Читать книгу Billionaires: The Rebel - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 11

CHAPTER TWO

“HAVE YOU LAPSED into a coma?” Dario asked, the silk and menace in his voice hitting her like a lash and cutting deep. “Or is this remorse at last?”

And Anais hadn’t entirely realized how much hope she’d allowed herself to feel in the weeks leading up to this meeting with him, after all these years of silence, until now. When he took it all away again.

She should have known better.

“Remorse?” she echoed. She moved farther out onto the lanai, dropping the leather folder on the table between them and ordering her legs to stay steady beneath her when they felt like one of the palm trees being buffeted this way and that by the relentless trade winds. “For what, exactly? Your extended temper tantrum six years ago? I have a lot of feelings about that actually, but remorse isn’t one of them.”

Dario’s mouth moved into a hard, cynical sort of smile that made her stomach clutch. She’d had no idea he could look like that. So etched through with bitterness. She told herself he deserved it, but still. It made her ache.

“It’s good to know you’re as shameless as ever,” he said. “But why change? It got you what you wanted.”

“Yes. How silly of me. You storming off into the ether was exactly what I wanted. It’s like you read my mind.”

“My mistake, of course. Maybe you were angling for a threesome? You must have read too many tabloids. You should have asked, Anais. I would have told you that I don’t like sharing anything with anyone, least of all my twin brother.”

“I see you’re still hell-bent on being as insulting and disgusting as you were back then. What a happy reunion this is. I’m beginning to understand why it took six years.”

After the way he’d treated her, after the way he’d acted as if she’d never existed in the first place—refusing all contact with her and barring her from entering his office or apartment building as if she was some kind of deranged stalker—she couldn’t believe that, deep down, she still expected Dario to be a better man. Even now, some part of her was waiting for him to crack. To see reason. To stop this madness at last.

Anais told herself it was because of Damian. She wanted her son’s father to be a good man at heart, even if that took some excavating, like any mother would. She wanted his father to be the man she’d once believed he was, when she’d been foolish enough to fall in love with him. Because that would be a good thing for her child, not for herself.

Or not entirely for yourself, whispered that voice inside of her that knew exactly how selfish she was.

But life wasn’t about what she wanted. She’d learned that as a child in Paris, the pawn of two bitter parents who had never wanted her and had only wanted each other for that one night that had created her and thrown them together, like it or not. Life was about what she had. Like her cruel, flamboyantly unfaithful French father and the embittered Japanese mother whose name she’d taken when she’d turned eighteen because she’d been the lesser of two evils, those two things had never matched. It was high time she stopped imagining they ever would.

She tapped her fingers on the leather folder. “These are the contracts. Please sign them. Once you do, the earrings are yours, as promised.”

“Are we back to doing business, Anais?” he asked softly. She didn’t mistake that tone of his. She could hear the steel beneath it. “I might get whiplash.”

She allowed herself a careless shrug and wished she actually felt even slightly at her ease. “Business appears to be the only thing you know how to do.”

“Unlike all the things you know how to do, I imagine. Or should I ask my brother about that? He was always the more adventurous one.”

Anais would never know how she managed to keep from screaming out loud at that—at the unfairness and the cruelty of it, from a man whom she’d once believed would never, ever, say the kinds of things to her that her parents had hurled at each other all her life. She felt a vicious red haze slam down over her, holding her tight, like a terrible fist. But somehow, she beat it back. She thought of Damian, her beautiful little boy, and stayed on her feet. She managed, somehow, to keep herself from screaming like some kind of banshee at this man she couldn’t believe she’d married.

Not that he didn’t deserve a little bit of banshee, the way he’d acted back then and was still acting now. Still, that didn’t mean she had to give him the satisfaction of acting insane.

She met his condemning gaze with her own.

“I have nothing to be ashamed about,” she told him. Icily. Distinctly. “I did not sleep with your brother. I don’t care if Dante has spent the past six years telling you otherwise. I didn’t. He’s a liar.”

“I wouldn’t know what he is,” Dario said with cool nonchalance. “I haven’t spoken to him since I found him with you in my bedroom. Don’t tell me you two lovebirds didn’t make it. How heartbreaking for you both.”

That shocked Anais in a way she’d have thought was impossible. The Di Sione twins she’d known had been inseparable. Until you, she reminded herself. Dante hated you on sight. She tried to blink it away.

“The fact you thought anything happened between us—and still think it, all these years later, to such an extent that you feel justified in hurling insults at me—says more about what a vile, dark little man you are than it could ever say about me.”

