Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8 - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

THEY LANDED AT the private Castelli airstrip, high in the far reaches of northern Italy in the shadow of the towering Dolomites, just after dawn the following morning. Daylight was only beginning to stretch out pink and crystalline over the jagged spires and craggy, snowcapped heights of the sharply imposing mountains on either side of the narrow valley. Lily stared out of the window as the plane taxied down the scenic little runway, feeling as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

She’d never imagined she’d see this place again. For years now she’d told herself she didn’t want to see it or anything else the Castellis owned again, including those wine bottles with their distinctive labels in the liquor store—yet there was no mistaking the way her heart leaped as the private jet touched down. There was no denying the fact that this felt a whole lot more like a homecoming than it should. Certainly more than was safe.

Last night had been the second-worst night of her life, all things considered.

She’d known on the long drive home from Charlottesville after she’d left Rafael in that café that he wasn’t likely to simply disappear. Not Rafael. He might have been spoiled rotten when she’d known him, a being created entirely out of wealth and privilege and more than happy to exploit both to serve his own ends—but he’d always gotten what he’d wanted. Lily being but one in a long line of things he’d taken because he could.

She’d sped along the dark country roads, hardly seeing the cold winter beauty of this place she’d come to call home. Lost in that kiss again. Lost in him. If it had been only her, she would have left then and there. Just kept on driving until she became someone else, somewhere else. She’d done it before. She knew exactly what it took to disappear without a trace.

But she wasn’t twenty-three and desperate any longer, and there was Arlo now. Her beautiful, magical little boy. She’d turned it over and over in her head all throughout that drive, but she couldn’t see how she could legitimately uproot Arlo and make him act like he was in the witness protection program for the rest of his life simply because she didn’t want to deal with his father.

His father.

It still made her shiver to think of Rafael that way.

She could remember when she’d confirmed she was pregnant as vividly as if it had happened last night out there on those lonely country roads. She’d been dead for six weeks by then. Every day that she’d stayed away from her old life had been easier than the one before, because it was that much harder to go back. Too much time had passed. A day or two’s worth of confusion, maybe a couple of weeks—she could have explained that away in the wake of her accident. But six whole weeks without so much as a scratch on her? That indicated intent, she’d thought. They’d know she’d disappeared deliberately.

Lily had looked at the coverage of her car accident from a library computer in Texas once, early on, but that had been a mistake she hadn’t repeated. Seeing the people that she’d loved grieving for her loss had made her feel like the lowest kind of worm. A truly despicable human being. How could she walk back into their lives having caused them so much pain? What could she say?

Oh, sorry, everybody, I thought I wanted to make a clean break from all this and making you think I died horribly in that accident seemed like a good idea at the time...

After a few weeks of feeling strangely thick and deeply ill in turns, she’d taken a pregnancy test in a truck stop bathroom near the Missouri-Arkansas border. She could remember every detail of that winter morning. The sound of the big rigs outside. The chill in the air that seemed to have crept deep into her bones in the unheated little stall. The way her stomach had sunk down to the dirty floor and stayed there as she’d stared in an unmitigated horror at the positive test in her hand for what might have been whole years.

There’d been no going back. She’d understood several things with a rush of clarity in that badly lit bathroom in the middle of nowhere. That, despite everything—like the memorial service they’d held for her in Sausalito a few weeks after the accident—she’d believed until that moment that she might go back someday. That she’d pretended it wasn’t an option for her while holding it there in reserve, tucked away in the back of her mind.

And that the fact she’d been pregnant with Rafael’s child meant that door was forever closed to her.

It had been bad enough that she’d had a relationship with Rafael for all those years, no matter who else he’d been seeing and no matter how badly their families would have reacted to it if they’d known. It had been twisted and it had been wrong, given the fact her mother had insisted on referring to Rafael and Luca as your big brothers at every opportunity. How could she bring a baby into that gnarled, sick mess? Not to mention, she’d had no idea how Rafael might behave in the face of real adversity. Would he deny he was the father? Would he order her to terminate the pregnancy?

How had her life come to this? she’d wondered. That she’d felt she had no option but to walk away from everything she knew—only to discover that she’d made a new life with a man she obviously didn’t know at all if she had so little idea how he might react or what he might do.

She’d vowed then and there that she would raise this child better than this squalid little beginning in a truck stop bathroom. That she would give her baby a fresh start in a new place where her sick need for Rafael—like her own mother’s varied addictions that had marked Lily’s own life so deeply—was no longer a factor. Where the child could come first, and not her—the very opposite of how she’d been raised.

And she’d done a good job sticking to all of those vows, she’d thought last night as she’d pulled up in front of the farmhouse. Arlo had come hurtling outside as she’d parked, heedless of the wintry weather the way he always was—as excited and bouncy as the dogs who romped along with him. She’d caught his hot and squirmy little body against hers in a hard hug, and had poured all her regrets and apologies into the way she squeezed him tight until he wriggled free.

Because she’d known it was only a matter of time, and sure enough, they hadn’t even started their usual nightly dinner with Pepper when the car had pulled up outside. She’d tried to hold back the inevitable that little bit longer—but there had been no stopping it. On some level, she’d known that since she’d looked up and seen Rafael on the street.

And it had been even worse than she’d imagined.

She’d known that Arlo took after his father, of course, but it had been one thing to know it and another entirely to see it in the flesh. It had made her heart flip over in her chest and her eyes prickle with heat...

But then Rafael had turned that frozen, astonished glare on her, his eyes so dark they’d made the deep December night around him seem bright by comparison. And while it hadn’t been as terrifying or dramatic as that car crash five years ago, Lily had known that it amounted to the same thing.

