“Lily,” he whispered.

Then he was moving. Rafael closed the distance between them in a moment, and there was nothing but noise inside him. A great din, pounding at him and tearing at him and ripping him apart, and his hands shook when he reached to take her by the shoulders.

“What are you doing?”

He saw her lips form the words, read them from her mouth, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He only knew that was her voice—her voice—the voice he’d never expected to hear again, faintly husky and indisputably Lily’s. It was like a sledgehammer through him, inside him. Wrecking him and remaking him at once.

And the scent of her … that indefinable fragrance that was some combination of hand lotion and moisturizer, shampoo and perfume, all rolled together and mixed with the simple truth of her beneath it all. All Lily. His Lily.

She was alive. Or this was a psychotic break. And Rafael didn’t give much of a damn which.

He simply hauled her toward him and took her mouth with his.

Secret Heirs of Billionaires

There are some things money can’t buy …

Living life at lightning pace, these magnates are no strangers to stakes at their highest. It seems they’ve got it all … That is until they find out that there’s an unplanned item to add to their list of accomplishments!

Achieved:

1. Successful business empire

2. Beautiful women in their bed

3. An heir to bear their name …?

Though every billionaire needs to leave his legacy in safe hands, discovering a secret heir shakes up his carefully orchestrated plan in more ways than one!

Uncover their secrets in:

Unwrapping the Castelli Secret by Caitlin Crews

and, coming December 2015

Brunetti’s Secret Son by Maya Blake

Look out for more stories in

The Secret Heirs of Billionaires series in 2016!

millsandboon.co.uk

Unwrapping the

Castelli Secret

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

USA TODAY bestseller and RITA® Award-nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

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Contents

Cover

Introduction

Secret Heirs of Billionaires

Title Page

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

RAFAEL CASTELLI WAS entirely too familiar with ghosts.

He’d seen them everywhere in those first dark months following the accident. Every woman with anything resembling strawberry blond hair was his Lily in a certain light. A hint of her scent in a passing crowd, the suggestion of her delicate features across a busy train car, a low, faintly hoarse bit of feminine laughter in a packed restaurant. All Lily for a heart-stopping instant of wild recognition—and hope.

Always that delirious scrap of hope, as desperate as it was doomed.

He’d once chased a woman halfway across London before he’d realized that she wasn’t Lily. That she couldn’t have been Lily. His stepsister had died in that terrible crash on the rugged California coast north of San Francisco. And despite the fact that her body had never been recovered from the treacherous waters below that rocky cliff, despite the fact no one had ever found any proof that she’d died in the fire that had burned her car to ash, nothing, not tricks of light or three a.m. conspiracy theories or his own despairing heart playing games with him, could change that.

It had been five years. Lily was gone.

He understood, finally, that they weren’t ghosts at all, these flashing glimpses of what might have been. They were his bitter, consuming regret mapped onto a hundred strangers, and none of them the woman he wanted.

But this ghost was different.

And the last, Rafael vowed as a deep, black fury surged through him. Five years was long enough to grieve what had never been, thanks to his own selfishness. More than long enough. It was time to move on.

It was a December late afternoon in Charlottesville, Virginia, a picturesque American university town nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, some three hours by car from Washington, DC, and a world away from his native Italy. Rafael had made the trip from the nation’s capital by helicopter today, the better to tour the region’s vineyards from above with an eye toward expanding the global reach of the Castelli family’s historic wine business. As acting CEO—because his ailing father’s immense pride did not allow for an official transfer of leadership to Rafael or his younger brother, Luca, while the old man still drew breath, which was as unsurprising as it was irritating—Rafael had taken many such trips in the past few years. Portugal. South Africa. Chile.

This latest trip to the central Virginia wine region was more of the same. The late-afternoon stop in self-consciously charming Charlottesville en route to a later dinner event with one of the local wine associations was the typical excursion to help promote the charm of the area. Rafael had expected it and in truth, the bustle of the holiday season made the entire town feel like an interactive Christmas card.

It was not unpleasant, he’d thought as they’d walked the outdoor mall, though he had never much cared for the holiday frenzy. Carolers were strewn along the pedestrianized street, their voices mingling and competing in the crisp air. Shoppers milled in and out of the brightly lit shops beneath festive lights and around clusters of street vendors hawking their wares, and Rafael’s small group had ducked inside one of the cafés for strong local coffee to ward off the cold. And to battle any traces of jet lag, no doubt. Rafael had made his order a triple shot of espresso, per piacere.

And then he’d seen her.

The woman moved like poetry against the falling dark, the particular rhythm of her stride chiming deep inside him even though he knew better, drowning out the barrage of Christmas carols assaulting him from the café’s overloud sound system.

It had been five years, but Rafael knew that walk in an instant. He knew the swing of those hips and the stretch of those legs. That irresistible roll as she strode past the window where he stood. He caught the flash of her cheek, nothing more.

But that walk.

This must stop, he ordered himself coldly. Lily is dead.

“Are you all right, Mr. Castelli?” the local wine association host asked worriedly from beside him. His brother, Luca, here in his capacity as global marketing director of Castelli Wine, was too busy on his mobile to do more then frown distractedly in Rafael’s direction.

“I will be fine,” Rafael gritted out. “Excuse me for a moment.”

And he stalked out of the café, pushing his way through the milling holiday crowds and into the waning light.

For a moment, he thought he’d lost her, and he knew that was the best possible outcome of this tired old madness—but then he saw her again, moving on the far side of the mall with that gait that recalled Lily like a shout across the busy street, and that dark current of pure rage sparked in him all over again.

It wasn’t Lily. It was never Lily. And yet every time this happened, Rafael raced after the poor stranger who looked a bit too much like his memories and made a goddamned fool of himself.

“This will be the last time you indulge this weakness,” he muttered to himself, and then he set out after this latest incarnation of the woman he knew—he knew—he’d never see again.

One more time to stamp out the last spark of that nasty little flame of hope that still refused to die. One last time to prove what he already knew: Lily was gone, she was never coming back, and he would never, ever see her equal.

And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t look for her in all these strangers’ faces if he hadn’t been such a bastard to her in the first place.

Rafael doubted he’d ever shift the guilt of all he’d done from its usual place, crouched fat and greasy and bristling with malice in the spot where his soul should have been. But tonight, in this charming little town in a part of America he’d never visited before and likely wouldn’t visit again, he would lay what he could of his wretched history to rest.

He didn’t expect peace. He didn’t deserve it. But he was done chasing phantoms.

She will be a stranger. She is always a stranger. And after you confirm that for the hundredth time, you will never doubt it again.

This had to end. He had to end it.

He couldn’t see the face of his quarry, only the fine line of her back and the hint of her willowy form as she walked briskly away from him. She was wrapped up against the December chill in a long black coat and a bright scarf, with only hints of honey-colored hair peeking out from beneath the black knit hat she wore tugged low over her ears. Her hands were thrust deep into her pockets. She was weaving her way through the crowds in a manner that suggested she knew exactly where she was going, and she didn’t look back.

And the memories rolled through him like waves against the rocks, crashing over him one after the next. Lily, the only woman who’d ever captured him so completely. Lily, whom he’d lost. Lily, his forbidden lover, his secret and dirty passion, whom he’d hidden from the world and then had to mourn as if she was no more than the daughter of his father’s fourth wife. As if she had been nothing more to him than that.

