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CHAPTER THREE

THE KNOCK ON the front door of Anais’s little house in Kihei, a few blocks up the hill from the ocean in a strictly residential, tourist-free neighborhood, came after nine o’clock that same night.

Anais scowled at the door as if it had transformed into a snarling monster.

Her comfortable two-bedroom house was arranged in a breezy open plan. That meant she didn’t have to get up from the living area’s couch where she had files spread out on the coffee table before her to see that the figure standing on her front step and visible through the panes of clouded glass in the door could not possibly be her aunt or uncle or any of her friends.

He was too tall. Too solid. Too obviously him, and besides, that knock had been brusque and demanding, not anything like friendly.

She gritted her teeth and wished she hadn’t changed into her comfortable evening-at-home clothes after she’d put Damian to bed hours ago. Yoga pants and a tank top didn’t seem like adequate armor against Dario. Not here in her own home. Not when she could still feel his mouth against hers from earlier, the way he’d tasted her and tempted her and taken her over, leaving her with nothing but that fire she’d convinced herself over the past six years had been entirely in her imagination.

Her imagination was pretty vivid, it turned out. So vivid her breasts seemed to swell at the thought of him now, and she felt that deep, restless ache low in her belly that only Dario had ever brought out in her.

Anais got to her feet reluctantly. She threw a glance over her shoulder toward the half-closed door to Damian’s room, but she knew her little boy could sleep through a rock concert. And she also knew enough about Dario to realize that if he’d tracked down her home address and shown up at this hour, he didn’t plan to wander off quietly into the night simply because she hadn’t answered his first knock.

He knocked again, louder, and she blew out a breath as she crossed the room. She smoothed a hand over her high ponytail and wished she really was the cool, practical woman she’d gotten so good at pretending she was. The kind who could take anything in stride, including the reappearance of her son’s father on her doorstep. The kind who wouldn’t spare a single thought for how she looked under the circumstances.

That woman does not exist, she told herself staunchly. That woman is nothing but other women just like me, faking it.

Then she steeled herself and wrenched open the door.

Dario stood there before her on the lower step, looking edgier and more dangerous than he had out on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai earlier in the day. It was dark now, a thick Hawaiian summer night that seemed to cling to the edges of things. It made Dario look as ruthless as he did powerful, somehow. He stared at her, unsmiling and intense, and she was unreasonably glad his hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans. As if that made him safer when she knew better than that.

He should have looked disreputable, in jeans and an untucked shirt. Instead, he looked like a particularly gorgeous object lesson in wealthy young scions who also happened to be world-famous CEOs of major companies at such a relatively young age. Not that she’d followed his many corporate exploits on the internet, or anything.

Anais folded her arms and stood in her doorway. She did not invite him in. And she didn’t particularly care if every last one of her neighbors on the small cul-de-sac was watching this scene from their windows right now. If anything, that gave her the courage she needed to handle this.

Like a glacier, she told herself. You’re cold to the core. Heat can’t touch you, even his.

“I don’t recall inviting you over for a nightcap,” she said coolly.

She’d invited him to go straight to hell, and she hadn’t stuck around to see if he’d taken her up on that. She’d driven so fast down Mr. Fuginawa’s drive and then back out the rustic Piilani Highway toward home that her car had bottomed out in the rutted road more than once.

It hadn’t slowed her down at all.

“Is this impolite? I’d hate to be impolite in a situation like this.” His voice was as thick and dark as the night all around him, and seemed to stick to her as if it was barbed. Anais felt goose bumps shiver over her bare arms and had to fight to keep herself from rubbing at them and giving herself away. “Maybe you can explain the etiquette of secret babies and hidden children to me. I’m not as familiar with it as you are. Obviously.”

“What do you want?”

“You claimed you had my son. What do you think I want?”

“Damian is in bed, the way small children often are at this time of night.” She made a shooing motion with one hand. “Go away.”

“I want to see him.”

Anais had to grit her teeth to keep from shouting loud enough to bring the entire island to her door. “You don’t get to decide that, Dario. You can’t show up here after being absent his entire life and spring yourself on him in the middle of the night.”

“I knew you’d use him as a pawn. Why am I not surprised that you’re precisely this shameless?”

“He is five years old. He wants a father more than you can possibly imagine. I’m not using him as a pawn. I’m protecting him.”

“From me?” If possible, his face got even darker. She thought his arms tightened, as if he was clenching his hands into fists in his pockets. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Anais couldn’t pretend to keep calm any longer. She couldn’t stay cool and smooth and hard. And she didn’t much care what he might make of that. She didn’t care about him, to be honest. Not when it came to Damian’s feelings. Not when Dario could crush her little boy so easily. And likely would.

“It means I know what you do to hearts.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She wished she’d bitten off her tongue instead, especially when he made that derisive sound that might as well have been a punch to the gut, the way it hit her.

“This is exactly the kind of crap I expected you to say and I don’t have time for it. I’m not going to participate in whatever great melodrama you have planned here, Anais. I want to see the child.” He shifted, as if it hurt him. Or as if maybe he wasn’t as hard as he seemed, either—but it was dangerous to imagine such things. She’d already made that mistake six years ago, and look what had happened. “My child, or so you claim.”

