Книга - The Return Of The Di Sione Wife

The Return Of The Di Sione Wife
CAITLIN CREWS


“I’ll have the earrings now. Or are there more hoops to jump through?”Dario Di Sione should be feeling triumphant, he’s about to fulfil his grandfather’s wish and retrieve the precious earrings, but all he feels is fury. The beautiful lawyer handling the sale is the woman who betrayed him six years ago… his wife!But discovering Anais has kept their child a secret, makes Dario determined to be the father he never had. But Anais’s return to his side casts a new light on past events, and now it’s not the child he just wants to claim!







“I’ll have the earrings now. Or are there more hoops to jump through?”

Dario Di Sione should be feeling triumphant—he’s about to fulfill his grandfather’s wish and retrieve the precious earrings, but all he feels is fury. The beautiful lawyer handling the sale is the woman who betrayed him six years ago…his wife!

Discovering Anais has kept their child a secret makes Dario determined to be the father he never had. But Anais’s return to his side casts a new light on past events, and now it’s not just the child he wants to claim!

Book 3 of The Billionaire’s Legacy


It was the same madness he remembered. That same wild burn that sizzled through Dario, lighting him up and making him crazy, eating him alive. Anais still tasted sweet and perfect, the way she always had, as if no time at all had passed.

Dario moved closer, slid his hands into the thick fall of her hair, then tugged her mouth into a better angle beneath his and kissed her deeper, harder. As if he could block out not only what she’d told him, all the accusations she’d thrown at him, but the six years since he’d touched anyone like this or let himself be touched in return. He hadn’t wanted anyone near him. He hadn’t wanted anything that resembled intimacy with anyone.

And yet here, now, with that breeze still dancing all over him and Anais’s perfect mouth hot and demanding beneath his, he couldn’t seem to remember why that was.


The Billionaire’s Legacy (#ulink_32e014a3-1dab-54c7-9e26-c029b581ad05)

A search for truth and the promise of passion!

For nearly sixty years Italian billionaire Giovanni Di Sione has kept a shocking secret. Now, nearing the end of his days, he wants his grandchildren to know their true heritage.

He sends them each on a journey to find his ‘Lost Mistresses’—a collection of love tokens and the only remaining evidence of his lost identity his lost history...his lost love.

With each item collected the Di Sione siblings take one step closer to the truth...and embark on a passionate journey that none could have expected!

Find out what happens in

The Billionaire’s Legacy

Di Sione’s Innocent Conquest by Carol Marinelli

The Di Sione Secret Baby by Maya Blake

To Blackmail a Di Sione by Rachael Thomas

The Return of the Di Sione Wife by Caitlin Crews

Di Sione’s Virgin Mistress by Sharon Kendrick

A Di Sione for the Greek’s Pleasure by Kate Hewitt

A Deal for the Di Sione Ring by Jennifer Hayward

The Last Di Sione Claims His Prize by Maisey Yates

Collect all 8 volumes!


The Return of the Di Sione Wife

Caitlin Crews






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://www.caitlincrews.com).

Books by Caitlin Crews

Mills & Boon Modern Romance

Castelli’s Virgin Widow

At the Count’s Bidding

Undone by the Sultan’s Touch

Not Just the Boss’s Plaything

A Devil in Disguise

In Defiance of Duty

The Replacement Wife

Princess from the Past

Wedlocked!

Expecting a Royal Scandal

The Chatsfield

Greek’s Last Redemption

Scandalous Sheikh Brides

Protecting the Desert Heir

Traded to the Desert Sheikh

Vows of Convenience

His for a Price

His for Revenge

Royal and Ruthless

A Royal Without Rules

Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk) for more titles.


Contents

Cover (#u35a16b89-c701-5cdc-a998-a57cedc97d58)

Back Cover Text (#uf47ca4d8-b292-5fcd-9f6d-95bbda66814e)

Introduction (#u1c83c3eb-7015-55af-b8cd-a0ec6f7bd4ef)

The Billionaire’s Legacy (#ulink_f9e54b8e-4ea2-5deb-b60b-03e039dea364)

Title Page (#ucd61bd22-73f8-5457-818a-9e0f8652f5ab)

About the Author (#u58d0b5e0-252e-5a66-b9f6-77ecabcbe2b5)

CHAPTER ONE (#u246a3cfc-16b9-5cda-952a-134542a34688)

CHAPTER TWO (#u8694a184-b2e8-5257-8c90-743d7b17e012)

CHAPTER THREE (#u82adb327-d2e0-5cc0-ace2-67722621adde)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_69250c62-c968-5002-8685-db8e566c98c8)

THE HAWAIIAN ISLAND of Maui was tropical and lush, exactly as advertised, which irritated Dario Di Sione the moment he stepped off his private jet and into its unwelcome embrace.

The press of the island humidity felt intimate, and Dario didn’t do intimate. The thick air insinuated itself against his skin, making the faded jeans and expertly tailored jacket he’d worn on the long flight from New York City feel limp and too close as he strode across the tiny tarmac toward the Range Rover that waited there for him, as ordered. A gentle breeze carried the exotic scent of the island—deep green things in exultant growth and the rougher, deeper smell of sugarcane production from all those fields they’d flown over on the way in to land—playing across his face like so many unsolicited kisses.

It only annoyed him more. He was trying to conduct a business conversation, not indulge in sensory overload on a damned tarmac.

“Is the car waiting as promised?” his secretary, Marnie, asked through the top-of-the-line, brand-new smartphone he had clamped to his ear. He was a proud user of his company’s highly coveted products. “I was very clear about the need for a sports utility vehicle. The road out to the Fuginawa estate is very rough, apparently, and—”

“I can handle rough road,” Dario told her, trying to rein in his impatience. He didn’t want to be here so soon after the major product launch his company had pulled off this past weekend—or at all, for that matter—but that wasn’t his secretary’s fault. It was his. He should never have allowed an old man’s sentimentality to win out over his own hard-won rationality. This was the result. He was halfway across the planet—when he should have been in his office—surrounded by lazy palm trees and exotic smells, all to appease an elderly man’s whims. “The Range Rover is fine. And here, as ordered.”

Marnie moved on to the long list of calls and messages she’d fielded during his first absence from the office he’d actually been sleeping in these past few months, a flashback to the kind of stress he’d been under six years ago when he’d first started with ICE. Dario scowled as another sultry breeze licked over him. He didn’t like flashbacks and he didn’t like that breeze, either. It was fragrant and sensuous at once, moving through his hair like a caress and getting beneath the fine linen of the button-down shirt he wore. Like a woman’s fingers trailing down the length of his abdomen, suggestive and mischievous.

He rolled his eyes at his own flight of fancy, then scraped a hand over his unshaven jaw, aware that he looked a little more disreputable than the CEO of a major computer company, currently the darling of the tech industry and the smitten public, probably should. And he was about as interested in the intimate touch of Hawaiian breezes as he was in being here in the first place. Not at all.

