Читать книгу The Billionaires Collection - Оливия Гейтс - Страница 71

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ANAIS DIDN’T KNOW what she expected Dario to do. But it wasn’t what he did, which was walk inside as if he’d never had any doubt she’d let him in eventually and then look around, as if searching for something.

“Do you have a fireplace?” he asked.

She scowled at him. It was lowering to realize she’d expected fervent declarations, or at least a discussion of some kind, while he apparently wanted...something else entirely. Whatever that was.

“We have a little fire pit out back,” she said. “Damian likes to roast marshmallows every now and again.”

He strode past her and she found herself following, then watching in some mix of astonishment and bemusement as he set about building a fire in the hollowed-out center of the table that claimed pride of place on her small patio. It had been an indulgence, that odd little table with the built-in fire pit in its center, but she’d had some of her favorite evenings here with Damian. She had no idea why Dario’s being here now made her feel as if she ought to apologize for that.

“Wait here,” he said when he got the fire going.

And the crazy thing was, she did as he asked. She waited. She told herself she was simply standing there, waiting to see what would happen next, but it was nothing so passive. She was terrified. She was exhilarated.

Maybe she was paralyzed.

She was too many things at once and she had no idea how she could possibly survive this. Whatever this was. She’d lost Dario too many times already. How much of her was left? How could she afford to risk it again?

But she knew, standing there with her eyes on the flames as they leaped against the dark, that this had nothing to do with Damian. People all over the world shared the custody of their children, and the great majority of those children were just fine.

This was about her. This was about the two of them, Anais and Dario. This was about six years ago, and this was about New York, and she didn’t know if she had it in her to survive this.

Dario came back out on the porch, holding a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. He moved around to the opposite side of the table from where Anais was standing, and he met her gaze over the dancing flames of the fire between them.

“My father was a ruined man,” he said.

He tilted the sheaf of papers he held so she could see them, and Anais caught her breath. It was the divorce papers. He’d brought them here.

Dario peeled the first page off, held it aloft, then fed it to the flames. “He was addicted to everything. You know this. He and my mother were as raucous and wild as yours were furious and brooding. I don’t know that they ever loved anything. Not each other, not us.” He watched her as he added another page to the fire. “After they died, my grandfather took us in, but he was not precisely a warm man. As he grew older, the stories he told were affectionate, interesting and never about us. They were always of other places, lost friends, misplaced trinkets. He was always somewhere else, even when he was in the same room.”

“You don’t have to tell me this,” she whispered, surprised to find she’d shifted to hold herself at some point, her arms wrapped around her middle. “I know your family story.”

“All I had was Dante,” Dario said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “He was my twin, my brother, my best friend. Truly, the first person I ever loved. I would have done anything for him. I did. And there were things that came between us before you, cracks in our relationship, but no one else I loved.”

That word. Loved. She realized he’d never told her he loved her. She’d accepted that she’d loved him back then, but she’d never have dared to say so. That wasn’t their agreement. That broke all the rules. Hearing that word in his mouth now made something inside her flutter. As if, were she not very careful, it might spread out its wings and start to fly away.

“And then you,” Dario said quietly, as if he knew. “I looked up, and there you were, and nothing was ever the same after that.”

Anais held herself tighter, all of her attention—all of herself—focused squarely on Dario, just there on the other side of the small fire, burning page after page of those awful papers as he spoke.

“I spent some time with Dante the other day,” he told her.

There was no holding back those wings inside her then. They unfurled. They started to beat. And something inside her soared.

“Then you know.” She felt the wetness on her face, but did nothing to stop the tears. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t look away from him. “You know I never betrayed you. I didn’t. He didn’t.”

“No,” Dario agreed, and there was sheer torment in his voice, his eyes. “I betrayed you. I was so ready to believe the worst. I was so lost back then, stressed out and overwhelmed, and maybe I wanted a terrible fight so I could control something, anything that was happening to me. I walked away from the only two people I’ve ever loved. I told myself cutting you both off was a victory, that it was an act of strength in the face of what you’d done to me. But I understand now it was the worst kind of cowardice.”

“Dario...” she whispered.