He’d hated himself for so long now it was indistinguishable from that grief that never quite left him. That grief that had transformed him—turning him from a too-rich dilettante who’d been content to throw his family money around rather than make any himself into one of the most formidable businessmen in Italy.

That, too, had taken years. It had been another form of penance.

“Inside you is the seed of a far better man,” Lily had said to him the last time he’d seen her, after he’d made her come and then made her cry: his specialty. “I know it. But if you keep going the way you’re going, you’ll kill it off before it ever has a chance to grow.”

“You mistake me for someone who wants to grow,” Rafael had replied with all that confidently lazy indifference he’d had no idea he’d spend the rest of his life hating himself for feeling. “I don’t need to be a bloody garden, Lily. I’m happy as I am.”

It was one of the last conversations they’d ever had.

His heart was a hard, almost painful drum inside his chest. His breath came like clouds against the deepening night. He tracked her past this novelty shop, that restaurant and a band of singers in period dress singing “Ave Maria” while he drank in that walk as if it was a prayer.

As if this time around, after all these years of regret, he could appreciate that it was the last time he’d ever see it.

He followed her as she left the clamor and bright mess of the downtown mall and started down one of the side streets, marveling at her hauntingly familiar silhouette, that figure he could have drawn in his sleep, the sheer perfection of this woman who was not Lily yet looked exactly the way he remembered her.

His Lily, stalking off down a foggy San Francisco street, claiming she wanted nothing more than to get the hell away from him and their twisted relationship at last. Back then he’d laughed, so arrogantly certain she’d come back to him the way she always did. The way she’d been coming back to him since the day they’d first crossed that line when she’d been nineteen.

Another tryst in a hall closet, perhaps, with his hand wrapped over her mouth to muffle her cries as they drove each other crazy only feet away from their families. Another stolen night in her bedroom in her mother’s stately home in the moneyed hills of Sausalito, tearing each other apart in the stillness of the northern California night, hands in fists and teeth clenched against the pillows. A hotel room here, a stolen moment in the gardening shed of a summer rental there—all so tawdry, now, in his recollection. All so stupid and wasteful. But then, he’d been so certain there would always be another.

His mobile vibrated in his pocket; the assistant he’d left back in that café, he assumed, wondering where in the hell Rafael was. Or perhaps even his brother, Luca, irritated by Rafael’s absence when there was work to be done. Either way, he ignored it.

The afternoon was falling fast into evening and Rafael was a different man now than the one he’d been five years ago. He had responsibilities these days; he welcomed them. He couldn’t simply chase women across cities the way he had in his youth, though back then, of course, he’d done such things for entirely different reasons. Gluttony, not guilt. He was no longer the inveterate womanizer he’d been then, content to enjoy his questionable relationship with his stepsister in private and all his other and varied conquests in the bright glare of the public eye, never caring if that hurt her.

Never caring about much of anything at all, if he was honest, except keeping himself safe from the claws of emotional entanglements.

This is how it must be, cara, he’d told her with all the offhanded certainty of the shallow, pleasure-seeking fool he’d been then. No one can ever know what happens between us. They wouldn’t understand.

He was no longer the selfish and twisted young man who had taken a certain delight in carrying on his shameful affair right under the noses of their blended families, simply because he could. Because Lily could not resist him.

The truth was, he’d been equally unable to resist her. A terrible reality he’d only understood when it was much too late.

He’d changed since those days, ghosts or no ghosts. But he was still Rafael Castelli. And this was the very last time he intended to wallow in his guilt. It was time to grow up, accept that he could not change his past no matter how he wished it could be otherwise and stop imagining he saw a dead woman around every corner.

There was no bringing Lily back. There was only living with himself, with what he’d done, as best he could.

The woman slowed that mesmerizing walk of hers, pulling her hand from her pocket and pointing a key fob at a nearby car. The alarm beeped as she stepped into the street and swung around to open the driver’s door, and the light from the street lamp just blooming to life above her caught her full in the face—

And hit him like a battle-ax to the gut.

There was a buzzing in his head, a dizzy, lurching thing that almost cut him in half. She jerked against the car door and left it shut, and he had the dim realization that he’d barked out some kind of order. Or had it been her name? She froze where she stood, staring back at him across the hood of a stout little American wagon that could fit six or seven Italian cars, the frigid sidewalk, the whole of the night.

But there was no mistaking who she was.

Lily.

It could be no other. Not with those fine, sculpted cheekbones that perfectly framed her wide, carnal mouth that he’d tasted a thousand times. Not with that perfect heart-shaped face that belonged in a painting in the Uffizi. Her eyes were still that dreamy, sleepy blue that reminded him of California winters. Her hair poked out from beneath her knit hat to tumble down over her shoulders, still that rich summer honey, golds and auburns combined. Her brows were the same shade, arched slightly to give her the look of a seventeenth-century Madonna, and she looked as if she had not aged a single day in five years.

He thought his heart might have dropped from his chest. He felt it plummet to the ground. He took a breath, then another, expecting her features to rearrange themselves into a stranger’s as he stared. Expecting to jolt awake somewhere to find this all a dream. Expecting something—

He dragged in a deep breath, then let it out. Another. And it was still her.

“Lily,” he whispered.

Then he was moving. He closed the distance between them in a moment, and there was nothing but noise inside him. A great din, pounding at him and tearing at him and ripping him apart, and his hands shook when he reached to take her by the shoulders. She made a startled sort of sound, but he was drinking her in, looking for signs. For evidence, like that faint freckle to the left of her mouth, to mark that dent in her cheek when she smiled.

And his hands knew the shape of her shoulders even beneath that thick coat, slender yet strong. He had the sense of that easy fit he remembered, his body and hers, as if they’d been fashioned as puzzle pieces that interlocked. He recognized the way her head fell back, the way her lips parted.

“What are you doing?”

He saw her lips form the words, read them from her mouth, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He only knew that was her voice—her voice—the voice he’d never expected to hear again, faintly husky and indisputably Lily’s. It was like a sledgehammer through him, inside him. Wrecking him and remaking him at once.

And the scent of her, that indefinable fragrance that was some combination of hand lotion and moisturizer, shampoo and perfume, all rolled together and mixed with the simple truth of her beneath it all. All Lily. His Lily.

She was alive. Or this was a psychotic break. And Rafael didn’t give much of a damn which.

He simply hauled her toward him and took her mouth with his.

She tasted the way she always had, like light. Like laughter. Like the deepest, darkest cravings and the heaviest need. He was careful at first, tasting her, testing her, his whole body exulting in this impossibility, this thing he’d dreamed a thousand times only to wake up without her, again and again across whole years.

But then, the way it always had, that electric thing that arced between them shifted, blasted into heat lightning and took him whole. So he merely angled his head for that perfect fit he remembered so well and devoured her.

His lost love. His true love.

Finalmente, he thought, his grasp on the English he’d been fluent in since he was a boy eluding him, as if only Italian could make any sense of this. At last.

His hands were in her hair, against her cheeks, when she jerked her mouth from his. Their breath mingled into another cloud between them. Her eyes were that impossible blue that had haunted him for half a decade, the color of the crisp San Francisco sky.

