Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8 - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 17
ОглавлениеLILY WOKE TO find herself all alone in that great bed, the sheets a tangle below her and the canopy like a filmy tent high above.
For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was.
It came back to her slowly at first, then with a great rush. That quick plane ride down from the remote lake in the Dolomites yesterday afternoon, then the boat that had whisked them through the eerie, echoing wonder of the Venice canals, past winding, narrow byways and under more than one distractingly elegant bridge. After which she’d spent hours getting ready for a ball she hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place, surrounded by servants like some kind of latter-day queen, finding herself less and less averse to the night ahead the more she liked the way they made her look in the beveled mirror in front her.
There was the most unpalatable truth of all: that she really was that vain.
But it had been worth it when she’d seen that stunned, famished look on Rafael’s face as she’d made her way down the long stair to his side. It had all been worth it.
Looking back, Lily thought she could trace all the rest of her questionable decisions last night to that moment. The long walk down, her gaze fastened to his, while he looked at her as if she was the answer to a very fervent prayer.
She sat up slowly now, the long night evident in the small tugs and pulls all over her body, unable to regret a single one of them. She imagined that would come. But in the meantime, she rolled from the bed and drew the coverlet around her as she stood. The fire was low in the grate, while the thin light of dawn made the air seem blue. Rafael was nowhere to be found and when she cocked her head to listen intently, she couldn’t hear him in the bath suite either. Outside, last night’s snow dusted all the boats moored along the edges of the canal and the tops of the grand palazzos opposite, making a particularly Venetian Christmas card out of the already lovely view.
Lily placed her hand against the glass the same way she’d placed it against Rafael’s hand the night before, felt that deep ache in her heart, and understood entirely too many things at once.
She was in love with him. Of course she was. She had always been in love with him, and it was as wretched a thing now as it had been when she’d been nineteen.
Because nothing had changed. Not really.
They were the same people they had always been and now the past five years were between them. And Arlo. And all the sex in the world, no matter how good, couldn’t change what she’d done or who Rafael was or any of the many, many reasons they could never, ever work.
At heart he was his father, who married and remarried at the drop of a hat and believed himself deeply in love without ever having to prove it for too long. And she was entirely too much like her own mother, who had disappeared into the things she loved, whether they were prescription drugs or men—until it had killed her. So selfish. So destructive.
Running away in the way she had might not have been a particularly mature choice, or even a good one. Lily understood that. The pain she’d caused was incalculable. One night in Venice couldn’t change that. Maybe nothing could.
She was no less selfish. No less destructive. But at least she was aware of it; she accepted the truth about her behavior, however unpleasant. Like everything else, she thought then, there was nothing to do but live with it. One way or another.
She squared her shoulders and dropped her chilled hand back down from the window, feeling scraped raw inside. Lily decided that was hunger. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten something. She pushed her way out of the bedroom into the sitting room she’d glimpsed so haphazardly last night, sure there must be something to eat somewhere in a palace so grand.
But she stopped short when she entered the sitting room. The fire in here was blazing, and there was an impressive selection of breakfast foods laid out along the side table as she’d expected, but what caught her attention was Rafael.
He stood by the windows, looking out on what she assumed was the same view she’d left behind in the other room. She thought that was the sum total of who they were. Forever separated, forever lost to each other in pursuit of the same end. A wave of melancholy threatened to take her from her feet then, surprising her with its strength.
She shoved it back down and blinked that heat in her eyes away.
“It’s pretty out there,” she said, inanely, and it was worse because her throat was so raw. She coughed and pulled the coverlet tighter around her, cold despite the warmth of the room. “Though very raw, I think. With all that snow.”
It had something to do with the way Rafael stood there, so remote, wearing nothing but low-slung trousers that showed off that powerful body of his. It was the set of his broad shoulders, or that sense that he wasn’t really there at all. That he saw something other than the snow and the canal, and the light of a winter morning turning the sky to liquid gold.
“My mother was mad,” he said without turning around, as if he was wholly impervious to the cold on the other side of that window. Or in his own voice. “That is not the preferred term, I know. There were so many diagnoses, so many suppositions. But in the end, mad is what she was, no matter how they tried to sanitize it.”
All it had taken was an internet connection to find the few articles about Gianni Castelli’s doomed first marriage, so this was not precisely news to Lily. She’d read everything she could in a fury when she’d been sixteen and less than pleased about her mother’s new fiancé. But she couldn’t remember Rafael ever discussing his family history before. Not ever, in all the time she’d known him. That he was choosing to do so now, unprompted, made her heart beat hard and low in her chest.