Dario seemed almost amused by that. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be comfortable there in your fantasy world. But the truth is the truth, no matter how many lies you pile on top of it. So many it looks like you’ve convinced yourself. Congratulations on that, but you haven’t convinced me.”

If he’d been thrown by her appearance here, he was over it now, clearly. This was the Dario she remembered. The stranger who had walked into their home that awful day and had inhabited the body of the husband she’d adored a whole lot more than she should have. This cruel, mocking man who looked at her and saw nothing but the worthless creature her parents had always told her she was. As if that twisted truth had merely been lurking there inside of her, waiting to come out, and after their wild year together, he’d finally seen what they’d always seen when they’d looked at her.

Dario had done a great many unforgivable things, many far worse than how he’d looked at her that day, but that had been the first. The shot over the bow that had changed everything. Anais found she still wasn’t over it.

At all.

His lips thinned as he looked at her and he reached for the leather folder, pulling out the stack of documents. Then he acted as if she was another piece of furniture. He ignored her. He pulled out a chair and sat down, then proceeded to read through the dense, legal pages as if he was looking for further evidence of her trickery.

Anais thought sitting down with him at the table as if this was a normal, civilized meeting might actually break something inside of her, so she stood where she was instead. Calmly. Easily. On the outside, anyway. Letting the breeze toy with the ends of her hair as she stared out at the water and pretended she was somewhere else. Or that he was somebody else. Or that his being here didn’t present her with a huge ethical dilemma.

She didn’t want to tell him.

He didn’t deserve to know.

What if he turned this cruelty, this viciousness, on his own son?

But even as she thought it, she knew she was trying to rationalize her dilemma away instead of addressing it head-on, the way she should. Because he kept hurting her feelings all these years later, not because she truly believed Dario would ever do anything to hurt a child.

Not telling him now would change everything. She recognized that. Up until today, the fact that Damian didn’t know his father had been entirely Dario’s own fault. He’d made sure Anais couldn’t contact him, and she hadn’t seen how taking out an advertisement in the papers—as her aunt had suggested one night after a few too many of Anais’s tears and rants to the heedless walls—could help her child. By feeding Damian to the hungry tabloids? By making his life a circus? No, thank you. And she’d have eaten a burning hot coal before she’d have called Dante for any help, that manipulative bastard.

Dario had maintained his silence ever since that day back in New York. That wasn’t her fault.

But letting him leave here today no wiser? That would be.

She felt her hands bunch into fists and couldn’t quite make herself smooth them out again, even though she knew he’d see it. He could think what he liked, she told herself stoutly. He would, anyway.

“I have something to tell you,” she said woodenly, forcing the words out past lips that felt like ice and keeping her eyes trained on the sea. The beautiful Hawaiian sea that didn’t care about her troubles. The sea that washed them all away, or seemed to, if she stared at it long enough. The sea that had saved her once and could again, if she let it. Even from this.

Even from him. Again.

“I’m not interested.”

“I don’t really care if you’re interested or not. This might come as a surprise to you, but there are some things in this world that are more important than your feelings of persecution.”

He pushed back in his chair and looked up at her, and because he was Dario, he appeared in no way diminished by the fact that he had to look up to meet her gaze. Or by the fact she was standing over him, wearing three-inch wedges that made her nearly six feet tall. If anything, he appeared even more powerful than he had before.

She’d forgotten that. How easily he dominated whole rooms, whole cities, whole swathes of people, without even trying. How that beat in her like her own traitorous heart.

“I don’t feel persecuted, Anais. I feel lucky.” Dario even smiled, in that same sharp and bitter way that she worried might actually leave scars on both of them. Perhaps it already had. “It wakes me up at night, wondering what my life would be like if I hadn’t caught the two of you when I did. How many more ways would you have tricked me while I was so wrapped up in my work? How much more of a fool would you have made of me right under my nose? What if I’d never caught on?” He shook his head and blew out a breath. “I should thank you for being dumb enough to take my own brother into our bed. It saved me a world of hurt.”

It shouldn’t still cause her pain. None of what he said was a surprise to her. She knew what he thought. What Dante had stood by and let him think. Dario hadn’t bothered to ask her, his wife, to confirm or deny his suspicions. He’d walked into the house, seen Dante buttoning up a shirt in their bedroom and leaped to the worst possible conclusion. He’d believed the worst, instantly, and that was that.

And still, she felt that heaviness deep inside of her, a little too much like shame. As if she’d actually done something to make him think so little of her. As if she could have done something to prevent it. As if, despite everything, the things he’d done to her and the son he didn’t know he had was somehow all her fault.

She didn’t think she’d forgive him for that, either.

