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And Anais forgot about storms and papers and everything else.
“What? Damian? No—”
“The school just called,” her aunt told her, her voice a streak of high-pitched upset, hardly intelligible. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but he’s gone. He went out with the other children for their midmorning recess and he never came back in. They’re going to call the police, but I said I’d check with you—”
And that was when she understood. The harsh truth fell through her like a guillotine, swift and gleaming and lethal.
Dario’s change in behavior last night. The abrupt switch from antagonist to lover. His absence this morning, the divorce papers, the damned phone number.
He’d planned the whole thing.
Including and especially her sensual surrender to him in bed, not once or even twice, but three times before she’d dropped off into an exhausted, dreamless sleep in the blue light before dawn.
“No, Tante,” she managed to say. She would never know how she managed to keep herself from breaking down, right there on the phone. “Tell them not to call the police. Tell them it’s fine. I know where he is.”
“But, Anais—”
“I’ll explain everything when I get home,” she managed to grit out, and that wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Though she had no idea where she’d start.
She ended the call with her aunt and yanked the divorce papers toward her, flipping through the pages with numb fingers until she reached the signatures and that scrawled taunt of a phone number. It took her two tries to enter it correctly because her hands shook so badly and her thumbs seemed suddenly twice their previous size.
It rang. Endlessly. Anais thought she aged a thousand years before she heard the line connect and then Dario’s smooth, calm voice, as effective as a gut punch. She doubled over, right there at the counter.
“Anais.”
“Where is he?” Her voice was rough. Terrible. “What did you do?”
“He’s perfectly fine,” Dario said coolly. “He’s happily watching a movie on his tablet.”
“I told you I’d let you see him, you bastard. You didn’t have to take him during recess! The school were going to call the police until they realized you were his father!”
“Go ahead,” Dario invited her, and he didn’t sound particularly cool any longer. “My son and I will be in New York in approximately ten hours. My entire legal team looks forward to handling the issue, however you choose to address it.”
She couldn’t make her trained legal brain work the way it should. She couldn’t think.
“Dario, you can’t—”
“I can and I did.” His voice was the harshest she’d ever heard it. Worse than a stranger’s, judgmental and cruel. “You never should have hidden my child from me, Anais. You reap what you sow.”
And then, impossibly, he disconnected the call.
The smartphone fell from her hand and clattered against the hard marble, but she was already racing around the counter to pitch herself against the sunken sink and lose the contents of her stomach right there. Once. Again.
For a moment she thought her knees would give out. She could see herself in her head, sliding to the floor in a kind of puddle of despair and staying there until the hotel’s housekeeping team swept her out with the trash. Her breath came hard and harsh, loud against the sink’s hard walls.
But her knees didn’t give out, somehow. Slowly, surely, she straightened. She braced herself against the sides of the sink and then she ran the water cold. She splashed it on her face and rinsed her mouth and slowly, slowly fought back the panic so she could think this through.
Dario wouldn’t hurt Damian. That was the most important thing. He might be a terrible bastard to her, but he wasn’t a monster. The worst-case scenario was that her baby might be scared, might want her and not be able to find her—she let out a ragged sob at that thought—but Dario had nothing but stacks of money at his disposal. Damian’s physical and material needs would be met, no question.
She tried to take a moment to feel thankful for that. To remind herself how many women—many of whom she’d had as clients as part of her pro bono work on the islands—couldn’t allow themselves that same confidence in their exes.
But the thought of her little boy afraid, however well Dario might treat him, made her shake again. She fought it back, and that dizzy, swimming thing in her head that was so much worse than a mere sob...she thought it might take her to the ground, after all.
But it didn’t. She didn’t let it.
She’d been prepared to do what she could to ease Dario’s access to Damian. She’d wanted her son to have his father in his life, no matter her complicated feelings about that father. Despite what he’d thought, she’d never wanted to conceal Damian from him in the first place. She shouldn’t have slept with him, certainly, but that was a minor misstep, all things considered. She wasn’t sure she’d have forgiven herself for succumbing to that old addiction so easily, but she’d have handled it, somehow. She still would have done what she could to make things work well enough that Damian and Dario could build some kind of relationship between them.
