Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8 - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 13
ОглавлениеTHE HISTORIC CASTELLI palazzo was small by Venetian standards, set on the stately Grand Canal in the shadow of far loftier residences once inhabited by the great and noble families of old Venice. But no matter how many times Lily told herself that, no matter how she reminded herself of the offhanded way her former stepfather had referred to this place as a pile of sentiment and rising tides as if it was beyond him why anyone would come here, her first sight of it from the water of the Grand Canal made her breath catch in her throat.
Catch, then hold too tight, as if that much beauty in one place might damage her heart within her chest.
She told herself it was the view. The rise of the old stone building from the depths of the canal as if it was floating there, the quality of the pure gold light that beamed out from within and spilled across the water, like a dark dream made real on this cold, breezy evening. It was the view, she assured herself, not the man who stood so tall and brooding and forbiddingly silent beside her in the private water taxi, as if the wind that ruffled at her hair and made her wrap herself even more tightly in her winter coat was yet one more detail that was far beneath his notice.
He looked like a dark prince, she thought then, as if she was channeling the teenaged poet she’d never been. Made of shifting shadows and the graceful lights that moved over the water like songs. He looked otherworldly. More fable than man.
You need to get a grip, she told herself sternly. Lose control with this man and you lose everything.
“It is beautiful, is it not?” Rafael’s voice was silky, like the falling night in this nearly submerged city of echoes and arches, mysteries and dreams, and there was no reason at all that it should shiver down the length of Lily’s spine like that, then pool too hot at its base. “And not yet sunk into the sea.”
“It’s lovely, of course, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” she replied, sounding stiff and unfriendly to her own ears. “I’m sure every guidebook printed in the last three hundred years agrees. But I still don’t understand why we’re here.”
“I told you.” He shifted his position against the polished hull of the small, sleek boat that cut through the water as efficiently as he seemed to slice deep into her with that dark look he kept trained on her. Lily wished she’d sat down in the sheltered interior, away from him. But she’d wanted to see Venice more than she’d wanted to avoid him, and contending with Rafael was the price of that decision. “It is the Christmas season. I must make my annual appearance at our neighbors’ ball or the world as we know it will come to a shuddering halt. My ancestors will rise from their graves in protest and the Castelli name will ring in infamy throughout the ages. Or so my father has informed me in a series of theatrical voice mail messages.”
Her hands clenched tight deep inside her pockets against a certain warmth that threaded its way through her chest and would be her downfall, she knew it. “I don’t see what any of that has to do with me. Or why I had to leave my son with strangers to accompany you on some family errand.”
Rafael’s hard mouth moved then, into that little crook that undid her. “Do you not? You are the mother of my child—who could not be happier where he is, with a veritable army of nannies to tend to his every whim, as I think you are well aware. Where else should you be but at my side, for all the world to see and marvel at your resurrection?”
Lily didn’t know what scraped at her more—that he’d called her the mother of his child with such matter-of-fact possessiveness it made her head spin, or that he claimed he wanted her with him, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
When the Rafael she’d known had refused, point-blank, to ever keep her anything but his own dirty secret.
Of course, she wasn’t supposed to remember that. And for a taut moment, she let herself imagine what it might have been like if she truly couldn’t remember him. If she could take all of this—him—at face value. If she could believe him this time around.
But that way lay nothing but madness. Heartbreak and betrayal. She tried to shake it off.
“When you say, ‘for all the world to see,’ I hope you don’t mean that whole paparazzi thing.” She frowned, and shook her head. “I work in a kennel in Virginia. I don’t want strangers looking at me.”
She couldn’t read that dark gleam in his gaze then, or the way his hard, lean jaw moved as if he was biting something back.
“You can wear a mask if you like, even if it is not yet Carnevale,” he said, after a moment. “Many do, though perhaps not out of the same misplaced sense of modesty you seem to feel. Given that you are but a kennel worker. From Virginia.”
Lily looked sharply at him at that too-dry tone, then away, as the boat reached the palazzo’s low dock and the driver leaped out to pull the ropes taut and bring the sleek vessel in close so they could disembark. Though it seemed Rafael’s voice was the tighter noose, wrapped like a hand around her throat.