“I keep waiting for you to come to your senses, but you’re not going to, are you?” she asked softly. Rhetorically, she was aware. “This is who you are. The Dario Di Sione I met and married was the make-believe version.”

She’d believed in that made-up version, that was the trouble. Why did some part of her still wish that was the real Dario? She should know better by now, surely.

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.” He signed the last page of each set of documents and then shoved the stack of them toward her. “Can I have the earrings now? Or are there more hoops to jump through?”

“No hoops.” She did her part with the documents, slipping them back into the leather folder when she was finished. Then she reached into one of the deep pockets of her dress and pulled out the small jeweler’s box. She cracked it open and set it down on the table between them, watching the way the light danced and gleamed on the precious stones, perfect white diamonds and gorgeous emeralds. “These are the earrings. Note the size of the emeralds and the delicate craftsmanship of the diamonds. They’re extraordinary and unusual, and Mr. Fuginawa would not have let them go to anyone save your grandfather. He conveys his deepest respects, of course.”

“They’re earrings,” Dario said bluntly. He snapped the box shut as he surged to his feet, then shoved it in his front pocket. “Whatever tiny bit of sentimentality I had was beaten out of me six years ago, Anais. Old earrings are just old earrings. They don’t matter to anyone in the long run. My grandfather is a foolish old man who should be using his money to make his last days easier, not for this kind of nonsense.”

Anais straightened her shoulders and told herself to spit it out. To get it over with. To do what was right because it was right.

Because none of this was about her. It was about Damian.

“I’m delighted to hear you’re so unsentimental,” she said, and her only possible defense was to keep her voice as ice cold as she could. To act like she was a glacier, the way she had as a girl, because feigned, icy indifference was the only way she could get her parents to leave her out of their daily target practice. So that was exactly what she did now. It was almost alarming, how easy it was to slip back into old patterns. “Maybe this conversation doesn’t have to be as unpleasant as I feared it would be.”

He didn’t actually sneer. Not quite. “This conversation is already unpleasant.”

“Then what I’m about to tell you is unlikely to improve it.”

Anais held that harsh blue gaze of his. She reminded herself this was the right thing to do, no matter how it felt.

Be cold straight through, she told herself. Feel nothing but ice until you become it.

She didn’t look away. “You have a son.”

* * *

“I beg your pardon?”

Dario felt bolted to the stones beneath his feet. Pierced straight through. His heart stopped beating, then kicked at him hard, while his entire gut seemed to drop down to the ground and stay there.

And Anais only stood before him, as calm and unbothered and untouched as ever, damn her.

“You have a son.” She didn’t seem surprised she had to repeat that. “We do, I suppose. Biologically speaking. His name is Damian.”

He didn’t think he could breathe. “Tell me this is one of your jokes.”

“Because I’m renowned for my stand-up routine?” she asked tartly, and he recognized that sharp tone. He remembered it. On some level, it was much better than unbothered—but he couldn’t process that at the moment. “No. I’m not joking about my child.”

He continued to stare at her, like an idiot, while his head spun. As if she’d anticipated that reaction—and of course she had, he told himself bitterly, because she’d known he was coming today, hadn’t she?—she reached into the other pocket of that long, flowing dress and pulled out something. It took him a moment to understand it was a slightly bent photograph, and then she was sliding it onto the table before him.

Dario didn’t want to look. Looking would be admitting...something. But he couldn’t help himself.

A small boy with black hair and his mother’s eyes laughed in the sunlight. He was kneeling on a beach, his little body sturdy and perfectly formed. Ten fingers covered in sand, stretched toward the camera. And aside from those eyes Dario knew all too well came straight from Anais, every other part of his face could have been lifted from the pictures Dario had seen of himself and Dante at the same age.

There had been exactly one other time in his life when he’d wanted to deny the truth in front of him this much. When he’d felt precisely this sleepless and out of his depth and furiously incapable of processing what was happening. And this, six years later, was worse. Much worse. The world went white around the edges. Or maybe he did.

“How?” he heard himself grit out, not looking at her. He didn’t touch that photograph and he didn’t trust himself to look at her. Every muscle in his body was so tense he thought he might rupture something where he stood. There was a storm building inside of him and he thought it might simply blow him to pieces right here—a thousand jagged, broken shards of him, until neither one of them was left standing.

It took him a minute to recognize that storm for what it was.

Fury.

Pure and undiluted and directed straight at this woman and her betrayal of him.

Again.

“I’m sure that if you think about it, you can figure out how,” Anais was saying. He wouldn’t call that tone of hers amused, exactly. It was far too crisp and pointed, and she still managed to sound so distant besides. That made it all worse. “I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t a stork.”

