Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8. Кейт Хьюит
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that with a shrug. “You can’t imagine that you can rise from the dead unremarked, can you?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, blowing on her coffee and then taking a sip before she turned to face him again. “It’s not anybody’s business.”
“Perhaps not. But the media attention will be unavoidable.” He sounded impatient even by his own reckoning, but that coverlet was sliding down her upper arm, now, coming perilously close to shifting just far enough to expose the rosy tip of her breast. He needed to focus. “You died tragically and very young. That you are alive and well and in possession of the heir to the Castelli fortune will make it all that much more irresistible.”
She’d become that stranger again, cool and unreadable—or maybe she, too, had grown up in these intervening years. Become less raw, less emotional. Or at least less likely to show her every thought on her face. It was his own curse that he should feel that like a loss. Like one more thing to grieve.
“It sounds like you already know what they’ll say,” she said mildly. It was her turn to shrug. “Why can’t we let them say it?”
“The real story here isn’t your unexpected resurrection, as exciting as that might be,” he replied after a moment, after he’d had to force himself to look away from her almost-yet-not-quite-revealed breast. “It’s the question of what happened five years ago.”
“And here I thought rising from the dead would be sufficient,” she said, cool and dry, though he did not mistake that edge beneath it. “The media really is voracious these days.”
“It depends on the story. Did you deliberately hide yourself away all this time? Or did you hit your head and forget who you were?” He kept his gaze trained on hers. “The former leads to all manner of unpleasant inquiries about why you might have felt it necessary to do such an irrevocable thing and who might have been responsible. The latter, meanwhile, is a special interest story that will no doubt capture the public’s interest for a while, as these things do, but will then fade away.”
“So to be clear, we’re not talking about the truth right now, despite how many times you’ve called me a liar in the past two weeks.” She raised a challenging brow. “We’re talking about manipulating the media for your own murky ends.”
“No, Lily.” His tone was harsh. He made no attempt to soften it. “We’re talking about Arlo.”
She looked shocked by that. “What does this have to do with Arlo?”
“He will eventually be able to read all about this,” Rafael pointed out. “Assuming someone doesn’t share the whole of it with him on a playground, as children are wont to do. It will be part of the very public story that he and anyone else can access at will. I’d prefer that story not be about his mother thinking so little of his father that she pretended to kill herself and then hid herself away for half a decade. What good could possibly come of his knowing that?”
Something glittered in that too-blue gaze of hers. “I’m not going to lie to him. I can’t believe you’d really think I would.”
“Please spare me the moral outrage. You’ve already lied to him. You’ve lied to everyone you’ve ever met, before and after that accident. At least this time, the lie would be in his best interests.”
“You’re assuming a lot,” she said in a clipped tone, that glitter in her gaze even more hectic and a dark thing in her voice besides. “You barely know him. And one night with me after five years hardly gives you the right to make any kind of decision about what’s in his best interests.”
“I’m not assuming anything,” Rafael said, soft and harsh, giving absolutely no quarter. “Arlo is my son. You either hid him away from me deliberately, in which case any court in the land is likely to award me custody in the face of such a contemptible parental act—or you didn’t know what you were doing until I found you, which suggests a brain injury that hardly sets you up as mother of the year. I’d think long and hard about that, if I were you. I don’t want to treat you like a business rival and take you down by any available means necessary. But if I have to, I will.”
She eyed him as if she’d never seen him before and didn’t much like what she saw now.
“Is that what last night was about?” There was no particular inflection in her voice, though he could see all manner of shadows in her gaze as she set her coffee back down on the nearby side table with a bit too much precision. “Trying to sneak your way beneath my defenses so you could better knock me flat today?”
“Lily.” He said her name the way he heard it in his head, delicate and light, that same song that had been torturing him for all these years. “I have no reason whatsoever to think anything I did could reach you. Ever.”
He saw her hands shake then, very slightly, before she clenched them into the fabric slipping and sliding around her. And it made him feel worse, not better. Hollow.
“So the fact it sounds a lot like you’re threatening me is what, then?” she asked, her voice crisp, as if he’d imagined that small, telling tremor. “My overactive imagination? A remnant of that convent school poet you made up for your own amusement?”
“I wasn’t threatening you. I’m merely pointing out the realities of the situation we find ourselves in.”
“A man standing half-naked in a Venetian palazzo passed down through his family line for centuries maybe shouldn’t set himself up as the last word on reality,” she retorted. “It makes you sound silly.” She lifted a hand when he started to respond to that. “I understand that your feelings are hurt, Rafael. That sex only made it all that much more raw, and maybe that much worse.”
“You have no idea.” He hadn’t meant to say that. But he had, and so he thought he might as well keep going. “I want you, Lily. I can’t deny that. It doesn’t go anywhere, no matter how many times I lose myself in you. But that doesn’t change what we did to each other. How we behaved and what came of it. As you said yourself last night.”
“Neither does using my son—our son—as a weapon.” She held his gaze. “What does that make you?”
“Determined,” he retorted, a little more temper in his voice than he liked. As if he still had absolutely no control over himself where she was concerned. “I lost five years of his life. I won’t lose a moment more.”
“I haven’t denied you access to him,” she said stiffly. “I won’t. We can work something out, I’m sure. People who can’t manage to spend three seconds in a room together without drawing blood can do it. So can we.”
“You’re not understanding me.” He waited for her to focus on him again. “There will be no split custody, no separate homes. He stays with me.”
Lily’s mouth actually dropped open. “You must have lost your mind.”
“That leaves you with a very few options, I’m afraid, and I’m sorry for that,” he said, and there was a part of him that hated that she’d gone pale, that this clearly surprised and hurt her. But not enough to stop. “You can stay with him, with me. But that will require we make this official—and while I won’t pretend I’ll manage to keep my hands off you, I can’t promise I’ll ever give you more than sex. I can’t imagine I’ll ever trust you.” He shrugged as if that was of no matter to him. “Alternatively, you can go back to your life in Virginia or come up with a new one if you prefer, and you can call yourself any name you like until the end of time. But if you choose that option, you’ll do so alone.”
She didn’t move, though he had the impression she swayed on her feet, and he wished this was different. He wished he could gather her in his arms, make her smile. Make all of this all right. But the saddest truth of all was that he didn’t know how. Theirs was the high drama, the angst and the deeply thrust knife of betrayal. He didn’t know how to make her smile. He only knew how to bring out the worst in her—and how to make her cry.
He’d done nothing but that,