“But make no mistake, Lily. I will always know who you are.”
His voice was like a touch, and she hated that traitorous part of her that wished it really was. More than wished it—longed for him in all those ways she was afraid to admit, even to herself. Afraid that once she did, it would be the emotional equivalent of hurling herself off the side of a cliff for real this time, and then what would become of her? But of course, she already knew. Maybe you don’t want to know the truth, he’d accused her the other night, and he was right. She really didn’t want to know it. Because she’d already seen exactly where it led. She already knew exactly what loving him made her do.
At the very least, the fallout of those feelings had turned her into someone she despised.
“It’s a clear day,” Rafael had said on a bright morning this past week, walking into the private salon in the family wing of the old house where Lily and Arlo had become accustomed to having their breakfast.
Lily had glanced up and lost her breath for a moment at the unexpected hit of him. That rangy body of his that he’d dressed that morning in the kind of deceptively casual clothing she knew only appeared to be simple and straightforward. The stretch of exquisite luxury wools across his perfect chest, the way those trousers clung to the lean muscles in his thighs. He looked like some kind of infinitely powerful adventurer, some modern-day Italian prince, as likely to leap over one of the looming mountains outside as he was to take to the nearest throne—
Maybe, she’d thought then, all those ridiculous lies he told you about your absurd and overdramatic teenaged behavior weren’t so far off the mark.
“Thank you,” she’d said, with as little inflection as she could manage, as if maintaining an even tone could repel him. As if anything could have. She’d looked past him toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, where she could see what kind of day it was all by herself, then back. “I appreciate the weather report.”
Rafael’s mouth had moved in that same curve, not quite a smirk, that had lit her on fire no matter how she’d tried to tell herself that was simply the old house’s unwieldy heating, not him at all.
“Your appreciation is overwhelming,” he’d murmured, and she didn’t understand how he could make that sound like sex. How he could make anything sound like sex when he said it in that voice of his.
Arlo, meanwhile, appreciated all things Rafael in a pure and straightforward way that made Lily’s heart squeeze too tight in her chest. And something like shame form a thick, oily slick deep in her belly. That morning, Arlo had tossed his arms above his head and started singing at the top of his lungs, completely unaware of all those dangerous undercurrents swirling through the room.
Lily had forced a smile when Rafael raised a querying brow at her.
“That is the hello song,” she’d told him with as much dignity as she could muster while sitting next to a five-year-old who was singing and dancing and wriggling madly in his seat. “He learned it in his preschool. They sing it every morning.”
“I’m honored,” Rafael had said, smiling at his son. A real smile, she’d noted. One of those pure Rafael smiles she remembered from before that could have knocked them straight into spring, it had been so bright.
And Lily had officially hated herself, then. Because the smile he’d used when he’d looked at Arlo had been genuine. It had been beautiful. It was lit with pride and longing and a sweetness she’d have said Rafael Castelli could not—did not—possess. Arlo had catapulted himself off the side of his chair and raced around the table at the sight of it, tossing himself at Rafael’s legs to bestow one of his heedless, reckless full-body hugs.
Lily hadn’t known whether to smile or cry. Especially when Rafael had looked so stunned for a second. He’d put his hand on his son’s head as if it belonged there and then he’d smiled down at the little boy as if Arlo was a burst of pure summer sunshine on such a chilly December morning.
And so she’d ruined it.
“He does that to every man he meets,” Lily had heard herself say, ugly and sharp.
The words had hung there in the air of the salon between them. They’d seemed to grow louder with every second, as if they were amplified off the graceful old walls. If she could have reached into the air and plucked them back, thought better of them and kept them to herself, she would have done it.
But there was no repairing the kind of damage she’d always done to this man, and him to her. There was only the living with it.
Rafael’s smile had dimmed, then disappeared altogether, and he’d taken his time looking back at her. His gaze had been dark and something much too bleak and furious at once, and it had hurt as much as if he’d thrown something back at her. More, perhaps. Lily kept thinking she couldn’t feel any more horrible than she already did, and then sure enough, she found there was a darker, deeper, far worse place.
