“Maybe I’ve had a radical personality transplant and now enjoy nothing more than lying on a bit of sand, waiting for death or boredom to claim me,” Dario said.
Dante laughed. “Have you?”
“Certainly not.” Dario laughed, too, and it felt good. It felt like a revelation, like another key turned in a lock he hadn’t realized was there, to sit beneath the stars and laugh with his twin again. “I was tracking down a pair of earrings for our possibly demented grandfather.”
“He sent me off to find a tiara,” Dante said. He raked a hand through his hair. “Maybe this has all been an elaborate ruse on the old man’s part. Maybe he didn’t accidentally sell off a load of trinkets at all. Maybe they were all baubles he handed out.”
“What, as gifts? Who hands out priceless jewelry as gifts and calls them ‘trinkets’?”
“Remember that Grandfather’s from Europe. He’s very old school.” Dante shrugged, that utterly familiar maverick’s grin tugging at his mouth. “Maybe he took a very European view of his wedding vows and kept a string of wealthy mistresses on the side.”
It was hard to imagine their grandfather doing any of the things one might logically do with a mistress—especially when the image Dario had of him now was Giovanni as he’d been at the house the other day, frail and unwell. On the other hand, the old man was famously cagey. And certainly their own father’s brief, chaotic life suggested that growing up in Giovanni’s house had been something less than perfect.
“The man likes his secrets,” he said now.
They looked at each other, and it was back. That instant, wordless communication that the twins had once been so fluent in it had taken them longer to learn actual English than any of their siblings. They hadn’t needed it.
They both pulled out their smartphones and started typing various things into the search fields of their browsers.
“‘Tiara and earrings,’ it turns out,” Dante murmured a few moments later, “leads us directly to the Duchess of Cambridge and her pageant of a wedding. Who knew she’d cornered the market on a matched set?”
“I think we can cross Kate Middleton off the list of our grandfather’s potential mistresses,” Dario replied. “I feel certain the British press would have picked up on it.”
But he remembered the snatches of conversation he’d heard over the past few months while he’d been concentrating on the product launch. Little snippets about family matters he hadn’t been particularly bothered about at the time.
One of his brothers had found a necklace for Giovanni; one of his sisters had produced a bracelet. He put all of those together, and then threw in a description of the jewels. White diamonds. Bright green emeralds.
“Look at this,” he said, leaning closer so Dante could see the screen, as well.
“They were all a commissioned set,” Dante said as Dario scrolled down the page, reading at the same pace. Of course. “I’m surprised they were ever broken apart.”
“It says each piece is inscribed with a word.”
“Kate Middleton? I knew it.”
“BALDO,” Dario said, his mouth twitching. He read down further. “No one has ever been able to figure out what that means.”
“That’s the trouble with secrets,” Dante said then, sitting back in his chair. “They must seem like a good idea at the time. Then they’re nothing but old words inscribed on the back of lost trinkets, and precious few people to care.”
Dante had to head out not long after, but Dario knew that everything had changed between them—and for the better this time. They might not have solved every problem, but they’d started the process.
He had his brother back. He was himself again.
The future was not going to take place in a series of little boxes. Not if he could help it.
And that meant there was only one thing left he needed to do.
It was time to head back to Hawaii and claim his family.
* * *
This time, when that same hard knock sounded on her door after dark, Anais told herself it couldn’t possibly be Dario. She’d been very clear with him. She and Damian had come home and settled right back into the perfectly decent life they’d been living before Dario had made his reappearance. Everything was exactly as it had been before.
Save that Damian now had a lot more to say to the photograph by his bed, and Anais found herself curled up in her own empty bed with nothing but her broken heart. Broken even harder this time, because she’d been the one to leave.
The knock came again, even louder.
Anais took her time getting to her feet, and longer still crossing to the door. And maybe some part of her had been expecting an impromptu visit one of these days, because she hadn’t changed into her usual postwork clothes. Not a single one of the nights since they’d come home from New York.
Had she been hoping he’d show up? Had she imagined that if he did, she’d really feel safer in a pencil skirt and a sleeveless blouse?
She swung open the door and there he was, and her whole body hummed to life, as if she’d locked herself away in a deep freeze here in the tropics. As if Dario was all the heat in the world.