“Where the hell have you been?” he grated out at her, sounding more heavily Italian than he had in years. “What the hell is this?”

“Let go of me.”

“What?” He didn’t understand.

“You seem very upset,” she said, in that voice that was etched into his soul, as much a part of him as his own. Her blue eyes were dark with something that looked like panic, which didn’t make any kind of sense. “But I need you to let me go. Right now. I promise I won’t call the police.”

“The police.” He couldn’t make any sense of this, and only partly because of that great buzzing still in his head. “Why would you call the police?”

Rafael studied her, that lovely face he’d believed he’d never see again. Not in this life. There was heat on her cheeks now, staining them pink. Her mouth was slick from his. But she wasn’t melting against him the way she always had before at his slightest touch, and if he wasn’t entirely mistaken, the hands she’d lifted to his chest were pushing at him.

At him.

As if, for the first time in almost as long as he’d known her, she was trying to push him away.

Everything in him rebelled, but he let her go. And he more than half expected her to disappear into the darkness drawing tight around them, or a plume of smoke, but she didn’t. She held his gaze for a long, cool moment, and then, very deliberately, she wiped her mouth with one hand.

Rafael couldn’t define the thing that seared through him then, too bright and much too hot. He only knew it wasn’t the least bit civilized.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, in the voice he only ever had to use once with his staff. Never twice.

Lily stiffened, but she was still looking at him strangely. Too strangely.

“Please step back.” Her voice was low and intense. “We might appear to be alone here, but I assure you, there are all kinds of people who will hear me scream.”

“Scream?” He felt something like ill. Or dull. Or—but there were no words for the devastation inside him. There was nothing but need and fury, grief and despair. And that terrible hope he’d held on to all this time, though he’d known it was unhealthy. He’d known it was a weakness he could ill afford. He’d known it was sentimental and morbid.

He’d considered it the least of his penance. But she was alive.

Lily was alive.

“If you assault me again—”

But the fact she was standing here, on a side street in Charlottesville, Virginia, made about as little sense to him as her apparent death had five years ago. He brushed aside whatever she was saying, scowling down at her as the haze began to recede and the shock of this eased. Slightly.

“How did you survive that accident?” he demanded. “How did you end up here, of all places? Where have you been all this time?” Her words caught up with him and he blinked. “Did you say assault?”

He hadn’t imagined it. She edged away from him, one hand on the side of the car. Her gaze was dark and troubled, and she certainly hadn’t greeted him the way he might have expected Lily would—if, of course, he’d ever allowed himself to imagine that she could really still be alive.

Not a ghost this time. The real, flesh-and-blood Lily, standing before him on a cold, dark street.

Even if she was looking at him as if he was a monster.

“Why,” he asked, very softly, “are you looking at me as if you don’t know who I am?”

She frowned. “Because I don’t.”

Rafael laughed, though it was a cracked and battered sort of sound.

“You don’t,” he repeated, as if he was sounding out the words. “You don’t know me.”

“I’m getting in my car now,” she told him, too carefully, as if he was some kind of wild animal or psychotic. “You should know that I have my hand on the panic button on my key chain. If you make another move toward me, I will—”

“Lily, stop this,” he ordered her, scowling. Or shaking. Or both.

“My name is not Lily.” Her frown deepened. “Did you fall and hit your head? It’s very icy and they aren’t as good about putting down salt as they—”

“I did not hit my head and you are, in fact, Lily Holloway,” he gritted out at her, though he wanted to shout it. He wanted to shout down the world. “Do you imagine I wouldn’t recognize you? I’ve known you since you were sixteen.”

“My name is Alison Herbert,” she replied, eyeing him as if he’d shouted after all, and perhaps in tongues. As he’d done any of the wild, dark things inside his head, none of which could be classified as remotely civilized. “You look like the kind of man people remember, but I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Lily—”

She moved back and opened the car door beside her, putting it between them. A barrier. A deliberate barrier. “I can call nine-one-one for you. Maybe you’re hurt.”

“Your name is Lily Holloway.” He threw it at her, but she didn’t react. She only gazed back at him with her too-blue eyes, and he realized he must have knocked that cap from her head when he’d kissed her so wildly, as her hair gleamed in the streetlight’s glow, a strawberry blond tangle. He recognized that, too. That indefinable color, only hers. “You grew up outside San Francisco. Your father died when you were a toddler, and your mother married my father, Gianni Castelli, when you were a teenager.”

She shook her head, which was better than that blank stare.

“You’re afraid of heights, spiders and the stomach flu. You’re allergic to shellfish but you love lobster. You graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English literature after writing an absolutely useless thesis on Anglo-Saxon elegies that will serve you in no way whatsoever in any job market. You have a regrettable tattoo of your namesake flower on your right hip and up along your side that you got as an act of drunken rebellion. You were on a spring break trip to Mexico that year and sampled entirely too much tequila. Do you think I’m making these things up to amuse myself?”

“I think you need help,” she said with a certain firmness that didn’t match his memories of her at all. “Medical help.”

“You lost your virginity when you were nineteen,” he threw at her, everything inside him a pitched and mighty roar. “To me. You might not remember it, but I bloody well do. I’m the love of your goddamn life!”

CHAPTER TWO

HE WAS HERE.

Five years later, he was here. Rafael. Right here.

Standing in front of her and looking at her as if she was a ghost, speaking of love as if he knew the meaning of the word.

Lily wanted to die on the spot—and for real this time. That kiss still thudded through her, setting her on fire in ways she’d convinced herself were fantasies, not memories, and certainly not the truth. She wanted to throw herself back in his arms, in that same sick, addicted, utterly heedless way she always had. Always. No matter what had happened or not happened between them. She wanted to disappear into him—

But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She had other responsibilities now, far bigger ones. Far more important things to think about than her own dizzy pleasure or this destructively self-centered man who had loomed far too large over too much of her life already.

Rafael Castelli was the demon she carried inside her, the dark, selfish thing she fought against every single day of her life. The emblem of her bad behavior, all her terrible choices, her inability to think of anyone or anything but herself. The hurt she’d caused, the pain she’d meted out, whether intentional or not. Rafael was intimately wrapped up in all of that. He was her incentive to live the new life she’d chosen, so far away from the literal wreck of the old. Her boogeyman. The monster beneath her bed in more ways than one.

She hadn’t expected that particular metaphor, that vivid memory she’d used as her guiding compass away from the person she’d been back when she’d known him, to bloom into life on a random Thursday evening in December. Right here in Charlottesville, where she’d believed she was safe. She’d finally started to believe she really could sink into the life she’d made as Alison Herbert. That she could fully become that other, better, new and improved version of herself and never look back.

“Should I go on?” Rafael asked in a tone of voice she couldn’t remember him ever using before. Hard, uncompromising. Very nearly ruthless. It should have scared her, and she told herself it did, but what shuddered through her was far more complicated than that as it pooled hot and deep in her belly. Lower. “I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the things I know about you. I could write a book.”

Lily hadn’t meant to pretend she didn’t know him. Not exactly. She’d been stunned. Frozen in some mix of horror and delight, and then horror at that delight. She’d been walking back to her car after running a few errands, had heard a noise behind her on the darkening street as she’d unlocked the car and there he’d been like a dark angel straight out of her nightmares.