One life was over. A new one was beginning—whether she wanted it or not.

It had all been very cut-and-dried. There had been no mistaking the connection between father and son. It was written on both their faces, as obvious as the sun. And though Lily had valiantly stuck to her Alison story, which included a part about a drug dealer boyfriend who’d conveniently died after helping make Arlo, Pepper had been involved in the conversation this time.

Pepper, who’d confirmed that yes, Alison had that exact tattoo that Rafael mentioned, which had made Rafael’s mouth curve in a way that had in turn made Lily’s heart kick at her. And no, Pepper had said when pressed, she’d never met a single person from Alison’s life before Charlottesville. And therefore, no, there was no corroboration to any of the Alison stories at all.

Only what Lily had told her.

“I told you what I know,” Lily had said at that point, and she’d worried that the lies were like tattoos she wore on her face. That they were that bright, that indelible. “Everything I know.”

Lily had been involved in a serious car accident on the winding California coastal road five years ago, Rafael had said—for Pepper’s benefit, presumably—and Luca had confirmed. Her body had never been found. Now they knew why.

“How can you explain the fact that I’m here and don’t remember you?” Lily had demanded, as Pepper had stared at her from across the table as if looking for the truth on her face. Or those terrible tattoos Lily was sure she could feel stamped across her cheekbones. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know how a woman could go over the side of a cliff on the Sonoma Coast and yet turn up unharmed five years later on the other side of the country, with a memory of a completely different woman’s life and a child who is inarguably mine,” Rafael had said, a seething fury in his voice and in his eyes though he’d sat at Pepper’s table so easily. So calmly. As if he was a friend instead of a foe—but Lily couldn’t accuse him of that if she was pretending she didn’t know him, could she? Maybe a stranger wouldn’t be able to read him as well as she could. “I only know that you are the same woman. That means it happened, whether it makes sense or not.”

And the truth was, there had been no need to trot out all the old pictures Rafael apparently kept cached on his mobile and ready to show, because this game had ended the moment Pepper had seen Rafael next to his son.

His son.

“This is a good thing,” Pepper had whispered fiercely, hugging Lily as the Castelli brothers had led them away from the only home Arlo had ever known. “Everyone should know who they really are, honey. And that little boy needs his father.”

Lily had questioned whether anybody needed Rafael Castelli, especially the child she had no intention of allowing him to corrupt, but she’d known better than to say that out loud. And it had been out of her hands. She’d been utterly outmaneuvered. The only card she could possibly have played was a demand for a blood test as some kind of stalling tactic—but to what end? She already knew what it would say.

And anyway, Rafael had anticipated that move.

“We will take the helicopter back to Washington, DC,” he’d told her in that cool way of his, at such odds with her memories of his tempestuousness and that ferocious gleam in his gaze. “Where a suitably discreet doctor is waiting to perform the necessary blood work. We will know the whole biological truth before we land in Italy. If there has been some mistake, I promise you that the Castelli family will see to it that you and your son have a lovely holiday in Italy before we return you back here to your home, safe and sound.”

“Wonderful,” she’d retorted, baring her teeth in some approximation of a smile. “I’ve always wanted to see Venice. Before it sinks.”

The jet rolled to a stop on the Castelli airfield, jerking her back into the wholly unwelcome present. Arlo was already bouncing up and down in his seat beside her with his usual boundless energy, and she could hardly blame him for taking off at a dead run once the plane’s door opened and the cold, crisp mountain air poured in.

She took her time, but there was only so much dawdling she could do before she, too, had to step off the plane and climb down the metal steps. Putting her well and truly back in Italy. The truth of that felt like a blow. And it was even more beautiful here than she remembered it, so stunning it actually hurt—the soaring heights of the Alps dressed up in their winter whites, the blue sky with hints of pink and coral from the exultant dawn still fading away as she watched—and the man who waited for her at the foot of the steps as darkly gorgeous and even more dangerous than the view.

Rafael slid his mobile into his pocket as she stepped onto the solid, frozen ground beside him. Lily refused to look at him, and then despaired of herself if something so small and pointless was her only potential rebellion. Pathetic. She could feel her heart in her throat, and for the first time in her entire life, thought it was within the realm of possibility that she might faint.

Don’t you dare! she snapped at herself. And not because fainting was a weakness, though it likely was and she didn’t want to show any weakness here. But because she knew Rafael would catch her and the very last place she needed to be, ever again, was in his arms.

She kept her gaze trained on Arlo, who was chasing his uncle up and down the otherwise empty runway, kept as it was for the family’s use alone. A gleaming black Range Rover waited at a discreet distance, poised to sweep them all down to the grand old house that lounged across several acres at one end of the crystal-blue mountain-rimmed alpine lake the locals called Lago di Lacrime.

Lake of Tears, Lily thought darkly, glaring in the direction where she knew the lake waited, out of sight behind the nearest wall of alpine rock. How appropriate.

“I’m afraid the results of the blood tests are in and allow no further room for debate,” Rafael told her then, his voice quietly triumphant in a way that made her skin feel shrunken down too tight against her own bones. “You are Lily Holloway. And Arlo is very much our son.”

She should feel something big, Lily thought then. Panic. Desperation. Even the polar opposite of that—a pervasive sense of relief, perhaps. Or perhaps of homecoming, after all these years of hiding.

But what she felt, instead, was profoundly sad.

Our son, he’d said, as if they were like other people. As if that was a possibility. As if they hadn’t ruined each other, down deep into their cores, so comprehensively that even the past five years hadn’t healed it or changed it at all.