He, meanwhile, had deliberately misled her and then kidnapped her child.
Which made what she had to do easy, she decided then and there, braced against an unaffordable sink in this outrageously luxurious resort villa on the edge of the vast, uncaring Pacific.
It felt a little bit like a death, but it wasn’t. It was a declaration. He’d made it, but she could answer it—and much, much louder.
Dario wanted a war, apparently.
And this time, she’d damn well give it to him.
* * *
It should probably not have come as a surprise to Dario that the child—his child, if any of what Anais had said to him in Hawaii could be believed—was an utter terror.
There was no other word for it.
On the fourth day of his surprise fatherhood, Dario stood in the foyer of his sprawling Upper West Side penthouse apartment with its three stories of sweeping views over Central Park, and watched the little demon who supposedly bore his DNA run in screaming circles for no apparent reason, putting priceless artifacts at risk with each lap around the expansive living room.
“I don’t understand why you haven’t handled this,” Dario said coldly to the nanny who’d come with the highest of references from the most prestigious Manhattan agency, which normally boasted a waiting list years long. “Why you haven’t done whatever it is I’m paying you to do to stop this kind of insanity at six-thirty in the morning.”
“I’m a nanny, Mr. Di Sione,” the woman replied crisply, with the hint of an English accent Dario was ninety percent convinced she faked for effect and her arms crossed over her ample bosom. “Not Albus Dumbledore.”
The tiny creature, who was, as far as Dario had been able to tell, made entirely of howls and fists and a boundless, terrifying energy, stopped of his own accord then and shouted something incomprehensible at Dario.
“Can you translate that?” Dario asked the nanny in the same cold tone. “Because if you can’t, I might as well fire you and locate a zoologist.”
“I’ll handle him,” the woman said with a sniff.
“See that you do,” Dario gritted out, and then he stalked for the door.
None of this was going according to plan.
You do understand that he’s an entire little person all his own, don’t you? Anais had asked him back in Hawaii. If you have some fantasy in your head about an angelic creature who will gaze at you and call you Daddy and serve as some kind of appendage to your whims, that’s probably not Damian.
It was definitely not Damian.
“Go to hell,” he gritted out as he stabbed at the button of his private elevator, and he hoped Anais heard that, wherever she was. Lying in a heap on some Hawaiian floor, he hoped—and he told himself that pang he felt at the thought was the thrill of his victory over the woman who had wronged him, not something a whole lot more like shame.
He felt slightly more in control when he got to the ground floor of his building and pushed his way out into the sweltering heat of another Manhattan late-summer morning. He waved off his driver and walked instead, thinking the exercise would clear his head. Something had to, or he thought he might implode.
The child—his son—was only part of it. The truth was, he’d expected Anais to appear on his doorstep within twelve hours or so of that morning-after phone call, and she hadn’t. He didn’t know what to make of that. Or, to be precise, one irrepressible part of his body knew exactly what to make of it now it had tasted her again—it counted this as an unacceptable loss and wanted her even more—while the rest of him was as close to confused as he’d been in years.
Not confused, exactly, he corrected himself as he strode down Central Park West toward the ICE headquarters farther south. He was only dimly aware that the other pedestrians cleared the way before him, which probably meant he was scowling ferociously. But he refused to call it confusion, this heavy, spiked thing in him. It was anger. It was self-righteous indignation, and he’d earned it, by God. It had nothing at all to do with the bright images of their night together that coursed through his head and made him worry he might embarrass himself in the middle of corporate meetings. Nothing to do with that at all.
It came down to one simple point, he told himself as he walked toward his office. If it was all right for Anais to raise their child without him, well, then, that must mean it was all right for him to do the same thing.
Even if the child in question appeared to be the spawn of the devil on an extended sugar high.
His phone kept buzzing in his pocket but he ignored it. It was either a member of his family or of his staff. The earrings Giovanni had demanded he find were the lesser of the two priceless items Dario had brought back from Hawaii, and he kept forgetting he needed to get them out to the Hamptons and into his grandfather’s hands. He made a mental note—because delivering the earrings would stop the calls at least.
