CHAPTER ELEVEN

      IT WAS LATE that night when Dario gave up on trying to sleep in the bed he now found far too empty, when he’d never shared it with another soul. He found himself out on the great balcony that surrounded the master suite and the rest of the top floor of the penthouse. The September night was a warm caress against his bare skin, just the faintest hint of the coming fall in it, and he was glad he hadn’t bothered to pull on anything more than a pair of loose black trousers.

      Manhattan stretched out in the dark before him, as exultant and bright as it always was, and it echoed deep within him. It played through him like a long, low note of music, altering everything it touched. Knocking apart those careful boxes of his and making him wonder how he’d ever lived in them. How he’d ever managed to survive like that, bound and minimized. For a long while he stood there, simply stood there in the night with the city beneath him, and did nothing at all but breathe.

      He sensed her approach in the moment before she appeared there at the rail beside him, her long black hair tumbling over her shoulders as straight and glossy as ever and her lovely arms bare. She wore a tank top and a pair of men’s boxers, the very same uniform she’d worn to sleep in for as long as he’d known her. Dario couldn’t have said why the sight of it tonight swelled inside him like a song.

      He only knew he wanted to sing it so loud he woke the neighborhood. The whole city and all the boroughs. The world.

      He settled for turning toward her instead, reaching out to trace a faint pattern down one slim, strong arm and taking note of the goose bumps that shivered alive beneath his touch.

      “Life is so short,” he said, and he felt her tremble slightly at that beneath his fingers. “Too short, Anais.”

      She glanced at him, then away, her gaze on the dark heart of Central Park below them. “I know. I can’t imagine the world without him.”

      Dario hadn’t been thinking of his grandfather, or not directly.

      “He’s wily,” he said. Because Giovanni always had been. Because he couldn’t conceive of anything getting the better of the old man, even leukemia. “He’s beaten a thousand enemies in his day, and is never quite as fragile as he looks. I wouldn’t count him out yet.”

      She smiled. And she didn’t say what she must have been thinking then—what he knew he ought to be thinking himself. What he’d thought explicitly, in fact, even as he’d arrived in Hawaii and had found himself marooned in all that dangerously seductive tropical heat. That Giovanni was ninety-eight years old. That there was a natural order to things. That living too long must sometimes seem as much a curse as a blessing to a man who had once been so active and was now confined to a few rooms in a house.

      She only smiled, this beautiful woman who was still, astonishingly, his wife.

      His wife. That was the part that mattered. That was the only part that mattered.

      “Anais,” he began, his voice serious, because this was long overdue.

      But she surprised him. She turned toward him and she shook her head, and when he didn’t continue speaking she stepped closer and slid her hands up over the planes of his bare chest. Heat against heat.

      And everything inside him burst into flame.

      “I don’t want to talk,” she said, and there was something about her voice. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him, with that gleam of something he couldn’t quite read in her eyes. “I want to say a thousand things to you, Dario, but I don’t want to talk.”

      And she was so close, after everything that had happened. And he wasn’t playing any games this time, the way he’d tried so hard to pretend when he was on Maui. Her hands were on his bare skin and she gleamed pale and smooth in the light from the city around them, and he was only a man.

      “I think we can figure out a better way to communicate,” she whispered.

      And Dario didn’t have it in him to refuse her.

      He didn’t have it in him to try.

      He swept her closer and she was against him then, all those sweet, lean curves pressed tight to him as he bent down and took her mouth the way he’d wanted to for days and days. A lifetime or two, by his reckoning. Every time she laughed, or was still. Every time she frowned at him, or simply breathed the same air.

      He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted all of her.

      The kiss was a lick of pure fire, of blinding need. And it wasn’t nearly enough.

      He let the wild thing inside him loose, claiming her and marking her, tasting her deep. And as he kissed her he backed her across the smooth stone deck toward the glass doors that led inside his suite, pulling his mouth from hers only to tug the tank top up and over her head.

      Her laugh as she lifted her arms to help him was better than the city’s bright gleam, and it moved inside him like the same restless song.

      By the time they made it to the side of the wide bed he’d never imagined he’d share with anyone, they were both breathing much too heavily, their clothes strewn behind them in a trail.

      “You’re perfect,” he told her, his voice a guttural rasp against the dark. “You’re so damned perfect.”

      “That sounds like talking,” she teased him, nipping at his chin.

      And he worshipped her, this woman he’d never recovered from and never gotten past. This woman he’d never divorced, across all these years.

      Some part of him must have known it was never over between them. It was never finished, no matter how it seemed. The hunger went on and on and on.

      He knelt before her by the side of his bed and he relearned every inch of her gorgeous body, the way he had the night she’d trusted him with her innocence. From her marvelous collarbone to the exquisite arch of her narrow feet, he memorized her. He studied her and he adored her.

      With his hands and his mouth and his gaze, he made her his and he made her come. Once. Again.

      And the third time he threw her over that edge, this time with two fingers deep in her soft heat and his mouth a small torment against one perfect breast, she cried out so hard and so long he thought she might shatter his windows.

      He almost wished she had.

      “Enough,” she managed to say, spread out across his bed like a feast. “You’ll kill me.”

      “You say that as if you’d mind.”

      Her mouth curved dangerously and she rolled over, coming up on her knees beside him. “My turn,” she murmured.

      And she took her time.

      She tortured him, with an electric intensity that might have concerned him, had she not been making him feel quite so good. She marked him with her teeth and she indulged herself in him with her mouth, her tongue, the sensual slide of her palms against his skin. She lavished her attention on every part of him, each ridge of his abdomen, the flat disc of each nipple, the line of his neck and all along his jaw, before heading back down the length of his body.

      She smiled up at him as she knelt between his legs, something particularly raw in her dark eyes. But before he could question her, she leaned forward and took him deep in her mouth.

      He thought he might die. He swore he had. He forgot everything in the world but this. Her. Anais.

      Her mouth was hot and wet, a benediction and a prayer, and he lost himself in the slide and the suck,