This entire trip was a waste of his time, he thought as Marnie kept talking her way through the pile of messages and calls that needed his personal attention immediately, if not sooner. He ought to be back in his office in Manhattan today, handling all of this in person. Instead, he’d flown some ten hours down his grandfather’s memory lane to appease the very worst kind of nostalgic sentiment. Giovanni had sold off his collection of beloved trinkets years ago and had talked about them endlessly throughout Dario’s youth. Now, ninety-eight years old and facing down his impending death with his usual sense of theater and consequence, the old man wanted them all back.

They remind me of the love of my life, his grandfather had claimed when he’d asked Dario to buy back these earrings for him. From a reclusive Japanese billionaire on his remote estate in Hawaii.

In person.

Dario actually snorted at the memory as he threw his bag into the back of the Range Rover and shrugged out of his jacket, too. He didn’t know how he’d managed not to do exactly that to his grandfather’s face when the old man had summoned Dario to his side earlier this month and made his outlandish request. But who refused an old man what he’d claimed was his dying wish?

“Email me those specs, Marnie,” he told his secretary before she could ask what that noise was. Bless that woman. She was infinitely more dependable than anyone else he knew, including every last member of his overly dramatic and periodically demanding family. He made a mental note to give her another richly deserved bonus, simply because she was not one of the pain-in-the-ass Di Siones he shared his blood with, if little else. “Give me a minute to switch to hands-free and then start rolling the calls.”

He didn’t wait for Marnie to respond. He rolled his sleeves up, hoping that would cut some of the tropical humidity. He dug out his earpiece and activated it, then climbed behind the wheel of the sparkling, brand-new Range Rover. He started it up, punching the address he needed into the GPS and heading out of the small airport as the first call came in.

But even as he listened to one of his vice presidents lay out a potentially tricky situation with the brand-new phone they’d just released over the weekend, he was thinking about his grandfather and the so-called lost love of his very long life.

Lost loves, in Dario’s experience, were lost for a damned good reason. Usually because they hadn’t been worthy of all that much love in the first place.

Or possibly—and this was his pet theory— because love was a great big lie people told themselves and everyone else to justify their own terrible and usually painfully dramatic behavior.

And lost loves certainly didn’t need to be found again, once the truth about them came out the way it always did. Better to leave the past where it lay, so it could fester on its own without infecting the present, or so Dario had always believed.

It had been difficult not to share his thoughts on that with his grandfather when Giovanni had told Dario that same old mushy story about love and secrets and blah-blah-blah. He’d shared it in one form or another all his life. Then he’d sent Dario off on this idiotic errand that anyone—literally, anyone, including the overzealous recent college grads working in Dario’s mailroom—could have performed. But then, Dario was used to biting his tongue when it came to the foolish emotions other people liked to pretend were perfectly reasonable. Reasonable and rational and more than that, necessary. Whatever.

There was never any point in saying so, he knew. Quite apart from the fact that Dario wasn’t about to quarrel with the elderly grandfather who’d taken him and his siblings in after his parents had died, he’d also come to realize that the more he shared his opinion on subjects like these, the more people lined up to tell him how cynical he was. As if that was an indictment of his character, or should allow them to dismiss his opinion out of hand. Or as if it should be a matter of deep concern to him, that weird fetish he had for realism.

He’d stopped bothering years ago. Six years ago, in fact.

And the truth was, he cared so little either way that it was easier to simply do as he was asked—in this case, fly across the planet to buy back a pair of earrings that could easily have been sent by courier had there not been so much sentiment attached to them, apparently—than to explain why he thought the entire enterprise was ridiculous. He was vaguely aware that the old man had been sending all the Di Sione siblings off on these pointless quests for what he called his Lost Mistresses, but Dario had been far too busy with this latest product launch to pay that much attention to round nine hundred and thirty-seven of the Di Sione family melodrama.

Surely they’d had a lifetime’s worth already. He’d been sick of it at eight years old, when his hedonistic and undependable parents had died in a horrible, utterly avoidable car crash and the paparazzi had descended upon them all like a swarm. His feelings on the subject hadn’t improved much since.

There was a part of Dario—not hidden very deeply, he could admit—that would have been perfectly happy if he never heard from another one of his relatives again. A part of him that expected that, once the old man passed on, that would happen naturally enough. He was looking forward to it. He would retreat into his work, happily, the way he always did. God knew he had enough to do running ICE, the world’s premier computer company if he said so himself, a position he’d won with his own hard work and determination. The way he’d won everything else that was his—everything that had lasted.

Besides, the only member of his family he’d ever truly loved had been his identical twin brother, Dante. Until Dante had smashed that into so much dust and regret, too. He couldn’t deny that his brother’s betrayal had hurt him—but it had also taught him that he was much better off surrounding himself with people he paid for their loyalty, not people who might or might not give it as it suited them.

Dario really didn’t want to think about his twin. That was the trouble with any kind of involvement with his family. It led to precisely the thoughts he spent most of his time going out of his way to avoid.

He’d assumed that if he performed this task for his grandfather the way the rest of his brothers and sisters were supposedly doing, they could all stop acting like any of what had happened six years ago and since was Dario’s fault. Or as if he shared the blame for what had happened in some way, as he’d been the one to walk away from his marriage as well as his relationship with Dante. He hadn’t exactly asked his brother to sleep with his wife during what had been one of the most stressful periods of his life. And he refused to accept that there was something wrong with him that he’d never forgiven either his brother or his wife for that, and never would.

They’d let him twist in the wind, the two of them. They’d let them think the tension between them was dislike, and Dario had believed it, too busy trying to sort out what to do with the company he and Dante had started and whether or not to merge with ICE, which Dario had thought was a good idea while Dante had opposed it. All that mess and tension and stress and sleeplessness to discover that the two of them had been betraying him all along...

Here and now, in Hawaii of all places, Dario thought the only thing wrong with him was that he was still paying any kind of attention to anything a member of the Di Sione family said, did or thought. That needed to stop.

“It will stop,” he promised himself between calls, his voice a rasp in the Range Rover’s quiet interior. “As soon as you hand the old man his damned earrings, you’re done.”

He drove through the business district of Kahului, then followed the calm-voiced GPS’s directions away from the bustle of big-box stores and chain restaurants clustered near the airport toward the center of the island. He soon found himself on a highway that wound its way through the lush sugarcane fields, then up into the hills, where views even he had to admit were spectacular spread out before him. The Pacific Ocean gleamed in the summer sun with another island stretched out low in the distant water, green and gold. The old volcanic West Maui Mountains were covered in windmills, palm trees lined the highway and exuberant flowers in shockingly bright colors were everywhere, from the shrubs to the trees to the hedges.