Rafael.

She’d hardly had time to take him in. She’d had that flash of recognition—his lean and muscled form that she’d know anywhere in a sleek and extraordinarily well-cut black coat, his gorgeous face a symphony of male beauty from the thick, dark hair he wore cut closer than she remembered it to that mouth of his that had laughed with so little care and then tempted her beyond measure and tormented her beyond imagining—and that stunned, haunted, wondering look in his searing dark gaze.

And then none of that mattered, because he’d been kissing her.

His mouth on hers, after all this time. His taste, his touch. His heat.

Everything had disappeared. The street. The faint music from the outdoor mall in the air around them. The whole city, state, country.

The past five years, gone in a single blast of heat and hunger that had roared through her, blowing apart every single lie she’d been telling herself all this time. That she’d been infatuated with him and nothing more. That time and distance would erode that mad light between them, dimming it into nothing more than girlish silliness. That there was nothing to fear from this man who had been no more than a spoiled little rich boy who’d refused to give up a favorite toy—

The truth was so hot, so demanding, it burned. It told her things she didn’t want to know—proved she was as much an addict as she’d ever been, and worse, as her own mother had always been. Clean for five years and that quickly a junkie again. It had shaken her so deeply, so profoundly, that she didn’t know what might have happened next—but then she’d remembered.

With a thud so hard it should have toppled her, though it didn’t. She’d yanked her mouth from his, appalled at herself.

Because she’d remembered why she couldn’t simply fall into this man the way everything inside her yearned to do. Why she couldn’t trust herself around him, not even for an instant. Why she had to make him go away again, no matter what it took.

But he was not looking at her as if he had the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort.

“It would be a work of fiction, then,” she managed to say now. “If you wrote a book. Because none of those things ever happened to me.”

His face changed, then. That haunted expression dimmed, and something far more considering gleamed gold there in the depths of his dark gaze.

“My apologies,” he said softly. She felt how dangerous it would be to believe that tone of voice in the goose bumps that prickled all over her, though she kept herself from shivering in reaction. Barely. “Who did you say you were?”

“I’m not sure I want to share my personal information with some ranting madman on the street.”

“I am Rafael Castelli,” he said, and the way he said his name lilted through her like a song, lyrical and right. Yet another reason to hate herself. “If you don’t know me, as you claim, the pertinent details would be these—I am the eldest son of Gianni Castelli and heir to the ancient Castelli fortune. I am acting CEO of the Castelli Wine Company, renowned the world over for my business acumen. I do not hunt women down in the streets. I do not have to do such things.”

“Because rich men are so well-known for their reasonable behavior.”

“Because if I was in the habit of accosting strange women in the street, it would have been noted before now,” he said dryly. “I suspect countries would think twice before letting me cross their borders.”

Lily shifted and tried to look the appropriate mixture of blank and confused. “I really think I should call nine-one-one,” she murmured. “You’re not making any sense.”

“There is no need,” he said, sounding more Italian than he had a moment ago, which made everything inside her feel edgy. Jagged. That and the tightness of his lean jaw were the only hints she could see of his anger, but she knew it was there. She could feel it. “I will call them myself. You were reported dead five years ago, Lily. Do you really imagine I will be the only person interested in your resurrection?”

“I have to go.”

He reached out a hand and wrapped it over the top of her car door as if he intended to keep her there simply by holding the vehicle itself in place. Her curse was that she believed he probably could.

“There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight.”

Lily stared back at him, a war raging inside that she fervently hoped wasn’t visible on her face. He had to leave. He had to. There was no other option. But this was Rafael. He’d never done a single thing he didn’t want to do in as long as she’d known him—even back when he’d seemed far more languid and perpetually unbothered than this man who stood before her now, radiating a kind of authority she really didn’t want to investigate any further.

“My name is Alison Herbert,” she said again. She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and then she told him the Alison story in all its particulars—save one crucial detail. “I’m originally from Tennessee. I’ve never been to California and I didn’t go to college. I live on a farm outside of town with my friend and landlady, Pepper, who runs a dog boarding and day care facility. I walk the dogs. I play with them. I clean up after them and live in a little cottage there. I have for years. I don’t know anything about wine and to be honest, I prefer a good beer.” She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Then you will have no problem submitting to a DNA test, to set my mind at ease.”

“Why on earth would the state of your mind be of interest to me?”

“Lily has people who care about her.” Rafael’s shrug seemed far more lethal than hers, a weapon more than a gesture. “There are legal issues. If you are not the woman I would swear you are, prove it.”

“Or,” she said, distinctly, “I could reach into my pocket and produce the driver’s license that proves I’m exactly who I say I am.”

“Licenses can be forged. Blood work is much more honest.”

“I’m not taking a DNA test because some crazy man on a street thinks I should,” Lily snapped. “Listen. I’ve been more than nice, considering the fact you grabbed me, terrified me and—”

“Was that terror I tasted on your tongue?” His voice was like silk. It slid over her, through her, demolishing what few defenses she had in an instant. Reminding her again why this man was more dangerous to her than heroin. “I rather thought it was something else.”

“Step away from this car,” she ordered him. She couldn’t let herself react. She couldn’t let him see that he got under her skin. “I’m going to get in it and drive away, and you’re going to let me.”

“Not one of those things is going to happen.”

“What do you want?” she hurled at him. “I told you I don’t know who you are!”

“I want the last five years of my life back!” he thundered, his voice a loud, dark thing in the quiet of the street, bouncing back from the walls of the surrounding buildings and making Lily feel flattened. Punctured. “I want you. I’ve been chasing your ghost for half a decade.”

“I’m not—”

“I went to your funeral.” The thunder was a stark thing, then, and far more painful because of it. It punched through her, leaving her winded. Wobbly. “I stood there and played your stepbrother, nothing more. As if my heart hadn’t been ripped from my body and battered apart on the rocks where that car went off the road. I didn’t sleep for months, for years, imagining you losing control of the wheel and plummeting over—” His fine lips pressed together, hard and grim, as he cut himself off. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “Every time I closed my eyes I pictured you screaming.”

She would never know how she stood there and stared back at him, as if he was talking about someone else. He is, she told herself fiercely. The Lily Holloway he knew really did die that day. She’s never coming back.

And the Rafael she’d known had never cared about her—or anything—that much. Who was he kidding? She’d been but one of his many women at the time, and she’d accepted that because what else had she known? She’d learned how to lose herself in awful, narcotic men at her mother’s knee.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “For everyone involved. That sounds horrific.”

“Your mother never recovered.”

But Lily didn’t want to talk about her mother. Her bright and fragile and largely absent mother, who had shivered at the slightest wind, susceptible to every emotional storm that rolled her way. Her mother, who had self-medicated with ever more dangerous combinations of prescription pills, always under the aegis of this or that quack of a doctor.

“Did you know that she died eighteen months ago?” Rafael continued. “That wouldn’t have happened if she’d known her daughter was still alive.”

That one would leave deep, deep scars, Lily knew. But she didn’t crack. What she felt about her doomed and careless mother paled in comparison to what she had to keep safe here.

“My mother is in jail,” she told him, and she had no idea how she managed to sound so even. “Last I heard she’d found Jesus, for the third time. Maybe this time it’ll stick.”

