Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James
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the old man who was the center of the family and the great house’s patriarch had remained larger than life in her mind all this time.
Giovanni was exactly as she remembered him, if significantly more frail. He sat in an armchair in one of the drawing rooms of the grand old house, covered in a thick blanket, though the September day outside was warm. And he smiled as they walked in to greet him, that same old glint Anais remembered making his eyes seem much too bright for a man said to be on the brink of death.
“I should have told the world I was dying thirty years ago,” Giovanni said, his voice more feeble than Anais remembered it, making the possibility of his death seem much more real, suddenly. “It brings you all running.” His canny gaze shifted to Anais, then down to Damian in front of her. “And with such gifts.”
“This is Damian,” she said, smiling at the old man who she could never remember being anything but kind to her, no matter that her relationship with his grandson had been a mad little whirlwind with an unhappy ending. Then she smiled down at her son, taking her hand from his shoulder as she did. “Damian, this is your great-grandfather.”
She thought her heart might burst wide open when her self-possessed little boy walked right up to the oldest man he’d likely ever seen and held out his hand, very much like the man she knew he’d one day become. And this time, there was someone to share that sort of wild maternal pride. This time, she caught Dario’s eye and was sure he saw the same thing she did—maybe even felt it himself.
That unexpected moment of communion shook her, deep and hard, making her bones ache.
“It’s nice to meet you, young man,” Giovanni said with an extra bit of solemnity in his voice, as if speaking to the future man instead of the current boy. But he looked at Dario when he continued, and that glint in his eye seemed more pronounced. “Very nice indeed.”
“Behave,” Dario told him as Anais took a seat on the couch opposite Giovanni. Her stomach flipped over and she realized it was because there was actual laughter in Dario’s voice. It made him sound like a different person. It made him sound alive. It made him sound like that young man who’d chased her out of the Columbia University library on a gray winter’s afternoon and had talked her into having coffee with him when she’d been convinced he was playing a trick on her. “Or I won’t give you the earrings you sent me halfway across the planet to fetch for you.”
“Ah,” Giovanni said, sounding not in the least bit worried that Dario would do anything but what he’d asked. “My lovely Lost Mistresses are coming back to me at last. Tell me they still sparkle the way I remember them.”
“Of course they do, old man,” Dario replied, still with all that rich amusement in his voice. It was mesmerizing. It seemed to wrap around her and pull taut, like a slipknot she feared she’d never work loose. “They’re made almost entirely of diamonds. They make the night sky look dull in comparison.”
The old man smiled and then coughed. And coughed. So hard his whole body shook and his hands trembled, and that was when Anais understood that this wasn’t some kind of merry joke. Giovanni was truly ill. The force of his personality couldn’t change that. Nothing could.
Dario’s smile faltered, but he caught himself. Visibly. Anais felt a lump grow in her throat as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the same little box she’d given him in Hawaii. When Giovanni was sitting upright in his chair again and his breathing was less labored, Dario cracked it open and placed it carefully in his grandfather’s parchment-pale hands.
“I wish Dante were here,” Giovanni said, gazing down at the earrings, a faraway look on his face. “He always has appreciated the shiny things in life just a little bit more than you. You always did think you needed to be the serious one.”
Damian chose that moment to stage-whisper his desire to go outside and play, but there was no mistaking the way Dario stiffened at the mention of his twin’s name, no matter Anais’s momentary distraction. Or the way that long-lost laughter disappeared from his blue gaze and the curve in his mouth flattened out into a line, as if both had been figments of her imagination.
“Why would you bring him up?” Dario asked tautly. “Is he here?”
His grandfather looked old then. Every inch of his ninety-eight years.
“I believe he’s out for the day,” he said with obvious reluctance.
“I’m not talking about Dante,” Dario told his grandfather gruffly. “Ever. And we don’t need you meddling, Grandfather. He doesn’t need to know I was here.”
Giovanni eyed him as if he was inclined to argue, but then merely nodded his head weakly before returning his attention to the open box in his lap. He ran a finger over the bright face of one of the earrings. Then he quietly asked Dario about ICE’s much-publicized launch a few weeks back.
While Anais sat frozen on the couch across from them, her heart in a thousand pieces all over the priceless carpet at her feet.
Through the windows she could see her beautiful little boy running in gleeful zigzags on the great lawn, as if the September sun shone for him alone. But here inside this room, an old man was dying after nearly a century on this earth and the man she’d loved for far longer than was wise or healthy was so closed up inside he might as well be dying, too.
Dario was never going to change. He didn’t want to talk about his twin to his own grandfather—or at all—even all these years later.
He was never, ever going to believe her.
He was fine with these make-believe spaces, these in-between times, when they pretended nothing was wrong. Meanwhile, the past festered between them. Where would it come out? It was one thing for Dario to periodically vent his spleen on her. Anais could take it, no matter how unjust it was. But what happened when he said the wrong thing one day and Damian heard it?
Because that would happen. It was inevitable.
And she couldn’t stand by and allow this man to break her son’s heart, simply because he didn’t have it in him to trust her.
It was high time she was honest with herself. Dario had never trusted her in the first place. He couldn’t have, or he’d never have misinterpreted the scene he’d walked in on that terrible day. He’d never have believed the worst of her, no matter what Dante did or didn’t say.
That was the truth she’d been hiding from all this time. Dario had wanted to believe the worst of her. He’d seized the opportunity to leave her and he’d made sure there was absolutely no way she could prevail upon him to reconsider. He’d seen an opportunity to get the hell out of their marriage and he’d taken it.
He’d wanted to leave her then; he’d done it with surgical precision, and he’d had no intention of returning to her. Ever. If she’d never had Damian, she imagined that scene on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai would have gone very differently. He’d have insulted her, she’d have returned fire and he’d have swanned back off into the ether.
You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, she told herself now, watching Dario laugh with his grandfather in a way she hadn’t seen him laugh with anyone in years. In a way she’d forgotten he’d ever laughed, even with her. Those stories you told the tabloids might as well have been the stories you told yourself all this time. That there was some grand misunderstanding. That left to his own devices, away from his brother, none of this would have happened.
It would have happened. He wanted it to happen. He made it happen.
She sat so still, while everything inside of her spun around too fast and made her worry she might simply fall over with the force of this realization.
And she couldn’t push this or any other truth on him. She couldn’t make him believe her. She couldn’t prove Damian was his and she couldn’t prove she’d loved him and she couldn’t prove there’d never been anyone for her but him, ever. He would have to take that leap of faith on his own; and here, now, in the lovely home where she’d been reminded of the man she’d fallen in love with