Dario didn’t take vacations, but if he did, he supposed this would be a decent place for it. As he waited for another call to connect, he tried to imagine what that would even look like. He’d never lounged anywhere in his life, poolside or beachside or otherwise. The last almost-vacation he’d taken had been an extreme sports weekend with one of Silicon Valley’s innumerable millionaire genius types. But since he’d landed that particular genius and his cutting edge technology after they’d skydived down to a killer trail run in Colorado, en route to some class-V rapids, he didn’t think that counted.

Even so, he certainly hadn’t been lounging around that weekend out west, contemplating the breeze. He’d always worked. Maybe if he hadn’t been working so hard six years ago, he’d have seen what was coming. Maybe he’d have seen the warning signs between his brother and his wife for what they were instead of naively assuming that neither one of them would do such a thing to him...

Why are you dwelling on this old, boring nonsense? He shook his head to clear it.

The road headed out along rocky cliffs that flirted with the ocean, then turned to packed red dirt, and Dario slowed down. He was listening to one of his engineers when his cell signal dropped out, and he sighed, scowling at the GPS display that showed he still had quite a distance left to go.

He didn’t understand why anyone would live out here, this far from the rest of the world. He knew the current owner of his grandfather’s earrings was the kind of wealthy man as well known for his eccentricities as the family fortune he’d augmented considerably throughout his lifetime, but this was taking things a little bit far. Surely a paved road wouldn’t have gone amiss.

But then, Dario loved New York City. He liked to be where everything was happening, all the time. Where he could walk down streets as busy at 4:00 a.m. as they were at four in the afternoon. Where he could be anonymous on the street and then recognized instantly when he walked into a favorite restaurant. He didn’t understand all this lonely quiet, no matter how pretty it was out here. He didn’t get what it was for. It appeared to allow entirely too much room for maudlin contemplation.

Then again, his idea of relaxing was closing a new deal and bolstering his stock portfolio. Things he was very, very good at.

Dario passed a tiny little country store that was the only sign of civilization he’d seen in miles and continued down the dusty, winding, rutted track at the base of the looming mountain. There were old, intricate stone walls and stretches of green pasture to his left, climbing up the steep side of the mountain, and wilder-looking fields to his right that gave way to rocky cliffs each time the road wound its way around again.

He felt as if he was on a different planet.

“Only for you, old man,” he muttered.

But this was the last time Dario planned to extend himself, even for Giovanni. He’d had enough family for one life.

Without any cell service he was left to his own dark thoughts, which Dario preferred to avoid at the best of times—the way he’d been doing for at least the last six years, thank you. He shut off the AC and lowered his windows, letting that same mysterious breeze fill the car. It smelled like sunshine and unfamiliar flowers. It danced over him, distracting him, seeming to fill him up from the inside.

Dario scowled at that nonsense and focused on the rough, decidedly rural landscape all around him instead. It was hard to believe he was in one of the foremost tourist destinations in all the world. This part of Maui was not the luxury-hotel, world-class golfing mecca he’d been led to expect had taken over the whole island—or hell, the entire state of Hawaii. This was all gnarled trees and wild, untamed countryside. He made his way along the foothills of the mountains toward rocky beaches strewn with smooth pebbles and sharp-edged volcanic rock. A small, proud little church drew itself up at the end of the world as if it alone held back the sea, and then Dario was climbing back up into the hills again to skirt this or that rocky, black stone cove.

Right about the time he ran out of patience, he finally found the gleaming entrance that marked his turn inward to the Fuginawa estate. At last. He had a brief discussion with a disembodied guard over the intercom before the imposing iron gates swung open to admit him. This drive was not paved, either, but it was noticeably better tended than the previous road—which was called a highway even while it was made of little more than reddish dirt and grass. The estate’s private lane meandered lazily from the cliff’s edge over the water until it delivered him to a sweeping, landscaped circle behind an impressive house that rambled for what seemed like miles in both directions, commanding a stunning view out over the water and on toward the horizon.

Dario climbed out of the Range Rover, unable to keep himself from taking the kind of deep breath that let perhaps too much of all that dizzy sunshine into his lungs. Fog clung to the mountain above him, draping the hills in ribbons of smoke and navy, the mist seeming to dance a bit as he looked at it. It made it hard to keep hold of his impatience, but still, he managed it.

Pretty wasn’t going to run his company for him, and no matter that the sun felt good on his face after the mad crush of the past few weeks and a long plane ride. He glanced at his watch to see that it had just come noon here, as his secretary had arranged with Fuginawa’s representatives. There was no reason he couldn’t get the damned earrings for his grandfather and get right back on his plane. He could be back in New York by the start of the business day tomorrow. He certainly didn’t have to stay in this odd place any longer than necessary.

Dario raked a hand through his hair and followed the path down toward the impressive, faintly Asian-inspired front door, his own footsteps seeming unduly loud in all the quiet. Even the door itself opened soundlessly as he approached.

He was beckoned inside by a smiling member of staff, who then led him through the graciously appointed house. It was all high ceilings with silent fans to move the air about, and shockingly expensive, highly recognizable art on the walls. The inside spaces blended seamlessly into outside spaces with walls that rolled back to let in the air and light, making the house wide open to the elements in a manner Dario found...reckless. Very nearly disturbing, especially given the priceless paintings on the walls—but what did he care? It wasn’t his art at risk. It was only his time he was wasting here, nothing more. The staff member invited him to sit in one of the outside areas, tucked beneath an overhang wrapped with blooming vines, offering sweeping views out toward the deep blue Pacific Ocean and the winding road he’d just driven up.

It was still so quiet Dario almost thought he could hear the ocean waves crashing into the rocky black shore down below, when he was sure that couldn’t be possible this far up the side of the mountain. He thrust his hands into his pockets. If he’d had to traipse this far off the beaten path into what appeared to be the distant edge of the middle of nowhere, he supposed a view like this made it almost worth it.

Almost.

He heard a step on the stones behind him and turned, itching to get to the actual point of this absurd journey so he could get back to New York as quickly as possible. He wasn’t a hobbit en route to Mount Doom, and no matter if that mountain above him was actually the side of a dormant volcanic crater. He was a very busy man who didn’t have time to waste gazing at the view on the back end of the world—

But then Dario froze.

For a stunned moment he thought he was imagining her.

Because it couldn’t be her.

Inky black hair that fell straight to her shoulders, as sleekly perfect as he remembered it. That lithe body, unmistakably gorgeous in the chic black maxidress she wore that nodded to the tropical climate as it poured all the way down her long, long legs to scrape the ground. And her face. Her face. That perfect oval with her dark eyes tipped up in the corners, her elegant cheekbones and that lush mouth of hers that still had the power to make his whole body tense in uncontrolled, unreasonable, unacceptable reaction.

He stared. He was a grown man, a powerful man by any measure, and he simply stood there and stared—as if she was as much a ghost as that damned Hawaiian wind that was still toying with him. As if she might blow away as easily.

But she didn’t.

“Hello, Dare,” she said with that same self-possessed, infuriating calm of hers he remembered too well, using the name only she had ever called him—the name only she had ever gotten away with calling him.

Only Anais.