Lily didn’t think anything ever could.

They stood there together in one of the most gorgeous and remote spots in the world. The thrust of the fierce mountains was exhilarating, the sky bluer by the moment while the crisp wind danced through her hair and moved over her face like a caress, and it was beautiful. It was more than beautiful. And yet all she could see was the dark, twisted past that had brought them here. Her terrible addiction to him and his profound selfishness. Their dirty, tawdry secrets. The awful choices she’d made to escape him, as necessary as they were unforgivable.

This was no new start. It was a prison sentence. And the only thing she knew for sure was that while Rafael was responsible for her son—the single greatest thing in her life and, as far as she could tell, her singular purpose on this earth—Rafael was also the reason she’d had to burn down every bridge and walk away from everything she’d ever loved.

And Arlo was worth that. Arlo was worth anything.

But that didn’t mean she had the slightest idea how she would survive proximity to Rafael again now.

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” she told him, long after the silence between them had grown strained and awkward and possibly revealing, too. That was what made her tell him as much of the truth as she could. “I don’t feel like Lily Holloway. I don’t know who that is. I certainly don’t understand who she was to you.”

“Never fear,” Rafael said, his voice soft but somehow containing all the might of those mountains looming up above them, solid rock and sheer, dizzying magnitude, and all of that dark heat besides. “I’ll teach you.”

* * *

Rafael had no idea what to do with himself now that he’d brought Lily and her son—his son—back to Italy.

It was a novel, distinctly unpleasant sensation.

He heard his brother walk into the cozy, private study he used as his office in the great old house, but he didn’t turn away from the window where he stood. He’d been there some time, still gripped in the same tight fist that had held him fast since Virginia. Before him, the pristine alpine lake stretched off into the low afternoon mists that concealed the small, picturesque village that adorned its far end and the tall mountains that thrust up like a fortress behind it, as if to protect it.

And much closer, down in the gardens that were little more than a suggestion beneath packed and frozen earth this time of year, the five-year-old child who was indisputably his own ran in loopy circles around the woman who claimed she could not remember Rafael at all.

He was certain she could. More than certain. He’d seen it in those lovely eyes of hers the way he’d always seen her need. Her surrender. He knew she was lying as sure as he’d known who she was when he’d seen her on the street.

What Rafael didn’t know was why.

“Are you planning to speak?” he asked Luca with perhaps more aggression than necessary. “Or will you loom there like one of the mountains, silent and disapproving?”

“I can speak, if you like,” Luca replied, sounding wholly unaffected by Rafael’s tone, much as he always did. “But the stories I have to tell are far less interesting than yours, I think.”

Rafael turned then and eyed his little brother. “I thought you were heading down to Rome tonight.”

“I am. I imagine you and Lily have a bit more to talk about than she and I do.” The sound of a child’s excited laughter wafted up from the gardens then, as if on cue, and hung there between them. Luca only smiled. “All of those interesting stories, for example, that you still haven’t seen fit to tell me.”

They looked at each other across the relatively small room. The fire licked at the grate. The December wind shook the windows, sweeping down from the heights of the mountains and off the surface of the freezing lake. And outside, a little boy was running hard enough to make himself dizzy in the very same spot they’d done so themselves, though in their case, it had been entirely without any parental supervision from the increasingly unwell woman who had never wanted to be a mother in the first place.

Rafael had never intended to have a child of his own. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do now it turned out he had one, without his permission. Without his knowledge, even. Thanks to a woman who had run from him and then concealed that child’s very existence from him for all these years.

Deliberately. She had done this deliberately.

He didn’t know what he felt. Or more precisely, which dark thing he should feel first.

“Have you come to ask me something?” Rafael asked after a moment or two dragged by. “Or is this the sort of tactic you use in negotiations, hoping the other party will fall to pieces in the silence?”

Luca laughed, but he didn’t deny that. “I would ask you to confirm that you did, in fact, sleep with our sister—”

“Stepsister,” Rafael growled. “A crucial distinction, I think you are aware.”

“—but that would be for dramatic effect, nothing more.” Luca waved a languid hand. “I already know the answer. Unless you have a contorted tale of a petri dish and a turkey baster you’d like to tell me, in which case, I am all ears.”

Luca proceeded to drape himself over the nearest chair, lounging there as if this really was a bit of mildly entertaining theater and not Rafael’s life. But then, he supposed that for Luca, it was.

Rafael sighed. “Was there a question in there somewhere?”

“Is this why she ran away, then?” Luca’s voice was light. Almost carefree, but Rafael didn’t quite believe it. He’d seen the shock on Luca’s face when she’d walked into that café.

“I couldn’t say why she ran away,” Rafael replied evenly. Or faked her own death, if he was to call this situation what it truly was. That was what she’d done, after all. Why pretty it up? “And she doesn’t appear to have any intention of telling me.”

Luca watched him for a moment, as if weighing his words. “It’s uncanny, how much that little boy looks like you. Father might well have a heart attack when he sees him. Or lapse further into dementia, never to return, mumbling on about ghosts in the family wing.”

“I will be certain to schedule time to worry about that,” Rafael assured him, his lips twitching despite himself. “But as I do not expect the old man and his brand-new child bride until much nearer Christmas, I think we can hold off on the family melodrama until then.”

“Buon Natale, brother,” Luca murmured, and then laughed again. “It will be the most joyous Christmas yet, I’m sure. Ghosts and resurrections and a surprise grandson, too. It’s nearly biblical.”

“I’m glad you find this amusing.”