“These are all lies.” He was too intense. His gaze was too penetrating. She was terribly afraid he could see straight through her, see everything. “What I can’t understand is how you imagine you can tell them to my face. You can’t really think I’m likely to believe them, can you?”

Lily didn’t know what might have happened then. They were at a stalemate and she had no idea how to extricate herself from this—but then she heard voices calling to her from across the street.

Two of Pepper’s clients stood there, a married couple who called her Alison and made polite enough conversation while she held herself still, icy with terror, waiting for them to ask after Arlo. But when they did, as they inevitably did because this was the South and people still took manners seriously here, she realized there was no need to panic. The man beside her didn’t move a muscle. And why would he? It wasn’t as if Rafael knew that name. He couldn’t possibly know what it meant.

She was something like giddy with her relief when the couple moved on.

“I hope that clears things up for you,” she said.

“Because they called you by this assumed name of yours?” Rafael’s voice was mild. “Questions only lead to more questions. You’ve been living here for some time, clearly. You’ve made yourself part of this community.” His expression was harsh. Something like unforgiving. “You had no intention of ever coming home, did you? You were content to let us mourn your death as if it was real.”

He’d let go of her car door, and she slammed it shut then, aware of the way his dark eyes narrowed on her as she did. She ignored him, beeping the alarm on and swinging around again, heading back toward the mall. Where there would be lights and people. More people who knew her. More people to put between them and use as a barrier.

“Where are you going?” he asked, not particularly nicely. “Is this what you do now, Lily? You run away? Where will I find you next time—roaming the streets of Paraguay? Mozambique? Under an entirely different assumed name?”

She kept walking, and he fell into step beside her, which wasn’t any kind of help. It made her remember far too many things best left shut away inside her. It made her think about things that could only hurt. He matched his athletic stride to hers, the way he always had. He was so close that if she merely leaned a little bit to the left, she could nudge up against his arm, which was the closest they’d ever come to public displays of affection back in the day.

She felt blinded with grief, then, and with that old, sick need that had taken over so much of her life back then. But she kept her eyes straight ahead and told herself it was the cold weather stinging at her eyes, nothing more.

There had to be a way out of this. There had to be a way to get rid of him. She had to keep Arlo safe. That was the only thing that mattered in the past five years and it was the only thing that she could let matter now.

She felt safer once they reached the crowd on the festive mall. Not that she thought Rafael was likely to abduct her or anything that required so much commitment—but if he’d had any thoughts in that direction, it would be a great deal harder surrounded by so many people.

“Are we shopping?” Rafael’s voice was sardonic, managing to slice through the noise, the singing. The barricades she’d been erecting inside her as they’d walked. “This reminds me far more of the lonely little heiress I once knew.”

“I thought I’d get something hot to drink and get out of the cold for a moment,” she said, refusing to react outwardly to what he’d said. Though she had to blink hard to get the red haze to roll back, and it actually hurt to bite her tongue.

She hadn’t been a lonely little heiress. There’d been little enough to inherit, first of all, outside her mother’s house. But the poor little rich kid in this scenario had been bored, sybaritic party boy Rafael, beloved of C-list actresses, reality television pseudostars and a host of lingerie models. Those had been the women he’d paraded around with in public. Those had been the women he’d brought home with him, the women he’d taunted Lily with on all those terrible family vacations at Lake Tahoe, letting them drape their cosmetically enhanced bodies all over him and then making her admit her jealousy before he’d ease her pain a little with his clever fingers, that awful mouth of his and the things he could do with a few stolen moments against a locked door.

He was a terrible man, she reminded herself fiercely as they ducked out of the way of a kid on a skateboard. He’d been hideous to her, and worse, she’d let him. There was nothing here to be conflicted about. Everything between them had been twisted and wrong. She loathed who she’d been around him. The lies she’d told, the secrets she’d kept. She’d hated that life she’d been trapped in.

She refused to go back to it. She refused to accept that her only fate was to become her sad mother, one way or another. She refused to let the poison of that life, those people, infect Arlo. She refused.

Lily didn’t wait to see if Rafael was following her—she knew he was, she could feel that he was right on her heels like an agent of doom—she simply marched down the mall until she reached her favorite café, then she tossed open the door and walked in.

Straight into another male body.

She heard an Italian curse that Rafael had taught her when she was a teenager—as pretty to the ear as it was profoundly filthy—and she jerked back, only to look up into another set of those dark Castelli eyes.

Damn it.

Luca, younger than Rafael by three years. The quieter, more solid stepbrother, to her recollection, but then, she’d never seen much besides Rafael. Luca looked as if she’d sucker punched him. Lily felt as if she’d sustained the same blow. It might have been possible to convince only Rafael that she was someone else—or so she’d been desperate to believe the whole walk here. But both Castelli brothers? There was no way.

She was completely and utterly screwed.

“Ah, yes,” Rafael said from behind her, that sardonic tone of his wrapping around her, far hotter than the heat of the café or the shock in his brother’s gaze. “Luca, you remember our late stepsister, Lily. It turns out she’s been alive and well and right here in Virginia this whole time. Hale and hearty, as you can see.”

“I’m not Lily,” she snapped, though she suspected that was more desperate than strategic, especially with both men scowling at her. But there was only one man’s scowl she could feel inside her, like acid. “I’m getting tired of telling you that.”

Rafael’s gaze was a blast of dark fire as he stepped to the side and then steered her out of the way of oncoming foot traffic, there in the café doorway, with a hand on her arm she couldn’t shake off fast enough. But perhaps that was even less strategic, she thought, when his lush mouth quirked slightly—very much as if he knew exactly what his touch did to her, even all these years later.

As if he could feel the lick of that fire as well as she could.

He directed his attention to his brother. “Though, you will note, she does appear to be suffering from a convenient case of amnesia.”

Which was not a solution, but was the best answer to her current situation, of course.

And it was how Lily decided, right there on the spot in that crowded little café, that amnesia was exactly what she had. In spades.

CHAPTER THREE

“THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE,” was all that Luca said, while Lily pretended she wasn’t affected by the shock on his face.

“Behold,” Rafael answered him darkly, though that hot, furious gaze of his was on Lily, making her skin feel much too hot beneath her winter layers. “I bring you tidings of comfort and joy. Our own Christmas miracle.”

“How?” Luca asked. It was the closest to shaken she’d ever heard him.

It made her feel awful. Hollow. But this was no time to indulge that.

The three of them shifted out of the flow of café traffic, over near the row of stools that sat at the window looking over the mall and all its holiday splendor. The Castelli brothers stood there like a six-foot-and-then-some wall of her past, staring at her with entirely too much emotion and intensity. She tried to look unbothered. Or perhaps slightly concerned, if that—the way a stranger would.

“How did she manage to walk away from that crash?” Luca asked. “How did she disappear for five years without a single trace?”

Lily had no intention of telling either one of them how easy that had been. All she’d needed to do was walk away. And then never, ever revisit her past. Never look back. Never revisit any of the people or places she’d known before. All she’d needed was a good enough reason to pretend that she’d had no history whatsoever—and then six weeks into her impetuous, spur-of-the-moment decision, she’d found she had the best reason of all. But how could she explain that to two Italian men who could trace their lineage back centuries?