His wife.

His treacherous, betraying cheat of a wife, who he’d never planned to lay eyes on again in this lifetime. And who he’d never quite gotten around to divorcing, either, because he’d liked the idea that she had to stay shackled to the man she’d betrayed so hideously six years ago, like he was an albatross wrapped tight around her slim, elegant neck.

Here, now, with her standing right there in front of him like a slap straight from his memory, that seemed less like an unforgivable oversight. And a whole lot more like a terrible mistake.

* * *

Anais Kiyoko had been dreading this moment for six years.

Dreading it, dreaming it. Same difference.

And still, nothing could have prepared her for this. For him. For Dario, her Dario, in the flesh.

Nothing ever had. She’d never seen him coming. Not when she’d met him on an otherwise ordinary winter afternoon, not when he’d turned into a stranger in the middle of their marriage, accused her of the worst betrayal and then left her. Never. Today, Anais thought, she’d take control. She wouldn’t be blindsided by him again.

She just needed to recover from the sucker punch of seeing him again first. She’d assumed she never would.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he growled at her.

That same voice, rich and low, kicked at her, leaving a shower of sparks behind. It was definitely him. She’d expected him, of course, but some part of her hadn’t thought he’d really show after all these years. After the way he’d left things. After all this cruel, deliberate silence.

But it was him. It was really, truly him.

Dario stood there before her on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai, the rolling green pastures of the remote Kaupo district’s countryside behind him, the ocean a bright blue far below, like something straight out of her fantasies. And despite her many fervent prayers over the years, time had not smacked him down the way she would have preferred.

The way she’d prayed it would, more than once.

He was not a troll. He was not disfigured by his own cold, black heart and his dark imaginings the way he richly deserved. He was not stooped with loss or rendered appropriately hideous by the things he’d done.

Quite the opposite.

Unfairly, Dario Di Sione was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life. Still. He exuded that intense, brooding masculinity of his the way other, much less intriguing men smelled of aftershave or cologne. He wore the kind of seemingly casual jeans only very rich, very powerful men could make look like formal wear, and one of those whisper-soft shirts of his that clung to the glorious planes of his chest, the sleeves rolled up to show off his golden skin and the sheer strength of his forearms. She knew that behind the aviator sunglasses he wore, his eyes would still be blue enough to rival the Hawaiian sky all around him, always such a dizzying contrast with the black hair he wore a touch too long and what looked like a day or two’s growth of beard on his perfect jaw.

Damn him.

And damn her for being just as susceptible to him as she’d always been. Despite everything.

“I asked you a question.”

Anais blinked, trying to shove aside her wholly unwanted reaction to him. But her fingers dug into the leather folder she carried, and she didn’t think she was fooling anyone. Least of all herself.

“I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the place,” she said, as if this was a normal business meeting, the kind she carried out as Mr. Fuginawa’s lawyer, his first line of defense and his preferred method of communication with the outside world, all the time. “The road is a little bit tricky.”

Dario didn’t move. And yet she felt as if he’d reached across the distance between them and snatched her up in his fist. She had to force herself to take a breath. To stop holding the last one in as if letting it out might hurt her.

Especially when he slid those sunglasses from his face and focused all that furious blue attention on her.

“Really, Anais?” His voice was as mocking and withering as it was harsh, but she didn’t recoil at the sting of it. She was tougher now. She’d had to be, hadn’t she? “That’s how you want to play this?”

Anais didn’t look away. “Should we pick up the conversation where we left off six years ago, Dare? Is that what you want? The fact you cut me off without a word back then suggests not.”

“Was that a conversation?” His voice took on that same lethal edge she could see in the tense way he held himself, and it made her stomach ache. “I would have chosen an uglier word to describe the scene I walked in on.”

“That’s because your mind is a gutter,” she replied, still trying to keep her voice cool and professional, despite the topic. “But I’m afraid that has nothing to do with me. It never did.”

He laughed. Not the laughter she remembered from when they’d first met, when she’d been a third year at Columbia Law and Dario had been finishing his MBA. The laughter that had made the entire city of Manhattan seem to stand still around him, lost in that rough sound of pure male joy. This was not that. Not even close.

“I don’t care enough to ask you what you mean by that.” He looked around, his gaze as hard as that set to his jaw. “I came here for a pair of earrings, not to play Ghost of Christmas Past games with you. Can you help with that, Anais, or was this whole thing a setup so you could ambush me?”

By some miracle, her jaw didn’t drop at that.

Because she realized he meant what he said. She could read it in every hard, belligerent line of his body and that bright blaze of temper in his gaze.

“You knew this meeting was with me,” she managed to make herself say, though she couldn’t pretend she still sounded calm or in control. “We’ve been emailing for weeks.”

“My secretary has been emailing for weeks,” he corrected her. He shook his head, impatience etched across his features. “I’ve been busy with things that actually matter to me. And don’t flatter yourself, please. If I’d known you were going to be here, I wouldn’t be.”

And his voice was precisely as cutting as she remembered it from that horrible day when he’d walked out of their marriage, and her life, without warning and without a backward glance.

As if no time had passed. As if nothing had changed.

As if he really did think she was the cheating whore she still couldn’t quite believe he’d so easily, so quickly, so utterly accepted she was based on one easily explained and wholly innocent moment with his awful brother. Just as she couldn’t believe he’d never stuck around for that explanation—or even a fight. He’d simply...left.

Which meant all her silly expectations about this meeting today were nothing more than the same foolish dreams she’d nurtured all this time, all the while pretending she’d gotten over him and his shocking betrayal. That maybe he regretted what he’d done. That maybe he’d finally put aside his pride. That maybe he’d come to his senses at last. It was bad enough that she’d entertained such fantasies. It told her all kinds of uncomfortable things about how pathetic she was, how desperate and sad.

But much worse than her own hurt feelings and obviously messed-up heart, it meant that he still had no idea.

He still didn’t know about Damian.

He really had come all the way to this remote corner of Maui for a pair of earrings, not for her.

And certainly not for their son.


CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_46423fba-188c-5371-8b22-3bcd5d0cff12)

“HAVE YOU LAPSED into a coma?” Dario asked, the silk and menace in his voice hitting her like a lash and cutting deep. “Or is this remorse at last?”

And Anais hadn’t entirely realized how much hope she’d allowed herself to feel in the weeks leading up to this meeting with him, after all these years of silence, until now. When he took it all away again.

She should have known better.

“Remorse?” she echoed. She moved farther out onto the lanai, dropping the leather folder on the table between them and ordering her legs to stay steady beneath her when they felt like one of the palm trees being buffeted this way and that by the relentless trade winds. “For what, exactly? Your extended temper tantrum six years ago? I have a lot of feelings about that actually, but remorse isn’t one of them.”

Dario’s mouth moved into a hard, cynical sort of smile that made her stomach clutch. She’d had no idea he could look like that. So etched through with bitterness. She told herself he deserved it, but still. It made her ache.