“I wouldn’t say this is amusing, exactly,” Luca said then, the laughter disappearing. “But what would be the point in beating you up any further? You’ve been rolling around in the proverbial hair shirt for the last five years and have taken all the pleasure out of needling you, to be honest.”

“There was no hair shirt,” Rafael said, trying to keep his tone even, because the penance he’d done for a woman who hadn’t actually died was not his brother’s business. “It was time to grow up. I did.”

“Rafael.” Luca shifted in his chair, then blew out a breath, shoving back that unruly hair of his. “You were a wreck when you thought she was dead, and for a long time after. Maybe you should take heart that she is not. All the rest is noise that will sort itself out, surely.”

Rafael frowned at him. “Of course I’m pleased that she’s not dead, Luca.”

“But are you happy she’s alive?” Luca asked, with that uncanny insight of his that suggested he was something more than the lazy creature he’d spent most of his life pretending he was. At least in public. “It’s not quite the same thing, is it?”

“Of course.” But Rafael had waited a moment too long to respond, and he knew it. “Of course I’m happy she’s alive. What a thing to ask.”

His younger brother studied him for a moment. “Is it that she can’t remember you?” His mouth curved slightly. “Or anything else, for that matter?”

“I don’t believe that she has forgotten a thing,” Rafael said quietly, and it took him a moment to recognize the sheer savagery in his voice, to hear the way it sliced through the air between them, harsh and unmistakable. “Not one single thing. She left.”

He did not say, she left me, and yet that sat there for a moment in the middle of the room as well. Right there in the center of the priceless rug that was older than the two of them and Lily combined. Obvious and terrible, and Rafael thought he couldn’t possibly loathe himself more than he did at that moment.

Luca shifted in his chair, his whole body suddenly gripped with a different kind of tension.

“Rafael,” he began. “Mio fratello—”

“I’m finished discussing this,” Rafael gritted out.

“But I am not.” Luca shook his head. “This is not the same. Lily is not our mother. There is no comparison between an accident and what happened here.”

“You don’t actually know that,” Rafael said quietly. Too quietly. It revealed too much and even if he hadn’t heard that in his own voice as it hung there between them, he saw it in his brother’s eyes.

“Raf—”

“No more,” Rafael said, cutting his brother off. “Lily and I will come to terms with what she’s actually forgotten and what she’s found convenient to pretend she’s forgotten, I’m sure. That’s quite enough ancient history to dredge up. There’s no need to drag our mother into this.”

For a moment he thought Luca would protest that. He felt himself tense, as if he thought he might fight back if his brother dared—

You need to pull yourself together, he ordered himself. This is Luca. He’s the only person you love who’s never betrayed you.

“Do you have any particular reason to think she’s pretending?” Luca asked after a moment, his voice as light and easy as if they’d never strayed into the muddy waters of their mother’s sad fate. He even smiled again. “Most women, of course, would hold you like the North Star deep within them, knowing you even if they lost themselves. Such is the Castelli charm. I know this myself, obviously. But Lily always was different.”

Rafael forced himself to smile. To play off the darkness pounding through his veins even then, whispering things he didn’t want to hear.

“She was that.”

“Her memory will return or it won’t,” Luca said carefully, watching Rafael much too closely. “And in the meantime, there is the child. My nephew.”

“My son,” Rafael agreed.

He didn’t think he’d said that out loud before. My son. He wasn’t prepared for that rush inside, that simmering, inarticulate joy, beating back the darkness. He hardly knew what to make of it.

“Indeed.” Luca’s dark eyes gleamed. “So perhaps what she remembers, or what happened in this ancient history of yours, is unimportant next to that. Or should be.”

“Goodbye, Luca,” Rafael said softly, and he didn’t care what his brother could read in his tone. He didn’t care what he revealed, as long as this uncomfortable conversation ended immediately. As long as Luca left him here to fight his way toward his equilibrium again. Rafael was sure it had to be in there somewhere. “I don’t expect to see you again until Christmas. What a shame. You’ll be missed. By someone, I’m sure.”

“Liar,” said his irrepressible brother, wholly unconcerned by his dismissal. “You miss me already.”

Rafael shook his head, then turned back to the window and ignored the sound of his brother’s laughter behind him as Luca took his leave.

Outside, the little boy—his little boy—was still running, the hood of his bright blue coat tossed back and his head tipped toward the sky.

Arlo was a miracle. Arlo was impossible. Arlo was a perfect, wonderful mistake Rafael hadn’t known he’d made, and Rafael already thought he was a pure delight.

But he changed nothing.

He only made Rafael’s course of action that much more clear.

* * *

The ancient Castelli mansion bristled with the kind of supernaturally perfect staff that Lily had forgotten about over the course of these past five years. Impeccably trained, they made her feel as if she was gleaming and perfectly presentable at all times. When in fact it was their ability to clean rooms while she was still in them, produce a phalanx of nannies with credentials in hand to watch Arlo whenever she needed a moment and maintain the elegance all around her so expertly that made it feel quite natural that she should find herself living in it again.

It had been different going in the other direction, from these nonchalant everyday luxuries to the challenges of real life without them, but at the time, Lily had viewed all of that as her penance. And her test. If she could manage it, she’d told herself as she’d waited tables in places the old Lily wouldn’t have dared enter, she’d earn the right to raise her child herself.

