by Dani Collins
“Remember I said Auntie Scarlett was having her baby? He’s called Locke.”
“I want to see him.”
“She said she would send me a picture later. Right now I want you to meet someone else. This is—”
Her mouth hung open as they both seemed to realize that they hadn’t discussed how she would introduce him to their daughter.
“Papà,” Val said, feeling as though the ground shifted beneath him.
Kiara’s smile took a split second to cement itself, but then she said, “We’re going with Papà to his house.”
Aurelia looked at him, one arm still firmly curled around her mother’s neck as she decided what she thought of him.
For his part, Val was absorbing an instinctual sense of mine. Not ownership, but a primordial recognition he’d never experienced before. It was probably what he should have felt toward his father or mother—a sense of kinship or being alike. He had never experienced it so strongly with them, but when he looked at Aurelia, for the first time in his life, he knew she was a part of some abstract collective they both belonged to. She was his.
“I have to pack some things from my studio,” Kiara said to Aurelia. “Would you like to show Papà your slide?”
Aurelia nodded and they went through the house to the side door. Kiara disappeared into the old guest bungalow, leaving the door open. Val took note of Aurelia’s climbing gym and empty wading pool, the miniature picnic table and the cat that appeared and rubbed against his leg.
Niko hadn’t provided anything like this for him and Javiero. Val’s earliest memories involved kicking a ball at each other or learning to swim in the cold waves of the sea because learning in a pool was “soft.” They’d had chores in the vineyard, raking and gathering twigs, and had listened to endless droning lectures on how they would inherit all of this and needed to know how to manage it from the bottom up.
Every conversation with Niko had been one way and about one topic—the future and what he expected of them. There had been no sense of them being good enough as they were. Niko hadn’t even been mindful of the fact they were children. He hadn’t been present in a meaningful way—
Neither was he, Val realized with a snap of his head. The climbing gym was empty. Aurelia was gone.
* * *
“Aurelia. No!”
The barreling shout was so loud and imperious, it arrested Kiara’s heart. She dropped what she was doing and ran out to see Val running toward the pool.
The gate was open and Aurelia stood there paralyzed. When she saw Kiara, she let out a wail and lifted her arms, running toward her and tripping onto the grass as she came off the paving stones.
Kiara hurried forward and picked up her screaming toddler while Aurelia clung to her with all her wee might.
“You’re fine. Settle down,” Kiara murmured, rubbing her back. “You know you’re not allowed in the pool without a grown-up.” Kiara’s own heart was pounding. As far as she’d known, Aurelia still couldn’t reach the latch. She’d either grown in the past two days or the pool boy had been sloppy about closing it properly.
“I took my eyes off her for one second,” Val muttered as he came up to them, emanating umbrage.
Kiara tried to calm Aurelia, but it took effort to keep her agitation from her voice. “Listen, baby. Papà thought you were going to get hurt. He didn’t mean to scare you.” She sent him a pointed glance.
“That went both ways,” he retorted sharply.
“Fair enough, but maybe dial back the volume to an age-appropriate two. You scared me, yelling like that.”
His mouth flattened as he looked at Aurelia, who was keeping her face firmly turned from his, still bawling her heart out, tiny body quivering. Remorse creased his expression along with lingering concern. “My heart completely stopped.”
“Welcome to being a parent.”
He jolted at that and watched her continue rubbing Aurelia’s back as she wound down to sniffles.
“We’re working on our apology skills,” Kiara told Val and tucked her chin to address her daughter. “Would you like to tell Papà you’re sorry for giving him a fright?”
“No, Mummy.” She began to sob again, this time more pitifully.
“Aurelia, I’m sorry,” Val said quietly and sincerely. His hand came up as though he wanted to touch her, but he hesitated at the last second and let it drop back to his side. “I shouldn’t have yelled. I was afraid you were going to fall in the water. I may yell again if I’m afraid for you, but I’m not angry. I promise I will never, ever hurt you. Please don’t be afraid of me.”
Kiara was pretty sure Val had never apologized to anyone. Ever. She melted from the inside out, limbs going so weak she could barely hold on to her daughter.
“Do you have something you want to say to Papà?” She prodded Aurelia in a husky voice.
“I’m torry,” Aurelia said, lifting her heartbroken, tear-tracked face.
As naturally as if she’d been doing it from the moment she had arrived on this earth, she tipped out of Kiara’s arms and went to her father for a make-up cuddle.
He caught her with an audible inhale of surprise and then released a shaken exhale.
Kiara’s defenses crumbled to nothing then, as she watched the impact of Aurelia’s freely offered love hit Val like a meteorite. The glimmer of something flashed and shattered in his eyes before he closed them, yet he failed to hide his emotions as he cradled her tiny form against his chest. He hung his head over her, and his brow pulled with torment, as though he had indeed rescued Aurelia from the bottom of the pool.
Or she had rescued him.
Kiara pressed a hand to her chest, trying to keep her heart from breaking through her rib cage, while Aurelia let her head settle on Val’s shoulder and stuck two fingers in her mouth. Tears still stood on her cheeks as she blinked at her mother, but her trust in her father had been secured.