Even if she’d wanted to explain. Which she didn’t.

You can’t, she reminded herself sharply. That was the trouble with the Castelli family. Any exposure to them at all and she stopped doing what she knew she should do and started doing whatever it was they wanted, instead.

“Oddly,” Rafael replied, in that same dark tone, still studying her though he was clearly speaking to Luca, “she is claiming that she is a different person and that none of that happened to her.”

“She is also standing right here in front of you and can speak for herself,” Lily said tartly then. “I’m not claiming anything. Your confusion over my identity is very much your problem, not mine. You assaulted me on a dark street. I think I’m being remarkably indulgent, given the circumstances.”

“You assaulted her?” Luca’s dark brows edged up his forehead as he shifted his gaze to his brother. “That doesn’t sound much like you.”

“Of course not.” But Rafael still did not look away from Lily as he said that.

Inside, in the warmth and the light of the café, she could see the hints of gold in those dark eyes of his that had once fascinated her beyond measure. And she could feel his mouth against hers again, a wild bright thing in all that December dark. She told herself what moved in her then was a memory, that was all. Nothing more than a memory.

“I don’t think—” She almost said your brother but caught herself in the nick of time.

Would a stranger to these men know they were brothers at a glance? She thought the family resemblance was like a shout in a quiet room—unmistakable and obvious. Their imposing height, their strong shoulders, their rangy, rampantly masculine forms and all that absurd muscle that made them look carved to perfection. The thick black hair that, when left to its own devices, flirted with the tendency to curl.

Luca wore his in a haphazard manner he’d already raked back from his brow several times as they stood there. Rafael, by contrast, looked like some kind of lethal monk, with his hair so short and that grim look on his face. But they shared the same mouth, carnal and full, and she knew they even laughed in that same captivating, stunning way—using the whole of their bodies as if giving themselves over to pleasure was why they’d been placed on this earth.

Not that she could imagine this stark, furious, older version of Rafael laughing about anything—and she told herself she felt nothing at that thought. No pang. No sharp thing in the vicinity of her chest. Nothing at all.

She directed her attention toward Luca. “I don’t think your friend is well.”

“That’s a nice touch,” Rafael said flatly. “‘Friend.’ Very convincing. But I am not the one who is in some doubt as to his identity.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Lily continued, still looking at Luca, though it was almost as if he appeared in silhouette, with Rafael the dark and brooding sun that was the only thing she could see no matter where she looked. “I’m not sure, but he might need medical attention.”

Rafael said something in a sleek torrent of Italian that made Luca blink, then nod once, sharply. Clearly Rafael had issued an order. And it seemed that in this incarnation of the Castelli family, Rafael expected his orders to be followed and, more astonishing by far, they were. Because Luca turned away, toward a man and woman she’d completely failed to notice were sitting on the stools a few feet away watching this interaction with varying degrees of interest, and started talking to them in a manner clearly designed to turn their attention to him.

And off Lily and Rafael.

“I’m going to leave you in your friend’s hands now,” Lily told Rafael then, in a falsely bright sort of voice that she hoped carried over the shout of the espresso machine and some pop star’s whiny rendition of a Christmas carol on the sound system.

Rafael’s mouth moved again, another one of those too-hard quirks that felt wired directly to every last nerve in her body. It set them all alight and shivering. “Do you think so?”

“I have a life.” She shouldn’t have snapped that. It sounded defensive. A true stranger wouldn’t be defensive, would she? “I have—” She had to be careful. So very careful “—things to do that don’t include tending to strange men and their confusion over matters that have nothing to do with me.”

“Why did you come here?” he asked, much too quietly, when she could see temper and pain and something far darker in gaze.

Maybe that was why she didn’t throw herself out the door. That darkness that she could feel inside her, too. The guilt she couldn’t quite shake. But she did deliberately misunderstand him.

“This is my favorite coffee shop in Charlottesville. I was hoping a peppermint mocha might wash away all of that weirdness out in the street, and give you time to sober up.”

Amusement lit his dark gaze and it walloped her hard in the gut. So hard she saw stars for a moment.

“Am I drunk?”

“I don’t know what you are.” She tilted her head slightly. “I don’t know who you are.”

“So you have said.”

Lily waved a dismissive hand in the air. “I think this must be a rich-man thing. You think you see someone you know in the street, so you hunt them down and demand that they admit they’re that person, despite their insistence—and documented proof—that they’re someone else. I’d end up in jail if I tried that—or on a psychiatric ward. But I imagine that’s not a concern for someone as wealthy as you are.”

“Has my net worth penetrated the shroud of your broken memory?” His voice should have left marks, it was so scathing. “I find that is often the case. It’s amazing how many women I’ve never met can estimate my net worth to the penny.”

“You told me you were rich.” She used a tone she was quite certain no one had ever used on him before. One that suggested he was extraordinarily dim, though he looked more entertained by that than he did furious. “Not to mention, you’re not exactly dressed like a vagrant, are you?”

“When will this performance end?” he asked softly.

“Right now.” She straightened. “I’m going home. And I’m not asking you if that’s all right with you. I’m informing you. I suggest you get a good night’s sleep—maybe then you’ll stop seeing things.”

“What is amusing about that, Lily, is that tonight is the first time in five years that I haven’t seen a ghost when I thought I saw you.” He didn’t look as if he found that even remotely amusing. She knew she didn’t. “You are entirely real and standing right here in front of me, at long last.”

She forced a smile. “They say everyone has a twin.”

“If I were to open your coat and look beneath your shirt right now, what would I find?” he asked in the same softly menacing way.

“An assault charge,” she retorted, her tone brisk. “And a potential jail sentence, God willing.”

His mouth shifted into something not quite a smile. “A scarlet lily nestled in a climbing black vine, crawling over your right hip and stretching up your side, perhaps?”

His dark gaze was so intent, so absolutely certain, that it took her breath away. And it was far harder than it should have been to simply stand there. To do nothing. To keep herself from touching her side in wordless acknowledgment, jerking back as if he’d caught her or any of a hundred other little tells that would show him her guilt.

Not that he appeared to be in any doubt about her guilt. Or her identity.

“There are a number of good psychiatrists in the Charlottesville area,” she told him when she was certain she could speak without any of that turmoil in her voice. Only the politeness she’d offer any random person she encountered, with a little compassion for someone so obviously nutty. “I’m sure one of them would see you for an emergency session. Your net worth will undoubtedly help with that.”

He really smiled then, though it was nothing like the Rafael smiles of old, so bright and carefree he could have lit up the whole of Europe if he’d wanted. This one was hard. Focused. Determined—and still it echoed deep inside her like a touch.

She was so busy telling herself that he didn’t affect her and he didn’t get to her at all that she didn’t move out of the way fast enough. She didn’t even see the danger until it was too late. His hand was on her too quickly, his fingers brushing over her temple, and Lily didn’t know how to react as sensation seared through her.

Would a stranger leap away? Or stand there, frozen in shock and disbelief?

“Get your hand off me right now,” she gritted out, going with the frozen option—because that was what she was. Head to toe. She didn’t think she could move if she’d wanted to, she was so rooted to the ground in what she told herself was outrage. She could feel his touch everywhere. Everywhere. Hot and right and perfect. As if all these years later, the merest brush of his fingers was all he had to do to prove that she’d been stumbling around in the cold black-and-white dark without him.