She’d given herself a deadline. If, by her eighth month of pregnancy, she couldn’t come up with a better life than the hand-to-mouth, on-the-run existence she’d fashioned for herself, then she would have to tell Rafael about the baby. Or arrange for him to get custody without directly confronting him, maybe. Something. No child deserved to struggle along in poverty at all, but certainly not when his mother could make one phone call and whisk him away from a truck stop diner to a place like this. Lily might have left her life the way she had for what had felt like very good reasons, despite the pain she knew she’d caused—but she hoped she wasn’t that selfish.

Lily had been six months pregnant when Pepper had walked into her diner, headed home after delivering a pair of rescue dogs from a high-kill shelter in Virginia to their loving new home in Missouri. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that they’d hit it off instantly—after all, Pepper had a way with strays.

And when she’d hit that eight-month deadline, Lily had been living in the guest cottage on Pepper’s land, with a job she quite enjoyed to go along with it. She’d liked her life there and had seen no reason her baby wouldn’t, too. Pepper had felt like the long-lost older sister Lily had never had. And then she’d been more like a doting grandmother to Arlo.

Lily didn’t regret a single minute of her time in Virginia, and she told herself she didn’t regret keeping Arlo’s existence from Rafael, either.

But it was shockingly easy to adjust to life in all of that Castelli luxury again, she found, regrets or no. From the stately ballrooms to the gracious salons to the many libraries, large and small, that dotted the rambling old house, every inch of the place was a song of praise to the ancient Castelli name and a celebration of their many centuries of wealth and prominence. She’d made her way to her favorite library tonight, a week after they’d arrived in Italy, while the nannies she’d have said she didn’t need tended to Arlo’s nightly bath.

This was what they’d been hired to do, she’d been informed the first night they’d come to spirit him away. Which meant Rafael had decreed it—and in this great house, what Rafael decreed was law. That took some getting used to.

“You always loved this room.”

Lily jumped at the sound of his voice. It was as if she’d summoned him out of thin air with a single thought, and it took everything she had not to whirl around and face him, the way a guilty person who remembered exactly how much she’d loved this room might do.

“I do like libraries,” she said, trying to sound vague. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“You like this one because you said it felt like a tree house,” Rafael said, and it was only when she heard how calm and even his voice was that she realized she’d been much too close to snapping at him.

Lily heard him move farther into the cozy room, all dark woods and packed bookshelves and the bay window that sat out amid the leafy green treetops in summer. This time of year the bare branches scratched at the glass and made her think about all the ghosts that stood in this room with them, none of whom she wanted to contend with just then.

She turned to find Rafael much closer than she’d expected. He stood there in casual trousers and a sleek sweater that made her palms itch to touch it—him—and she told herself the way her heart leaped inside her chest was anxiety. Panic at this awful role she had to play, when she’d never been any good at pretending much of anything.

But the heat that washed over her told a much different story, especially as it settled low and deep and heavy in her belly. And then began to pulse.

It was then that she realized that she hadn’t been alone with Rafael since that cold street back in Charlottesville. Not truly alone. Not like this—closed off in a faraway room in a rambling old house where no one could hear them and no one was likely to intervene even if they could.

Lily’s heart began to drum against her ribs, so loud that for a moment she was genuinely afraid he could hear it.

“A tree house?” she asked now. She frowned at him, then out the window and into the darkness, where the December trees were skeletal at best. Someone who had never been here before would certainly not make the summertime connection. It required having whiled away hours in the window seat, surrounded by all of those leaves. “I don’t get it.”

His dark gaze was intent on hers, as if he was parsing it—her—for lies, though he still stood a few feet away, his hands thrust in his pockets. She supposed that was meant to be a safe distance. But this was Rafael. Nothing about him was safe and there was no distance in the world that cut off that electricity that bloomed in the air between them. Even now, as if nothing had happened. As if it was five years ago and no time had passed.

No car accidents. No Arlo. Just this thing that had stalked them both for years.

“How have you enjoyed your week here?” Rafael asked. So mildly, as if he had nothing on his mind save the duties of a host and this was a mere holiday for the both of them.

Lily didn’t believe that tone of voice at all.

“It’s very pretty here,” she said, the way a first-time guest might have. “If a bit bleak this time of year. And obviously, the house itself is amazing. But that doesn’t make it feel like any less of a prison.”

“You are not in prison, Lily.”

“That’s not—” She cut herself off. “I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“I can’t call you anything else,” he said, a dark fire in his voice, his eyes, and it stirred up that dangerous matching blaze inside her. “It sits on my tongue like lead.”

She didn’t really want to think about his tongue. “If this isn’t a prison, when can I leave?”

“Don’t.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t know this place. The fact that you remember this life you think I had doesn’t change the fact that I don’t remember living it. A blood test doesn’t change how I feel.”

She thought if she kept saying that, over and over again, it might make it true.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Rafael said, in a remarkably calm tone that was completely at odds with that harsh look on his dark, beautiful face. “But things are complicated. I can’t simply let you go and hope you’ll be kind enough to stay in touch. You are somewhat more than a mere flight risk.”

Lily thought better of showing him her reaction to that. She might not have been truly alone with him since they’d arrived here, but she’d certainly suffered through too many of these sorts of seemingly innocuous barbs that she worried were actually tests. At the various meals they’d taken together with Arlo, because, she’d been informed, hiding away with a tray in her room was not allowed. Every time Rafael encountered her, in fact.

Was she responding as Lily? Or as someone who didn’t know who Lily was? Having to worry over every single word she said or expression she let show on her face was like talking through a stone wall, and she was beginning to feel the weight of it inside her, dragging her down.

“And why not?” she asked crisply. “When you know that’s what I want?”

“Because,” he said softly, “I am a father.”