He was still reeling. Dario pushed back in the chair and onto his feet, leaving the photo where it sat as if it was poisonous. He raked his hair back with both hands, and then he got a hold of himself.

It was painful.

“And how,” he asked, his voice rough and his gaze probably a lot worse than that as he finally looked at her again, “do I know this is my child and not Dante’s? We’re identical. I can’t even take a DNA test to find out the truth.”

She stiffened as if he’d struck her. Then her dark eyes blazed—and damn him, he preferred that over the chilliness.

“Then I suppose it will have to remain a mystery,” she threw at him. “What a shame. Damian and I will have to continue doing just fine without you, you incredible jackass.”

He didn’t process what was happening until she was almost through the great, open doorway that was the length of the pulled-back wall. That she had thrown that bomb at him and was now walking away as if it didn’t matter.

“Where the hell are you going?” he demanded. “After dropping that kind of thing on me?”

Anais stopped walking, and the stiffness of her back told him that was a battle. She turned slowly. Very slowly. He thought she looked pale, and her lips were thin, and he didn’t understand why he even noticed that. Why he cared at all.

You do not care about her, he snapped at himself. You care about this lie she’s telling.

“I’m going to carry on with my life,” she told him when she faced him fully, in that overly precise way of hers that indicated the raging temper inside of her. He remembered that, too. He could even see the faint hint of it in her eyes. “What did you expect me to do? Stand here and cry? Beg you to believe me? I’ve already been down that road. I’m well aware it’s a dead end.”

“Then why bother with this conversation at all?” he gritted out. “Unless you just wanted to throw a few grenades around. For fun.”

That smile of hers was much too sharp. One more blade stuck deep in his gut, a match for all the rest.

“The only difference this conversation makes to me is that I no longer feel any sense of responsibility about the fact you’re too much of a sulking child to have picked up the phone and found this out years ago.” She leaned forward slightly, as if some unseen hand was keeping her from hurling herself at him, holding her back from attacking him with those fists he could see bunched up at her sides. “Thank you, Dario. Truly. I needed the reminder that you’re absolutely useless. And, worse than that, cruel.”

She turned to walk away again, and he should have let her. He should have cheered her on. He couldn’t have a child. He couldn’t have a child. Not him. He’d never wanted one, not after his own disastrous childhood, and he certainly didn’t want to test that theory with the woman who had betrayed him so horribly with his own brother.

This can’t be happening.

Maybe that was why he found himself across the patio without knowing he meant to move, wrapping his hand around her smooth upper arm to pull her back around to face him.

“Don’t walk away from me.”

And it was a mistake to have touched her. It was a terrible mistake, because touching her was what had caused all of this in the first place. His uncharacteristic loss of control when he’d first met her. His astonishing decision to marry her—and who cared if he’d lied to himself and told himself it was to secure her a visa to stay in New York? That wild, nearly ungovernable fury when he’d discovered her deceit. He knew better. It had all been about this.

This touch. Her skin. The wildfire he was horrified to realize still raged between them that easily, that unmistakably, even now.

“Take your hand off my arm,” she snapped at him, her voice not quite as cool as it had been, and he was the little man she’d called him, wasn’t he? Because he derived far more satisfaction from that than he should. “Now.”

Dario hated the fact it was hard to let go of her. That he didn’t want to do it. But he forced himself to release her and he took a perverse pleasure in the way she rubbed the place he’d touched her with her other hand, as if she could feel the same lick of fire that leaped in him, too.

Chemistry had never been their problem. Never that. It was only honesty and fidelity that had tripped them up, or her stunning lack of both, and he needed to remember that. He needed to remember that no matter what his body agitated for, wild and loud in his blood just now, he knew who she really was.

“You kept my child from me for all these years. Six years. Is that really what you’re telling me?”

“Please spare me the sob story you’re making up in your head,” Anais bit out, jutting her chin out as he stood over her, and whatever shoes she was wearing put her almost exactly level with him. That mouth of hers, right there, and what the hell was the matter with him that he could think about something like that now?

Especially when she was talking to him as if he was the person at fault, when they both knew better.

“You refused to take my calls. You moved all of your things out of our home while I was at work. You barred me from your new apartment building and you instructed the security people in your office to call the police if I tried to get in—which I know, because they did.”

He shouldn’t have been fascinated by the spots of color that bloomed on her gorgeously high cheekbones, shouting out her temper in unmistakable red. It was as if her betrayal and the six years between them had never happened. The fact his body didn’t care about any of that made that fury in him burn brighter. Colder. As if he was complicit in his own betrayal here.

