Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James
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into the next.
The less they discussed the serious issues that hung between them like so many shimmering veils—the less they talked about what was happening between them, or the dark past they’d never agree on, or what had led them to end up in this penthouse together with the child they’d made—the easier it was to keep right on rolling.
As if this was their real life. As if this was who they were, this...family unit.
Every night, weather depending, they would eat dinner together out on that roof deck. The three of them, together.
Like a real family, Anais thought every time, and she knew how dangerous that was. She knew that the dream she’d succumbed to that one night in Hawaii was nothing next to this one, and that single night had put only her heart at risk, not Damian’s, too. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself from indulging.
She thought Dario felt it, too—the insistent, beguiling tug of the sweet life that wasn’t theirs.
But it could be, that seductive voice whispered inside of her, night after night. It could be exactly like this...
It was a treacherous landscape to navigate, and every day it got a little bit harder.
Damian loved Dario. Instantly and wholly. That much was clear, and it made Anais feel a little bit bruised inside that he’d had to do without his father all this time. It wasn’t that the life she’d given him hadn’t been good, it was only that this life—this make-believe fairy tale of a shining existence complete with a mother and a father all for him—was that much better.
She’d loved Dario six years ago and she despaired of the fact she loved him still, but she thought she hadn’t really known what love was at all until she’d rushed through that door to find him cradling their sick son in his lap. Or when she’d watched him read Damian a bedtime story, doing all the voices. Or the many times he let Damian beat him at the video games the five-year-old adored and the grown man clearly enjoyed just as much.
Anais had always thought love was about tempestuous romances followed by years of emptiness and loss, recrimination and regret. That was what her parents had taught her, in their sad, angry marriage. It was what she’d learned in her own. She’d only started to understand the complexities of different kinds of love these last few years in Hawaii, with Damian and the steady support of her aunt and uncle.
But watching the man she’d loved since very nearly the moment she’d met him take care of the child they’d made together was like watching a new sun dawn on a brand-new world. She certainly couldn’t rip Damian away from it. She hardly knew how to contain the joy of this thing she’d barely dared to dream inside herself.
She wasn’t sure she managed it at all. She wasn’t sure she tried very hard, come to that. And she knew, deep down, it would be one more thing she paid for in the long run.
One night they’d followed their usual pattern. They’d had a carefree family dinner, one marked by their usual easy conversation that never strayed from their preferred path of light, airy, unobjectionable topics, just like every other night since she’d come to stay here. And if there was a growing part of her that hated that—that wanted to dig down into this thing and see what was there beneath the surface, if anything—there was an even larger part of her that would have done absolutely anything to keep from rocking that boat. So she’d smiled and laughed. She’d meant it, the way she did each time, and then they’d put Damian to bed as if they’d been working together like this, like a perfect team, since the day he’d been born.
Anais couldn’t control the rueful little laugh she let out at that notion, as Dario pulled the door to Damian’s room shut behind him and they started back down the hall. She remembered going into labor all by herself entirely too well. It had been Team Her for a long time, no matter the show they were putting on now.
“Is something funny?” he asked.
She should have shrugged it off. Dario looked deliciously rumpled, the way he always did in the evenings. He’d shrugged out of his jacket the moment he’d stepped into the penthouse’s foyer after work, leaving the cuffs of his dress shirt rolled up over those strong, muscled forearms. He’d raked his hands through his dark hair a thousand times or more over the course of their family evening, leaving it in that marvelously disheveled state, and his jaw sported its usual shadow at the end of the day.
Surely she shouldn’t find all of that quite as delectable as she did. Surely she shouldn’t even notice it any longer, much less after all the things he’d done to her. Anais kept waiting to grow used to Dario. To his undeniable appeal, all that tousled black hair and electric blue eyes. To find him a part of the scenery, nothing more. To stop being so...aware of him the way she always was.
It hadn’t happened yet.
Maybe, she thought now, his eyes were simply too blue.
“Nothing’s funny,” she said. “Not really.” Damian’s door was closed and all three levels of the penthouse were quiet, hushed and still. And yet her heart was beating loud and hard against her chest as if it knew things she didn’t. And she suspected it had more than a little to do with the way he stood there, watching her, an expression she couldn’t quite read on his beautiful face. “We make a good team, it turns out. I suppose that surprises me.”
She didn’t say, the way we congratulated ourselves for being years ago, before we’d ever been tested. She didn’t ask him if he remembered how sure they’d been that their cool version of marriage, spiced up by those long, hot nights, could handle anything and everything.
It was one more thing to hang in all the shadows between them and pretend she couldn’t see.
Anais thought he’d change the subject instantly, pretend he hadn’t heard her, steer the conversation back to safe ground. But he only stood there, the light from farther down the hallway playing over his features, making him seem something other than hard as she looked up at him. Something other than the avenging angel he’d been playing for six long years, without ever relenting at all. Something she might have called wistful, had he been a different man.
She told herself she was imagining it.
“I’m no good on a team,” Dario said after a while. Almost as if it hurt him to say it out loud. “I’m much better on my own.”
“You don’t seem better on your own, Dare,” she said without thinking. Without paying attention to the precipice it seemed they were standing on suddenly, when she’d thought they were on solid ground. When she’d hoped they were. “You seem alone.”
He moved as if he meant to reach out to her, then he slipped his hands in the pockets of his trousers instead, and she thought the sheen in his gaze then was much too close to misery. It echoed that feeling inside her own chest too well.
“I am alone.” He shook his head when she started to speak, and Anais didn’t know if he was trying to keep her from arguing with him or if it was himself he feared. “I prefer it that way.”
“You’re an island all your own?” It was an effort to make her voice dry, to try to sound more amused than shaken. “When you used to be a package deal? That seems a strange evolution.”
“It suits me.” His voice took on an edge then. “Surely you realized that six years ago.”
“Six years ago I was so in love with you I couldn’t see straight.” Anais regretted it the moment she said it—particularly like that. So casually. Almost as an aside. He shifted, an arrested expression on his face, and she had no choice but to keep going. “I’m not sure I realized anything but that, to be honest.”
And this time, the silence between them was anything but comforting. Anais was sure she could see the same old accusations right there between them, dancing in the light and landing hard on the floor. She waited for him to strike out, to knock her down with one of his well-placed barbs, to make her wish she’d never said anything at all. She already wished that.
She’d spent these strange days poking at this odd little