“Arlo doesn’t know you from a can of paint,” she snapped at him.

“And whose fault is that?”

The silky rejoinder stopped her short. She could feel her temper pounding in her temples, her throat, down in her gut, goading her on. When she knew the very last thing she could be around Rafael was out of control in any way. Temper would take her down as fast as passion. Faster. At least if she was kissing him, she couldn’t run her mouth at the same time.

Lily blinked. Where had that come from?

But of course, she knew. She was in a small room, alone with Rafael. Five years ago he would already have been inside her. There would have been no hesitation, no hands thrust into his pockets and that wary distance. He’d once hitched her up on the back of the deep leather sofa to her right and had her biting her own hand within seconds of closing the door behind them.

She went and sat on that same sofa now and saw a gleam of something edgy and very male in his gaze as she did, telling her he was remembering the same thing. She toed off the short boots she wore, pulled her legs in their warm leggings beneath her where she sat and wrapped her arms around her middle and the oversize tunic of a sweater she wore, with the great big cowl neck that was perfect for drafty old European halls like this one.

“So, tell me your theories,” she said, with a calm she didn’t feel at all.

Rafael stood where she’d left him, over near the wall of books. He didn’t cross over and sit down in the chair across from her. He only studied her.

Looking for weaknesses, she thought, and tried to steel herself.

Because she was well aware that Rafael didn’t buy her amnesia story for an instant.

“What theory would you prefer to hear?” he asked after a moment. “I have so many.”

This angle, staring up at him from below, was unsettling. It was impossible not to be entirely too aware of every hard plane of his perfect chest, or that ridged abdomen of his. It was hard not to lose herself in the stark male lines of his fine, athletic form, much less that ruthlessness he’d always exuded. But where it had been purely sexual five years ago, now it was tempered. Steelier. Harder. More focused and intent. It made him that much more devastating.

And Lily had to find a way to ignore it. All of it. When she’d never managed to do so before.

You’re an addict like any other, she told herself now. Like her mother. Hadn’t she sat in those meetings from time to time in those first days on the run, pretending it had been something else that had overtaken and ruined her life so totally? You know how to do this. One excruciating moment at a time.

Though heroin didn’t talk back, she imagined.

“What do you think happened to me?” she asked him then. “If I’m this Lily person, why do I think I’m someone else?”

His dark eyes glittered, and she knew he was biting back the urge to tell her there was no if about it. That she was Lily Holloway, whether she liked it or not. She could practically hear him say it—but to his credit, he didn’t.

“What did you think when I asked you about your tattoo in that café?” he asked instead. “Didn’t you think it was odd that a total stranger could describe it so perfectly when, according to you, we’d never met before?”

“Of course I did. But I thought everything about you was odd.”

“That was it? It didn’t cross your mind that what I was saying might be true?”

“Not at all.” She eyed him, hoping the tension in her arms as she hugged her legs closer into her chest wasn’t obvious. “If I walked up to you and said, oh, hello, your name is actually Eugene Marigold and I know you from our days in Wisconsin, would you believe me?”

His eyes gleamed with a hint of golden amusement that danced down the length of her spine, making her shiver deep within. “It would depend on the evidence.”

She shrugged. “I’m here to tell you that the evidence doesn’t help. I guess I thought you must have seen my tattoo before.”

“You often parade around with it showing, do you?”

Lily stilled. She knew that tone. Possessive. And darkly thrilling to her in a way that felt physical, when she knew she should have found it appalling. The only appalling thing here is you, she snapped at herself.

“I wear a bathing suit at the lake sometimes, if that’s what you mean by ‘parading around.’”

“A rather skimpy bathing costume.”

“In America we call them bikinis.”

He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and then he moved toward her, which made her throat go dry in an instant and every part of her body go stiff—but he only dropped down in the chair across from her.

And that suddenly, Lily was tossed back in time. It was the way he lounged there, so surpassingly indolent, as if nothing on earth could ever truly bother him. She remembered that too well. This was the Rafael she’d known. Provocative. Sensual. Even now, with that considering sort of gleam in his gaze that told her he wasn’t the least bit relaxed no matter how he happened to be stretched out in that chair, her body reacted to the memory.

More than simply reacted. She burst into long, hot, blistering flames. They shuddered through her, one lick after the next, making her want to writhe where she sat. But she didn’t dare move. She hardly dared breathe. And she had to hope against hope he thought she was blushing about the mention of bikinis. Or from the crackling fire in the nearby grate. Who was she kidding? He knew exactly why she’d flushed red, and she knew he did, too.

But none of this was about what Rafael knew. It was about what he could prove.

“How did you come up with the name Alison Herbert in the first place?” he asked, much too quietly, after another heavy moment dragged by, leaving furrows of stone deep in her gut. “You had a very specific biography at the ready. Where did it come from?”

Where indeed, Lily thought darkly. The truth—that she’d bought that driver’s license off a girl she’d vaguely resembled in a truck stop parking lot with a week’s worth of tips, and had helped herself to that same girl’s hastily told life story, too—was obviously out of the question. And she had to bite her tongue against the urge to overexplain and overcomplicate, because that could only make this harder.

She shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

“I think you can do better than that.” A crook of his sensual lips when she frowned at him. He propped up his head against the fingers of one hand like some emperor of old and didn’t shift his hard gaze from hers for a moment. “Do you remember your childhood as this Alison?”

She’d had a little more than a week to prepare for this particular performance, and had thought of little else in that time. So she scowled at him now, bristling a bit where she sat.

“Of course.” He waited when she paused. She made herself breathe in, then out. Count to ten. “I mean... I think I do.”

