Читать книгу Billionaires: The Rebel - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 13

CHAPTER FOUR

“STARTING RIGHT IN with the lies?” Dario asked.

And because she hadn’t let him into her house last night—which annoyed him a lot more than he cared to admit, and had gotten under his skin the more he’d thought about it—he blocked the doorway to his villa now. She could see how she liked it, and if there was a part of him that was ashamed at his own childishness, he ignored it.

He ignored a whole host of unfortunate truths, many of them making themselves known physically, as he gazed at her. “Touching me was never the issue, as I think we both know.”

She looked at him as if she pitied him, which made him want to...do all kinds of things he wouldn’t let himself do.

Yet.

“I was foolish and young back then,” she said in that prim voice of hers that had always, always, driven him crazy with lust and need. Today was no different, damn her. “I thought the package mattered a lot more than what was inside it. But people change.”

“Selective memory isn’t change. It’s a lie you tell yourself.”

“Happily, you don’t know me well enough either way.” She shrugged. If it bothered her that he hadn’t stepped aside to let her in yet, she didn’t show it. That, in turn, cranked up his irritation even higher. “I could have undergone a huge personal transformation. I could be lying through my teeth. Neither one has anything to do with the cold, hard fact of your paternity, does it?”

Dario had woken up at eight in the morning New York time, which was six hours earlier than here in this lost corner of the world. He’d spent a couple of hours on the phone and another hour or so on his laptop, and then he’d dealt with the restless anger beating at him by going for a very long run on a dark island road that wound down to beaches made of hard, black volcanic rock. He’d greeted his first Hawaiian sunrise with a swim in the shockingly warm sea, and then he’d come back to his villa and banged out a hundred furious laps in the significantly cooler pool, just to make sure he had a handle on himself.

Except he hadn’t.

He’d spent the day on a series of calls and video chats with employees all over the world, and then he’d gone on a second, much harder run up into the hills, and even that hadn’t done a damn thing.

Not when Anais appeared in front of him again.

She looked as effortlessly sexy as she always did, and he bitterly resented it. He resented her. She’d been beautiful yesterday on that remote estate. She’d been ridiculously appealing last night in nothing but a tank top and stretchy pants that had clung to every inch of her long, shapely legs. And today it was worse.

Much worse.

She’d put her hair up into one of those complicated, seemingly messy buns that he’d used to love to watch her create with her clever fingers and a series of pins she shoved into the masses of her silken hair seemingly at random. She wore a deceptively simple blouse in a soft cream color that made her skin seem to glow, tucked into a pencil skirt in a warm camel shade that should have been illegal, the way it clung to her lean curves and made her look even more feminine and alluring than she already was. Some animal part of him hated the fact she walked around like this. That anyone could see her. Even the delicate red shoes that clung to her feet and wrapped around her ankles annoyed him, sleek licks of flame that anyone could lust after the way he did—and likely had.

She looked elegant and cool and distressingly, achingly sexy. As untouchable as ever.

And Dario wanted nothing more than to dirty her up, the way he always had. The way he had from the moment he’d first seen her, looking like a faintly irritated librarian, prim and disapproving and ridiculously gorgeous in hushed Butler Library on the Columbia University campus, where he and Dante had been making entirely too much noise one winter afternoon. He couldn’t remember what they’d been laughing about, only that someone had shushed them—and when he’d looked up, he’d seen Anais scowling at him from behind a pile of books.

He’d had the sudden and nearly overpowering urge to mess her prim exterior up a little, get under her skin, see how straitlaced she really was. He’d wanted to peel back her winter layers and her offended expression and see what kind of woman lurked beneath.

Something inside him, in that swirl of heat that unfurled in his gut, had whispered he already knew.

He’d wanted to get inside her, badly. Right then and there. That longing hadn’t eased any, then or now.

And he was aware that the urge had nothing at all to do with the child she claimed was his, and everything to do with the madness inside of him that had already claimed him once.

“Be careful, brother,” Dante had said with great amusement when Dario had kept staring at Anais in that library, until she blinked and looked away, her cheeks flushing. “She’ll eat you alive.”

Dario hadn’t liked that. His easy relationship with his twin had never been quite the same after an incident with a woman they hadn’t known they’d both been sleeping with at the same time when they were younger. They’d forgiven each other, if not the woman in question—but Dario hadn’t quite trusted Dante in the same way as he had before. It had bled over into their business. Dario had been overwhelmed back then, fighting to figure out the future of the company in that year before they sold—and he hadn’t felt that Dante had been willing to shoulder his half of the responsibility. It had made him want to punch his twin right there in the library for even looking at the same pretty girl in a way Dario didn’t like. He’d shoved it aside then, but he hadn’t forgotten it.

