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She was damned proud of those things. This was the life she’d built all on her own. Her parents had stopped even the pretense of any obligations to her the day she’d turned eighteen. Her husband had abandoned her seven years later, right after she’d finally learned to trust him. Yes, her aunt and uncle helped her as best they could and that had been everything to her at times, but ultimately Anais had made herself by herself.
Anais had never had Dario’s kind of money, however, and she never would. She’d spent a long time telling herself she was glad of that—that it was all the money he and Dante had made while they were still in college that had ruined him, in the end. It had made him expect too much from the world and everyone in it, as if he could make everything he looked at what he wanted it to be, simply because he wanted it that way. It had also trained him to see the very worst in people, as they schemed to get close to him and use him for their own ends.
She’d been arrogant enough to think she was the antidote to that, but it had turned out that once a man was poisoned, that was how he stayed. Unless the man in question wanted something different for himself. Dario had pretended he had, but he hadn’t.
In the end, he hadn’t wanted anything he’d claimed he did. Particularly not Anais.
And for some reason the exquisite four-bedroom villa that would have been more than suitable for a king and the whole of his royal court seemed to press that fact deeper into her as she found herself knocking at his door, the staff member having long since melted away into the exultant, flowered shrubbery festooned with torches and dancing with real flames against the sunset.
She knocked with a wide-open hand, loudly and rudely, and of course Dario didn’t rush to answer her. It gave her far too much time to stand there and think better of this. To wonder what she thought she might gain from acquiescing to his demands no matter what her reasons might have been.
And worse, what she stood to lose.
Nothing with Dario had ever been straightforward. They’d skipped regular dating altogether—having fallen hard into something far more intense neither one of them had dared name. Then they’d gotten married much too fast, each telling the other and maybe themselves it was a cool, rational decision based on Anais’s immigration status as a French citizen instead of that insane fire that had consumed them both in bed. Dario had told her very little about his family, except that his twin was the only one he truly cared about at all—and yet Dante had been openly suspicious of her from the start. She’d tried to ignore that, too swept up in her first year of law practice and the head-spinning reality of her first lover who was also the husband she didn’t dare admit she’d fallen head over heels in love with.
Maybe it wasn’t surprising that it had taken exactly one year for it all to fall apart.
There was nothing good to be gained by poking her fingers into those old wounds, she told herself then, scowling at the villa’s front door.
This is for Damian, she reminded herself. She chanted it a few times, just to make sure she was listening to her own words, and knocked again. Louder.
And this time Dario swung the door open and took her breath away.
It only made her that much more furious with him. She kept telling herself that, too, with even less success.
Dario wore nothing but a loose pair of linen trousers that hung low—much too low—on his lean hips and made it impossible to do anything but gape at that remarkable chest of his. She’d assured herself that he couldn’t possibly be as good-looking as she remembered, as perfectly formed, like something that ought to have been carved from marble and propped up in a museum. She’d had six years to decide she’d built him up in her head.
She hadn’t.
If anything, he was far, far better than she remembered, all flat planes of muscle and that ridged abdomen, smooth olive skin and a dusting of dark hair that arrowed down beneath those low-hanging, decadent trousers. Even his bare feet were gorgeous, big and inescapably male, and she hated everything about this.
Mostly, she hated that terrible yearning that ripped through her, tearing her wide open and making it impossible to lie to herself about it. She wanted him. She’d always wanted him. That connection between them had been everything to her, for a time.
There had never been anything as huge or powerful or all-consuming in all her life, until she’d held Damian for the first time in the hospital.
She’d been silly enough to think that connection was what had forged the true bond between them, back then. That their marriage had been conducted for all the practical reasons they’d agreed upon in their analytical way—for Anais’s green card, because Dario had liked the idea of a lawyer in the immediate family to handle the company he and his brother ran, etc. It had all made such sense on paper.
But the truth of it, the truth of them, had been what happened in the fire that raged between them. Always. At the slightest touch. At the ways they tore each other apart and put each other back together, night after night. The things they talked about in the cold light of day were their cover, their pretense. The nights were their truth.
That was what she’d told herself. It was what she’d believed. What she’d felt, deep inside, in that cold place no one else had ever touched.
Until he’d smashed it all into a million little pieces when he’d walked away from her without a backward glance.
“I hope you didn’t undress just for me,” she said, smiling faintly at him as if she found his bare chest—truly, one of the great wonders of the world, to her way of thinking, and she hated that she still thought it—embarrassing. For him. “I wouldn’t touch you again with a ten-foot pole covered in all your wealth and status. Look what happened the last time.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ud6c78c16-a98b-5d31-99c6-d0b62863a869)
“STARTING RIGHT IN with the lies?” Dario asked.
And because she hadn’t let him into her house last night—which annoyed him a lot more than he cared to admit, and had gotten under his skin the more he’d thought about it—he blocked the doorway to his villa now. She could see how she liked it, and if there was a part of him that was ashamed at his own childishness, he ignored it.
He ignored a whole host of unfortunate truths, many of them making themselves known physically, as he gazed at her. “Touching me was never the issue, as I think we both know.”
She looked at him as if she pitied him, which made him want to...do all kinds of things he wouldn’t let himself do.
Yet.
“I was foolish and young back then,” she said in that prim voice of hers that had always, always, driven him crazy with lust and need. Today was no different, damn her. “I thought the package mattered a lot more than what was inside it. But people change.”
“Selective memory isn’t change. It’s a lie you tell yourself.”