“Dante and I were twin brothers, the two of us against the world. We had our own language, our own universe. I never learned how to work at things. I never had to learn. I was raised by a man who ignored the present all around him, the better to drift off into the past. And my parents dealt with their problems by courting oblivion by any means necessary. Up their noses, down their throats, whatever worked.”

He threw another set of pages on the fire and the breeze blew the smoke in her face, sharp and rough at once. Anais didn’t turn away.

“My parents were no better,” she told him. “They taught me I deserved cruelty. That I was worth nothing.”

“I know,” Dario gritted out. “And I will never forgive myself for sending you the same message, all because I was too much of a coward to tell you the truth. I didn’t marry you because it was good business. I didn’t do it out of the goodness of my heart, because you needed immigration help or because I thought an in-house lawyer would be a great idea. I married you because I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, and it scared the hell out of me.”

Anais couldn’t see then. Tears streamed down her face, mixing with the fire and the smoke and the thick Hawaiian night. Somehow forming a kind of paste that wrapped itself around her broken heart and made it feel whole again.

Making her imagine. Making her hope.

“I knew Damian was mine the moment I saw that photograph,” Dario continued, his voice rougher than before, his gestures jerkier as he kept throwing page after page into the fire. “But more than that, I knew you. I knew you’d never throw it in my face like that if there’d ever been the slightest bit of doubt. I didn’t want to know these things. I pretended I didn’t know them. But I did.”

He held up the last page, with both of their signatures, both bold scrawls of blue. He waited while she wiped at her eyes, her face. He waited until she met his gaze again.

“Anais,” he said, “I love you. I’ve never loved another woman and I never will. I don’t want to pretend anymore.”

Then he set their divorce on fire. He held the paper for another moment, then let it go.

And then there was nothing but flames, and smoke, and love.

Their twisted, stubborn, fierce love that nothing had managed to destroy. Not betrayal. Not distance. Not her own better judgment. Not his vast wealth and ability to pretend she didn’t exist. Nothing.

Here they still were, all these years later. No matter who walked away, the other one always opened the door. Eventually.

“Listen to me,” he said urgently.

He moved around the table then to take her shoulders in his hands, as if he thought she planned to reject him yet again. When the truth was, she didn’t know what she planned to do.

Don’t you? a voice inside of her asked.

“I know this is about trust,” he said, his hands so warm against her, sending heat spiraling down into her flesh. “And I know you have no reason to trust me. I can’t make you trust me or promise you I won’t let you down in the future. I can only tell you that I’m not the same man I was six years ago, or even a month ago. You changed me.” His hands moved to her upper arms, drawing her closer to him. “If you give me the chance, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to prove myself to you. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

She couldn’t speak. She could only gaze up at him, almost as if she didn’t believe this was happening.

“I love you,” he said, and then he said it again, as if to make sure there could be no mistake. “And I love Damian. I want us to have the family we deserve, and I want to give him the family you and I never had. I want the whole package, Anais, if you’ll let me. If you’ll try.”

And life came down to leaps of faith. Running for the edge and jumping out into nothing, hoping something would come to break the fall before landing. Sometimes it did. Other times it didn’t, and that was a different lesson altogether. But no matter how many times she’d landed on her face, with Dario in particular, there was something that made Anais want to jump all over again.

Because even if she fell, the falling would be worth it.

She had to believe it.

There was a reason she hadn’t moved on. There was a reason she’d built a safe little life here, where she could pretend to be getting on with things when all she’d really been doing was waiting. There was a reason she’d never made a very good glacier. She’d made sure Damian loved his father before he’d ever met him. She’d been paving the way back to Dario since she’d left New York. How had she never realized it?

“There are no guarantees,” he told her, his hands tightening where he held her. “But I can promise you this. I’ll always come back to you. You’ll always be my home. I hope I’ll never give you reason to doubt that again.”

She swayed closer to him. She lifted her hands to cup his face, reveling in the scratch of his unshaven jaw against her palms. She gazed into the eyes of the only man she’d ever loved, just yards away from where the perfect little boy they’d made together slept soundly. Maybe there were more perfect things than this, than him, but not for her.

Anais had only and ever been destined to be right here.

