Читать книгу Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4 - Julia James - Страница 21

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT TOOK DARIO less than a day to determine that he was not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. He refused to throw himself into that darkness and hope his work might save him. Not this time.

By the end of the day she left him, taking Damian with her, Dario was fully resolved. He stood on the roof deck without her, staring off into the hectic muddle of the city he hardly saw without her in it, and knew exactly what he wanted.

And Anais had named the single obstacle standing in his way.

Of course, he told himself then, he needed to call his damned brother.

But it took him a little bit longer to actually do it. He’d been so furious at his twin for so long. It was hard for him to let go of that.

Maybe too hard, he thought a few hours later as he waited on the same roof. Maybe some breaches were supposed to be there.

He didn’t have to turn around to know that Dante had arrived. That same intuition that had seemed like magic to those around the two of them, dormant for six long years, prickled alive instantly. He knew the very moment Dante stepped out onto the roof.

He didn’t simply know it. He felt it.

He took his time turning, and his brother was there when he did. It had been six years, and yet it felt...right.

“This is anticlimactic,” he said, eyeing the man standing across from him. It was still like looking into a mirror. It was still as if Dante was an extension of himself. This is right, he thought again. “I thought you’d at least have the good grace to be horrifically scarred or stunted in some way.”

“I could fling myself off the balcony in a show of dramatic atonement,” Dante replied in his usual easy manner, though Dario could see the wariness in his eyes. “Of course, that would likely kill me instantly. Much less suffering for me that way, which I’d think would defeat the purpose.”

Dario had to catch himself then, because he almost laughed at that—and this was the trouble. This was his twin. He knew Dante better than he knew himself, in some ways, or he had. He was genetically predisposed to get along with him. These past six years had been torture—and he couldn’t understand how he’d managed to convince himself otherwise. How he’d believed his own lies.

You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, he thought then.

“You betrayed me,” he said starkly, and his brother stiffened. “That was all I knew six years ago. That was all I wanted to know. You hurt me. You, of all people.”

Dante only stared back at him, the way he had then, and said nothing.

“Now I want to know the details,” Dario continued. He realized he’d tensed every muscle in his body and forced himself to relax. As best he could. “Anais has a child. He looks just like us.”

He searched his brother’s face. His own face, at a distance, as identical as it had ever been. As children and teenagers they’d played each other for days at a time to see if anyone noticed the switch. No one ever had.

Dario forced himself to ask the question. “Is he yours?”

“No.”

The word was like a stone hurled from a great height, and it landed between them with the force of too much gravity. Dario was surprised the roof deck didn’t buckle beneath them with the wallop of it. He was surprised he didn’t.

Dante looked stricken and fierce at once. “No. I never touched Anais, Dario. I never laid a single finger on her. I never would.”

And Dario realized that he’d known this, on some level. He must have known this, or he wouldn’t have turned and walked away. He wouldn’t have cut Dante and Anais off so completely, leaving them no recourse, if he’d thought they’d really cheated on him, because why would he have cared what they said then? And he certainly wouldn’t have thrown his revenge aside, ignored the way she’d deliberately aired their private business in the papers, all for the sake of a few family dinners. Not if he’d truly believed she was trying to foist off his brother’s child on him.

Because there was only one way Anais could be so sure Damian was Dario’s. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Only one explanation.

This was what she’d meant, he understood now. This was what she couldn’t live with. It wasn’t only that he’d believed the worst of her. It was that he must have been looking for something hideous to believe about her as his way out, because look how quickly he’d taken it. Look what damage he’d done.

What he didn’t know was why.

“You let me believe otherwise,” he said now to the twin who was the lost part of him. How had he pretended all this time that he was whole when that was laughable at best? He didn’t care that his voice was too thick. “Deliberately.”

Dante moved then, closing the distance between them to stand nearer to Dario at the deck’s rail. He frowned down at the traffic on Central Park West, but Dario knew he didn’t see it.

He saw the past. Dario had lived in that past for too long. He wanted out.

He wanted to be free.

More than that, he wanted his family.

“I did,” Dante admitted. He shook his head. “I hated that you listened to Anais more than to me. I hated that she’d come between us when she was supposed to be nothing more than a business arrangement. You’d married her to give her a green card, not to install her as our third partner.”

Lies upon lies, Dario thought, and all of them his own damned fault. “I didn’t marry her to give her a green card.”

Dante let out a small laugh at that. “That became clear.” He shifted to look at Dario. “You were at that damned meeting with ICE. I thought she’d put you up to it, so I took the opportunity to drop by and get in her face.” He looked rueful. “She doesn’t back down.”

“Not usually,” Dario agreed. “As you’ve likely seen in the tabloids.”

“She threw a glass of water at me.” Dante moved a hand in the air over his chest. “All over me. And that calmed things down. The irony is that we’d actually started talking to each other when you walked in.”

“On you. Coming out of my bedroom, half-dressed.”

“It didn’t even occur to me that you might read it the wrong way,” Dante said in a low voice, “until you did. And I realized you’d obviously never gotten over what happened in college.”