“Happily, you don’t know me well enough either way.” She shrugged. If it bothered her that he hadn’t stepped aside to let her in yet, she didn’t show it. That, in turn, cranked up his irritation even higher. “I could have undergone a huge personal transformation. I could be lying through my teeth. Neither one has anything to do with the cold, hard fact of your paternity, does it?”
Dario had woken up at eight in the morning New York time, which was six hours earlier than here in this lost corner of the world. He’d spent a couple of hours on the phone and another hour or so on his laptop, and then he’d dealt with the restless anger beating at him by going for a very long run on a dark island road that wound down to beaches made of hard, black volcanic rock. He’d greeted his first Hawaiian sunrise with a swim in the shockingly warm sea, and then he’d come back to his villa and banged out a hundred furious laps in the significantly cooler pool, just to make sure he had a handle on himself.
Except he hadn’t.
He’d spent the day on a series of calls and video chats with employees all over the world, and then he’d gone on a second, much harder run up into the hills, and even that hadn’t done a damn thing.
Not when Anais appeared in front of him again.
She looked as effortlessly sexy as she always did, and he bitterly resented it. He resented her. She’d been beautiful yesterday on that remote estate. She’d been ridiculously appealing last night in nothing but a tank top and stretchy pants that had clung to every inch of her long, shapely legs. And today it was worse.
Much worse.
She’d put her hair up into one of those complicated, seemingly messy buns that he’d used to love to watch her create with her clever fingers and a series of pins she shoved into the masses of her silken hair seemingly at random. She wore a deceptively simple blouse in a soft cream color that made her skin seem to glow, tucked into a pencil skirt in a warm camel shade that should have been illegal, the way it clung to her lean curves and made her look even more feminine and alluring than she already was. Some animal part of him hated the fact she walked around like this. That anyone could see her. Even the delicate red shoes that clung to her feet and wrapped around her ankles annoyed him, sleek licks of flame that anyone could lust after the way he did—and likely had.
She looked elegant and cool and distressingly, achingly sexy. As untouchable as ever.
And Dario wanted nothing more than to dirty her up, the way he always had. The way he had from the moment he’d first seen her, looking like a faintly irritated librarian, prim and disapproving and ridiculously gorgeous in hushed Butler Library on the Columbia University campus, where he and Dante had been making entirely too much noise one winter afternoon. He couldn’t remember what they’d been laughing about, only that someone had shushed them—and when he’d looked up, he’d seen Anais scowling at him from behind a pile of books.
He’d had the sudden and nearly overpowering urge to mess her prim exterior up a little, get under her skin, see how straitlaced she really was. He’d wanted to peel back her winter layers and her offended expression and see what kind of woman lurked beneath.
Something inside him, in that swirl of heat that unfurled in his gut, had whispered he already knew.
He’d wanted to get inside her, badly. Right then and there. That longing hadn’t eased any, then or now.
And he was aware that the urge had nothing at all to do with the child she claimed was his, and everything to do with the madness inside of him that had already claimed him once.
“Be careful, brother,” Dante had said with great amusement when Dario had kept staring at Anais in that library, until she blinked and looked away, her cheeks flushing. “She’ll eat you alive.”
Dario hadn’t liked that. His easy relationship with his twin had never been quite the same after an incident with a woman they hadn’t known they’d both been sleeping with at the same time when they were younger. They’d forgiven each other, if not the woman in question—but Dario hadn’t quite trusted Dante in the same way as he had before. It had bled over into their business. Dario had been overwhelmed back then, fighting to figure out the future of the company in that year before they sold—and he hadn’t felt that Dante had been willing to shoulder his half of the responsibility. It had made him want to punch his twin right there in the library for even looking at the same pretty girl in a way Dario didn’t like. He’d shoved it aside then, but he hadn’t forgotten it.
Later, when Anais had packed up her things and headed out and Dario had made to follow her and chance an “accidental” meeting, his brother had outright laughed at him.
“Don’t blame me when she ruins your whole life,” Dante had said. “Which I can pretty much guarantee she will.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Dario had shrugged on his coat. He had not punched his twin. “It’s like your own, personal perversion.”
“A city full of women who would throw their panties at you if you smiled,” Dante had murmured, shaking his head. “They have. And yet you want to chase the one who disliked you on sight. Maybe I’m not the perverted one.”
Dario blinked now, astounded that the memories he normally kept locked away and inaccessible had taken him over like that. He wanted to think about his brother about as much as he wanted to think about his marriage. Meaning, he didn’t. More blame he could lay at her feet, he thought furiously.
He turned back into the villa and walked toward the kitchen area, where the hotel staff had left him a selection of fine wines. He heard her close the door behind her and follow him, those high red heels loud against the smooth floors, and he poured them both a glass. Red for him. White for her. The way it had always been, back then.
And he didn’t think he imagined the way she swallowed hard when he handed her glass to her, as if the memories were getting to her, too. He hoped they were as unwelcome as his were, and as uncomfortable.
“What is this?” she asked, but she didn’t put her glass back down.
He crooked a brow. “Wine.”
“You didn’t think to dress, but you had different kinds of wine delivered? What a fascinating approach to a meeting. No wonder ICE is doing so well.” She tipped her glass toward his chest. “Do you tantalize your investors and stockholders like this? Maybe put on a little cabaret number to seal the deal? Everything begins to make a lot more sense.”
He bit back the insulting words that flooded his mouth, because that was no way to play this game. And Dario had always been very, very good at games. He won them without trying very hard. He’d spent all day in heated conversations with his lawyers discussing the different ways he could win this one, too. Decisively.
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.”
