Читать книгу The Billionaires Collection - Оливия Гейтс - Страница 64
ОглавлениеANAIS WOKE TO find the sun streaming across her face and the sound of the surf in her ears. She blinked in all the brightness and then sat up too quickly, taking in the vast room, the sleek furnishings, the astonishing softness of the dizzyingly high-thread-count sheets against her skin.
She wasn’t particularly surprised to find herself alone. She wasn’t necessarily happy about it, of course, but she couldn’t claim she was surprised. No matter the places they could take each other in bed, out of it she and Dario seemed destined to do nothing but hurt each other.
Over and over again.
Anais moved very slowly, very carefully, to the edge of the bed and was faintly disappointed that nothing sang out in pain as she did. No twinges or tugs to remind her in that raw, physical way of how she’d spent most of the previous night, or with whom. Nothing that would last.
She told herself that was better. Memories were bad enough. They could lurk about for years, as she knew all too well. They snuck into the corners of things and blended into the shadows. They could ruin a woman without her even realizing it, popping up in dreams whenever she closed her eyes and making her unwilling to even consider moving on the way she should. No matter that he had, and years before.
But this was neither the place nor the time to worry about the ways Dario would likely haunt her now. Besides, she’d had six years to find a way to handle it before and she’d managed it. This would be no different. She’d be fine.
Eventually, she assured herself, you’ll be perfectly fine.
Her clothes were draped over the chaise in the corner near the open glass doors, the screen letting in the ocean’s song and the summer sunlight but none of Hawaii’s less pleasant realities.
Reality is better, no matter how unpleasant, she told herself firmly as she dressed. This place—Dario—it’s all a fantasy that has nothing to do with you or your actual life. It never did. It all might as well be another dream.
That made her feel better—or at least ready to face him. She raked her fingers through her hair, letting it fall where it would and happy that it conformed to its usual sleek, straight, depressingly unchangeable style without her having to do anything more than that. She’d never before realized how lucky she was to have such hair that allowed her to look a lot more pulled together than a woman wearing last night’s outfit should.
She slipped her shoes back on as if they were armor and she then squared her shoulders before she pushed through the door and marched out into the vast living area prepared to do battle—but it was empty.
That confused her. It seemed so unlike him. She stood there for a moment, listening for the usual sounds that indicated Dario was near—the brusque clicking of the keys on his laptop, the sound of his voice issuing orders on the phone. But there was nothing. The villa was hushed. Still.
Empty, she thought. But she couldn’t quite believe that.
There was what looked like a stack of papers on the kitchen counter, but she ignored it as she walked to each of the bedrooms and looked inside. Each was as beautifully decorated and as empty as the next. He wasn’t in the little den with its massive flat-screen television, or in the separate office space equipped with a massive steel desk. He wasn’t on the lanai or out on his secluded beach. He wasn’t in the private pool on the far side of the villa, either.
He was gone.
Almost as if he’d never been here on Maui at all.
And Anais could admit it. It surprised her. And, more than that, felt a lot like a slap. The hurt feelings were silly, she recognized, but the other feeling bubbling up inside of her was a complicated sort of disappointment—as if she’d wanted what would likely have been another tense, unpleasant scene with Dario.
“Surely not,” she murmured to herself, her voice the only sound in the villa.
She shook her head as she crossed the living area again, amazed at herself. At her own capacity for self-delusion and what amounted to self-harm. And she knew—she knew—there was a storm waiting there in the distance, bunched up on the horizon, dark and menacing. Thunder rolled deep inside her and the skies were threatening and low, but she was ignoring all of it. She was refusing to play through the images in her head of last night’s abandon.
The way he’d touched her, the ways she’d tasted him—no.
She was pretending everything was fine—that she was fine. She was pretending that she could handle what she’d done last night and the fact he’d disappeared this morning, even though she’d half expected he would. She was desperately pretending she couldn’t feel that cold harbinger wind on her skin, making every hair on her body stand on end, letting her know in no uncertain terms that there was no outrunning the storm—the terrible reckoning for all her recklessness—that was headed straight for her.
But maybe she could delay it awhile. Just a little while.
At the kitchen counter, she picked up the bag she’d forgotten she’d even brought with her last night and pulled out her car keys. And she couldn’t help but glance over at the stack of papers, which it took her a beat or two longer than it should have to realize was actually a legal document.
With her name on it.