“It’s good to know you’re as shameless as ever,” he said. “But why change? It got you what you wanted.”

“Yes. How silly of me. You storming off into the ether was exactly what I wanted. It’s like you read my mind.”

“My mistake, of course. Maybe you were angling for a threesome? You must have read too many tabloids. You should have asked, Anais. I would have told you that I don’t like sharing anything with anyone, least of all my twin brother.”

“I see you’re still hell-bent on being as insulting and disgusting as you were back then. What a happy reunion this is. I’m beginning to understand why it took six years.”

After the way he’d treated her, after the way he’d acted as if she’d never existed in the first place—refusing all contact with her and barring her from entering his office or apartment building as if she was some kind of deranged stalker—she couldn’t believe that, deep down, she still expected Dario to be a better man. Even now, some part of her was waiting for him to crack. To see reason. To stop this madness at last.

Anais told herself it was because of Damian. She wanted her son’s father to be a good man at heart, even if that took some excavating, like any mother would. She wanted his father to be the man she’d once believed he was, when she’d been foolish enough to fall in love with him. Because that would be a good thing for her child, not for herself.

Or not entirely for yourself, whispered that voice inside of her that knew exactly how selfish she was.

But life wasn’t about what she wanted. She’d learned that as a child in Paris, the pawn of two bitter parents who had never wanted her and had only wanted each other for that one night that had created her and thrown them together, like it or not. Life was about what she had. Like her cruel, flamboyantly unfaithful French father and the embittered Japanese mother whose name she’d taken when she’d turned eighteen because she’d been the lesser of two evils, those two things had never matched. It was high time she stopped imagining they ever would.

She tapped her fingers on the leather folder. “These are the contracts. Please sign them. Once you do, the earrings are yours, as promised.”

“Are we back to doing business, Anais?” he asked softly. She didn’t mistake that tone of his. She could hear the steel beneath it. “I might get whiplash.”

She allowed herself a careless shrug and wished she actually felt even slightly at her ease. “Business appears to be the only thing you know how to do.”

“Unlike all the things you know how to do, I imagine. Or should I ask my brother about that? He was always the more adventurous one.”

Anais would never know how she managed to keep from screaming out loud at that—at the unfairness and the cruelty of it, from a man whom she’d once believed would never, ever, say the kinds of things to her that her parents had hurled at each other all her life. She felt a vicious red haze slam down over her, holding her tight, like a terrible fist. But somehow, she beat it back. She thought of Damian, her beautiful little boy, and stayed on her feet. She managed, somehow, to keep herself from screaming like some kind of banshee at this man she couldn’t believe she’d married.

Not that he didn’t deserve a little bit of banshee, the way he’d acted back then and was still acting now. Still, that didn’t mean she had to give him the satisfaction of acting insane.

She met his condemning gaze with her own.

“I have nothing to be ashamed about,” she told him. Icily. Distinctly. “I did not sleep with your brother. I don’t care if Dante has spent the past six years telling you otherwise. I didn’t. He’s a liar.”

“I wouldn’t know what he is,” Dario said with cool nonchalance. “I haven’t spoken to him since I found him with you in my bedroom. Don’t tell me you two lovebirds didn’t make it. How heartbreaking for you both.”

That shocked Anais in a way she’d have thought was impossible. The Di Sione twins she’d known had been inseparable. Until you, she reminded herself. Dante hated you on sight. She tried to blink it away.

“The fact you thought anything happened between us—and still think it, all these years later, to such an extent that you feel justified in hurling insults at me—says more about what a vile, dark little man you are than it could ever say about me.”

Dario seemed almost amused by that. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be comfortable there in your fantasy world. But the truth is the truth, no matter how many lies you pile on top of it. So many it looks like you’ve convinced yourself. Congratulations on that, but you haven’t convinced me.”

If he’d been thrown by her appearance here, he was over it now, clearly. This was the Dario she remembered. The stranger who had walked into their home that awful day and had inhabited the body of the husband she’d adored a whole lot more than she should have. This cruel, mocking man who looked at her and saw nothing but the worthless creature her parents had always told her she was. As if that twisted truth had merely been lurking there inside of her, waiting to come out, and after their wild year together, he’d finally seen what they’d always seen when they’d looked at her.

Dario had done a great many unforgivable things, many far worse than how he’d looked at her that day, but that had been the first. The shot over the bow that had changed everything. Anais found she still wasn’t over it.

At all.

His lips thinned as he looked at her and he reached for the leather folder, pulling out the stack of documents. Then he acted as if she was another piece of furniture. He ignored her. He pulled out a chair and sat down, then proceeded to read through the dense, legal pages as if he was looking for further evidence of her trickery.

Anais thought sitting down with him at the table as if this was a normal, civilized meeting might actually break something inside of her, so she stood where she was instead. Calmly. Easily. On the outside, anyway. Letting the breeze toy with the ends of her hair as she stared out at the water and pretended she was somewhere else. Or that he was somebody else. Or that his being here didn’t present her with a huge ethical dilemma.

She didn’t want to tell him.

He didn’t deserve to know.

What if he turned this cruelty, this viciousness, on his own son?

But even as she thought it, she knew she was trying to rationalize her dilemma away instead of addressing it head-on, the way she should. Because he kept hurting her feelings all these years later, not because she truly believed Dario would ever do anything to hurt a child.

Not telling him now would change everything. She recognized that. Up until today, the fact that Damian didn’t know his father had been entirely Dario’s own fault. He’d made sure Anais couldn’t contact him, and she hadn’t seen how taking out an advertisement in the papers—as her aunt had suggested one night after a few too many of Anais’s tears and rants to the heedless walls—could help her child. By feeding Damian to the hungry tabloids? By making his life a circus? No, thank you. And she’d have eaten a burning hot coal before she’d have called Dante for any help, that manipulative bastard.

Dario had maintained his silence ever since that day back in New York. That wasn’t her fault.

But letting him leave here today no wiser? That would be.

She felt her hands bunch into fists and couldn’t quite make herself smooth them out again, even though she knew he’d see it. He could think what he liked, she told herself stoutly. He would, anyway.

“I have something to tell you,” she said woodenly, forcing the words out past lips that felt like ice and keeping her eyes trained on the sea. The beautiful Hawaiian sea that didn’t care about her troubles. The sea that washed them all away, or seemed to, if she stared at it long enough. The sea that had saved her once and could again, if she let it. Even from this.

Even from him. Again.

“I’m not interested.”

“I don’t really care if you’re interested or not. This might come as a surprise to you, but there are some things in this world that are more important than your feelings of persecution.”

He pushed back in his chair and looked up at her, and because he was Dario, he appeared in no way diminished by the fact that he had to look up to meet her gaze. Or by the fact she was standing over him, wearing three-inch wedges that made her nearly six feet tall. If anything, he appeared even more powerful than he had before.

She’d forgotten that. How easily he dominated whole rooms, whole cities, whole swathes of people, without even trying. How that beat in her like her own traitorous heart.