He looked gorgeous and intent, in the kind of sleek, expensive T-shirt that only very rich men thought looked casual and a pair of jeans. He looked rugged and rumpled, his dark hair shoved back from his face at an angle that suggested he’d been raking his hands through it all day. His blue eyes met hers and held.
“This time,” he said in that low voice that connected to every part of her that longed for him and lit it all up like fireworks against a dark night, “you need to let me in.”
Anais didn’t move. She didn’t step toward him and she didn’t step back. And she was terribly afraid that he could hear how hard her heart was beating in her chest, that he could see how little it would take for her to simply throw herself in his arms and wave away the past...
But she refused to do that. Damian deserved better than that.
And so did she.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Anais said, and it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life. She’d thought that morning in New York had been difficult. She’d had to fight to keep herself from sobbing in front of her five-year-old on that endless flight home. But this was harder.
Because he was here. He’d come after her.
She wanted that to mean a lot more than she suspected it could.
“I meant what I said in New York,” she made herself tell him, because she didn’t want to say anything of the kind. She wanted to stop gripping the doorjamb. She wanted to launch herself at him. But that was always the trouble, wasn’t it? She wanted things she couldn’t have, and Dario was at the top of that list. “This can’t work.”
She expected his eyes to flash dark, for him to argue. She expected threats, harsh words.
Instead, he smiled.
That beautiful smile of his. It was like a perfect sunrise. It was entirely too much like joy, and she didn’t understand it at all.
“I’m not going anywhere, Anais,” he told her, as if he was reciting a vow. “I’m not walking away again. I’ll stay right here on the doorstep for as long as it takes.”
“You’re not going to stay on the doorstep. Don’t be ridiculous.”
That smile of his widened. “Maybe not literally.”
And she told herself she had no choice. That her heart was a terrible judge of character, or none of this would have happened, would it? She made herself step back.
“Goodbye, Dare,” she said.
That smile of his didn’t fade. And it hurt her—physically hurt her—to close the front door. Then force herself to walk back into her house and carry on with her life somehow.
She couldn’t say she did a good job. She sat there on her sofa and stared across the room at the bookcase where her single photo album of their time together was stored, and she ordered herself not to cry.
Over and over and over. Until she fell asleep s
lumped sideways on the couch and stayed there until morning.
It was a new day, she told herself when she woke up, cranky and sore. Dario had been seized with something highly uncharacteristic to come all this way and make declarations, but she imagined it was like a tropical sunburn. Painful, but it would peel eventually. Then disappear.
But he came back again that night. And the night after.
And every night that week.
Always after dark, when Damian was already in bed, so there could be no chance of using their son’s feelings as any kind of bargaining chip. And he always left with that same smile on his face, as if he really could do this forever.
“I think you have issues,” she told him when it continued into a second week. “I never should have gone out to coffee with you in the first place all those years ago. It set a terrible precedent. You think you can wear me down with persistence and a smile.”
The scary part was that they both knew he could. She expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He stared at her, the thick dark all around him and his blue gaze serious.
“I don’t want to wear you down, Anais,” he told her. “You already know that I can walk away when things get tough. Now you know that I can stick around when things don’t go my way.”
“What if I want you to go away?” Her voice was so hoarse, so soft. She might have thought she hadn’t said anything out loud, but she could see that she had in the way he went still.
“Then you have to say that,” he said. “You have to tell me there’s no hope and that this is never going to change. As long as there’s hope, I can do this forever. Tell me that’s gone and I’ll never bother you again.”
And she stood there for a shuddering beat of her heart. Then another. She felt the soft breeze on her face, and curled her bare toes into the cool concrete of her front step. Everything else was the blue of his eyes, the starkness of his expression. The way he held himself, as if braced for the worst.
She should open her mouth right now and tell him there was no hope. It was the kind thing to do—the safe and smart thing to do, for everyone.
“Good night, Dare” was what she said instead, stepping back inside and closing the door.
She could feel him there on the other side. She slumped against the closed door, squeezing her eyes shut, and she could feel him there, only that flimsy bit of wood and her own determination separating them.
Anais didn’t know how long they stood there. She’d never know how long it was before she heard him turn around and go. Or how much longer she stayed where she was, before she forced her stiff, protesting muscles into a hot shower in the hopes that might stave off insomnia. It didn’t help at all.
And two nights later, she let him in.
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 w
as 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.
The Return of the Di Sione Wife Page 15