This is what you do, she’d told herself. When you’re with him, this is who you are. She’d wanted to say that out loud. To remind him that they’d always ended in the same ugly place—but she couldn’t say a word. She’d had to sit and stew in it instead.
“It’s clear enough to walk down to the village today,” Rafael had said after a long, heavy sort of moment, when she’d thought he could see all the ugliness inside her. When she’d imagined it filled the whole room—the whole sprawling length of the house. Arlo, happily, had seemed completely oblivious, still clinging to his father’s legs and chanting something new and bright. “I thought it would be a pleasant family excursion, assuming you’re not too busy coming up with further vicious comments to fling at me.”
Lily had refused to apologize to him, but still, her throat hurt as if she had more than one apology stacked there. She’d swallowed hard against it. And maybe it would have been different if she hadn’t tried to take him out at the knees. Maybe then she might have come up with some way to resist him. But she’d made that glorious smile of his go away because she was a terrible person, and she didn’t seem to have any resistance in her just then.
And he’d used the word family.
“That sounds lovely,” she’d said, her voice hoarse with all the things she couldn’t say. The things she didn’t want to admit she could feel. The memories she’d been terribly afraid he could see all over her face. “Thank you.”
Lily jolted back into the present to find Rafael studying her expression in that way of his that made her forget to breathe. She kept herself from scowling her reaction at him by sheer force of will, and realized only after a long, shuddering beat of her treacherous heart that he was holding out his hand to her. And waiting for her to take it.
She wanted to touch him about as much as she wanted to fling herself off the side of the boat into the frigid waters of the Grand Canal and swim for it, but she swallowed that down, aware that he was measuring her reaction. That he was clocking exactly how much time it took her to look from that extended hand back up to his face. That, worse, he could probably read every last thought she had as she did it.
Because she was perfectly aware that he knew she could remember him.
He still couldn’t prove that she could.
“I only want to help you from the boat, Lily,” he said softly, the hint of a dark amusement in his voice.
“That is another lie.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She should have swallowed that down with all the rest of it, she knew that. And maybe to prove how little he bothered her, to herself if nothing else, she slid her hand into his.
It was a mistake. She’d known it would be.
It didn’t matter that they both wore gloves to ward off the cold. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t feel the slide of his skin against her palm or the true heat of his hand. She could feel his strength. She could feel that leashed power of his like a deep, dark ricochet inside her, flooding her with sensation she didn’t want, as dangerous as the mysterious Venetian night all around them.
There was no curve at all to that hard mouth of his, then. Rafael’s gaze locked to hers.
Heat. Passion. Need.
It slammed into her. It made her feel distorted. Altered. She moved then, jerky and uncertain, as if the world was as rickety beneath her feet as the boat. As the dock that extended out from the palazzo’s first-level loggia. As the grand houses of Venice themselves, arrayed around them up and down the canal on their ancient and uncertain ground—some dark with disuse and age, some lit from within like sets of perfect Christmas ornaments made from local Murano glass—and none of them as safe as they were beautiful.
Just like Rafael.
Lily climbed up onto the dock with more alacrity than grace and then dropped his hand as if he’d burned her.
And he didn’t have to laugh at her, though she could sense more than hear the deep, dark rumble of it. It was already inside her, where she was still so attuned to him, a part of him. As if they were still connected that way—deeper than sex, like a fire in the blood nothing had ever been able to quench. Not time, not distance. Not betrayal. Not her own supposed death. She began to understand that nothing ever would. That she’d been kidding herself all these long years, imagining it could ever be otherwise.
The palazzo loomed before her, its graceful upper floors gleaming bright against the dark like some kind of beacon, and Lily assured herself it was nothing more than the cold wind sweeping down the canal from the lagoon in the distance and slapping against her face that made her eyes water.
It’s the cold, she assured herself. It’s only the cold.
But then she felt his hands on her, turning her to face him, and she knew better. She was doomed. They were both doomed. They’d been destined to do nothing but rip each other apart since the moment they’d met and set themselves on this terrible collision course that destroyed them both. Over and over again.