Her stomach flipped over, then plummeted straight down to her feet.
She reached over and pulled the papers toward her, and felt something like frozen solid as she scanned the first page. Once. Twice. It was only the third attempt that she was able to really, truly comprehend that she was looking at divorce papers.
Divorce papers for her and Dario, to be precise.
All drawn up and ready for her signature, demanding the divorce on the grounds of Anais’s infidelity and naming his brother Dante as her lover. Just as he’d promised before in what she’d truly believed was simply a hateful, throwaway comment.
It took her another long moment to realize she was shaking. That the words were blurring there before her on the page.
There was a single sticky note attached to the last page, where the line for her signature sat, blank and cruel, next to the bold dash of Dario’s name in an offensively bright blue shade of ink. The shiny yellow note contained nothing but a phone number with a New York City area code.
Dario’s, she was certain. Not that she could understand why he’d left her divorce papers and his phone number. It didn’t make any sense.
That terrible storm drew closer, the thunder growling ferociously at her as it came. She could feel the leading edge of the rain, battering at her where she stood...
Her phone began to ring in her bag, forcing her to breathe. To look away from the papers and that damned phone number. To shove back that storm as best she could. She tried to gather herself as she rummaged in her bag, and she’d at least taken a few calming breaths by the time she pulled out her smartphone to see her aunt’s number on the screen.
“Bonjour, Tante,” she murmured as she answered it, trying to sound calm. Normal. In one piece.
“Is Damian with you?” her aunt demanded in panicked French, without bothering to greet Anais at all, which could not have been more unlike her.
And Anais forgot about storms and papers and everything else.
“What? Damian? No—”
“The school just called,” her aunt told her, her voice a streak of high-pitched upset, hardly intelligible. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but he’s gone. He went out with the other children for their midmorning recess and he never came back in. They’re going to call the police, but I said I’d check with you—”
And that was when she understood. The harsh truth fell through her like a guillotine, swift and gleaming and lethal.
Dario’s change in behavior last night. The abrupt switch from antagonist to lover. His absence this morning, the divorce papers, the damned phone number.
He’d planned the whole thing.
Including and especially her sensual surrender to him in bed, not once or even twice, but three times before she’d dropped off into an exhausted, dreamless sleep in the blue light before dawn.
“No, Tante,” she managed to say. She would never know how she managed to keep herself from breaking down, right there on the phone. “Tell them not to call the police. Tell them it’s fine. I know where he is.”
“But, Anais—”
“I’ll explain everything when I get home,” she managed to grit out, and that wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Though she had no idea where she’d start.
She ended the call with her aunt and yanked the divorce papers toward her, flipping through the pages with numb fingers until she reached the signatures and that scrawled taunt of a phone number. It took her two tries to enter it correctly because her hands shook so badly and her thumbs seemed suddenly twice their previous size.
It rang. Endlessly. Anais thought she aged a thousand years before she heard the line connect and then Dario’s smooth, calm voice, as effective as a gut punch. She doubled over, right there at the counter.
“Anais.”
“Where is he?” Her voice was rough. Terrible. “What did you do?”
“He’s perfectly fine,” Dario said coolly. “He’s happily watching a movie on his tablet.”
“I told you I’d let you see him, you bastard. You didn’t have to take him during recess! The school were going to call the police until they realized you were his father!”
“Go ahead,” Dario invited her, and he didn’t sound particularly cool any longer. “My son and I will be in New York in approximately ten hours. My entire legal team looks forward to handling the issue, however you choose to address it.”
She couldn’t make her trained legal brain work the way it should. She couldn’t think.
“Dario, you can’t—”
“I can and I did.” His voice was the harshest she’d ever heard it. Worse than a stranger’s, judgmental and cruel. “You never should have hidden my child from me, Anais. You reap what you sow.”
And then, impossibly, he disconnected the call.
The smartphone fell from her hand and clattered against the hard marble, but she was already racing around the counter to pitch herself against the sunken sink and lose the contents of her stomach right there. Once. Again.
For a moment she thought her knees would give out. She could see herself in her head, sliding to the floor in a kind of puddle of despair and staying there until the hotel’s housekeeping team swept her out with the trash. Her breath came hard and harsh, loud against the sink’s hard walls.
But her knees didn’t give out, somehow. Slowly, surely, she straightened. She braced herself against the sides of the sink and then she ran the water cold. She splashed it on her face and rinsed her mouth and slowly, slowly fought back the panic so she could think this through.