“Listen to me.” She stepped forward, out of her doorway and onto the wide top step, not caring that it put her much too close to him again, even raised to his eye level. She shoved her finger in his face and she wished it was something more substantial, like a kitchen knife. “This is not about you. I understand that you must be feeling all kinds of things right now. I’m not particularly sympathetic, but I understand. Still, Damian doesn’t know you. You’ve been missing in action his entire life. It doesn’t benefit him in any way to be woken from a sound sleep so that a strange man can brood at him. And if it doesn’t benefit him, it’s not happening.”

Her voice had gotten loud there. Or maybe it only felt that way, as if it echoed back from the gentle movement of the palm trees and the thick, dark night pressing in against them. And either way, Dario did nothing but study her, as if he was assessing her weaknesses and looking for evidence to use against her. He probably was. She only acted glacial in short, controlled bursts. She’d long suspected that the truth about Dario was that, deep down, he truly was nothing but a block of ice masquerading as a man.

She didn’t know how long they stood there, with nothing but the tropical night between them and all around them, the breeze dancing over them as if it was playing tag with the moonlight.

Dario was the one to break the silence, his voice dark, yet calm. “Why did you bother to tell me about him if you were only going to keep him from me?”

If he could put on that calm act, she could, too. She made herself do it.

“I’m not keeping him from you. I’m simply choosing not to wake him up so I can parade him in front of you right this very minute. They’re not the same thing.”

“You planned all of this, didn’t you?” He sounded as if he was marveling at the very idea, but his blue gaze was frigid as it held hers. “You want to stab a knife in my ribs any way you can. This is revenge served cold, six years later, because I didn’t stick around to play your deceitful little games with you.”

Anais made herself breathe, even though her temper and her sense of injustice at the unfairness of all this roared inside of her. She didn’t know how she kept herself from hauling off and slapping him. Only that whisper of something else deep inside her, that worried what she’d do if she touched him again because she doubted it would be as violent as he deserved, kept her from it.

That and the little boy who slept even now only a few yards behind her, completely unaware that his life had irrevocably changed today. That nothing could ever be the same, because now Dario knew that he existed. His father finally knew about him. That made everything different.

“I’m not going to do this with you,” she gritted out when she could trust herself to speak. Not to scream at him as he deserved, but to speak the way Damian deserved his parents to speak to each other. If she’d learned nothing else from her own parents, it was that. “You’re the one who made yourself unreachable for six years, not me. You don’t get to show up here and throw your weight around because you’ve suddenly decided that there’s something worth paying attention to in this life you walked away from so callously.”

“So you are planning to use him as bait. There’s the calculating, manipulative Anais I know.”

“You can see him.” And it was for her to know how much she wanted to tell him the opposite, purely out of the kind of spite she knew made her a truly terrible person, down deep inside where she tried hard to hide it. “But it will be on my schedule, not yours. I decide he’s ready, not you. Do you understand me?” When he only glared at her, his face like stone, she continued. “This isn’t about your pride or your ego or your miserable existence, Dario. This is a little boy’s life.”

The air between them went flat and taut. Then electric.

Temper, history. Fury and need.

It seared through Anais, from her exposed arms all the way down to her bare feet. She saw the way Dario held himself, as if he was this close to putting his hands on her again, and what worried her was that she didn’t know if she’d push him away or pull him closer. The trouble with Dario was that she didn’t know herself at all when she was near him.

But he stepped back instead, and Anais had to confront the fact that she didn’t feel any sense of relief at that, the way she should. She felt...disappointed.

You are sick, she told herself in no little despair.

He raked a hand through his black hair, making it look even messier against the jaw he still hadn’t bothered to shave. She didn’t understand how that could make him look more attractive, not less. Or why she couldn’t seem to keep herself from noticing things like that at a time like this.

Or maybe she did understand, and hated herself for that, too.

Dario considered her for what seemed like days, and then he bit out the name of one of the grand luxury resorts further south on this side of the island in exclusive Wailea.

“Do you know it?”

“Of course I know it.”

Not that she’d stayed there, of course. The prices were astronomical, even by exalted Maui resort standards. And she’d hardly had a lot of call to stay at luxury resorts in the past few years.

“That’s where I’m staying.” He studied her for a moment. “I’ll expect you tomorrow evening at seven o’clock.”

“I’m afraid I have a...”

“Cancel it, whatever it is.” His full mouth thinned and the way his blue eyes glittered made her heart leap in her chest. It made her the liar he’d always claimed she was. “Don’t make me hunt you down, Anais. You’ll like it even less than I will.”

And then he melted off into the night. She heard the sound of a car engine turning over in the street, outside her line of sight, but she couldn’t seem to move. She stood there on her own front step for much too long, as off balance as if she was out at sea on a rickety boat, trying and failing to handle the swell.

He’d left her with nothing to do but furiously debate whether or not she planned to follow his peremptory orders.

