Читать книгу Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4 - Julia James - Страница 20

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT WAS LATE that night when Dario gave up on trying to sleep in the bed he now found far too empty, when he’d never shared it with another soul. He found himself out on the great balcony that surrounded the master suite and the rest of the top floor of the penthouse. The September night was a warm caress against his bare skin, just the faintest hint of the coming fall in it, and he was glad he hadn’t bothered to pull on anything more than a pair of loose black trousers.

Manhattan stretched out in the dark before him, as exultant and bright as it always was, and it echoed deep within him. It played through him like a long, low note of music, altering everything it touched. Knocking apart those careful boxes of his and making him wonder how he’d ever lived in them. How he’d ever managed to survive like that, bound and minimized. For a long while he stood there, simply stood there in the night with the city beneath him, and did nothing at all but breathe.

He sensed her approach in the moment before she appeared there at the rail beside him, her long black hair tumbling over her shoulders as straight and glossy as ever and her lovely arms bare. She wore a tank top and a pair of men’s boxers, the very same uniform she’d worn to sleep in for as long as he’d known her. Dario couldn’t have said why the sight of it tonight swelled inside him like a song.

He only knew he wanted to sing it so loud he woke the neighborhood. The whole city and all the boroughs. The world.

He settled for turning toward her instead, reaching out to trace a faint pattern down one slim, strong arm and taking note of the goose bumps that shivered alive beneath his touch.

“Life is so short,” he said, and he felt her tremble slightly at that beneath his fingers. “Too short, Anais.”

She glanced at him, then away, her gaze on the dark heart of Central Park below them. “I know. I can’t imagine the world without him.”

Dario hadn’t been thinking of his grandfather, or not directly.

“He’s wily,” he said. Because Giovanni always had been. Because he couldn’t conceive of anything getting the better of the old man, even leukemia. “He’s beaten a thousand enemies in his day, and is never quite as fragile as he looks. I wouldn’t count him out yet.”

She smiled. And she didn’t say what she must have been thinking then—what he knew he ought to be thinking himself. What he’d thought explicitly, in fact, even as he’d arrived in Hawaii and had found himself marooned in all that dangerously seductive tropical heat. That Giovanni was ninety-eight years old. That there was a natural order to things. That living too long must sometimes seem as much a curse as a blessing to a man who had once been so active and was now confined to a few rooms in a house.

She only smiled, this beautiful woman who was still, astonishingly, his wife.

His wife. That was the part that mattered. That was the only part that mattered.

“Anais,” he began, his voice serious, because this was long overdue.

But she surprised him. She turned toward him and she shook her head, and when he didn’t continue speaking she stepped closer and slid her hands up over the planes of his bare chest. Heat against heat.

And everything inside him burst into flame.

“I don’t want to talk,” she said, and there was something about her voice. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him, with that gleam of something he couldn’t quite read in her eyes. “I want to say a thousand things to you, Dario, but I don’t want to talk.”

And she was so close, after everything that had happened. And he wasn’t playing any games this time, the way he’d tried so hard to pretend when he was on Maui. Her hands were on his bare skin and she gleamed pale and smooth in the light from the city around them, and he was only a man.

“I think we can figure out a better way to communicate,” she whispered.

And Dario didn’t have it in him to refuse her.

He didn’t have it in him to try.

He swept her closer and she was against him then, all those sweet, lean curves pressed tight to him as he bent down and took her mouth the way he’d wanted to for days and days. A lifetime or two, by his reckoning. Every time she laughed, or was still. Every time she frowned at him, or simply breathed the same air.

He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted all of her.

The kiss was a lick of pure fire, of blinding need. And it wasn’t nearly enough.

He let the wild thing inside him loose, claiming her and marking her, tasting her deep. And as he kissed her he backed her across the smooth stone deck toward the glass doors that led inside his suite, pulling his mouth from hers only to tug the tank top up and over her head.

Her laugh as she lifted her arms to help him was better than the city’s bright gleam, and it moved inside him like the same restless song.

By the time they made it to the side of the wide bed he’d never imagined he’d share with anyone, they were both breathing much too heavily, their clothes strewn behind them in a trail.

“You’re perfect,” he told her, his voice a guttural rasp against the dark. “You’re so damned perfect.”

“That sounds like talking,” she teased him, nipping at his chin.

And he worshipped her, this woman he’d never recovered from and never gotten past. This woman he’d never divorced, across all these years.

Some part of him must have known it was never over between them. It was never finished, no matter how it seemed. The hunger went on and on and on.

He knelt before her by the side of his bed and he relearned every inch of her gorgeous body, the way he had the night she’d trusted him with her innocence. From her marvelous collarbone to the exquisite arch of her narrow feet, he memorized her. He studied her and he adored her.

