Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James
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let out a small laugh at that. “That became clear.” He shifted to look at Dario. “You were at that damned meeting with ICE. I thought she’d put you up to it, so I took the opportunity to drop by and get in her face.” He looked rueful. “She doesn’t back down.”
“Not usually,” Dario agreed. “As you’ve likely seen in the tabloids.”
“She threw a glass of water at me.” Dante moved a hand in the air over his chest. “All over me. And that calmed things down. The irony is that we’d actually started talking to each other when you walked in.”
“On you. Coming out of my bedroom, half-dressed.”
“It didn’t even occur to me that you might read it the wrong way,” Dante said in a low voice, “until you did. And I realized you’d obviously never gotten over what happened in college.”
“It seemed like a pattern,” Dario said then. Though in truth, he thought it was the broken trust he’d never gotten over and never forgotten—and maybe that hadn’t been fair. It had been Lucy who had lied, not Dante. But he hadn’t wanted to consider that back then. It had all been a mess. ICE, their past, Anais... “But Anais mattered more. Much more.”
“I never meant any of this to happen,” Dante said fervently. “I never wanted to break up your marriage and I certainly never wanted you to cut me off. I assumed things would go back to normal after you’d had time to cool down. I assumed that, at the very least, you’d come after me. Yell at me. Fight with me. Hell, I thought you’d answer the damn phone, Dario.”
Dario blew out a breath. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I let a moment of silence ruin two relationships.” He looked his brother in the eye, then reached over and clapped his hand to Dante’s shoulder. “You might have done nothing to keep me from believing the worst, Dante. But I’m the one who believed it. That isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
The evening wore on then, but everything was different. Better.
They sat out on the roof and told each other the stories of their lives over the past six years, and while they were no longer finishing each other’s sentences the way they had as children, it was remarkably easy to get back in tune. To feel connected again. Whole.
Dario hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his brother, or how deeply he’d been fooling himself all this time.
“How did you end up in Hawaii, anyway?” Dante asked. “Didn’t you once claim you didn’t see the purpose of beaches?”
“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