Of course not, she told herself sharply, shaking herself out of whatever daze this was and walking back inside. It took a great deal more strength than it should have to keep from slamming the door shut, loud enough to bring the house down around her ears. Who does he think he is to issue commands? You don’t have to pay that man the slightest bit of attention!

Anais returned to the couch and tried to get back to the work she’d been doing, the work she needed to get done tonight, but it was no use. She was too...stirred up. Too uncertain and off balance, still.

He’s Damian’s father, a countering voice reminded her, as if she was likely to forget it. You owe Damian this, not Dario. Hammering out some kind of solution here helps him, and that’s what matters. It’s the only thing that matters.

Anais hardly slept that night.

She couldn’t get comfortable in her own bed. She checked on Damian more times in the night than she had since he was a newborn and she’d been terrified he might stop breathing if she relaxed her panicked vigilance even a little bit. He’d been so tiny and fragile for such a massive, lifetime responsibility and the blinding shower of love she felt every time she looked at him. She’d come to the conclusion that maybe she was the one who’d stopped breathing during those first, overwhelming months.

She hadn’t been entirely alone, thank God. Her elderly aunt and uncle had been the only bright spot in her family tree her whole life, and nothing had changed when Anais had come here to Maui with the shards of her marriage clinging to her like broken glass. They’d taken her in without question, the way they had back when she’d been a girl, desperate to escape her warring parents for a school holiday here, a summer there. When she’d finally admitted to them that she was pregnant, they’d taken that in stride, too. They’d helped her get on her feet and figure out a way forward as the single mother she’d never planned to become. And they’d been a steadfast, dependable presence in Damian’s life since his first breath.

Compared to some women, Anais knew, she had it good.

She reminded herself of that the next morning, when Damian woke up in his holy terror mode, in the full fury of all his five short years. She got his things ready despite his protests, wrestled him into something resembling an appropriate outfit for school, then had to cajole and threaten and bribe him into the car for a miserable ride all the way to drop him off.

She released him to his school with a muttered apology for unleashing a Damian in his most unreasonable and mutinous state upon them. Then she went into her law office where she was a senior associate for the single named partner and disappeared behind the mountain of paperwork on her desk. She told herself that she had no idea if she planned to go and see Dario as commanded. She told herself that repeatedly. But when her aunt called in the afternoon and asked if Damian could have one of his sleepovers at their house the way he did from time to time, it seemed like a sign.

“A sign that you should use the night to catch up on work,” she muttered to herself, scowling at her cell phone after she tossed it back down on the nearest case file. “Not gallivant about with the dangerous past.”

It wasn’t until she was back home that evening and finally able to clean up the evidence of Damian’s morning tantrum that she started to rethink that stance. She imagined Dario had visions of some appropriate movie child in his head, all serene smiles and quiet playtime with noninvasive toys under someone else’s cheerful supervision. That was a lovely daydream of a perfect little angel. She’d shared it herself before she’d become a mother. But it wasn’t reality and it definitely wasn’t her son.

She found she couldn’t wait to tell Dario so—and even a guilty look at the stacks of files waiting for her on her coffee table failed to sway her. The man who she suspected had sheets of ice where his heart should have been couldn’t possibly want a child, no matter what he might have said on her doorstep. Hadn’t he said so a thousand times when they’d been together? There was no reason that should have changed in all the time since. And Damian deserved more than a father who would, sooner or later, begrudge his very existence.

Anais had lived that bleak, miserable life. She wouldn’t condemn her own son to it. She wouldn’t.

The front desk was expecting her when she finally made it through the last of the summer traffic down through bustling Kihei and into Wailea, then followed the unobtrusive signs into the parking area of the exclusive resort. A staff member announced that Mr. Di Sione was waiting for her in one of the resort’s private, waterfront villas and proceeded to lead her there as if one or the other of them was visiting royalty.

Of course. Nothing but the best for Dario.

But if she was honest, wasn’t that part of the reason she’d found him so fascinating? He’d been a shot of controlled recklessness. Bright color in the middle of her black-and-white life. He’d been raised wealthy and indulged, and then he and Dante had made their own, personal fortunes while they were still in college. It had meant neither one of them had to pay any attention to the kind of boundaries other people had no choice but to obey.

And Anais had been feral, more or less. She’d raised herself in the crossfire of her parents’ endless wars, and she hadn’t had the slightest idea how to have fun, or fall in love, or be silly for absolutely no reason—all the things Dario had taught her.

Taught her, then taken away, as if all those things belonged to him and had only ever been on loan to the likes of her.

Anais got more and more furious as she walked, following the diffident staff member across one of the most stunning hotel grounds on Maui as the sun dropped toward the water, all sweeping views juxtaposed with sleek, modern designs that somehow evoked ancient Hawaii in the gathering dark—not that any of it registered. The truth was, she was lucky. She’d been an attorney for years now in one of the most beautiful places in the world. She liked her job, her clients and the life she’d built here. Practicing law was comfortable and it allowed her to take care of Damian and help out her aunt and uncle, too, when she could.

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.”