Dario wouldn’t hurt Damian. That was the most important thing. He might be a terrible bastard to her, but he wasn’t a monster. The worst-case scenario was that her baby might be scared, might want her and not be able to find her—she let out a ragged sob at that thought—but Dario had nothing but stacks of money at his disposal. Damian’s physical and material needs would be met, no question.
She tried to take a moment to feel thankful for that. To remind herself how many women—many of whom she’d had as clients as part of her pro bono work on the islands—couldn’t allow themselves that same confidence in their exes.
But the thought of her little boy afraid, however well Dario might treat him, made her shake again. She fought it back, and that dizzy, swimming thing in her head that was so much worse than a mere sob...she thought it might take her to the ground, after all.
But it didn’t. She didn’t let it.
She’d been prepared to do what she could to ease Dario’s access to Damian. She’d wanted her son to have his father in his life, no matter her complicated feelings about that father. Despite what he’d thought, she’d never wanted to conceal Damian from him in the first place. She shouldn’t have slept with him, certainly, but that was a minor misstep, all things considered. She wasn’t sure she’d have forgiven herself for succumbing to that old addiction so easily, but she’d have handled it, somehow. She still would have done what she could to make things work well enough that Damian and Dario could build some kind of relationship between them.
He, meanwhile, had deliberately misled her and then kidnapped her child.
Which made what she had to do easy, she decided then and there, braced against an unaffordable sink in this outrageously luxurious resort villa on the edge of the vast, uncaring Pacific.
It felt a little bit like a death, but it wasn’t. It was a declaration. He’d made it, but she could answer it—and much, much louder.
Dario wanted a war, apparently.
And this time, she’d damn well give it to him.
* * *
It should probably not have come as a surprise to Dario that the child—his child, if any of what Anais had said to him in Hawaii could be believed—was an utter terror.
There was no other word for it.
On the fourth day of his surprise fatherhood, Dario stood in the foyer of his sprawling Upper West Side penthouse apartment with its three stories of sweeping views over Central Park, and watched the little demon who supposedly bore his DNA run in screaming circles for no apparent reason, putting priceless artifacts at risk with each lap around the expansive living room.
“I don’t understand why you haven’t handled this,” Dario said coldly to the nanny who’d come with the highest of references from the most prestigious Manhattan agency, which normally boasted a waiting list years long. “Why you haven’t done whatever it is I’m paying you to do to stop this kind of insanity at six-thirty in the morning.”
“I’m a nanny, Mr. Di Sione,” the woman replied crisply, with the hint of an English accent Dario was ninety percent convinced she faked for effect and her arms crossed over her ample bosom. “Not Albus Dumbledore.”
The tiny creature, who was, as far as Dario had been able to tell, made entirely of howls and fists and a boundless, terrifying energy, stopped of his own accord then and shouted something incomprehensible at Dario.
“Can you translate that?” Dario asked the nanny in the same cold tone. “Because if you can’t, I might as well fire you and locate a zoologist.”
“I’ll handle him,” the woman said with a sniff.
“See that you do,” Dario gritted out, and then he stalked for the door.
None of this was going according to plan.
You do understand that he’s an entire little person all his own, don’t you? Anais had asked him back in Hawaii. If you have some fantasy in your head about an angelic creature who will gaze at you and call you Daddy and serve as some kind of appendage to your whims, that’s probably not Damian.
It was definitely not Damian.
“Go to hell,” he gritted out as he stabbed at the button of his private elevator, and he hoped Anais heard that, wherever she was. Lying in a heap on some Hawaiian floor, he hoped—and he told himself that pang he felt at the thought was the thrill of his victory over the woman who had wronged him, not something a whole lot more like shame.
He felt slightly more in control when he got to the ground floor of his building and pushed his way out into the sweltering heat of another Manhattan late-summer morning. He waved off his driver and walked instead, thinking the exercise would clear his head. Something had to, or he thought he might implode.
The child—his son—was only part of it. The truth was, he’d expected Anais to appear on his doorstep within twelve hours or so of that morning-after phone call, and she hadn’t. He didn’t know what to make of that. Or, to be precise, one irrepressible part of his body knew exactly what to make of it now it had tasted her again—it counted this as an unacceptable loss and wanted her even more—while the rest of him was as close to confused as he’d been in years.