“Ah.”

Lily didn’t understand how he could steal all the air from the room when she was looking straight at him and could see with her own eyes that he hadn’t moved at all. She frowned harder in his direction, though it didn’t seem to help. If anything, she found it harder to breathe.

“I don’t see the point in talking about this,” she said then. She jerked her gaze away from his, sure he could read entirely too much on her face, and scowled down at the cuff of her sweater as if it contained the answers to these mysteries. She picked at it with her other hand. “Obviously, what I remember or don’t remember is irrelevant. You have the blood work.”

“I do.”

“And that’s why we’re here.” Lily swallowed, then lifted her head again to meet his gaze. This time, she held it. “But what about you?”

“Me?” He looked faintly amused, or as amused as anyone could look with so much thunder in his gaze. “I know exactly who I am.”

“But you were my stepbrother,” Lily said, and tilted her head slightly to one side, hoping she looked curious rather than challenging. “How did any of this happen?”

* * *

She looked fragile and something like otherworldly tonight, Rafael thought, with her thick strawberry blond hair piled high on her head. It only called attention to the delicate elegance of her fine neck, something he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention to five years ago. Here, now, he couldn’t think of anything else. She was swallowed up in that oversize sweater, which he imagined was the point of it. The bigger and baggier the sweater, the less of her he could see.

He doubted she realized that without the distraction of that lithe, intoxicating body of hers that still drove him mad, he had nothing to do but parse every single expression that crossed her face and every last telling look in her lovely eyes.

Rafael didn’t believe for one moment that she couldn’t remember him.

And if she didn’t remember him as she claimed, then she couldn’t remember what had actually happened between them, and he could paint it any way he liked. If she could remember him, well, it was up to her to interrupt and set the record straight, wasn’t it?

After all, this was the woman who had failed to tell him he was a father, that he had a son, for five years—and had certainly not come clean about it on her own. If he hadn’t seen her on that street in Virginia, would she ever have told him about Arlo? He doubted it. He would never have known.

He almost wished she really did have amnesia. For her sake.

Rafael smiled at her then and felt rather more like a wolf than was wise.

“It’s really a very sweet story,” he said. He was sure he saw her stiffen. “You were an awkward sort of teenager when our parents got together, ungainly and shy. You hardly spoke.”

“What?” She coughed when he looked at her, and she managed to look so guileless that he almost doubted that he’d heard that sharpness in her voice then. Almost. “I’m sorry. Did you say ungainly?”

“Many teenage girls have those rough patches,” he said, as if he was trying to be comforting. “But I think being around Luca and me helped you a bit. Smoothed out the edges.”

“Because you were both such excellent brothers to me?” she asked, and wrinkled her nose in that way he’d always liked a little too much. He still did. “That pushes us straight into icky territory, doesn’t it?”

Rafael laughed. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. We more or less ignored you.” He waved a languid hand in the air. “Our father is always marrying various women, the more broken the better, and sometimes they come with children we’re expected to treat as family for a while. We all know it’s temporary. A form of charity, really.” He smiled at her, and there was a bit more color on those remarkable cheeks of hers than there had been before. Though that could also have been the cheerful fire that crackled away beside them. “No, I mean that Luca and I dated a wide selection of very elegant, fashionable, socially adept women. You idolized them, of course. It must have been a master class for a girl like you, from such different circumstances.”

She returned her attention to the sleeve of her sweater and fiddled with her cuff. “Were our circumstances so different?”

“I’m really talking more about a certain polish that some girls have. They’re born with it, I think.” He eyed the growing flush on her cheeks, certain it was her temper and not the fire this time, and kept going. “I hope my honesty doesn’t upset you. If it helps, I think European women are better at achieving this polish than American women. Perhaps it’s cultural.”

“How lucky that I had all of the many women you dated to help me overcome my Americanness,” she said evenly. He hoped she was remembering the women he’d dated back then, all of them about as polished as mud, and that her even tone was painful for her. But she only flicked a look at him, her blue gaze unreadable. “Is that what happened? These paragons of womanhood made me one of them and you found you had to date me, too?”

He actually grinned at that and saw the reaction in her clear blue eyes before she dropped them again. But the heat he’d seen there licked over him like wildfire, and his voice was huskier than it had been when he continued.

“You wrote me daily poems, confessing your girlish feelings to me. It was adorable.”

“Poems,” she echoed flatly. “I find that...amazing. Truly. Since I haven’t written a word in as long as I can remember.”

“We haven’t established how long that is, have we?”

“And how long did I attempt to woo you with teenage poetry?” she asked, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You must have found the whole thing embarrassing.”

“Very,” he agreed. “You were so bad at it, you see.”

“Were it not for the existence of Arlo, I’d think this story was heading in a very different direction,” she said dryly.

“On your eighteenth birthday,” he said, as if recalling a favorite old story instead of making it up on the spot, “you stood before me in a white dress, like a wedding gown, and asked me if I would grant you one wish.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “Like a fairy tale. Did you say I was eighteen or eight?”

“Eighteen.” His voice was reproving, and it was hard to keep himself from laughing. “You were quite sheltered, Lily.”

“But not by you, because then the fact that we actually did get together would surely be gross.” She smiled faintly at him. “I’m guessing.”

“You were sheltered by the strict convent school you attended,” he lied happily. She’d been nowhere near a convent in all her life, to his recollection. “You entertained some notion of becoming a nun.”

He could almost hear the crackle of her temper, like water against hot metal, though she only swallowed. Hard.

“A nun,” she repeated, her gaze narrow on his. “I wanted to become a nun.”