This was heat. This was color and light and—

This is dangerous! everything inside her shrieked in belated alarm.

“You got this scar skiing in Tahoe one winter,” he murmured, his voice pitched low, as if those were words of love or sex instead of accusation as he traced the tiny mark she’d long since forgotten was there. Up, then down. The effect was narcotic. “You hit a patch of ice and then, shortly after that, a tree. You were lucky you didn’t break anything except one ski. You had to walk down the side of the mountain, and you terrified the entire family when you appeared in the chalet, bleeding.”

He moved closer, those dark eyes of his intense and moody, focused on that little scar she didn’t even see anymore when she looked at herself. And surely the stranger she was pretending to be would have been paralyzed just as she was, then—suspended between the need to run screaming into the street and the desire to stay right where she was. Surely anyone would do the same.

Anyone for whom this man has always been a terrible addiction, a harsh voice inside told her.

But she still didn’t move.

“And I had to make the sarcastic remarks of the bored older brother I never was to you,” Rafael said gruffly. “Playing it off for our parents. Until later.”

Lily blinked. She remembered later. He’d used the key she shouldn’t have given him to her hotel room and found her in the shower. She could remember it too easily, too well, in too much detail. The steam. The sting of the hot water against her chilled skin. Rafael shouldering his way into the glassed-in little cubicle still fully dressed, his mouth uncharacteristically grim and a harsh light in his beautiful eyes.

Then his mouth had been on hers, and she’d wrapped herself around him, melting into him the way she always had. His hands had slicked over the curve of her hips, that damned tattoo she’d claimed she hated and he’d claimed he loved, until he’d simply dispensed with his wet trousers, picked her up and surged deep inside her with one slick, sure thrust.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he’d muttered into her hair, and then he’d pounded them both into a wild, screaming oblivion. Then he’d carried her out of the shower, laid her out on the hotel bed and done it all over again. Twice.

She’d found that desperately romantic at the time, but then, she’d been a pathetic twenty-two-year-old under this man’s spell that winter. Now, she told herself firmly, it was nothing more than another bad memory wrapped up in too much sex she shouldn’t have been having with a man she never, ever should have touched.

“That is a very disturbing story with some deeply troubling family dynamics,” she said now, batting his hand away from her face. “But it still doesn’t make me this other woman, no matter how many stories you tell to convince yourself otherwise.”

“Then you must take a DNA test and prove it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Thank you, but I’ll pass.”

“It wasn’t a suggestion.”

“It was an order?” She laughed then, and kept it light somehow. She could see Luca looking over, and those people with him, and knew she’d stayed too long. She had to walk away, because a stranger would have done that long ago. “I’m sure you’re used to giving lots of orders. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me, either.” She caught Luca’s gaze and forced a tight smile. “He’s all yours.”

Lily started for the door then, and she expected Rafael to stop her. She expected a hand on her arm, or worse, and she told herself she absolutely did not feel anything like a letdown when nothing happened. She threw the door open and then, though she knew better, she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder.

Rafael stood where she’d left him and watched her, dark and beautiful and harsher than she’d ever seen him before. She repressed a shiver and told herself it was the December evening. Not him.

“Mi appartieni,” he said, soft and fierce at once. And she understood that little scrap of Italian. He’d taught it to her a long time ago. You belong to me.

Lily sniffed, the cold night in her hair and slapping at her cheeks.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” she managed to say, though her voice was rougher than it should have been had she really not been able to tell the difference between Spanish and Italian. “I’m not her.”

* * *

Once she was gone, swallowed back up by the thick Virginia night, everything inside Rafael went still. Quiet. From that insane buzzing when he’d realized it was really, truly her to a sharp clarity he couldn’t recall ever feeling before.

His brother and their wine association host were talking, and his assistant was trying to show him something business related on his mobile screen, but Rafael simply slashed a hand through the air and they all subsided.

“There is a kennel outside of town run by someone called Pepper,” he told his aide in rapid-fire Italian. “Find it.” He shifted his gaze to Luca. “Call Father’s personal doctor and ask him how a person could have walked away from that accident five years ago and what kind of head injuries she might have sustained when she did.”

“Do you believe she truly has amnesia?” Luca asked. “It sounds like something out of a soap opera. But it is Lily, certainly.”

“There is no doubt about that whatsoever,” Rafael agreed. He’d known it was Lily the moment he’d seen her walk past this window. All the rest was mere confirmation of a truth he already knew, and the taste of her in his mouth after much too long.

Luca stared at him for a moment. “Your grief at her death was extreme. I am closer to her in age and I was less affected. You altered the whole of your life afterward, very much as if...”

Rafael only stared back at his younger brother, brows raised in challenge, daring him to finish that sentence. He didn’t know what Luca saw on his face, but the younger man only nodded, very wisely checked what looked like a smile and then pulled out his mobile.

It took very little time to get the answers he’d requested, dispatch the wine association woman off to tender their apologies to their would-be dinner companions and set out to find Lily in the car his assistant had waiting for them a block outside the pedestrianized area.

“If she is faking this memory loss,” Luca said as he lounged in the back of the sleek vehicle with Rafael, “she might be gone already. Why would she stay? She obviously didn’t want to be found.”

Rafael kept his gaze out the window as the car slipped through the streets and then out into the fields, barren this time of year and gleaming beneath a pale moon. He didn’t think Lily would have moved on yet, with that same gut-deep certainty that told him she was faking this whole thing. She’d been so adamant that she was this other woman, this Alison. He thought the stubborn girl he’d known was far more likely to dig in her heels and brave it out than turn and run—

But the truth is, you don’t know her at all, a dark little voice inside him whispered harshly. Because the girl you knew would never have walked away from you.

“We have a responsibility, as the closest thing Lily has left to any kind of family, to determine that she is not suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress brought on by the accident,” Rafael said. “At the very least.”

The words came so easily to him, when deep down, he knew they were excuses. Lily was alive. That meant he would do whatever he must to claim her the way he should have done five years ago.

But he didn’t want to say that to his brother. Not yet.

It was all for the best, he thought, that Luca did not respond.

The roads were emptier the farther they got from the center of Charlottesville, and the land on either side of the car was beautiful. Stark trees with their empty branches rose over fields still white from the last snow. This was rich, arable land, Rafael knew. Lily had always loved the extensive Castelli vineyards in the northern Sonoma Valley. Perhaps it should not surprise him that she’d found a place to live that was reminiscent. Gnarled vines and plump grapes had been a part of her life since she’d been sixteen and not at all pleased her mother was remarrying.

And even less pleased with him.

He could remember it all so clearly as the car made its way through the frozen Virginia fields. Rafael had been twenty-two. Their parents had gathered them together in the sprawling château that served as the Castelli Wine hub of operation and foremost winery in the States.

And Francine Holloway had been exactly what they’d expected. Beautiful, if fragile and fine featured, with masses of white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes. She’d trembled like a high-strung Thoroughbred and spoken in the kind of soft, high-pitched voice that made a certain sort of man lean in closer. Rafael’s father was precisely that type. He’d loved nothing more than wading in and solving the problems of broken, pretty things like Francine—a preference that dated back to Rafael’s mother, who had spent many years, before and after the divorce, institutionalized in a high-end facility in Switzerland.