Not confused, exactly, he corrected himself as he strode down Central Park West toward the ICE headquarters farther south. He was only dimly aware that the other pedestrians cleared the way before him, which probably meant he was scowling ferociously. But he refused to call it confusion, this heavy, spiked thing in him. It was anger. It was self-righteous indignation, and he’d earned it, by God. It had nothing at all to do with the bright images of their night together that coursed through his head and made him worry he might embarrass himself in the middle of corporate meetings. Nothing to do with that at all.
It came down to one simple point, he told himself as he walked toward his office. If it was all right for Anais to raise their child without him, well, then, that must mean it was all right for him to do the same thing.
Even if the child in question appeared to be the spawn of the devil on an extended sugar high.
His phone kept buzzing in his pocket but he ignored it. It was either a member of his family or of his staff. The earrings Giovanni had demanded he find were the lesser of the two priceless items Dario had brought back from Hawaii, and he kept forgetting he needed to get them out to the Hamptons and into his grandfather’s hands. He made a mental note—because delivering the earrings would stop the calls at least.
And the office could damn well wait until he got in. He’d only fire everyone who crossed his line of sight in his current mood, and more than that, he’d probably enjoy it a lot more than was good for anyone involved. He kept walking. Slowly, surely, the more blocks he covered the more New York worked its usual urban magic on him, the rhythm of the city getting into his blood the way it always did. One block, then another, and he felt the cloud of it all shift, then begin to lift. He was almost feeling back to his normal self when he stopped at a newsstand outside his office building for the paper.
For the first time since he’d turned his back on a stunning tropical view to find his past standing in front of him in a long black dress, Dario felt pretty good.
Until, that was, he saw his own name splashed across the tabloids. Bold and unmistakable.
For a moment he didn’t move. He couldn’t, no matter how the man behind the counter glared at him and the people behind him muttered. He stared at the obnoxious headlines in sheer disbelief, as if that might make sense of them.
It didn’t.
Di Sione in Bitter Custody Battle with Secret Wife—“He Wanted Nothing to Do with Me or My Baby Until Now!”
“He Left Me Years Ago to Make His Fortune, but Now He’s Stolen My Baby,” Cries Abandoned Anais!
Is ICE’S Front Man Cold Enough to Kidnap His Own Child?
And there was Anais’s face, treacherous and tearstained, as if she’d camped out in front of the paparazzi giving interviews. It occurred to him that she must have done exactly that. She was front and center on the three largest tabloid papers, her supposedly heartbroken photos side by side with the harshest-looking pictures Dario had ever seen of himself. He couldn’t imagine where they’d even found such photographs. He looked like a serial killer.
His stockholders were unlikely to find any of this particularly delightful.
Gritting his teeth, Dario pulled out his still-buzzing phone. Marnie, repeatedly, with a series of 911/SOS texts besides. His lawyers, every fifteen minutes to the second. Numbers he assumed were the usual carrion crows of the so-called press, looking for his response or his reaction, as ever. Some of his usually hands-off siblings, no doubt almost as astonished to discover they had a previously unknown nephew as he’d been to find out he had a son. And his grandfather, who surely deserved better at his advanced age than to see another one of his descendants splashed all over the papers in yet another scandal.
He didn’t return any of the calls.
He stalked into the cavernous entry hall of his building and stood stonily in the elevator as everyone else in it pretended not to stare at him, and he wasn’t at all surprised to find Marnie waiting for him when he arrived at his floor.
“I’m so sorry,” she began the moment he stepped out of the elevator car, which was never good. “I assume you know about the tabloid situation?” He only glared at her. “Of course you do.”
“I’ll want a copy of each paper that ran this story and the direct number of its managing editor within the hour,” he bit out.
“Of course, but—”
Dario didn’t wait to hear but what. He started moving toward his office in the far corner of the otherwise open, wood-and-steel space, Marnie scurrying along beside him.
“Get Legal on it. I’m not afraid to take every last one of them to court for publishing this crap.”
“Yes,” Marnie said, “I will, but really—”
He raked a hand through his hair and unclenched his teeth. Or tried, anyway. “Do we know if the stock has taken a hit? Has it gone that far?”
“Mr. Di Sione, I’m sorry, but she’s here.” Marnie took a deep breath when he scowled at her, but then pushed on, confirming that this unpleasant day really had gone from frying pan to fire, just like that. “Your—Mrs.—Anais is here. In the conference room, waiting for you. Right now.”
