder and harder woman than she was to pull away from him then. She didn’t even try. Anais had never been the glacier she thought she should have been with him, not even all those years ago when she’d known she should have resisted him and hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she had it in her.

Certainly not when Dario was so close to her in the late-summer dark, his strong arms closing around her as he pulled her flush against him.

It was the middle of the night, she told herself, and she was pretending to be the kind of woman who had dinner with a man like him at all, much less at a stunning resort like this, and who cared if she’d actually married him in a different life? Those quick, painfully bright and deeply hurtful years seemed as if they’d happened to someone else. Surely nothing that happened in the lush dark here, on an island tucked away in the Pacific Ocean so many miles from anywhere, counted.