“That is the excuse that was always trotted out in those years before she was taken away,” he said after a moment, when Lily didn’t respond. “That she was sick. Unwell. That she wasn’t responsible for her actions.” He shifted then, turning to look at her, though that wasn’t an improvement. That darkly gorgeous face of his was shuttered. Hard. Her heart kicked that much harder against her ribs. “As it turns out, it’s not much of an excuse when it’s your mother they’re talking about.”
“What did she do?” Lily didn’t know how she dared to speak. She realized she’d stopped dead a step from the door, and forced herself to move again. She walked farther into the deceptively cheery room and perched on the edge of the nearest chaise, as if she couldn’t feel the terrible tension in the air.
“Nothing,” Rafael said softly, his dark eyes bleak on hers. “She did absolutely nothing.”
Lily swallowed, hard. “I don’t know what that means.”
His mouth shifted into something not at all a smile. “It means she did nothing, Lily. When we fell. When we ran to her. When we jockeyed for her attention, when we ignored her. It was all the same. She acted as if she was alone. Perhaps, in her mind, she was.”
“I’m sorry.” Lily didn’t know why he was telling her this story, and she couldn’t read any clues on his face. “That can’t have been easy.”
“Eventually she was whisked away to a hospital in Switzerland,” he continued in the same distant tone. “At first we visited her there. I think my father must have believed that she could be fixed, you see. He’s always liked to put broken things back together. But my mother could not be repaired, no matter how many drugs or therapies or exciting new regimens they tried. Eventually, they all gave up.” He thrust his hands in his pockets, and though he didn’t look away from her, Lily wasn’t sure he saw her, either. “My father divorced her, claiming that was best for everyone, though it seemed it was really only best for him. The hospital started talking about her comfort and safety rather than her progress, and told us it was better if we stayed away.”
Lily didn’t know what she meant to say. What she could say. Only that she wanted to help him, heal him somehow, and couldn’t. “I’m so sorry.”
His mouth moved into a harsh curve. “I was thirteen the last time I saw her. I’d taken the train from my boarding school, filled with all the requisite drama and purpose of a young man on a mission. I had long since determined that my father was to blame for her decline, and that if I could see her alone, I could know the truth. I wanted to rescue her.”
Lily stared back at him, stricken. The fire popped and crackled beside her, but Rafael didn’t appear to hear it. And she couldn’t seem to read a single thing on that hard face of his.
“Rafael,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t have to tell me any of this.”
“But I do,” he replied. He studied her for a moment, then continued. “The hospital wouldn’t let me see her, only observe her from afar. My memories of her were of her rages, her tears. The way she would go blank in the middle of crowded rooms. Yet the woman I saw, alone in her little room, was at peace.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “She was happy there, locked up in that place. Far happier than she had ever been outside it.”
Lily studied him for a moment. “What did you do?”
He shrugged in that supremely Italian way. “What could I do? I was thirteen and she wasn’t in need of rescuing. I left her there. Three years later, she was dead. They say she accidentally overdosed on pills she should not have been hoarding. I doubt very much it was an accident. But by then, I had discovered women.”
Lily stiffened where she sat, and a harsh sort of light gleamed in his dark eyes, as if he could track her every movement. “I don’t understand why you’re sharing these things with me.”
“I had no intention of becoming my father,” Rafael told her quietly. “I had no interest in becoming some kind of relationship mechanic, forever tinkering around beneath the hood of another broken thing. I liked a laugh. I liked sex. I wanted nothing but a good time and when it turned heavy, the way it inevitably did? I was gone. I never wanted to feel that urge to rescue anyone, not ever again. I wanted no complications, no trouble.” His gaze was hard on hers, bright and hot. “And then came you.”
“You shouldn’t have kissed me,” she threw at him, as if this was a fight they were having instead of a quiet conversation in a cheerfully cozy room on a snowy December morning.
“No,” he murmured, and she might have said it first, but she found she greatly disliked his ready agreement. “I shouldn’t have touched you. I had no idea what I was unleashing.” She thought he tensed where he stood. Maybe that was how he seemed to crowd out all the air in the room. “And I hated it. I hated you.”
She couldn’t breathe. “You hated me,” she repeated, flatly, as if that would make it hurt less.
“I thought if I could pretend it hadn’t happened, it would go away. But it kept happening.” That dark, ruthless gaze of his tore her up. It made her shake. But he didn’t stop. “I thought if I could contain it, control it, diminish it or dilute it, I could conquer it. Keep it hidden. Choke the life out of it before it swallowed me whole.”