And the office could damn well wait until he got in. He’d only fire everyone who crossed his line of sight in his current mood, and more than that, he’d probably enjoy it a lot more than was good for anyone involved. He kept walking. Slowly, surely, the more blocks he covered the more New York worked its usual urban magic on him, the rhythm of the city getting into his blood the way it always did. One block, then another, and he felt the cloud of it all shift, then begin to lift. He was almost feeling back to his normal self when he stopped at a newsstand outside his office building for the paper.
For the first time since he’d turned his back on a stunning tropical view to find his past standing in front of him in a long black dress, Dario felt pretty good.
Until, that was, he saw his own name splashed across the tabloids. Bold and unmistakable.
For a moment he didn’t move. He couldn’t, no matter how the man behind the counter glared at him and the people behind him muttered. He stared at the obnoxious headlines in sheer disbelief, as if that might make sense of them.
It didn’t.
Di Sione in Bitter Custody Battle with Secret Wife—“He Wanted Nothing to Do with Me or My Baby Until Now!”
“He Left Me Years Ago to Make His Fortune, but Now He’s Stolen My Baby,” Cries Abandoned Anais!
Is ICE’S Front Man Cold Enough to Kidnap His Own Child?
And there was Anais’s face, treacherous and tearstained, as if she’d camped out in front of the paparazzi giving interviews. It occurred to him that she must have done exactly that. She was front and center on the three largest tabloid papers, her supposedly heartbroken photos side by side with the harshest-looking pictures Dario had ever seen of himself. He couldn’t imagine where they’d even found such photographs. He looked like a serial killer.
His stockholders were unlikely to find any of this particularly delightful.
Gritting his teeth, Dario pulled out his still-buzzing phone. Marnie, repeatedly, with a series of 911/SOS texts besides. His lawyers, every fifteen minutes to the second. Numbers he assumed were the usual carrion crows of the so-called press, looking for his response or his reaction, as ever. Some of his usually hands-off siblings, no doubt almost as astonished to discover they had a previously unknown nephew as he’d been to find out he had a son. And his grandfather, who surely deserved better at his advanced age than to see another one of his descendants splashed all over the papers in yet another scandal.
He didn’t return any of the calls.
He stalked into the cavernous entry hall of his building and stood stonily in the elevator as everyone else in it pretended not to stare at him, and he wasn’t at all surprised to find Marnie waiting for him when he arrived at his floor.
“I’m so sorry,” she began the moment he stepped out of the elevator car, which was never good. “I assume you know about the tabloid situation?” He only glared at her. “Of course you do.”
“I’ll want a copy of each paper that ran this story and the direct number of its managing editor within the hour,” he bit out.
“Of course, but—”
Dario didn’t wait to hear but what. He started moving toward his office in the far corner of the otherwise open, wood-and-steel space, Marnie scurrying along beside him.
“Get Legal on it. I’m not afraid to take every last one of them to court for publishing this crap.”
“Yes,” Marnie said, “I will, but really—”
He raked a hand through his hair and unclenched his teeth. Or tried, anyway. “Do we know if the stock has taken a hit? Has it gone that far?”
“Mr. Di Sione, I’m sorry, but she’s here.” Marnie took a deep breath when he scowled at her, but then pushed on, confirming that this unpleasant day really had gone from frying pan to fire, just like that. “Your—Mrs.—Anais is here. In the conference room, waiting for you. Right now.”
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ud6c78c16-a98b-5d31-99c6-d0b62863a869)
DARIO STOPPED WALKING. Abruptly.
He was aware of too many eyes on him, from people who should have been concentrating on their work instead of on this explosion of his personal life into the public domain. God, but he hated this. He’d hated it when he’d been a kid and his parents’ tempestuous lives and tragic deaths had brought the Di Sione family entirely too much unwanted attention. It was worse now.