She could see it in that stern set to his beautiful mouth. That bold fire in his gaze. Worse, she could feel it in the way she simply...melted. Everything inside her turned soft and ran sweet, and she thought she’d never wanted anything more in all her life than the press of that mouth of his against hers again.
Just one more time, she told herself, almost wistfully, as she looked up at him.
But she knew that was the biggest lie of all.
“Don’t kiss me,” she whispered then, too quick and too revealing. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”
Rafael’s stern mouth was so close then—so close—and that look in his eyes was enough to raze whole cities, and there was no disguising the way it made her tremble, too. She didn’t try.
“Speaking of lies,” he said, and drew closer still, his arms moving around her to hold her there in a parody of a lover’s embrace.
Or perhaps it was no parody, after all.
She braced her hands against his chest, though she couldn’t have said if she was pushing him away or, far more worrying, simply holding him there. “It’s not a lie just because you don’t like it.”
He studied her for a moment, and Lily forgot where they were. What continent, what year. What city. There was nothing but that dark gold brilliance in his gaze, the riot deep inside her, and her ever more fragile resistance. He shifted, raising one gloved hand to smooth over her cheek, the leather both a caress and a punishment, as it was not the lick of heat his bare skin would have been.
She imagined he knew that, too.
“Relax,” he said, and he sounded far too amused, then. As if she was the only one torn asunder by this. The only one so affected. “I’m not going to kiss you here. It’s far too cold.”
“You mean public.”
There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “I mean cold.”
“I don’t understand what the temperature has to do with it.” She sounded far more cross than was wise. Rafael’s mouth curved.
“The next time I kiss you, Lily, I won’t be as thrown as I was on the street in Virginia. There will be nothing but our usual chemistry.” He shrugged, though the hand against her cheek tightened, and she knew then that he wasn’t nearly as unaffected as he seemed. “And you know what happens then.”
She did. A thousand images surged through her then, one brighter and more sinfully wicked than the next. A messy, slick tumult of his mouth, his hands. The thrust of his body deep into hers. The taste of his skin beneath her tongue, the hard perfection of him beneath her hands. Salt and steel.
The ache, the fire. The impossible, unconquerable fire.
“No,” she gritted out, glaring at him no matter how much emotion she feared was right there in her eyes to make a liar of her. “I don’t know what happens.”
He dragged his thumb over her bottom lip, his mouth cruel and harsh and no less beguiling, because he knew exactly what it did to her. The thick heat that wound tight and dropped low, nearly making her moan. Nearly.
“Then you’ll be in for quite a ride.” He looked at her as if he was already inside her. Already setting a lazy, mind-wrecking pace. “It’s uncontrollable. It always has been.”
Lily jerked her head back, out of his grip, much too aware that he let her. That he could have stopped her, if he chose. His hand dropped from her face and she wanted to slap that deeply male, wholly satisfied look straight off his face. She had to grit her teeth to keep from doing it.
“I don’t know what that means,” she told him, her voice as frigid as the air around them. As the dark, mysterious waters of the canal behind him. “I feel certain I don’t want to know what it means.”
His dark eyes were hooded as they met hers. He still looked like they were already having sex. As if it was a foregone conclusion. As if this was nothing more than foreplay—and every part of her body burst into jubilant flame at the sight.
“It means I kiss you, then I’m inside you,” he told her, in a voice straight out of those wild, feverish dreams she lied and told herself were nightmares. She’d been telling herself that for years. “Always.”
“I will take that as a threat,” she threw at him and stepped back, as if that tiny wedge of space could make what he said less true. His mouth shifted, and she thought she’d never seen him look more like a wolf than he did then.
And she didn’t think she’d ever wanted him more.
“You may take it any way you choose,” he told her, all dark intent and certainty. “It is a fact, Lily. As inevitable as the dawn after a long, cold night. And as unavoidable.”
* * *
Rafael thought she might run.
He set footmen at the door to her bedchamber and found himself rather more grim than he should have been as he considered what pointless attempt she might make to escape him this time. Yet despite his dark imaginings as the hours crept by, no alarm was raised.