Against his will, he remembered the confusion of those first days after he’d discovered Anais and Dante together. How the stress from the work decisions he’d had to make had fused with the terrible blow he’d suffered and had made him waver. He’d considered going back on his decision. He’d considered a thousand things in the even more sleepless nights that followed, just him and his bitterness and the messages he deleted unread and unheard from both his twin and his wife. There’d been a certain comfort in knowing that nothing could ever hurt him as much as they had then. He’d built his new life out of that certainty.

It had never occurred to him that he could have been wrong about that.

“My emails bounced back and you disconnected your cell phone number,” Anais was saying. “I watched you rip up a letter I left on your car, unread, with my own eyes.” She lifted her hands and then dropped them again as if what she really wanted was to use him as a punching bag. He almost wished she would. “So what exactly was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to tell you? I tried. But you were too busy licking your wounds and hiding yourself away behind all the wealth and privilege you could stack around you like stone walls. That’s not my fault.”

Dario concentrated on his temper as if it would save him. He had the sinking feeling it was the only thing here that could.

“You’re talking about a child,” he said very distinctly. “If you’d really wanted to tell me, you’d have found a way. This is just another game. You never run out of them, do you?”

“I told you today, the very first time I’ve seen you since you walked out on me,” she said icily, but there was nothing cold in that furious gaze of hers. “There’s no game.” She shook her head when he started to speak. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to this. Your feelings about the child you could have known all his life if you hadn’t deliberately hidden yourself away aren’t my problem. I didn’t tell you because I want something from you. I told you because it was the right thing to do.”

“Anais...”

“And now I’m leaving,” she interrupted him, her dark eyes glittering with emotions he couldn’t name. He shouldn’t want to name them. He shouldn’t believe they existed at all. “I don’t really care what you do with this information. Go lick your self-inflicted wounds some more. Pretend you still don’t know. Whatever lets you feed that persecution complex of yours, I’m sure you’ll do it.”

He couldn’t bear it. There was that fury in him and something much darker and deeper and worse. Much, much worse. Raw and aching and terrible. She eyed him as if she was looking for something on his face, but then her gaze shuttered and she started to turn away again—and he really couldn’t bear that.

So he did the only thing he could think of to do.

Maybe he wasn’t thinking at all.

He reached out, slid his hand over her delicate neck to cup her nape and pull her close and then he took her mouth with his.

It was the same madness he remembered. That same wild burn that sizzled through him, lighting him up and making him crazy, eating him alive. She still tasted sweet and perfect, the way she always had, as if no time at all had passed.

Dario moved closer, slid his hands onto the thick fall of her hair, then tugged her mouth into a better angle beneath his and kissed her deeper, harder.

And she kissed him back, the way he remembered she always, always had.

She met him, a tangle of tongues and need while the fire between them raged, and their whole history seemed to dance between them in the flames. It was as raw as it was hot, as greedy as it was painful, and Dario knew this was the worst idea he’d had in a long, long time.

But still he kissed her, over and over, as if he could glut himself on her. As if he could block out not only what she’d told him and all the accusations she’d thrown at him, but the six years since he’d touched anyone like this or let himself be touched in turn. He hadn’t wanted anyone near him. He hadn’t wanted anything that resembled intimacy, with anyone.

And yet here, now, with that damned soft breeze still dancing all over him, and Anais’s perfect mouth hot and demanding beneath his, he couldn’t seem to remember why that was.

She wrenched herself away. He heard the small sound of distress she made and he hated that it lodged itself in his chest, like one more bullet in this strange afternoon bristling with them. She stumbled back a step until her back hit the wall, and she stared at him.

She looked as shaken as he was. He hated that, too—the idea that she could actually be affected, that she might not be acting...

Of course she’s acting. Everything about her is an act.

He hated everything about this. This wild, untamed place. That insidious breeze that was messing with his head and making him feel restless and edgy. Anais and her lies and her deception, six years ago and today, and the fact she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever beheld only made it worse. He hated that he could taste her now. That he could feel her again, as if her perfect lips were some kind of brand and she’d marked him. Changed him.

And he hated that she’d made him feel again, when he’d tamped that down and shut it off in those tortured days following the end of their marriage. He hated that most of all.

“While we’re on the topic,” he said, not even sounding like himself, because that was what she did to him, still, “I want a divorce.”

Dario wanted nothing more than to make her feel as ripped wide open as he did, to take all the hurt and the fury and that spinning in his head, that unacceptable need that still surged in him, and make her feel it, too.

So he grinned while he said it, to make sure she got his point. To make sure it was painful. And because it was true and there should be a record of it. “On the grounds of your infidelity, of course. With my brother as the named third party.”