With his hands and his mouth and his gaze, he made her his and he made her come. Once. Again.

And the third time he threw her over that edge, this time with two fingers deep in her soft heat and his mouth a small torment against one perfect breast, she cried out so hard and so long he thought she might shatter his windows.

He almost wished she had.

“Enough,” she managed to say, spread out across his bed like a feast. “You’ll kill me.”

“You say that as if you’d mind.”

Her mouth curved dangerously and she rolled over, coming up on her knees beside him. “My turn,” she murmured.

And she took her time.

She tortured him, with an electric intensity that might have concerned him, had she not been making him feel quite so good. She marked him with her teeth and she indulged herself in him with her mouth, her tongue, the sensual slide of her palms against his skin. She lavished her attention on every part of him, each ridge of his abdomen, the flat disc of each nipple, the line of his neck and all along his jaw, before heading back down the length of his body.

She smiled up at him as she knelt between his legs, something particularly raw in her dark eyes. But before he could question her, she leaned forward and took him deep in her mouth.

He thought he might die. He swore he had. He forgot everything in the world but this. Her. Anais.

Her mouth was hot and wet, a benediction and a prayer, and he lost himself in the slide and the suck, the small humming noises she made, the way she rocked herself as she moved over him as if she was as carried away by the sensation as he was.

It was heaven. It was too good. It was so good he thought he might lose his head completely.

He pulled her off him, his jaw clenched tight as he fought to bring himself back under control. He dealt with the condom swiftly and then he was rolling them both over and bringing her beneath him to thrust himself home at last.

She cried out at his slick possession, and then, at last, he began to move.

And there was no skill in this tonight, no mastery. It was raw and intense, wild and hot. A stripped-down taking. A claiming, elemental and fierce. She wrapped herself around him and dug her nails into his skin, and he pounded into her with all the fury of this thing between them in each and every deep, perfect stroke. He lost himself in the fit of her, so gloriously right beneath him and around him, as if they’d always been meant for this.

And for a while, there was nothing but this.

But then Dario could take no more. He reached down between their bodies and pressed against the center of her need, making her throw back her head and cry out his name. Then she bucked against him, writhing out her pleasure, and he hurled her straight over the side of the world.

And he followed right behind her, her name on his lips all the while, as if those long six years had never happened.

* * *

Dario knew Anais wasn’t in the bed when he woke up the next morning.

He knew it in the same instant he opened his eyes and blinked in the morning sunlight, long before he turned his head to see the wide mattress as empty as it always was. As if her presence here last night, her body tucked against his as they’d finally drifted off to sleep together, had been nothing but a dream.

If it was a dream, he’d have stayed in it awhile longer. He’d have made it last, made it count.

But he knew he hadn’t dreamed a single second of it.

He swung out of the bed, pulling on the nearest pair of trousers he could find and leaving them low on his hips. He pushed his way out of the master suite to find the penthouse oddly, strangely, quiet all around him. The door to Anais’s bedroom was wide open, showing him it was empty, so he jogged down the wide steel stairs that brought him to the second level. It took him a moment to realize that he couldn’t hear Damian. Normally there’d be the usual clamor and howl of a young boy in the house, but not today. That was why it was so quiet.

The nanny must have taken him out, he thought absently, poking his head into one of the small reception rooms on the second level, the one Anais had claimed as her office while she’d been here. It, too, was empty. Not even her laptop open on the small, elegant desk in the corner.

Dario made his way down to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, then took it into his home office. The penthouse was still oppressively silent all around him, and there was a certain agitated sort of sensation brewing beneath his ribs. He couldn’t quite identify it. He rounded his desk and sat down, frowning at the large brown file folder that hadn’t been there last night, he was certain.

He picked it up and glanced inside...

And then everything seemed to turn to sheets of ice. Freeze solid, then shatter.

He understood in an instant that what had been bothering him wasn’t the absence of Anais’s laptop in that second-level room, but of everything else. The stacks of documents, the soft-sided briefcase she’d kept at her feet, the tangle of power cords. Or the suitcase that had sat at the foot of her bed in that bedroom across from his.

He should have realized at a glance that it wasn’t her laptop that was gone. She was.

Because he recognized the document in the file folder. It was the stack of divorce papers he’d left for her in his hotel room on Maui.

A dark, terrible thing was unfurling in him, deep and wide and thick, but he made himself flip through the papers to see if she’d signed it. She had. Of course she had. Her signature was just as he recalled it, somehow perfectly French and perfectly her at once, and he thought a bullet to the chest might have been easier. Better, maybe.

He heard a sound at the door and he looked up, somehow unsurprised to see her standing there, dressed head to toe in what he knew, now, were her lawyer clothes. Cool and gorgeous and sleek.

Her armor.