Rafael had expected the teenaged daughter to be much the same as the mother, especially with such a wispy, feminine name. But this Lily was fierce. Laughably so, he’d thought, as she’d sat stiffly on an overwrought settee in the formal sitting room at the château and scowled through the introductions.

“You do not appear to hold our parents’ mutual happiness foremost in your heart,” he’d teased her after an endless dinner during which his father had delivered the sort of speeches that might have been moving had Francine not been the old man’s fourth wife, and had Rafael not heard them all before.

“I don’t care about our parents’ happiness at all,” she’d retorted, without looking at him. That had been different. Most girls her age took one look at him and melted into shallow little puddles at his feet. That hadn’t been arrogance on his part. It had been pure, glorious fact—though he’d been, by his own estimation, far too worldly and sophisticated to sample the charms of such young, silly creatures. This one, apparently immune, had sniffed, her gaze trained somewhere far off in the distance through the great windows. “Which is about how much they care about ours, I imagine.”

“I’m sure they care,” Rafael had said, thinking he might soothe her girlish fears with the wisdom of his years. “You have to give them a chance to get over how perfect they imagine they are for each other so they can pay attention to their lives again.”

But Lily had turned to face him, that heart-shaped face of hers still faintly rounded with youth, those impossible eyes scornful. She’d been dressed in a perfectly appropriate sundress that showed nothing untoward at all and yet there had been something about the way she’d worn the masses of her strawberry blond hair tumbling in every direction, or the fact that her shoulders were far too smooth, that had made Rafael wonder what it would be like to touch her—

He’d been horrified.

“I don’t need a big brother,” she’d told him baldly, compounding his shock at the direction of his own thoughts. “I don’t want the unsolicited advice, especially from someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Someone who dates people purely to end up on tabloid television shows, which I’m sure keeps you super relevant in the world of the vapid and the rich. Congrats. And I don’t need you to fill me in on my mother’s ridiculous patterns. I know them all too well, thank you. Your father is the latest in a long line of white knights who never quite manage to save her. It won’t last.”

She’d turned back to the view, her manner clearly dismissive, but Rafael had not been accustomed to being dismissed. Especially not by teenage girls who were usually much more apt to follow him around and giggle. He hadn’t been able to imagine Lily Holloway doing anything of the sort.

“Ah,” he’d said, “but I think you’ll find it will last.”

She’d heaved a sigh but hadn’t looked at him again. “My mother’s relationships have the shelf life of organic produce. Just FYI.”

“But my father is a Castelli.” He’d only shrugged when she’d looked back at him then, her nose wrinkled as if he was more than a little distasteful. “We always get what we want, Lily. Always.”

Sitting in the back of his car as it turned from the main country road and headed down a smaller, private lane lit with quiet lights shaped like lanterns, Rafael still didn’t know why he’d said that. Had he known then? Had he suspected what was to come? Lily had hated him openly and happily for three more years, which had distinguished her from pretty much every other woman on the planet. She’d insulted him, laughed at him, mocked him and dismissed him a thousand times. He’d told himself she was obnoxious. He’d told himself she was jealous.

“She is unbearable,” he’d growled at Luca once, when Lily had spent an evening singing pointed old songs at him and his date.

“But your date really is acting her shoe size instead of her age,” his brother had replied, with a lazy grin. “Lily’s not wrong.”

And then had come that fateful New Year’s Eve party at the château in Sonoma. Rafael had perhaps had too much of the Castelli champagne. He’d long told himself he was simply drunk and she must have been, too, but he’d had five long years thinking she was dead and gone to admit to himself that he hadn’t been anything like drunk. He’d known exactly what he’d been doing when she’d sauntered past him in the upstairs hall of the family wing, in what he’d openly called “hooker shoes” earlier and a dress he’d thought trashily short. Her hair had been tumbling down the way it always had back then, sliding this way and that. The scent of her, a sugared heat, had been maddening.

“If you’re looking for Calliope,” she’d said, and had managed to make his then girlfriend’s ridiculous name sound like an insult, “she’s probably in the nursery with the other children. Your father hired a babysitting service.” She’d smirked at him. “He was obviously expecting you.”

Rafael had known that the last thing in the world he should have done was reach over, slide his palm around her neck and yank that smart mouth to his. Of course he’d known. He’d imagined he would kiss her, she would punch him and he would laugh at her and tell her that if she wasn’t angling to take Calliope’s place, she should keep quiet.

But one touch of her mouth with his, and everything had changed.

Everything.

And you ruined it, he told himself savagely then, as an old farmhouse came into view at the end of the lane. Because that is what you do.

The car pulled up in front of the bright old house and was promptly surrounded by a pack of baying dogs. Rafael climbed out of the car as a silver-haired woman charged out of the house and straight toward them in some misguided attempt to corral her charges.

But despite the barking and howling and general din, Rafael knew it the moment Lily appeared on the step behind the older woman, as if everything else fell quiet. He drank her in. Again. She was no longer wearing her coat and scarf, and he couldn’t keep himself from tracing the fine, elegant lines of that willowy body of hers. Her jeans were snug, making his mouth water, and the long-sleeved shirt she wore hugged her breasts and made him realize how hard and hungry he was for her—even in this sea of animals.

And even if she looked horrified to see him.

“This is stalking!” she threw at him from her place on the steps. “You can’t hunt me down at my home. You don’t have any right!”

Before Rafael could reply, a streaking shape shoved past her and would have hurtled itself down the steps and into the chaos had Lily not reached out and grabbed it.

Not an it. A boy. A small one.

“I told you to stay inside no matter what,” Lily told him sharply.

“Arlo is barely five,” the older woman said from somewhere off to the side where, Rafael was dimly aware, she’d managed to move all the dogs into a fenced-off pen. But he couldn’t look away from Lily. And the boy. “He doesn’t get ‘no matter what.’”

The little boy looked at the older woman, then angled his head back to look up at Lily, who still held him by the collar of his shirt.

“Sorry, Mama,” he said, angelically, and then he grinned up at her.

It was a mischievous grin. It was filled with light and laughter and the expectation that his sins would be forgiven in an instant, simply because he’d wielded it. Rafael knew that smile well. He’d seen a version of it on his brother’s face throughout Luca’s whole life. He’d seen it in his own mirror a thousand times more.

His heart stopped beating. Then started again with a deafening, terrible kick that should have knocked him to the ground. He couldn’t quite understand why it hadn’t.

“You don’t have the right to be here,” Lily said again, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glittering, and Rafael didn’t know how he could want her this badly. He’d never understood it. And it was back as if she’d never been gone, a yearning so deep it was like an ache inside him.

But it didn’t matter any longer. None of that mattered. The little boy didn’t resemble the fair woman he’d called Mama at all. He had Rafael’s dark curls and the Castelli dark eyes. He looked like every picture Rafael had ever seen of himself as a child, scattered all over the ancestral Castelli home in northern Italy.

“Are you so certain I don’t have the right to be here, Alison?” Rafael asked, amazed he could speak when everything inside him was a shout again, long and loud and drowning out the world. “Because unless I am very much mistaken, that appears to be my son.”

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