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considered her for what seemed like days, and then he bit out the name of one of the grand luxury resorts further south on this side of the island in exclusive Wailea.
“Do you know it?”
“Of course I know it.”
Not that she’d stayed there, of course. The prices were astronomical, even by exalted Maui resort standards. And she’d hardly had a lot of call to stay at luxury resorts in the past few years.
“That’s where I’m staying.” He studied her for a moment. “I’ll expect you tomorrow evening at seven o’clock.”
“I’m afraid I have a...”
“Cancel it, whatever it is.” His full mouth thinned and the way his blue eyes glittered made her heart leap in her chest. It made her the liar he’d always claimed she was. “Don’t make me hunt you down, Anais. You’ll like it even less than I will.”
And then he melted off into the night. She heard the sound of a car engine turning over in the street, outside her line of sight, but she couldn’t seem to move. She stood there on her own front step for much too long, as off balance as if she was out at sea on a rickety boat, trying and failing to handle the swell.
He’d left her with nothing to do but furiously debate whether or not she planned to follow his peremptory orders.
Of course not, she told herself sharply, shaking herself out of whatever daze this was and walking back inside. It took a great deal more strength than it should have to keep from slamming the door shut, loud enough to bring the house down around her ears. Who does he think he is to issue commands? You don’t have to pay that man the slightest bit of attention!
Anais returned to the couch and tried to get back to the work she’d been doing, the work she needed to get done tonight, but it was no use. She was too...stirred up. Too uncertain and off balance, still.
He’s Damian’s father, a countering voice reminded her, as if she was likely to forget it. You owe Damian this, not Dario. Hammering out some kind of solution here helps him, and that’s what matters. It’s the only thing that matters.
Anais hardly slept that night.
She couldn’t get comfortable in her own bed. She checked on Damian more times in the night than she had since he was a newborn and she’d been terrified he might stop breathing if she relaxed her panicked vigilance even a little bit. He’d been so tiny and fragile for such a massive, lifetime responsibility and the blinding shower of love she felt every time she looked at him. She’d come to the conclusion that maybe she was the one who’d stopped breathing during those first, overwhelming months.
She hadn’t been entirely alone, thank God. Her elderly aunt and uncle had been the only bright spot in her family tree her whole life, and nothing had changed when Anais had come here to Maui with the shards of her marriage clinging to her like broken glass. They’d taken her in without question, the way they had back when she’d been a girl, desperate to escape her warring parents for a school holiday here, a summer there. When she’d finally admitted to them that she was pregnant, they’d taken that in stride, too. They’d helped her get on her feet and figure out a way forward as the single mother she’d never planned to become. And they’d been a steadfast, dependable presence in Damian’s life since his first breath.
Compared to some women, Anais knew, she had it good.
She reminded herself of that the next morning, when Damian woke up in his holy terror mode, in the full fury of all his five short years. She got his things ready despite his protests, wrestled him into something resembling an appropriate outfit for school, then had to cajole and threaten and bribe him into the car for a miserable ride all the way to drop him off.
She released him to his school with a muttered apology for unleashing a Damian in his most unreasonable and mutinous state upon them. Then she went into her law office where she was a senior associate for the single named partner and disappeared behind the mountain of paperwork on her desk. She told herself that she had no idea if she planned to go and see Dario as commanded. She told herself that repeatedly. But when her aunt called in the afternoon and asked if Damian could have one of his sleepovers at their house the way he did from time to time, it seemed like a sign.
“A sign that you should use the night to catch up on work,” she muttered to herself, scowling at her cell phone after she tossed it back down on the nearest case file. “Not gallivant about with the dangerous past.”
It wasn’t until she was back home that evening and finally able to clean up the evidence of Damian’s morning tantrum that she started to rethink that stance. She imagined Dario had visions of some appropriate movie child in his head, all serene smiles and quiet playtime with noninvasive toys under someone else’s cheerful supervision. That was a lovely daydream of a perfect little angel. She’d shared it herself before she’d become a mother. But it wasn’t reality and it definitely wasn’t her son.
She found she couldn’t wait to tell Dario so—and even a guilty look at the stacks of files waiting for her on her coffee table failed to sway her. The man who she suspected had sheets of ice where his heart should have been couldn’t possibly want a child, no matter what he might have said on her doorstep. Hadn’t he said so a thousand times when they’d been together? There was no reason that should have changed in all the time since. And Damian deserved more than a father who would, sooner or later, begrudge his very existence.
Anais had lived that bleak, miserable life. She wouldn’t condemn her own son to it. She wouldn’t.
The front desk was expecting her when she finally made it through the last of the summer traffic down through bustling Kihei and into Wailea, then followed the unobtrusive signs into the parking area of the exclusive resort. A staff member announced that Mr. Di Sione was waiting for her in one of the resort’s private, waterfront villas and proceeded to lead her there as if one or the other of them was visiting royalty.
Of course. Nothing but the best for Dario.
But if she was honest, wasn’t that part of the reason she’d found him so fascinating? He’d been a shot of controlled recklessness. Bright color in the middle of her black-and-white life. He’d been raised wealthy and indulged, and then he and Dante had made their own, personal fortunes while they were still in college. It had meant neither one of them had to pay any attention to the kind of boundaries other people had no choice but to obey.
And Anais had been feral, more or less. She’d raised herself in the crossfire of her parents’ endless wars, and she hadn’t had the slightest idea how to have fun, or fall in love, or be silly for absolutely no reason—all the things Dario had taught her.
Taught her, then taken away, as if all those things belonged to him and had only ever been on loan to the likes of her.
Anais got more and more furious as she walked, following the diffident staff member across one of the most stunning hotel grounds on Maui as the sun dropped toward the water, all sweeping views juxtaposed with sleek, modern designs that somehow evoked ancient Hawaii in the gathering dark—not that any of it registered. The truth was, she was lucky. She’d been an attorney for years now in one of the most beautiful places in the world. She liked her job, her clients and the life she’d built here. Practicing law was comfortable and it allowed her to take care of Damian and help out her aunt and uncle, too, when she could.
She was damned proud of those things. This was the life she’d built all on her own. Her parents had stopped even the pretense of any obligations to her the day she’d turned eighteen. Her husband had abandoned her seven years later, right after she’d finally learned to trust him. Yes, her aunt and uncle helped her as best they could and that had been everything to her at times, but ultimately Anais had made herself by herself.
Anais had never had Dario’s kind of money, however, and she never would. She’d spent a long time telling herself she was glad of that—that it was all the money he and Dante had made while they were still in college that had ruined him, in the end. It had made him expect too much from the world and everyone in it, as if he could