“I didn’t ask you to tell me any of this,” she said then, feeling off balance. Something like dizzy, as if she was propped there on the edge of a cliff instead of an overstuffed chaise. “I wish you would stop.”
“But then you went over the side of a cliff you shouldn’t have been near, in a car you shouldn’t have been driving, going much too fast,” he said, his voice hoarse, and she could see from that look in his eyes that he had no intention of stopping. “I knew perfectly well that if you’d been upset, the way they claimed you must have been to drive like that, it was my fault. They said it was an accident, that you’d lost control and skidded, but I wondered. Was it really an accident? Or had I made your life so bloody miserable that your only chance at any kind of happiness was to escape me the only way you could? Just like she did.”
She was shaking outright then. “Rafael—”
“Except here you are,” he said softly, and she wished he would move. She wished he would do something more than simply stand there like some kind of creature of stone, breaking her heart more with every word. “And you still make my breath catch when you enter a room. And I’ve long since understood that it was never hate I felt for you, but that I was too immature or too afraid to understand the enormity of it any other way. And you have my child, this perfect and beautiful son I thought I didn’t want until I met him.” He shook his head slightly, as if the reality of Arlo still overwhelmed him. “And I don’t hate you, Lily. I want you in ways I’ve never wanted any other woman. I can’t imagine that changing if it hasn’t yet. But you’re right.”
His gaze was so bright, so hard, it hurt. And she’d been turned to stone herself.
“I don’t love you,” Rafael said. “If I can love anything at all, if I’m capable of such a thing, I love that ghost.”
Lily was dimly surprised that she was still in one piece after that. That the building hadn’t sunk into the water all around them. That there was still a sun to peek in the windows on this cold, ruined day. That she hadn’t simply turned to a column of ash and blown off into nothingness in the next breath.
And he wasn’t finished.
“I will always love that ghost,” he said, very distinctly, so there could be no mistake. So she could not misunderstand. “She’s in my head, my heart, as selfish and as worthless as I might be. Yet it’s the flesh and blood woman I can’t forgive, Lily. If I’m honest with you, I don’t know that I ever will.” His smile then was a razor, sad and lethal at once. “But don’t worry. I doubt I’ll forgive myself.”
* * *
Rafael watched her take that in, a kaleidoscope of emotion moving over her expressive face, and told himself it wasn’t a lie. Not quite. It was the truth—a truth. It was just that there was a greater truth he had no intention of sharing with her.
Because he couldn’t trust her, no matter the temptation to do exactly that. He knew her better than any other person alive, and he knew her not at all, and he’d understood over the course of that long, blisteringly hot night that he thought was branded into his very flesh that this was exactly the kind of heaviness he’d spent his life avoiding. For good reason.
There were other words for all those weighty things that rolled over him, pressing down on him like some kind of pitiless vise. He wasn’t afraid of them any longer. But he’d succumbed to his vulnerabilities last night. He wouldn’t do it again. There was Arlo to consider now.
And Rafael would be damned if he would ruin his son’s life the way his parents had so cavalierly wrecked his, by betting on feelings when it was the practical application of reason and strength that got things done. He’d spent the past five years proving exactly that in his business affairs. He could do no less for his only child.
He wouldn’t live his life for the ghost he hadn’t saved. He couldn’t.
“We are going to have to decide what story we wish to tell,” he said coolly, when it looked as if Lily had wrestled her reactions under control. She was wrapped up in that gold thing she must have pulled from his bed, her hair a glorious halo of strawberry blond all around her and falling over her shoulders, and he felt like a saint for maintaining his distance when it was the last thing he wanted to do. But it was necessary. No matter that her blue eyes looked slicked with hurt and it caused him physical pain to know he’d done that to her. Again. “Whatever the version, I have no intention of hiding the fact that I’m Arlo’s father. From the world or from him. You need to come to terms with that.”
She blinked, and then she rose somewhat stiffly to her feet, and he couldn’t tell if that was a remnant of the night they’d shared or if it was an emotional response to the things he’d told her. Or both.
“What do you mean?” she asked, and the gaze she fixed on him was blue and cool, no hint of any hurt or wetness. He was tempted to think he’d imagined it. “I’m in Italy, aren’t I? If I hadn’t come to terms with it, I imagine I’d still be back home in Virginia, knee-deep in dogs.”
“You are in Italy, yes,” Rafael said quietly. “Hidden away in a house off in the mountains where no one has seen you or him except a handful of villagers who would never question the family. And then masked in public here, so no one could recognize you. You can’t have it both ways for too much longer, I’m afraid.”