“I don’t feel persecuted, Anais. I feel lucky.” Dario even smiled, in that same sharp and bitter way that she worried might actually leave scars on both of them. Perhaps it already had. “It wakes me up at night, wondering what my life would be like if I hadn’t caught the two of you when I did. How many more ways would you have tricked me while I was so wrapped up in my work? How much more of a fool would you have made of me right under my nose? What if I’d never caught on?” He shook his head and blew out a breath. “I should thank you for being dumb enough to take my own brother into our bed. It saved me a world of hurt.”

It shouldn’t still cause her pain. None of what he said was a surprise to her. She knew what he thought. What Dante had stood by and let him think. Dario hadn’t bothered to ask her, his wife, to confirm or deny his suspicions. He’d walked into the house, seen Dante buttoning up a shirt in their bedroom and leaped to the worst possible conclusion. He’d believed the worst, instantly, and that was that.

And still, she felt that heaviness deep inside of her, a little too much like shame. As if she’d actually done something to make him think so little of her. As if she could have done something to prevent it. As if, despite everything, the things he’d done to her and the son he didn’t know he had was somehow all her fault.

She didn’t think she’d forgive him for that, either.

“I keep waiting for you to come to your senses, but you’re not going to, are you?” she asked softly. Rhetorically, she was aware. “This is who you are. The Dario Di Sione I met and married was the make-believe version.”

She’d believed in that made-up version, that was the trouble. Why did some part of her still wish that was the real Dario? She should know better by now, surely.

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.” He signed the last page of each set of documents and then shoved the stack of them toward her. “Can I have the earrings now? Or are there more hoops to jump through?”

“No hoops.” She did her part with the documents, slipping them back into the leather folder when she was finished. Then she reached into one of the deep pockets of her dress and pulled out the small jeweler’s box. She cracked it open and set it down on the table between them, watching the way the light danced and gleamed on the precious stones, perfect white diamonds and gorgeous emeralds. “These are the earrings. Note the size of the emeralds and the delicate craftsmanship of the diamonds. They’re extraordinary and unusual, and Mr. Fuginawa would not have let them go to anyone save your grandfather. He conveys his deepest respects, of course.”

“They’re earrings,” Dario said bluntly. He snapped the box shut as he surged to his feet, then shoved it in his front pocket. “Whatever tiny bit of sentimentality I had was beaten out of me six years ago, Anais. Old earrings are just old earrings. They don’t matter to anyone in the long run. My grandfather is a foolish old man who should be using his money to make his last days easier, not for this kind of nonsense.”

Anais straightened her shoulders and told herself to spit it out. To get it over with. To do what was right because it was right.

Because none of this was about her. It was about Damian.

“I’m delighted to hear you’re so unsentimental,” she said, and her only possible defense was to keep her voice as ice cold as she could. To act like she was a glacier, the way she had as a girl, because feigned, icy indifference was the only way she could get her parents to leave her out of their daily target practice. So that was exactly what she did now. It was almost alarming, how easy it was to slip back into old patterns. “Maybe this conversation doesn’t have to be as unpleasant as I feared it would be.”

He didn’t actually sneer. Not quite. “This conversation is already unpleasant.”

“Then what I’m about to tell you is unlikely to improve it.”

Anais held that harsh blue gaze of his. She reminded herself this was the right thing to do, no matter how it felt.

Be cold straight through, she told herself. Feel nothing but ice until you become it.

She didn’t look away. “You have a son.”

* * *

“I beg your pardon?”

Dario felt bolted to the stones beneath his feet. Pierced straight through. His heart stopped beating, then kicked at him hard, while his entire gut seemed to drop down to the ground and stay there.

And Anais only stood before him, as calm and unbothered and untouched as ever, damn her.

“You have a son.” She didn’t seem surprised she had to repeat that. “We do, I suppose. Biologically speaking. His name is Damian.”

He didn’t think he could breathe. “Tell me this is one of your jokes.”

“Because I’m renowned for my stand-up routine?” she asked tartly, and he recognized that sharp tone. He remembered it. On some level, it was much better than unbothered—but he couldn’t process that at the moment. “No. I’m not joking about my child.”

He continued to stare at her, like an idiot, while his head spun. As if she’d anticipated that reaction—and of course she had, he told himself bitterly, because she’d known he was coming today, hadn’t she?—she reached into the other pocket of that long, flowing dress and pulled out something. It took him a moment to understand it was a slightly bent photograph, and then she was sliding it onto the table before him.

Dario didn’t want to look. Looking would be admitting...something. But he couldn’t help himself.

A small boy with black hair and his mother’s eyes laughed in the sunlight. He was kneeling on a beach, his little body sturdy and perfectly formed. Ten fingers covered in sand, stretched toward the camera. And aside from those eyes Dario knew all too well came straight from Anais, every other part of his face could have been lifted from the pictures Dario had seen of himself and Dante at the same age.

There had been exactly one other time in his life when he’d wanted to deny the truth in front of him this much. When he’d felt precisely this sleepless and out of his depth and furiously incapable of processing what was happening. And this, six years later, was worse. Much worse. The world went white around the edges. Or maybe he did.

“How?” he heard himself grit out, not looking at her. He didn’t touch that photograph and he didn’t trust himself to look at her. Every muscle in his body was so tense he thought he might rupture something where he stood. There was a storm building inside of him and he thought it might simply blow him to pieces right here—a thousand jagged, broken shards of him, until neither one of them was left standing.

It took him a minute to recognize that storm for what it was.

Fury.

Pure and undiluted and directed straight at this woman and her betrayal of him.

Again.

“I’m sure that if you think about it, you can figure out how,” Anais was saying. He wouldn’t call that tone of hers amused, exactly. It was far too crisp and pointed, and she still managed to sound so distant besides. That made it all worse. “I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t a stork.”

He was still reeling. Dario pushed back in the chair and onto his feet, leaving the photo where it sat as if it was poisonous. He raked his hair back with both hands, and then he got a hold of himself.

It was painful.

“And how,” he asked, his voice rough and his gaze probably a lot worse than that as he finally looked at her again, “do I know this is my child and not Dante’s? We’re identical. I can’t even take a DNA test to find out the truth.”

She stiffened as if he’d struck her. Then her dark eyes blazed—and damn him, he preferred that over the chilliness.

“Then I suppose it will have to remain a mystery,” she threw at him. “What a shame. Damian and I will have to continue doing just fine without you, you incredible jackass.”

He didn’t process what was happening until she was almost through the great, open doorway that was the length of the pulled-back wall. That she had thrown that bomb at him and was now walking away as if it didn’t matter.

“Where the hell are you going?” he demanded. “After dropping that kind of thing on me?”

Anais stopped walking, and the stiffness of her back told him that was a battle. She turned slowly. Very slowly. He thought she looked pale, and her lips were thin, and he didn’t understand why he even noticed that. Why he cared at all.