Later, when Anais had packed up her things and headed out and Dario had made to follow her and chance an “accidental” meeting, his brother had outright laughed at him.

“Don’t blame me when she ruins your whole life,” Dante had said. “Which I can pretty much guarantee she will.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Dario had shrugged on his coat. He had not punched his twin. “It’s like your own, personal perversion.”

“A city full of women who would throw their panties at you if you smiled,” Dante had murmured, shaking his head. “They have. And yet you want to chase the one who disliked you on sight. Maybe I’m not the perverted one.”

Dario blinked now, astounded that the memories he normally kept locked away and inaccessible had taken him over like that. He wanted to think about his brother about as much as he wanted to think about his marriage. Meaning, he didn’t. More blame he could lay at her feet, he thought furiously.

He turned back into the villa and walked toward the kitchen area, where the hotel staff had left him a selection of fine wines. He heard her close the door behind her and follow him, those high red heels loud against the smooth floors, and he poured them both a glass. Red for him. White for her. The way it had always been, back then.

And he didn’t think he imagined the way she swallowed hard when he handed her glass to her, as if the memories were getting to her, too. He hoped they were as unwelcome as his were, and as uncomfortable.

“What is this?” she asked, but she didn’t put her glass back down.

He crooked a brow. “Wine.”

“You didn’t think to dress, but you had different kinds of wine delivered? What a fascinating approach to a meeting. No wonder ICE is doing so well.” She tipped her glass toward his chest. “Do you tantalize your investors and stockholders like this? Maybe put on a little cabaret number to seal the deal? Everything begins to make a lot more sense.”

He bit back the insulting words that flooded his mouth, because that was no way to play this game. And Dario had always been very, very good at games. He won them without trying very hard. He’d spent all day in heated conversations with his lawyers discussing the different ways he could win this one, too. Decisively.

But it was amazing how different the game looked to him when it was dressed like this, all womanly curves and that mouth of hers he could still taste against his.

That didn’t exactly bode well for what he had to accomplish here. But Dario ignored that with the ruthlessness that had allowed him to come into ICE and change the company from the ground up over the course of the past six years. He’d made it his. That was what he did.

“How does this work?” His voice was low, smooth. Appropriate, for a change. He was trying to make it seem as if he’d had time to calm down. To get his temper and his emotions under control.

To accept that this woman had kept his child a secret from him for five years.

Five years.

He told that tiny voice inside of him that knew he’d blocked her every attempt at contact, that knew he’d made contacting him impossible, to be silent. The point wasn’t what he might have done—he hadn’t had all the information she had. The point was what she’d done, and hadn’t done, when she’d been the only one who knew everything.

She took a sip of her wine, then smiled at him. Almost politely, as if they were cordial strangers at a cocktail party. “Because, presumably, I’m the expert on paternity issues?”

He eyed her a moment and reminded himself this was a game. That he needed to win it—and that meant controlling his temper. “Because you’re the lawyer.”

“How this works is, we talk,” she said. She stood on the other side of the marble bar that separated the sleek kitchen from the expansive teak-and-glass living area and gazed back at him. And if she was even remotely chastened, he couldn’t see it. “Rationally and reasonably, if we can manage it. We come to mutually acceptable arrangements.”

Dario was contemplating how much he loathed the fact that she still seemed so unaffected by all of this—and particularly by him, if he was brutally honest—when she tilted her head to one side.

“Do you think you can handle that?”

That sweet tone of hers with all that bite beneath it was better. It told him exactly where they stood. On the same uneven ground.

“If he’s mine...”

“If you say if one more time, this conversation is over. For good.”

He wanted to ignore that, but something in the way she watched him just then made him think better of it. Would she really walk out on him? He didn’t want to believe she could. And he really didn’t want to investigate why he thought that.

“I don’t know what you want from me, Anais,” he said after a moment. “You can claim the moral high ground. You can tell yourself that the fact I blocked your access to me is the issue here. We could argue about that for years.”

“I’d rather not.”

“It doesn’t change what I saw.”

He saw something flash in her dark eyes then, he was sure of it.

“You saw a man walk out of your bedroom buttoning up a shirt.”

“I saw my brother walking out of my bedroom with my wife,” he gritted out. He slammed his wineglass down on the counter, and he’d never know why it didn’t shatter and send red wine and glass everywhere. “Shrugging his half-naked body into one of my shirts.”

It took him a long moment to realize that while she did nothing but glare at him, with that otherwise unreadable expression on her face, she was trembling. Fury? Shame? Anger at being called out on her unfaithful behavior all these years later? Something as complicated as what surged in him—as much desire as what he desperately hoped was distaste? He didn’t know.