And when the clock struck the appointed hour, Lily appeared at the top of the grand stair inside the palazzo like every last one of the fantasies he’d conjured up over the past five years.
He’d planned this well, he’d thought. He’d had the gown shipped in from Milan, had dispatched servants to tend to her hair and her cosmetics. He’d thought he’d prepared himself for the inevitable result.
But it was one thing to imagine Lily, his Lily, alive and well and dressed like a member of the scrupulously high-class Venetian society they would mix with tonight. It was something else to see her again with his own eyes.
Rafael had never been so glad of that long staircase that swept down from the upper floor of the palazzo to the main level where he stood.
It gave him time to compose himself. Lily moved like water, grace and beauty in every light step, as she made her way toward him. Her honey-colored hair was piled high on her head, held fast with a series of glittering combs, just as he’d asked. The dress he’d had crafted to her precise measurements cupped her gorgeous breasts and then swept in a wide arc toward the floor, managing to hint at her lithe figure even as it concealed it in yards upon yards of a deep, mellow blue-green that made her seem to glow a pale, festive gold.
He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
And then she stopped at the foot of the stair, this perfect goddess with her heart-shaped and heart-stopping face that made his own battered heart ache within his chest, and scowled at him.
“I want a mask,” she said.
Rafael blinked. And tried to wrestle his roaring, possessive reaction into some kind of manageable bounds. It wouldn’t do to throw her down on the stairs, to lick his way into her heat and taste the secrets she still hid from him. It wouldn’t do to rip that perfect gown into shreds where she stood, the better to worship the curve of her sweet hip and the lily tattoo that he knew danced there, out of sight.
“Why?”
He thought he sounded relatively polite and civilized, all things considered, but her scowl only deepened.
“Do I need a reason? You said people wear them.”
“So they do.” He couldn’t let himself touch her. Not until he was certain he could keep himself in check. “This is Venice. But I want you to tell me why you want one.”
Lily tilted up that marvelous chin of hers and he felt it like a bolt of heat lightning, straight into his aching sex. Soon he would be unable to walk entirely, and those stairs would look that much better. He could pull her astride him, taking the cold floor against his back, and he could—
He shook the vivid images away. Somehow.
“I want to pretend to be one of the great Venetian courtesans,” she told him sharply, as if she’d read his mind. She eyed him, and Rafael was sure she had. “Isn’t that why you brought me here? So I could recreate history?”
“Unless you’d like to recreate our own history right here on the hard marble steps,” he said with a quiet savagery, “I suggest you try again.”
She looked at him, then away, though that proud chin remained high.
“I don’t want to be recognized. I don’t particularly enjoy being treated like a ghost from beyond the grave.” He watched the elegant line of her lovely neck as she swallowed. “Especially when I can’t remember the person they’ll think I am.”
“I will remember for the both of us.”
He didn’t know where that pledge came from, as if he was a good man and this was that kind of situation. And then she looked back at him, her blue eyes lit with a kind of warm, wry humor that he thought might be the end of him right there. And she didn’t quite smile, but he felt it as if she did. Like a gift.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said.
And Rafael found he couldn’t speak. He summoned the nearest servant with a lift of his finger and was glad of the few moments it took to produce a golden demimask, the perfect foil for her gown. For her lovely face.
She reached out for it, but he anticipated that and ignored her. He stepped closer to her than was entirely wise and fit the mask to her face carefully, something like reverently. He ran his fingers along the edges and smoothed it over the top of her elegant cheekbones, and felt the sweet reward of that catch in her breath and then the shiver of it, just that little bit ragged, against his hands.
“There,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “Now no one will know who you are but me.”
Lily’s eyes met his through the mask, and he thought they were troubled. Too dark. Something like lonely.
Or maybe that was him.
“I thought that was the point,” she whispered, and her voice was as thick as it was accusing, with that undercurrent of something like grief besides. “I thought that was what you’ve been at such pains to show me. That no one but you does.”
“Or ever will,” he agreed, more growl than vow.
And he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, not then and there, so he did the next best thing. He took her hand and led her out into the night.