* * *
Eight hours later Val removed Kiara’s charcoal sketch from where it hung between the pair of tall, double doors that led onto the master suite’s balcony. He didn’t glance out at his nonstop view of Lake Como or down to where the architect and his team were discussing retaining walls and rooflines.
His palms briefly felt the dig of the sleek chrome edges as his hands tightened on the frame, but he didn’t allow himself to get lost in reminiscence. He moved it to a high shelf in his walk-in closet and brushed his hands together, angry with himself for feeling compelled to hide that he’d not only kept her sketch, he’d also had it matted, framed and mounted in his bedroom.
It seemed a greater weakness to let Kiara see it, though. And he was already reeling under the punch that had been Aurelia. He’d overreacted on the island, he knew that, but in the moment of realizing she’d slipped away into the pool area, he’d been utterly terrified. Convinced he wouldn’t reach her before she drowned.
She might have been gone before he’d felt the weight of her head on his shoulder. Before he’d allowed her to crawl on him like a kitten as they traveled, showing him her handful of books and favorite toys. She would have been gone before she’d clung to his finger as she jumped the stepping stones down to the lower terrace so Kiara could approve the site for her new studio. Gone before he’d known that she was bright and curious and stubborn and had a giggle that filled his heart with joy.
He had known she could become a vulnerability for him, but he hadn’t known.
She wasn’t an exposed flank; she was an offered throat. He couldn’t bear it. He most especially resented that Kiara knew what was happening to him. A dewy smile appeared on her face every time Aurelia said Papà in her high, musical voice.
“Oh...um—” Kiara walked in and came up short as she saw him hovering in the middle of the room. “I was looking for my things. The maid said this was my room.”
A mad craving leaped in his blood at the sight of her. It was another
weakness, born in a single night of losing himself with her, and it further undermined his sense of self and autonomy.
“This is our room. Our bed,” he acknowledged with a nod toward the wide mattress, liking the flush of awareness that stained her cheeks. He needed the surge of power that filled him as he saw he could turn her on with a careless few words the same way she could light his fires just by appearing in front of him.
“It’s not a his and hers...?” She warily looked for a connecting door in the expansive room, but there was only the door into the bathroom and the one into the closet. Presently, the room had a cozy sitting area and a desk, but he expected there would be some changes to balance the masculine decor with some feminine touches.
“I bought this villa after the divorce and didn’t expect to marry again,” he explained.
Her little frown of consternation eased slightly. Perhaps she’d been bothered by the idea of sleeping in his ex-wife’s bed.
“Well, I just came to get changed.” She plucked at the shoulder of her dress where Aurelia looked to have cried herself to sleep.
He waved at the closet.
Kiara hesitated, then closed the bedroom door and stayed near it.
“I’m sorry about the meltdown.” She released an exasperated breath that lifted a corkscrew of hair out of her eyes. “Tantrums are fairly normal at her age, but she doesn’t usually go nuclear like that. I think it was a combination of missing me last night and all the new faces today.” Aurelia had screamed bloody murder when Kiara had tried to hand her off to the nanny for her nap. “She’ll probably be out of sorts until we find our routine here.”
She eyed him warily, perhaps expecting an indictment on her inability to discipline their daughter, but the kickup hadn’t fazed him.
“I’ve seen far worse displays from my mother over far less.”
Kiara gave a short laugh, but he was completely serious. She sobered.
“Well, I’m glad you don’t think less of her for it. She’s only little and still figuring things out.” And there was that starry look again, lips curving into an emotive smile.
She wanted another glimpse of the man whose armor had been breached and he refused to give it to her, hardening against her melting look.
Her gaze lowered and her lashes fluttered with brief confusion.
“I’m a little out of sorts myself,” she confessed, clutching her elbows, flashing him an upward look. “This must feel like an invasion of your space.”
He shrugged it off. “As a child, I had a lot of surprises thrust upon me. I learned to adapt very quickly.”
“Witness the installation of your child and her mother in your home barely twenty-four hours after learning about her.”
Plus, two nannies and a cat.
“I prefer to act, not react,” he said truthfully, even though he was reacting to her against his will as she moved cautiously into the room, trailing her fingers across the smooth polish on the desk and picking up a stray bottle of his sandalwood cologne for a sniff.
“I don’t know what I expected, but your home is very beautiful.” She glanced at the filmy dark blue of the curtain clasped back with a silver cuff. “Airy and full of textures and light.”
“Mother likes a project. Of her many faults, taste is not one of them.”
“I’ll be sure to compliment her when I see her.”
“You won’t,” he assured her. “I’m leaving her in time-out until she’s learned her lesson about keeping things from me.”
Kiara’s expression grew somber. She set the bottle back on its shelf.
“And me? Am I to be punished for keeping Aurelia from you?”
“Our marriage is very much two birds with one stone.” He discovered he wasn’t joking about that, either. He resented her for doing this to him. Not so much the hiding of his child, but the giving him one. He could stand that his life was changing. He couldn’t stand that he was changing. That wasn’t Aurelia’s fault, but Kiara knew what she was doing to him, provoking things in him. Feelings.