And even so, he was aware that what leaped in him at the sound of her name was not quite temper or fury or any of the things it should have been. It was that traitor inside his chest, and worse, entirely too much of that same old hunger he’d dared to imagine he’d slaked the other night.
What a laugh. There was no slaking his desire for Anais. There was only indulging it or recovering from that indulgence, and nothing in between.
Dario tried to focus on his secretary. “I was unaware that I’d lifted the standing security alert on her. She should be in a jail cell, not polluting my conference room.”
“Yes, well.” Marnie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but held his gaze with such directness it made her sleek, steel-gray bob shake slightly where the razor edge of it scraped her chin. “She told the security officers downstairs that if they didn’t let her come up she’d hold a press conference on the front steps. I thought this was better.”
Dario made a low noise that was far too close to a growl, but he knew it wasn’t Marnie’s fault. And there were a thousand things he could have done then. He could have turned and left the building. He could have had Anais wait for him all day while he dealt with the piles of actual work he needed to do. He could have had her thrown out, anyway, and damn her threats.
He didn’t do any of those things.
And later, he couldn’t remember leaving the elevator bank at all, but there he was, pushing through the glass doors of the conference room, every atom of his being focused on the slender woman who stood at the windows with a studied insouciance that made his blood boil.
And other parts of him stand up and pay far too close attention.
“The tabloids?” he demanded as he strode inside, and he made no attempt to keep the fury from his voice. “Is there nothing you won’t do? No depth too low for you to sink?”
Anais shrugged, but she didn’t turn from the stretch of windows across the back of the room, with skyscrapers and the distant Manhattan streets spread out before her. As if the great, sprawling city was sunning itself at her feet, the glare of the late-summer sun almost too bright to bear.
“Apparently the tabloids are the only thing that gets your attention. And you have some nerve talking about sinking to new depths, having recently transitioned from corporate shill to kidnapper.”
He ignored that, along with the uncomfortable twinge inside of him that suggested a few headlines wasn’t quite the same thing as flying off with a child, and no matter that he was supposedly the child’s father. “Lying to me in private wasn’t enough for you, so you took your lurid fantasies to the gutter press? I’d almost admire the escalation if it weren’t so calculated.”
“Says the man who seduced me for the sole purpose of abducting my child.” She sniffed, still with her gaze fixed on the city outside the windows, her voice irritatingly smooth and cool, like everything else about her. “You could teach the art of calculation to one of your computers, couldn’t you?”
“Is this a competition?” His voice was not nearly as smooth as it should have been. Dario found that far more irritating than was at all wise.
“You’ve been calling me a liar for years when I told you the truth. I thought I’d live down to your expectations.” She turned then, and she looked even more perfect and untouchable than she usually did, and God help him, but all he could think about was that wide bed in Hawaii and the way she’d sobbed out her pleasure in his arms. Over and over again. “Where is my son?”
“My son. Unless you’re ready to confess, at long last, your tryst with my brother? The anxious world you invited into our personal business awaits the truth.”
Her gaze cooled even further, but she didn’t otherwise react. Not in any way Dario could read, and he hated that. That she could still be a mystery to him and worse—that after all this time and all she’d done he could still want to solve it. What did that say about him?
But he was terribly afraid he knew the answer to that.
“You’re a sperm donor to Damian, nothing more,” she said quietly. Too quietly. “Rather than sort things out the proper way, you opted to become a terrifying stranger who plucked an innocent child off a playground as part of some twisted plot to make himself feel better about an imagined slight. I think your actions speak for themselves, but let’s not kid ourselves. I think we both already knew you’re not a very good man.”
Dario would never know how he managed to keep his temper leashed at that. How he kept his cool on the outside while inside he burned in a white-hot fury that he told himself was entirely rage—because it had to be. Because he refused to allow it be any of those darker things he hated that he could still feel for this woman.
He viewed it as a significant victory that his voice remained relatively calm when he replied to her.
“While you are, at best, a faithless cheater who will say and do anything to avoid responsibility for her own actions. Whether that’s taking a lover while married or neglecting to inform a man that he has a son in the first place. Which glass house do you think will shatter first, Anais? Yours or mine?”