“Yes,” she said, after a minute. “That’s what you saw. You didn’t see Dante and me naked and writhing around. You didn’t even see us touching. You saw your brother changing his shirt, and you ended our marriage on the spot.”

But Dario had been angrier with Dante by the day back then. Dario had walked in and seen what he’d seen and it had all made so much sense. That tension between Dante and Anais that Anais had assured him was dislike. The distance between the twins where their business was concerned, that Dante had claimed was about different philosophies. All such lies and misdirection. This is the truth, he’d thought then, like a death knell inside of him. All his late hours, all his work, all the responsibility he’d been carrying—it had all been a ruse, to keep him out of the way, so these two people who supposedly loved him and hated each other could meet. In his bedroom.

It still made him furious, as a matter of fact, when he should have been over it years ago.

He thought she could hear it in his voice when he spoke again. “Is this where you think I’m going to beg you to tell me what was really going on that day? So you can spin some fairy tale for me?”

“Or tell you the truth.”

He didn’t quite laugh. “That’s never going to happen. Don’t be so naive, Anais. Or do I mean self-absorbed?” Dario shook his head. And though it wasn’t an entirely fair representation of what had happened, he continued. “Do you really believe you’re the first woman Dante poached from me?”

She swallowed hard enough that he could see it, and it didn’t help matters to focus on the delicate line of her throat and the sheer perfection of that collarbone he’d spent many a night exploring with his own mouth. It didn’t help at all.

“Damian is your son,” she said after a moment. “I’m not going to argue about it. You either believe that or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s no reason for us to bother talking to each other.”

“Then what we need to talk about is what any parents in these situations talk about,” he said casually, as if this was an academic discussion with no painful personal history behind it. And as if he hadn’t spent entirely too long today on the phone with his own lawyers, running through various scenarios. “Visitation. Custody. Child support. The usual things.”

He thought she stiffened at that, or her dark gaze sharpened, but she only placed her wineglass back on the counter with a sharp clink and then folded her hands in front of her.

“Before you go too far down any kind of legal road, you should probably know that your name isn’t on Damian’s birth certificate.”

He hadn’t known he had a son a day ago, and yet hearing her say that made Dario want to howl at the sky. Break his glass and every other one in the villa. He didn’t know how he managed to keep himself from doing all of those things at once. How he sucked it all back in and tucked it away and managed to sound nothing but faintly icy when he responded.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you’d like to claim paternity,” she said calmly, though her gaze was hard, “you’ll have to first prove it, and then, of course, pay all the back child support you owe me since his birth.”

“How mercenary.”

“Not at all. If you want to claim your son, you need to do something to make up for the fact you’ve ignored five years of his life. You can’t go back in time and be less horrible to his mother, more’s the pity, but you can pay. Maybe that’s all you’re good for, and that’s okay.” She smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. “Damian deserves a robust college fund out of this, if nothing else. It’s not mercenary. It’s an insurance policy.”

“Other terms come to mind.”

“You’re filled with all kinds of unpleasant terms, aren’t you?” She shrugged again. Dario was beginning to think that shrug might be the most infuriating gesture he’d ever seen. “That’s not exactly a surprise.”

“I never called you names, Anais, and I could have.”

Her dark eyes glinted. “Don’t sell yourself short, Dario. Your nonverbal communication was deafening.”

“To be clear,” he said when he could speak in an even tone, “you claim you’re not using the child as a pawn, but you are perfectly prepared to hold him for ransom. Am I getting that right?”

“He’s just a concept to you, Dare,” she said after a moment, and he wondered if she knew she’d reverted to that nickname only she had ever used. He didn’t let himself think too much about why he’d noticed. Especially when she was looking at him as if it hurt her to do so. “But to me? Damian is everything.”

She shook her head at him as if she found him deeply lacking, and there wasn’t a single reason in the world he should care what this woman thought of him. What her opinion of him was. Not a single, solitary reason.

More than that, he wasn’t doing this to hash out things between them. He told himself he didn’t care. This was about the child she’d hidden from him. That was the only reason he hadn’t flown back to New York the moment he’d had those damned earrings in his possession.

He’d made a plan and he had every intention of carrying it out to the letter, and it didn’t make one bit of difference what she thought of him or what she called him or anything of the sort. None of that mattered at all.

Why was he finding it so hard to remember?

* * *

Anais couldn’t handle the way he looked at her then, so she turned away and walked toward the open doors that led out to his private lanai, with its gloriously unobstructed view of the sea and the fiery red sun sinking toward the distant horizon. He had his own beach if he wanted it, at the far end of a winding little path. She could see the white sand gleaming in the last of the daylight, and the waves rocked gently against the shore as if it was doing it for them alone.