Lily yanked her gaze from his and moved over to the side table, where she poured herself a cup of coffee with a hand that looked perfectly steady—and a good man, he was aware, would not want to see this woman, the mother of his child, so upset she shook. He understood that once again, he’d proved he could never be anything like good. Especially not where Lily was involved.
“I don’t know why you think a certain reticence is trying to have it both ways,” she said after a moment. She glanced at him over her shoulder, looking as though she belonged in the paintings that graced the walls, draped in gold and her own wavy hair. “What story do you think we ought to tell, Rafael? The one you just bludgeoned me with?”
He acknowledged the truth in that with a shrug. “You can’t imagine that you can rise from the dead unremarked, can you?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, blowing on her coffee and then taking a sip before she turned to face him again. “It’s not anybody’s business.”
“Perhaps not. But the media attention will be unavoidable.” He sounded impatient even by his own reckoning, but that coverlet was sliding down her upper arm, now, coming perilously close to shifting just far enough to expose the rosy tip of her breast. He needed to focus. “You died tragically and very young. That you are alive and well and in possession of the heir to the Castelli fortune will make it all that much more irresistible.”
She’d become that stranger again, cool and unreadable—or maybe she, too, had grown up in these intervening years. Become less raw, less emotional. Or at least less likely to show her every thought on her face. It was his own curse that he should feel that like a loss. Like one more thing to grieve.
“It sounds like you already know what they’ll say,” she said mildly. It was her turn to shrug. “Why can’t we let them say it?”
“The real story here isn’t your unexpected resurrection, as exciting as that might be,” he replied after a moment, after he’d had to force himself to look away from her almost-yet-not-quite-revealed breast. “It’s the question of what happened five years ago.”
“And here I thought rising from the dead would be sufficient,” she said, cool and dry, though he did not mistake that edge beneath it. “The media really is voracious these days.”
“It depends on the story. Did you deliberately hide yourself away all this time? Or did you hit your head and forget who you were?” He kept his gaze trained on hers. “The former leads to all manner of unpleasant inquiries about why you might have felt it necessary to do such an irrevocable thing and who might have been responsible. The latter, meanwhile, is a special interest story that will no doubt capture the public’s interest for a while, as these things do, but will then fade away.”
“So to be clear, we’re not talking about the truth right now, despite how many times you’ve called me a liar in the past two weeks.” She raised a challenging brow. “We’re talking about manipulating the media for your own murky ends.”
“No, Lily.” His tone was harsh. He made no attempt to soften it. “We’re talking about Arlo.”
She looked shocked by that. “What does this have to do with Arlo?”
“He will eventually be able to read all about this,” Rafael pointed out. “Assuming someone doesn’t share the whole of it with him on a playground, as children are wont to do. It will be part of the very public story that he and anyone else can access at will. I’d prefer that story not be about his mother thinking so little of his father that she pretended to kill herself and then hid herself away for half a decade. What good could possibly come of his knowing that?”
Something glittered in that too-blue gaze of hers. “I’m not going to lie to him. I can’t believe you’d really think I would.”
“Please spare me the moral outrage. You’ve already lied to him. You’ve lied to everyone you’ve ever met, before and after that accident. At least this time, the lie would be in his best interests.”
“You’re assuming a lot,” she said in a clipped tone, that glitter in her gaze even more hectic and a dark thing in her voice besides. “You barely know him. And one night with me after five years hardly gives you the right to make any kind of decision about what’s in his best interests.”
“I’m not assuming anything,” Rafael said, soft and harsh, giving absolutely no quarter. “Arlo is my son. You either hid him away from me deliberately, in which case any court in the land is likely to award me custody in the face of such a contemptible parental act—or you didn’t know what you were doing until I found you, which suggests a brain injury that hardly sets you up as mother of the year. I’d think long and hard about that, if I were you. I don’t want to treat you like a business rival and take you down by any available means necessary. But if I have to, I will.”
She eyed him as if she’d never seen him before and didn’t much like what she saw now.
“Is that what last night was about?” There was no particular inflection in her voice, though he could see all manner of shadows in her gaze as she set her coffee back down on the nearby side table with a bit too much precision. “Trying to sneak your way beneath my defenses so you could better knock me flat today?”
“Lily.” He said her name the way he heard it in his head, delicate and light, that same song that had been torturing him for all these years. “I have no reason whatsoever to think anything I did could reach you. Ever.”
He saw her hands shake then, very slightly, before she clenched them into the fabric slipping and sliding around her. And it made him feel worse, not better. Hollow.
“So the fact it sounds a lot like you’re threatening me is what, then?” she asked, her voice crisp, as if he’d imagined that small, telling tremor. “My overactive imagination? A remnant of that convent school poet you made up for your own amusement?”
