Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James
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new. It was eerily similar to how he’d felt when he’d arrived at ICE—having left his wife and his brother and his former company behind him in a bright blaze of a burned bridge—only to discover that the owner was precisely as shady as Dante had worried he was. That all of the company’s business practices were dubious and immoral, exactly as Dante had warned.
He rather doubted that a five-year-old child would appreciate the way he’d handled the ICE situation—with a systemic reworking of the company from the ground up over the course of years, which had included sidelining the owner and making him a silent partner before eventually ousting him altogether.
Dario had only spent a handful of days with Damian, but he knew full well that this child—he found it much too easy to assume the boy really was his son, and that should have worried him more than it did—was never going to be a silent anything.
“Enough,” he said one morning, interrupting another tantrum. The nanny wrung her hands in the background but it had been Damian who’d picked up a two hundred and twenty thousand dollar bronze statue from the coffee table and thrown it. At Dario’s head.
The fact he’d missed—by a mile—didn’t change Damian’s intent.
Nor did it change the fact that Dario now had a very heavy bronze stuck like a fork into his hardwood living room floor.
“I want my mom,” the little boy said, his face—a perfect replica of every photograph Dario had ever seen of himself and his own memories of his brother, save those eyes that could only be Anais’s—very solemn then, with his lower lip on the verge of trembling. “You said she’d come but she hasn’t come.”
“She’ll be here soon.”
And Dario wondered when he’d become such a liar. When he’d started tossing them out so easily, so readily. It made him wonder what lies he was telling himself.
“I don’t like it here,” Damian informed him. But it sounded like more of an observation than a complaint. “I want to go home.”
“What if I told you this was your new home?” Dario asked.
Most of the residents of New York City would fling themselves prostrate on the hot asphalt street outside to get the opportunity to so much as glance inside this particular building, so famous was it after the number of colorful, wealthy characters who had graced its Art Deco halls at one point or another. And most of the world would kill for a chance to spend even five minutes in Dario Di Sione’s highly coveted penthouse, and only partly because of the view.
This five-year-old who was very probably his own flesh and blood looked around as if he was deeply unimpressed, then screwed up his nose and shrugged.
“It’s okay.” He considered. “It would be better if my mom was here, though.”
Dario met the nanny’s gaze from across the room and dismissed her with a jerk of his chin, then returned his attention to Damian.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. He felt like an idiot. He felt like a movie villain, ponderous and laughable, except he had no mask to hide behind while he did this. “I’m your father.”
He didn’t know what he expected. Something out of a movie, perhaps. Something cinematic, dramatic. The child had flung an expensive bit of table art across the room because he’d wanted a different cereal for his breakfast—surely the news that he had a father at all should make him do...something.
Instead, Damian looked as nonchalant as if Dario had shared with him the news that it was sunny outside today, something they could both see quite easily through the sweeping windows that let in the morning light.
“I know,” he said after a moment, as if the topic was boring. Stupid, even. “My mom told me. She lets me keep your picture by my bed.”
“You know?” He was so dumbfounded he couldn’t quite process the rest of what Damian had told him.
“She said you’re very important and busy—that’s why you never come to our house.” Clearly tired of standing still, Damian started to fidget, working his left arm up over his head for no reason that Dario could discern. He held it there, then began to hop on his right leg. Up, down. Over and over again. “Is she coming soon?”
“Soon,” Dario said absently. He couldn’t quite get himself to look too closely at what the little boy had said, much less what it could mean. “You’ve known I was your father this whole time? Even at your school?”
“Of course.” Damian stopped hopping and looked at Dario as if he was very dim. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.”
And then he started using the nearest sofa as a trampoline while shouting out the words to a song he claimed had only dog words, while Dario sat there with an unfamiliar tight feeling in his chest. He didn’t know how to process this revelation.
Anais had kept a picture of him by Damian’s bed? She hadn’t kept the child’s paternity a secret at all?
What if you’re wrong? she’d asked him.
The truth was, Dario had never considered the possibility. Anais had denied it outright, but she would, wouldn’t she? It had been Dante who had made him so utterly certain. Because Dante hadn’t denied it. Dante had stared back at him and said nothing, not one word, his silence far more damning than anything he could have said.
And that had been a very dark time for Dario even before he’d walked into his apartment that day, but what possible reason could his own brother—his identical twin—have for lying about something like sleeping with Dario’s wife?
Still, none of that explained why Anais kept his picture next to their son’s bed. It was something he knew he wouldn’t have done, had their situation been reversed. He would have pretended she’d never existed.
He’d told her it would make him a monster if he was the man she suggested he was. If Dante had lied, if Dario had gotten the wrong idea, if more than half a decade had ticked by like this, rolling on from that single day in his old apartment...
But he knew that was impossible. Dante had been many things back then, but he’d never been a liar—and he’d certainly never looked Dario straight in the eye and lied to him, not once in all their lives. Not even by omission.
Dario knew it was impossible.
Yet somehow, he still felt like a monster.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself, almost under his breath. Because he didn’t understand how Anais could be the awkward virgin he’d run after on the Columbia campus and also the woman who’d slept with his twin brother. He’d never understood that progression—and he’d never wanted to hang around and ask for explanations, either. Over time he’d thought he’d figured it out. She’d been so starved for attention, for affection, after the childhood she’d had—no wonder one man hadn’t been enough for her. That was what he’d told himself. That was what he’d believed.
But a picture of him next to a child’s bed didn’t fit in with the character he’d imagined. With who he’d told himself she’d become by having sex with Dante for God only knew how long before he’d discovered them.
He didn’t know what to make of it, and he hated that. Anais belonged in the box she’d built with her own deceitful behavior. This past week had been bad enough. Running into her so unexpectedly in that remote house on Maui, then discovering she had a child she claimed was his—it all required a somewhat larger, more unwieldy box than he’d prefer.
Still, this was worse. This struck him as an act of charity and he couldn’t understand how such a thing fit with the woman who’d callously pitted one twin against the other. Who might have been doing so all throughout Dario’s relationship, for all he knew.
He raked a hand through his hair and picked up his cell phone, aware that calling her was the exact opposite of how he’d normally handle something like this. Why did this woman tie him in knots when she wasn’t