And somehow, she managed to wrestle that great ache inside of her into something more compact as she stood there and gazed out at the water, the sunset. Something she could breathe through. Something that wouldn’t betray her even further.

Dario was quiet for a long time, but she didn’t turn back to see why. She felt him approach, though she wasn’t sure she could actually hear him move, and then he was beside her, buttoning up a shirt made of the same lush linen as his trousers. It was also in black, and she didn’t know what was worse. Him bare-chested before her like a thousand desserts she didn’t dare touch, or him dressed like some kind of debonair lover, conjured straight up from the darkest part of the dreams she pretended she didn’t have.

Both, maybe.

“I’m sorry,” Dario said, and that was so shocking she whipped her head around to see if he was pulling her leg. But his moody blue gaze was focused on the sea, not on her. “I didn’t mean for this conversation to descend to that level. That’s not why I wanted you to come here.”

“I imagine you wanted to beat me over the head a little bit with your might and glory,” she said, her voice more bitter than she wanted it. More obviously affected. But she couldn’t seem to control it the way she should. “This villa has to be at least five thousand dollars a night.”

“Are you concerned about how I spend my money? I’m touched, truly.”

“Only if it affects Damian.” She made herself smile, as if this was an easy little talk. Or as if she was in some way light and airy herself. “That’s the beginning and the end of everything, isn’t it?”

She saw something move across his beautiful face, ruthless and determined, but then it was gone. She didn’t think she’d imagined it, but she couldn’t work out what his game was here, so she told herself it didn’t matter either way.

“There’s no need for us to fight, surely,” he said, his voice low. Something like agreeable, which she found instantly alarming. “Six years is a long time. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have a calm discussion about what’s best for Damian. We were rational once. Surely we can be again.”

And that was exactly what Anais had told herself she wanted. That was more than she’d dreamed would ever be possible with Dario. So why was it she didn’t quite believe him?

“I’d like that,” she said. And then, despite that lingering sense that this wasn’t real, she tried to be the generous person she thought she ought to be. The one she thought her son deserved. “I’d like Damian to get to know you, of course. But you do understand that he’s an entire little person all his own, don’t you? He came into this world on his own schedule and he’s stubbornly stuck to it ever since. 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 didn’t occur to me that I would ever be a father until you told me I had a son yesterday,” Dario said in a voice that sounded a little too close to grim for Anais’s peace of mind. “I have no expectations that require modification.”

She realized how close they were standing then, and worse, how obvious it would be if she leaped away from him the way she wanted. How he’d read into that and worse—how he’d be absolutely correct in what he read.

Anais didn’t want to be so close to him she could feel the heat he generated, the way she did now, as if that black linen was a radiator even here in the tropics in August. She didn’t trust herself.

Around Dario, she couldn’t.

The sad truth was that she’d fallen in love with him a very long time ago. Not quite at first sight, but not long after, and nothing had changed that since. Not the way he’d broken the lonely heart she’d only ever shared with him. Not the way he’d abandoned her so cruelly, as if she’d been unworthy of a backward glance. Not the way she’d tried to hate him in all these years since, and failed, again and again.

How could she hate this man when she saw so much of him in her little boy’s face? In that bigger than life laugh that was one hundred percent Dario in her son’s body? It wasn’t possible. She’d thought she’d come to a place of acceptance with that a long time ago. But of course, that had been when she’d never expected to see Dario again.

She still didn’t want to stand this close to him. It made her entirely too aware of her own, eternal weakness where he was concerned.

“Great,” she managed to say now, and she eased herself back and put a little more space between them, the better to look him in the eye, as if that would cut him down to size somehow. “Then when he throws a full-scale fit on the floor because he wants to wear a blue shirt instead of a red one the way he did this morning, I’m sure you’ll handle it calmly.”

Dario’s mouth curved, and that wasn’t helpful. It only reminded her all over again how susceptible she was to him. How badly some part of her wanted to believe that this—whatever this was—was real. God, how she wanted to believe that.

“If I can handle fractious board members and morally dubious CEOs, one small child shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’m glad you’re so confident.”

The air between them felt taut then. It shimmered like heat. Dario thrust his hands in his pockets in a way that suggested he wanted to do something else entirely with them, and Anais had to fight to conceal her delicious—and traitorous—shiver of reaction.

“I want you to come with me,” he told her. “Let’s eat a meal like civilized people. Let’s talk to each other.” That curve in his mouth deepened, and the truth was, Anais wasn’t strong enough to resist him. She never had been. And just then, with all his deep blue attention trained on her, she couldn’t remember a single reason why that should change. Why she’d want it to change. “Let’s do this the right way.”