A brief wrinkle of hurt pinched her brow and he braced himself for the inevitable refusal to marry him.
She surprised him by asking with quiet dignity, “Do you know what I find striking about you and me? That we’re both determined to be the thing we hate most about ourselves. After my mother died, I didn’t matter to anyone. I tried to fit in, but I was a square peg in every cliquey circle. The subtle rejections became too much for me. I decided friends were overrated and took introversion to its furthest degree. It was lonely, but it was safe. So there’s a part of me that prefers you to hate me and block me out. Then I can tell myself that trying to have a relationship with you is futile. I can refuse to marry you and retreat behind my walls. While you want me to believe that tying myself to you is a life sentence because you’re such a terrible man.”
“I’m not a good one,” he scoffed.
“Why not?” She cocked her head. “I mean, I understand that other people told you that you weren’t. And that you were angry with Niko and did whatever you thought you had to, to cut ties with him. But why is bitter misery such a comfortable place for either of us? I have to believe you have redeeming qualities, Val, otherwise, why am I here? And you have to believe I feel genuine remorse and forgive me for keeping Aurelia a secret. Otherwise, we have no hope, and a life without hope is a very dark place.”
Blows and insults and disparagement he could take. Her incisive honesty, however, peeled layers off him, leaving him raw and exposed. He couldn’t bear it and reached for the quickest, easiest means of turning the tables on her.
“I warned you against swimming with sea monsters.”
He ambled across to her, watching her eyes widen as he did. The glimmer of misplaced faith in her gaze dimmed to apprehension. Some distant, misguided part of himself wanted to preserve that hopeful gleam as badly as he wanted to dispel it.
He cupped the side of her throat and felt her swallow.
“I will be gentle with our daughter because she is a child, but whatever tenderness you think is inside me is imaginary. I never forgive people who wrong me.” He scraped his thumb across her bottom lip to pull it free from the wary catch of her teeth. “I never trust them again.”
“So you’ll—what? Get revenge by making hate to me, not love?” she asked shakily, color rising in reaction to his touch.
“That would imply I have strong feelings for you.” He would squelch such things before they sprouted. “No, you matter to me only insofar as it gives me incredible pleasure to watch you surrender to passion. So I’ll exact that sort of compensation from you again and again, because I like it. But I will never offer you a piece of my soul.”
“And if I say no to that?” Beneath his palm, her carotid artery was a rapid tattoo.
“Can you?” he chided, allowing his gaze to travel down to where her breasts were quivering as she panted in growing arousal.
He needed that. Needed to see that she was powerless against this force of lust between them because its grip on him was so inexorable, he could hardly breathe.
He brought his free hand up and rippled his knuckles across the point of her nipple where it strained against the cup of her bra and the fabric of her dress. Lightly, lightly, so the only sound was the faint brush of skin on linen. A straining silence that stretched and stretched as he moved his fingers back and forth, until she made a small noise and clasped his wrist, stopping his teasing caress.
“That’s—” A small sob escaped her.
“Too much?” he asked, dropping his hand to weigh heavily on her hip. “Or not enough?”
She clenched her eyes shut in sensual struggle.
“Come here, little mermaid,” he coaxed mockingly. “Let the monster take a bite.”
With a choke of capitulation, she moved forward to press against him.
He did bite he
r. He gently grazed his smiling teeth against the side of her neck until she trembled and arched and sighed. Then he showed her exactly how much penance he could wring out of her.
* * *
As retribution went, his was all the more powerful for its thrilling, torturous highs and her soaring abandonment of self. Val kissed her until she could barely stand, then he made her stand there before him anyway, skirt bunched around her waist, wrists pinned in one of his strong hands behind her back while he lowered her panties only enough to taste her until she whimpered.
Then he knelt her on the sofa cushions and stood behind her, thrusting lazily into her while she grasped at the slippery, striped silk. He brought her to such a peak, she didn’t care if people heard her pleasured cries across the lake.
He took her to the bed, stripped her and licked every inch of her, until she was nothing but one throbbing nerve ending, then he entered her again, made her come again, strong arms tucked behind her knees. Still, he wasn’t finished. He tumbled her across the bed until he was sitting on the edge and she was in his lap.
Oh, he pretended to love her then. He soothed and caressed and teased and incited until she was writhing. And all the while, the stiff thickness of him filled her. Each twist and arch of her body was stifled by strong arms as he fought his own release while provoking her to the very limits of her endurance of pleasure.
Only when she was running mindless fingers through his hair moaning, “Please, Val, please,” through swollen lips that clung to his did he shift her onto her back again and thrust steadily into her, keeping her on that acute point of unbearable arousal.
“Soon, bella,” he crooned, body shaking with exertion and the strain of maintaining his control. “When I say. Not before.”
“I can’t, I can’t,” she moaned, so close she was dying. She wanted so badly to let climax overtake her, but she fought it. For him. Because he wished it.
“Now,” he growled with a plunge of his hips.
The world went supernova. Her vision turned white, her scream silent, her only thought yes as orgasm exploded through her. Shock wave after shock wave of intense pleasure was made all the more exquisite for the pulsing heat within her and the ragged call of her name in Val’s triumphant voice.