You do not care about her, he snapped at himself. You care about this lie she’s telling.

“I’m going to carry on with my life,” she told him when she faced him fully, in that overly precise way of hers that indicated the raging temper inside of her. He remembered that, too. He could even see the faint hint of it in her eyes. “What did you expect me to do? Stand here and cry? Beg you to believe me? I’ve already been down that road. I’m well aware it’s a dead end.”

“Then why bother with this conversation at all?” he gritted out. “Unless you just wanted to throw a few grenades around. For fun.”

That smile of hers was much too sharp. One more blade stuck deep in his gut, a match for all the rest.

“The only difference this conversation makes to me is that I no longer feel any sense of responsibility about the fact you’re too much of a sulking child to have picked up the phone and found this out years ago.” She leaned forward slightly, as if some unseen hand was keeping her from hurling herself at him, holding her back from attacking him with those fists he could see bunched up at her sides. “Thank you, Dario. Truly. I needed the reminder that you’re absolutely useless. And, worse than that, cruel.”

She turned to walk away again, and he should have let her. He should have cheered her on. He couldn’t have a child. He couldn’t have a child. Not him. He’d never wanted one, not after his own disastrous childhood, and he certainly didn’t want to test that theory with the woman who had betrayed him so horribly with his own brother.

This can’t be happening.

Maybe that was why he found himself across the patio without knowing he meant to move, wrapping his hand around her smooth upper arm to pull her back around to face him.

“Don’t walk away from me.”

And it was a mistake to have touched her. It was a terrible mistake, because touching her was what had caused all of this in the first place. His uncharacteristic loss of control when he’d first met her. His astonishing decision to marry her—and who cared if he’d lied to himself and told himself it was to secure her a visa to stay in New York? That wild, nearly ungovernable fury when he’d discovered her deceit. He knew better. It had all been about this.

This touch. Her skin. The wildfire he was horrified to realize still raged between them that easily, that unmistakably, even now.

“Take your hand off my arm,” she snapped at him, her voice not quite as cool as it had been, and he was the little man she’d called him, wasn’t he? Because he derived far more satisfaction from that than he should. “Now.”

Dario hated the fact it was hard to let go of her. That he didn’t want to do it. But he forced himself to release her and he took a perverse pleasure in the way she rubbed the place he’d touched her with her other hand, as if she could feel the same lick of fire that leaped in him, too.

Chemistry had never been their problem. Never that. It was only honesty and fidelity that had tripped them up, or her stunning lack of both, and he needed to remember that. He needed to remember that no matter what his body agitated for, wild and loud in his blood just now, he knew who she really was.

“You kept my child from me for all these years. Six years. Is that really what you’re telling me?”

“Please spare me the sob story you’re making up in your head,” Anais bit out, jutting her chin out as he stood over her, and whatever shoes she was wearing put her almost exactly level with him. That mouth of hers, right there, and what the hell was the matter with him that he could think about something like that now?

Especially when she was talking to him as if he was the person at fault, when they both knew better.

“You refused to take my calls. You moved all of your things out of our home while I was at work. You barred me from your new apartment building and you instructed the security people in your office to call the police if I tried to get in—which I know, because they did.”

He shouldn’t have been fascinated by the spots of color that bloomed on her gorgeously high cheekbones, shouting out her temper in unmistakable red. It was as if her betrayal and the six years between them had never happened. The fact his body didn’t care about any of that made that fury in him burn brighter. Colder. As if he was complicit in his own betrayal here.

Against his will, he remembered the confusion of those first days after he’d discovered Anais and Dante together. How the stress from the work decisions he’d had to make had fused with the terrible blow he’d suffered and had made him waver. He’d considered going back on his decision. He’d considered a thousand things in the even more sleepless nights that followed, just him and his bitterness and the messages he deleted unread and unheard from both his twin and his wife. There’d been a certain comfort in knowing that nothing could ever hurt him as much as they had then. He’d built his new life out of that certainty.

It had never occurred to him that he could have been wrong about that.

“My emails bounced back and you disconnected your cell phone number,” Anais was saying. “I watched you rip up a letter I left on your car, unread, with my own eyes.” She lifted her hands and then dropped them again as if what she really wanted was to use him as a punching bag. He almost wished she would. “So what exactly was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to tell you? I tried. But you were too busy licking your wounds and hiding yourself away behind all the wealth and privilege you could stack around you like stone walls. That’s not my fault.”

Dario concentrated on his temper as if it would save him. He had the sinking feeling it was the only thing here that could.

“You’re talking about a child,” he said very distinctly. “If you’d really wanted to tell me, you’d have found a way. This is just another game. You never run out of them, do you?”

“I told you today, the very first time I’ve seen you since you walked out on me,” she said icily, but there was nothing cold in that furious gaze of hers. “There’s no game.” She shook her head when he started to speak. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to this. Your feelings about the child you could have known all his life if you hadn’t deliberately hidden yourself away aren’t my problem. I didn’t tell you because I want something from you. I told you because it was the right thing to do.”

“Anais...”

“And now I’m leaving,” she interrupted him, her dark eyes glittering with emotions he couldn’t name. He shouldn’t want to name them. He shouldn’t believe they existed at all. “I don’t really care what you do with this information. Go lick your self-inflicted wounds some more. Pretend you still don’t know. Whatever lets you feed that persecution complex of yours, I’m sure you’ll do it.”

He couldn’t bear it. There was that fury in him and something much darker and deeper and worse. Much, much worse. Raw and aching and terrible. She eyed him as if she was looking for something on his face, but then her gaze shuttered and she started to turn away again—and he really couldn’t bear that.

So he did the only thing he could think of to do.

Maybe he wasn’t thinking at all.

He reached out, slid his hand over her delicate neck to cup her nape and pull her close and then he took her mouth with his.

It was the same madness he remembered. That same wild burn that sizzled through him, lighting him up and making him crazy, eating him alive. She still tasted sweet and perfect, the way she always had, as if no time at all had passed.

Dario moved closer, slid his hands onto the thick fall of her hair, then tugged her mouth into a better angle beneath his and kissed her deeper, harder.

And she kissed him back, the way he remembered she always, always had.

She met him, a tangle of tongues and need while the fire between them raged, and their whole history seemed to dance between them in the flames. It was as raw as it was hot, as greedy as it was painful, and Dario knew this was the worst idea he’d had in a long, long time.

But still he kissed her, over and over, as if he could glut himself on her. As if he could block out not only what she’d told him and all the accusations she’d thrown at him, but the six years since he’d touched anyone like this or let himself be touched in turn. He hadn’t wanted anyone near him. He hadn’t wanted anything that resembled intimacy, with anyone.

And yet here, now, with that damned soft breeze still dancing all over him, and Anais’s perfect mouth hot and demanding beneath his, he couldn’t seem to remember why that was.