He smiled with entirely too much satisfaction. “It was cute.”

“And yet somehow we produced a child,” she prompted him, a touch of acid in her voice, though her expression was impressively impassive. “Despite the fact I was, apparently, an eight-year-old wannabe nun with no greater ambition than to live in a fairy tale. A poetic fairy tale.”

“On your eighteenth birthday you asked me for a kiss,” he told her, sitting back farther in his chair and enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time in the past five years he’d enjoyed himself quite so much, in fact. “‘Please, Rafael,’ you begged. ‘I want to know what it is to be a woman.’”

“Oh, come on. No one says things like that. Not in real life.”

He shrugged. “And yet, you did. Or do you remember it differently?”

“I don’t remember it at all,” she murmured, and he saw that mutinous light in her eyes. His stubborn girl. “Though that sounds a little bit dramatic, if I’m being honest.”

“You were a very theatrical teenager, Lily. The despair of your mother and a trial to all your teachers, or so I was told at the time.”

She rubbed her hands over her face. “And yet somehow all this drama led to a secret relationship? That strains belief, doesn’t it?”

“That was your call,” he told her without a single qualm, watching her for a reaction to what might have been the biggest lie of all, but she only stared back at him. “You begged for a kiss, which, of course, I refused.”

“I can’t say I blame you. I’d question the man who looked at a gawky teenager in a makeshift bridal gown who’d seriously considered taking up the veil and thought, I want some of that.”

Rafael had no idea how he kept from laughing. “I told you that I couldn’t possibly kiss such an innocent. That you would have to prove yourself a woman if you wanted me to kiss you like one.”

“You felt this was the right approach to an obviously confused teenager?” Lily sniffed. “I wonder if a kind word or two might have been a little more helpful. Or the number of a good therapist.”

“I thought you would run screaming back into your sheltered little world.” He didn’t know when he’d slipped from his fantastical story into something a lot like the truth, but he knew he didn’t like it. Rafael stretched out his legs before him and eyed her across the accent rug, where she’d once slipped to her knees and taken him in her mouth while his father and her mother had talked loudly in the hallway on the other side of the door. He remembered the heat of her mouth, the sweep of her tongue, as if it had happened yesterday. So did the hardest part of him. “I thought you were all bark and no bite.”

“Let me guess,” she said softly. “I bit.”

“In a manner of speaking.” Rafael remembered that kiss on New Year’s Eve. He remembered the taste of her flooding him, and the weight of her thick, wild hair against his palms. He remembered the press of her breasts against his chest and the silky-smooth expanse of the sweet skin at the tops of her thighs, where he shouldn’t have reached in the first place. “You decided you needed to prove yourself a woman.”

“Was there a series of tests?” Lily asked in that same soft voice, yet with something far edgier beneath it. “A gauntlet of fire, one can only hope?”

“Do you really want the details?”

Her gaze was too hot when it met his. She looked away—but it took a moment. “No.”

“You insisted we keep it a secret. You demanded I date other women in public so no one would know. You were determined.”

“And you, of course, acquiesced.”

“Of course. I am nothing if not a gentleman.”

There was a long silence, then. There was only the sound of the fire. The far-off noises that all old houses made, the shift and creak of settling. The moody December weather on the other side of the old glass windows.

His own heart, beating a little too hard for a simple conversation like this one.

“Can I be honest with you?” she asked.

“Always.”

“I don’t think I believe you.”

Rafael couldn’t keep from smiling then, and stopped trying. “Do you remember another version of events, then?”

“Of course I don’t. You know I don’t.”

He watched her ball her hands into fists, and took that as a victory. “Then my version will have to stand, as told.”

“Let’s say that all of this is true.” She studied him. “Why would you fall in love with me? The person you describe is a disaster at best.”

“Love makes us all fools, Lily,” he said quietly.

“You as much as admitted you made all of that up,” she pointed out. “Or you wouldn’t ask me for a different version.”

“Tell me which part,” he dared her.

She sat up then, so abruptly it made him blink. She stamped her feet back into her boots, one after the next with a certain nearly leashed violence, and then stood up in a rush. Rafael wanted nothing more than to do the same—but stayed where he was, lounging there as if he’d never in his life been more at his ease.

“This is crazy,” she muttered, as much to herself as to him. But then her blue eyes slammed into his. “What kind of person are you, to play games like this?”

“Do you really want to know the truth?” he asked her, and he wasn’t at all languid any longer. He couldn’t even pretend. He sat up, never shifting his hard gaze from hers.

“I thought that was the point of you bringing me here. All the truth, all the time. Whether I like it or not.”

“Because you knew the truth once, Lily,” he said, with a harshness that surprised him even as he spoke. He couldn’t seem to contain it. “You lived it. And then you sent your car over the side of a cliff and walked away from it. You had a baby, changed your name and hid in a place no one you’d known before would ever think to look for you. Maybe you don’t want to know the truth.”

Lily shook her head, more as if she was shaking this off than negating what he’d said, and he viewed that as a victory, too.

“Or,” he said in the same tone, with that same edge, “you already know the truth and all of this is a game you’re playing for reasons of your own. What kind of person would that make you?”

She stiffened as if he’d slapped her.

“I think you’re not right in the head,” she threw at him as she started for the door. “Why would you tell me a bunch of lies? How could fake stories of a made-up past do anything but make things worse?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rafael replied, and even he could hear the danger in his voice. The menace. And it took everything he had to stay where he was. To let her go when that was the last thing he wanted, ever again. “Chances are, you’ll forget that, too.”