He didn’t beat around the bush. “Why?”

Something moved over her face, too quick for him to categorize it.

“You don’t trust me,” she said simply. “You’ll never trust me.”

“This can’t possibly—”

“Dario.”

He stopped, though he thought it might have broken something inside him. He didn’t know how there could be anything left to break.

“I can’t live like that,” Anais told him, that same raw thing he’d seen in her gaze last night there again, and in her voice besides. “I grew up in a house of hatred and contempt. Terrible accusations were thrown about like they were nothing. I won’t raise my son that way, surrounded by suspicion and fury at every turn.”

Dario was reeling. Unmoored and untethered, and he remembered this feeling all too well from six years ago. The sick thud in his stomach. The noise in his head.

The great black pit of loss that yawned open beneath him and wanted to swallow him whole.

Last time, he’d let it. He’d jumped right in. He’d stayed there for years and called it realism. He couldn’t bear the thought of sinking into it again. He couldn’t imagine there was any way out a second time.

“And last night? What the hell was that?”

“I wanted to say goodbye,” she said, and her cool tone slipped a bit. He heard the rawness. The pain. And it didn’t make him feel any kind of triumph. It was no victory. It only made him hurt. “I didn’t want to walk out on you.”

The way he had, without a second thought or a backward glance. She didn’t say that. She didn’t have to say it.

Dario rose then. He didn’t know what he meant to do. If anything.

“Don’t do this.” He wanted to sound fierce, sure. Instead, he sounded broken. Maybe, this time, he really was. Or maybe that was the point she was making—that he had been all along. “Don’t. What do I have to do to keep you here? Name it.”

But Anais’s expression didn’t change. If anything, she looked sadder and more resolute at the same time. And he had the strangest sense of foreboding as she opened her mouth.

“Talk to your brother,” she said softly. “That’s what you have to do for me to stay.”

“No.” He gritted the word out, every part of him tense and furious and still reeling closer and closer to that great black pit. “Why would you ask such a thing? Did my grandfather put you up to this?”

And he saw the way her face crumpled, just slightly, before she blinked it away. He saw the way she clenched her hands into fists at her sides. He saw that terrible sadness in her eyes.

“The fact that you don’t know is why I’m leaving.” She waved a hand, taking in the room, the city, maybe. Him. “This only works if we pretend the past never happened. If you make an effort to act as if it never happened.”

He didn’t understand this at all. “I’d think that’s a good thing, considering.”

“Dare.” That nickname only she had ever used, but in that hard, hurt voice, and it was worse than a kick to the gut. “I won’t live my life as a hostage to a history that you’ve been getting wrong for six years. How can we ever move forward if you can’t look at the past and see the truth?”

“This has nothing to do with that.”

“There is no this without that,” she corrected him. “Because that never happened. I don’t need your forgiveness and I refuse to spend my life trying to convince you to trust me when I never broke your trust in the first place. You know what my parents were like. The screaming fights, the ugly names, the endless horror of it. I won’t raise Damian like that. I don’t want him to think that kind of war is love.”

“It’s not like that. We’re not like that.”

“You can’t even imagine calling your brother. Your twin. You can’t imagine it.”

“Dante has nothing to do with us!” he thundered at her.

“I know,” she said sadly. “And he never did. But I don’t think I’m the one you need to hear that from. And I can’t waste my life hoping you see the light and repair what you broke so we can all move forward. I won’t.”

She was really going to do this. She was really going to leave him, after everything. After they’d made it through what should have been the darkest place. He could see it on her face, in the gleam of moisture in her eyes.

He could feel it in that terrible constriction in his chest.

“Anais...”

“I’m taking Damian back to Maui,” she told him, straightening in the doorway, her tone measured. As if she’d been planning out what she would say and was delivering the news to him as calmly as she could. “I’m not taking him away from you and I won’t keep him from you. You can see him whenever you like. I’m happy to talk about a formal custody arrangement as we work through the divorce, but informally, I’m perfectly fine with whatever works for you.”

“Those are the same papers as before,” he said, unable to process this. Unable to understand. “The ones that claim you were unfaithful and name Dante as your lover.”

“If that’s what you need me to say in open court, then I’ll say it,” she told him.

And Dario understood that he should have viewed that quiet statement as his most decisive victory yet. But all he could seem to feel was a crushing sense of defeat. Of incalculable loss. Of nothing but grief, rolling on in all directions, forever.

She merely shrugged, and somehow that made it worse. “This needs to end, for all our sakes. I don’t care if it takes a lie to do that, as long as it’s over.”

“Anais. Damn it. This is...”

“Dario.” Her voice was hard then. Cold. Very serious. She waited until he met her gaze, and he knew then. He was already in that dark pit. He’d never climbed out. He never would. “You have to let me go.”