“It seemed like a pattern,” Dario said then. Though in truth, he thought it was the broken trust he’d never gotten over and never forgotten—and maybe that hadn’t been fair. It had been Lucy who had lied, not Dante. But he hadn’t wanted to consider that back then. It had all been a mess. ICE, their past, Anais... “But Anais mattered more. Much more.”

“I never meant any of this to happen,” Dante said fervently. “I never wanted to break up your marriage and I certainly never wanted you to cut me off. I assumed things would go back to normal after you’d had time to cool down. I assumed that, at the very least, you’d come after me. Yell at me. Fight with me. Hell, I thought you’d answer the damn phone, Dario.”

Dario blew out a breath. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I let a moment of silence ruin two relationships.” He looked his brother in the eye, then reached over and clapped his hand to Dante’s shoulder. “You might have done nothing to keep me from believing the worst, Dante. But I’m the one who believed it. That isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”

The evening wore on then, but everything was different. Better.

They sat out on the roof and told each other the stories of their lives over the past six years, and while they were no longer finishing each other’s sentences the way they had as children, it was remarkably easy to get back in tune. To feel connected again. Whole.

Dario hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his brother, or how deeply he’d been fooling himself all this time.

“How did you end up in Hawaii, anyway?” Dante asked. “Didn’t you once claim you didn’t see the purpose of beaches?”

“Maybe I’ve had a radical personality transplant and now enjoy nothing more than lying on a bit of sand, waiting for death or boredom to claim me,” Dario said.

Dante laughed. “Have you?”

“Certainly not.” Dario laughed, too, and it felt good. It felt like a revelation, like another key turned in a lock he hadn’t realized was there, to sit beneath the stars and laugh with his twin again. “I was tracking down a pair of earrings for our possibly demented grandfather.”

“He sent me off to find a tiara,” Dante said. He raked a hand through his hair. “Maybe this has all been an elaborate ruse on the old man’s part. Maybe he didn’t accidentally sell off a load of trinkets at all. Maybe they were all baubles he handed out.”

“What, as gifts? Who hands out priceless jewelry as gifts and calls them ‘trinkets’?”

“Remember that Grandfather’s from Europe. He’s very old school.” Dante shrugged, that utterly familiar maverick’s grin tugging at his mouth. “Maybe he took a very European view of his wedding vows and kept a string of wealthy mistresses on the side.”

It was hard to imagine their grandfather doing any of the things one might logically do with a mistress—especially when the image Dario had of him now was Giovanni as he’d been at the house the other day, frail and unwell. On the other hand, the old man was famously cagey. And certainly their own father’s brief, chaotic life suggested that growing up in Giovanni’s house had been something less than perfect.

“The man likes his secrets,” he said now.

They looked at each other, and it was back. That instant, wordless communication that the twins had once been so fluent in it had taken them longer to learn actual English than any of their siblings. They hadn’t needed it.

They both pulled out their smartphones and started typing various things into the search fields of their browsers.

“‘Tiara and earrings,’ it turns out,” Dante murmured a few moments later, “leads us directly to the Duchess of Cambridge and her pageant of a wedding. Who knew she’d cornered the market on a matched set?”

“I think we can cross Kate Middleton off the list of our grandfather’s potential mistresses,” Dario replied. “I feel certain the British press would have picked up on it.”

But he remembered the snatches of conversation he’d heard over the past few months while he’d been concentrating on the product launch. Little snippets about family matters he hadn’t been particularly bothered about at the time.

One of his brothers had found a necklace for Giovanni; one of his sisters had produced a bracelet. He put all of those together, and then threw in a description of the jewels. White diamonds. Bright green emeralds.

“Look at this,” he said, leaning closer so Dante could see the screen, as well.

“They were all a commissioned set,” Dante said as Dario scrolled down the page, reading at the same pace. Of course. “I’m surprised they were ever broken apart.”

“It says each piece is inscribed with a word.”

“Kate Middleton? I knew it.”

“BALDO,” Dario said, his mouth twitching. He read down further. “No one has ever been able to figure out what that means.”

“That’s the trouble with secrets,” Dante said then, sitting back in his chair. “They must seem like a good idea at the time. Then they’re nothing but old words inscribed on the back of lost trinkets, and precious few people to care.”

Dante had to head out not long after, but Dario knew that everything had changed between them—and for the better this time. They might not have solved every problem, but they’d started the process.

He had his brother back. He was himself again.

The future was not going to take place in a series of little boxes. Not if he could help it.

And that meant there was only one thing left he needed to do.

It was time to head back to Hawaii and claim his family.

* * *

This time, when that same hard knock sounded on her door after dark, Anais told herself it couldn’t possibly be Dario. She’d been very clear with him. She and Damian had come home and settled right back into the perfectly decent life they’d been living before Dario had made his reappearance. Everything was exactly as it had been before.