She wrenched herself away. He heard the small sound of distress she made and he hated that it lodged itself in his chest, like one more bullet in this strange afternoon bristling with them. She stumbled back a step until her back hit the wall, and she stared at him.

She looked as shaken as he was. He hated that, too—the idea that she could actually be affected, that she might not be acting...

Of course she’s acting. Everything about her is an act.

He hated everything about this. This wild, untamed place. That insidious breeze that was messing with his head and making him feel restless and edgy. Anais and her lies and her deception, six years ago and today, and the fact she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever beheld only made it worse. He hated that he could taste her now. That he could feel her again, as if her perfect lips were some kind of brand and she’d marked him. Changed him.

And he hated that she’d made him feel again, when he’d tamped that down and shut it off in those tortured days following the end of their marriage. He hated that most of all.

“While we’re on the topic,” he said, not even sounding like himself, because that was what she did to him, still, “I want a divorce.”

Dario wanted nothing more than to make her feel as ripped wide open as he did, to take all the hurt and the fury and that spinning in his head, that unacceptable need that still surged in him, and make her feel it, too.

So he grinned while he said it, to make sure she got his point. To make sure it was painful. And because it was true and there should be a record of it. “On the grounds of your infidelity, of course. With my brother as the named third party.”


CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_fcd67b32-e955-5b4d-99c8-3481411804f9)

THE KNOCK ON the front door of Anais’s little house in Kihei, a few blocks up the hill from the ocean in a strictly residential, tourist-free neighborhood, came after nine o’clock that same night.

Anais scowled at the door as if it had transformed into a snarling monster.

Her comfortable two-bedroom house was arranged in a breezy open plan. That meant she didn’t have to get up from the living area’s couch where she had files spread out on the coffee table before her to see that the figure standing on her front step and visible through the panes of clouded glass in the door could not possibly be her aunt or uncle or any of her friends.

He was too tall. Too solid. Too obviously him, and besides, that knock had been brusque and demanding, not anything like friendly.

She gritted her teeth and wished she hadn’t changed into her comfortable evening-at-home clothes after she’d put Damian to bed hours ago. Yoga pants and a tank top didn’t seem like adequate armor against Dario. Not here in her own home. Not when she could still feel his mouth against hers from earlier, the way he’d tasted her and tempted her and taken her over, leaving her with nothing but that fire she’d convinced herself over the past six years had been entirely in her imagination.

Her imagination was pretty vivid, it turned out. So vivid her breasts seemed to swell at the thought of him now, and she felt that deep, restless ache low in her belly that only Dario had ever brought out in her.

Anais got to her feet reluctantly. She threw a glance over her shoulder toward the half-closed door to Damian’s room, but she knew her little boy could sleep through a rock concert. And she also knew enough about Dario to realize that if he’d tracked down her home address and shown up at this hour, he didn’t plan to wander off quietly into the night simply because she hadn’t answered his first knock.

He knocked again, louder, and she blew out a breath as she crossed the room. She smoothed a hand over her high ponytail and wished she really was the cool, practical woman she’d gotten so good at pretending she was. The kind who could take anything in stride, including the reappearance of her son’s father on her doorstep. The kind who wouldn’t spare a single thought for how she looked under the circumstances.

That woman does not exist, she told herself staunchly. That woman is nothing but other women just like me, faking it.

Then she steeled herself and wrenched open the door.

Dario stood there before her on the lower step, looking edgier and more dangerous than he had out on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai earlier in the day. It was dark now, a thick Hawaiian summer night that seemed to cling to the edges of things. It made Dario look as ruthless as he did powerful, somehow. He stared at her, unsmiling and intense, and she was unreasonably glad his hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans. As if that made him safer when she knew better than that.

He should have looked disreputable, in jeans and an untucked shirt. Instead, he looked like a particularly gorgeous object lesson in wealthy young scions who also happened to be world-famous CEOs of major companies at such a relatively young age. Not that she’d followed his many corporate exploits on the internet, or anything.

Anais folded her arms and stood in her doorway. She did not invite him in. And she didn’t particularly care if every last one of her neighbors on the small cul-de-sac was watching this scene from their windows right now. If anything, that gave her the courage she needed to handle this.

Like a glacier, she told herself. You’re cold to the core. Heat can’t touch you, even his.

“I don’t recall inviting you over for a nightcap,” she said coolly.

She’d invited him to go straight to hell, and she hadn’t stuck around to see if he’d taken her up on that. She’d driven so fast down Mr. Fuginawa’s drive and then back out the rustic Piilani Highway toward home that her car had bottomed out in the rutted road more than once.

It hadn’t slowed her down at all.

“Is this impolite? I’d hate to be impolite in a situation like this.” His voice was as thick and dark as the night all around him, and seemed to stick to her as if it was barbed. Anais felt goose bumps shiver over her bare arms and had to fight to keep herself from rubbing at them and giving herself away. “Maybe you can explain the etiquette of secret babies and hidden children to me. I’m not as familiar with it as you are. Obviously.”

“What do you want?”

“You claimed you had my son. What do you think I want?”

“Damian is in bed, the way small children often are at this time of night.” She made a shooing motion with one hand. “Go away.”

“I want to see him.”

Anais had to grit her teeth to keep from shouting loud enough to bring the entire island to her door. “You don’t get to decide that, Dario. You can’t show up here after being absent his entire life and spring yourself on him in the middle of the night.”

“I knew you’d use him as a pawn. Why am I not surprised that you’re precisely this shameless?”

“He is five years old. He wants a father more than you can possibly imagine. I’m not using him as a pawn. I’m protecting him.”

“From me?” If possible, his face got even darker. She thought his arms tightened, as if he was clenching his hands into fists in his pockets. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Anais couldn’t pretend to keep calm any longer. She couldn’t stay cool and smooth and hard. And she didn’t much care what he might make of that. She didn’t care about him, to be honest. Not when it came to Damian’s feelings. Not when Dario could crush her little boy so easily. And likely would.

“It means I know what you do to hearts.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She wished she’d bitten off her tongue instead, especially when he made that derisive sound that might as well have been a punch to the gut, the way it hit her.

“This is exactly the kind of crap I expected you to say and I don’t have time for it. I’m not going to participate in whatever great melodrama you have planned here, Anais. I want to see the child.” He shifted, as if it hurt him. Or as if maybe he wasn’t as hard as he seemed, either—but it was dangerous to imagine such things. She’d already made that mistake six years ago, and look what had happened. “My child, or so you claim.”

“Listen to me.” She stepped forward, out of her doorway and onto the wide top step, not caring that it put her much too close to him again, even raised to his eye level. She shoved her finger in his face and she wished it was something more substantial, like a kitchen knife. “This is not about you. I understand that you must be feeling all kinds of things right now. I’m not particularly sympathetic, but I understand. Still, Damian doesn’t know you. You’ve been missing in action his entire life. It doesn’t benefit him in any way to be woken from a sound sleep so that a strange man can brood at him. And if it doesn’t benefit him, it’s not happening.”





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