“I wasn’t threatening you. I’m merely pointing out the realities of the situation we find ourselves in.”
“A man standing half-naked in a Venetian palazzo passed down through his family line for centuries maybe shouldn’t set himself up as the last word on reality,” she retorted. “It makes you sound silly.” She lifted a hand when he started to respond to that. “I understand that your feelings are hurt, Rafael. That sex only made it all that much more raw, and maybe that much worse.”
“You have no idea.” He hadn’t meant to say that. But he had, and so he thought he might as well keep going. “I want you, Lily. I can’t deny that. It doesn’t go anywhere, no matter how many times I lose myself in you. But that doesn’t change what we did to each other. How we behaved and what came of it. As you said yourself last night.”
“Neither does using my son—our son—as a weapon.” She held his gaze. “What does that make you?”
“Determined,” he retorted, a little more temper in his voice than he liked. As if he still had absolutely no control over himself where she was concerned. “I lost five years of his life. I won’t lose a moment more.”
“I haven’t denied you access to him,” she said stiffly. “I won’t. We can work something out, I’m sure. People who can’t manage to spend three seconds in a room together without drawing blood can do it. So can we.”
“You’re not understanding me.” He waited for her to focus on him again. “There will be no split custody, no separate homes. He stays with me.”
Lily’s mouth actually dropped open. “You must have lost your mind.”
“That leaves you with a very few options, I’m afraid, and I’m sorry for that,” he said, and there was a part of him that hated that she’d gone pale, that this clearly surprised and hurt her. But not enough to stop. “You can stay with him, with me. But that will require we make this official—and while I won’t pretend I’ll manage to keep my hands off you, I can’t promise I’ll ever give you more than sex. I can’t imagine I’ll ever trust you.” He shrugged as if that was of no matter to him. “Alternatively, you can go back to your life in Virginia or come up with a new one if you prefer, and you can call yourself any name you like until the end of time. But if you choose that option, you’ll do so alone.”
She didn’t move, though he had the impression she swayed on her feet, and he wished this was different. He wished he could gather her in his arms, make her smile. Make all of this all right. But the saddest truth of all was that he didn’t know how. Theirs was the high drama, the angst and the deeply thrust knife of betrayal. He didn’t know how to make her smile. He only knew how to bring out the worst in her—and how to make her cry.
He’d done nothing but that, over and over again.
She’s not the only one who needs forgiving, a tiny voice inside him suggested then, like a chill through his body. There are monsters enough in both of you, more than enough to go around.
But he didn’t know how to stop this. How to fix it. How to save either one of them.
“I’m not leaving Arlo with you,” she said, very precisely, as if she was worried she might scream if she didn’t choose each word that carefully. “That will never happen, Rafael.”
“My son will have my name, Lily,” he warned her, yielding to his temper rather than that other voice that whispered things he didn’t want to hear. “One way or another. You can be a part of this family or not, as you choose. But you’re running out of time to decide.”
“Running out of time?” She stared at him as if he’d grown a monster’s misshapen head as he stood there, and he wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if he had. “Arlo didn’t know you existed two weeks ago. You thought I was dead. You can’t make these kind of ultimatums and expect me to take you seriously.”
“Here’s the thing, cara,” he murmured, feeling that familiar kick of ruthlessness move in him, spreading out and taking over everything. It felt a lot like peace. He crossed his arms over his chest and told himself she was the enemy, like all the rivals he’d decimated in his years as acting CEO of the family business. He assured himself she was his to conquer as he chose. And more, that she’d earned it. “I’m sorry that this is hard for you. I feel for you, I do. But it won’t change a thing.”
Though it might have changed things if that glitter in her gaze had spilled over into tears. It might have reminded him that he could be merciful. That he really had loved her all along. But this was Lily, stubborn to the bitter end. She blinked, then again, and then those blue eyes were clear and hard as they met his. She tipped up that chin and she looked at him almost regally, as if there was nothing he could do to touch her, not really.
The same way she’d looked at him in that hallway when she was nineteen.
And he had the same riotous urge now as he had then: to prove that he damn well could. That he could do a great deal more than touch her. That he could mess her up but good.
He told himself that this time, at least, it was far healthier than it had been then, because it wasn’t about either one of them. It was about their son.
Which was why he kept his distance. The way he hadn’t done then.
And so what if it was killing him? That was the price. He assured himself Arlo was worth paying it.
“You have until Christmas,” Rafael told her matter-of-factly. “Then you will either marry me or you’ll get the hell out of my life, for good this time. And his.”