Save that Damian now had a lot more to say to the photograph by his bed, and Anais found herself curled up in her own empty bed with nothing but her broken heart. Broken even harder this time, because she’d been the one to leave.

The knock came again, even louder.

Anais took her time getting to her feet, and longer still crossing to the door. And maybe some part of her had been expecting an impromptu visit one of these days, because she hadn’t changed into her usual postwork clothes. Not a single one of the nights since they’d come home from New York.

Had she been hoping he’d show up? Had she imagined that if he did, she’d really feel safer in a pencil skirt and a sleeveless blouse?

She swung open the door and there he was, and her whole body hummed to life, as if she’d locked herself away in a deep freeze here in the tropics. As if Dario was all the heat in the world.

He looked gorgeous and intent, in the kind of sleek, expensive T-shirt that only very rich men thought looked casual and a pair of jeans. He looked rugged and rumpled, his dark hair shoved back from his face at an angle that suggested he’d been raking his hands through it all day. His blue eyes met hers and held.

“This time,” he said in that low voice that connected to every part of her that longed for him and lit it all up like fireworks against a dark night, “you need to let me in.”

Anais didn’t move. She didn’t step toward him and she didn’t step back. And she was terribly afraid that he could hear how hard her heart was beating in her chest, that he could see how little it would take for her to simply throw herself in his arms and wave away the past...

But she refused to do that. Damian deserved better than that.

And so did she.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Anais said, and it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life. She’d thought that morning in New York had been difficult. She’d had to fight to keep herself from sobbing in front of her five-year-old on that endless flight home. But this was harder.

Because he was here. He’d come after her.

She wanted that to mean a lot more than she suspected it could.

“I meant what I said in New York,” she made herself tell him, because she didn’t want to say anything of the kind. She wanted to stop gripping the doorjamb. She wanted to launch herself at him. But that was always the trouble, wasn’t it? She wanted things she couldn’t have, and Dario was at the top of that list. “This can’t work.”

She expected his eyes to flash dark, for him to argue. She expected threats, harsh words.

Instead, he smiled.

That beautiful smile of his. It was like a perfect sunrise. It was entirely too much like joy, and she didn’t understand it at all.

“I’m not going anywhere, Anais,” he told her, as if he was reciting a vow. “I’m not walking away again. I’ll stay right here on the doorstep for as long as it takes.”

“You’re not going to stay on the doorstep. Don’t be ridiculous.”

That smile of his widened. “Maybe not literally.”

And she told herself she had no choice. That her heart was a terrible judge of character, or none of this would have happened, would it? She made herself step back.

“Goodbye, Dare,” she said.

That smile of his didn’t fade. And it hurt her—physically hurt her—to close the front door. Then force herself to walk back into her house and carry on with her life somehow.

She couldn’t say she did a good job. She sat there on her sofa and stared across the room at the bookcase where her single photo album of their time together was stored, and she ordered herself not to cry.

Over and over and over. Until she fell asleep slumped sideways on the couch and stayed there until morning.

It was a new day, she told herself when she woke up, cranky and sore. Dario had been seized with something highly uncharacteristic to come all this way and make declarations, but she imagined it was like a tropical sunburn. Painful, but it would peel eventually. Then disappear.

But he came back again that night. And the night after.

And every night that week.

Always after dark, when Damian was already in bed, so there could be no chance of using their son’s feelings as any kind of bargaining chip. And he always left with that same smile on his face, as if he really could do this forever.

“I think you have issues,” she told him when it continued into a second week. “I never should have gone out to coffee with you in the first place all those years ago. It set a terrible precedent. You think you can wear me down with persistence and a smile.”

The scary part was that they both knew he could. She expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He stared at her, the thick dark all around him and his blue gaze serious.

“I don’t want to wear you down, Anais,” he told her. “You already know that I can walk away when things get tough. Now you know that I can stick around when things don’t go my way.”

“What if I want you to go away?” Her voice was so hoarse, so soft. She might have thought she hadn’t said anything out loud, but she could see that she had in the way he went still.

“Then you have to say that,” he said. “You have to tell me there’s no hope and that this is never going to change. As long as there’s hope, I can do this forever. Tell me that’s gone and I’ll never bother you again.”

And she stood there for a shuddering beat of her heart. Then another. She felt the soft breeze on her face, and curled her bare toes into the cool concrete of her front step. Everything else was the blue of his eyes, the starkness of his expression. The way he held himself, as if braced for the worst.

She should open her mouth right now and tell him there was no hope. It was the kind thing to do—the safe and smart thing to do, for everyone.

“Good night, Dare” was what she said instead, stepping back inside and closing the door.

She could feel him there on the other side. She slumped against the closed door, squeezing her eyes shut, and she could feel him there, only that flimsy bit of wood and her own determination separating them.

Anais didn’t know how long they stood there. She’d never know how long it was before she heard him turn around and go. Or how much longer she stayed where she was, before she forced her stiff, protesting muscles into a hot shower in the hopes that might stave off insomnia. It didn’t help at all.

And two nights later, she let him in.