“I love you,” she whispered, and she watched that go through him like a wave. “I’ve always loved you.” She went up on her toes and she wrapped her arms around his neck, getting her mouth so close to his she could almost taste him. “And we’ll try together, Dario. Again and again and again. Until we get it right.”

And then she started off their future with the perfect kiss, right there beneath the dark Hawaiian sky, with nothing left between them but love.

At last.

* * *

Love was the easy part, Dario thought a year later, as he stood outside that same villa at the luxury resort in Wailea and gazed at the beautiful woman who was not only his wife but the true light of his whole world.

Trust took time.

There were no boxes in this life they’d built together, day by day. There was a great deal more laughter. There were perfect nights and stolen moments they found when they could. They’d learned to split their time between New York and Hawaii. They’d learned to talk more and walk away less.

They taught each other how to try, every day. Sometimes they failed. More often, they got there. Wherever they were going, they got there. Together.

Today, Damian stood between them, all three of them with their bare feet in the sand of the private beach. They’d recited a few vows, though their child had declared that “weird.”

“It’s called renewing our vows,” Dario told him.

“Do all married people do that?” Damian asked.

“Only the lucky ones,” Anais told him, her dark eyes warm on Dario’s.

Damian seemed to accept that, grown-up six-year-old that he was, or perhaps his focus was on other things.

“I thought you said there was going to be a present.” He grinned angelically when both his parents frowned at him. “I like presents.”

“Holy terror,” Dario mouthed to Anais.

Her mouth twitched as she ran her hand over Damian’s head.

“What have you always said you wanted more than anything in the world?” she asked him.

“A brother,” Damian replied instantly, and when she smiled, he whooped. Then took off to run wild circles up and down the small beach, shouting out his excitement to the surf.

“I hope you’re ready for another one,” Anais murmured, wrapping her arms around Dario and tilting her head back to gaze up at him.

“I’ve never been more ready,” he promised her gruffly. “Trust me.”

And this time, when she gave birth to his son six months later, he was right there beside her. And the very first thing little Didier ever saw.

It got louder and it got messier, and the truth was, Dario loved it. He’d had no idea that he could love so much and so many. His brother was back in his life where he belonged, and better this time, since Dario appreciated what they shared—their twin bond—in a way he never had before. He’d had no idea how much he’d craved the kind of family bonds and deep intimacy he’d thought he’d wanted nothing to do with.

“I have something to tell you,” Anais said a couple of years later.

They’d come to Maui for Damian’s school vacation, and were sitting out on the lanai of the house where they’d met for the first time six years into their marriage, the house Dario had bought from the Fuginawa estate after the old man had passed on. The rolling hills of the Kaupo countryside gleamed beneath the stars and, far below, he still thought he could hear the sea.

“Because all good conversations start exactly like that,” Dario murmured, pushing his laptop aside and closing it. Focusing on Anais. He didn’t like the way she stood there, almost mimicking the same positions they’d taken all those years ago, so he hauled her into his lap and got his mouth on her neck.

The same fire roared between them. It always had. It always would.

A wave of goose bumps washed over her, and she shivered in his arms, and only the presence of his children in this house somewhere kept him from pulling up that loose dress she wore and making them both a whole lot happier, right here.

“Remember how I told you I didn’t feel well?” she asked, angling her head to one side to give him better access.

“I do.” He pushed the silk of her hair aside and trailed heat along the line of her neck. “Remember how I told you my theory and you assured me you couldn’t possibly be pregnant?”

She didn’t reply and that old fear gripped him—that he’d ruin this again, that he’d ruined her irreparably. That she still didn’t trust him to be there for her and never would.

“I can’t think of anything better than another baby with you,” he told her gruffly. He’d never meant anything more. “Another member of this family. Our family. It would be a gift.”

And Anais laughed. She tipped back her head to look him in the eye and he knew then. She wasn’t afraid of telling him this news, she wasn’t worried about their future—she was teasing him. She trusted him.

She trusted him.

He couldn’t think of a better gift than that.

“Twins,” she said, her dark eyes laughing at him. “And get ready, Dare. They’re girls.”

He couldn’t think of a better gift except that, he amended as he covered Anais’s mouth with his, love and laughter and that same old hunger underneath, making it all sing.

Except that.

* * * * *