on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai, the rolling green pastures of the remote Kaupo district’s countryside behind him, the ocean a bright blue far below, like something straight out of her fantasies. And despite her many fervent prayers over the years, time had not smacked him down the way she would have preferred.
The way she’d prayed it would, more than once.
He was not a troll. He was not disfigured by his own cold, black heart and his dark imaginings the way he richly deserved. He was not stooped with loss or rendered appropriately hideous by the things he’d done.
Quite the opposite.
Unfairly, Dario Di Sione was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life. Still. He exuded that intense, brooding masculinity of his the way other, much less intriguing men smelled of aftershave or cologne. He wore the kind of seemingly casual jeans only very rich, very powerful men could make look like formal wear, and one of those whisper-soft shirts of his that clung to the glorious planes of his chest, the sleeves rolled up to show off his golden skin and the sheer strength of his forearms. She knew that behind the aviator sunglasses he wore, his eyes would still be blue enough to rival the Hawaiian sky all around him, always such a dizzying contrast with the black hair he wore a touch too long and what looked like a day or two’s growth of beard on his perfect jaw.
Damn him.
And damn her for being just as susceptible to him as she’d always been. Despite everything.
“I asked you a question.”
Anais blinked, trying to shove aside her wholly unwanted reaction to him. But her fingers dug into the leather folder she carried, and she didn’t think she was fooling anyone. Least of all herself.
“I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the place,” she said, as if this was a normal business meeting, the kind she carried out as Mr. Fuginawa’s lawyer, his first line of defense and his preferred method of communication with the outside world, all the time. “The road is a little bit tricky.”
Dario didn’t move. And yet she felt as if he’d reached across the distance between them and snatched her up in his fist. She had to force herself to take a breath. To stop holding the last one in as if letting it out might hurt her.
Especially when he slid those sunglasses from his face and focused all that furious blue attention on her.
“Really, Anais?” His voice was as mocking and withering as it was harsh, but she didn’t recoil at the sting of it. She was tougher now. She’d had to be, hadn’t she? “That’s how you want to play this?”
Anais didn’t look away. “Should we pick up the conversation where we left off six years ago, Dare? Is that what you want? The fact you cut me off without a word back then suggests not.”
“Was that a conversation?” His voice took on that same lethal edge she could see in the tense way he held himself, and it made her stomach ache. “I would have chosen an uglier word to describe the scene I walked in on.”
“That’s because your mind is a gutter,” she replied, still trying to keep her voice cool and professional, despite the topic. “But I’m afraid that has nothing to do with me. It never did.”
He laughed. Not the laughter she remembered from when they’d first met, when she’d been a third year at Columbia Law and Dario had been finishing his MBA. The laughter that had made the entire city of Manhattan seem to stand still around him, lost in that rough sound of pure male joy. This was not that. Not even close.
“I don’t care enough to ask you what you mean by that.” He looked around, his gaze as hard as that set to his jaw. “I came here for a pair of earrings, not to play Ghost of Christmas Past games with you. Can you help with that, Anais, or was this whole thing a setup so you could ambush me?”
By some miracle, her jaw didn’t drop at that.
Because she realized he meant what he said. She could read it in every hard, belligerent line of his body and that bright blaze of temper in his gaze.
“You knew this meeting was with me,” she managed to make herself say, though she couldn’t pretend she still sounded calm or in control. “We’ve been emailing for weeks.”
“My secretary has been emailing for weeks,” he corrected her. He shook his head, impatience etched across his features. “I’ve been busy with things that actually matter to me. And don’t flatter yourself, please. If I’d known you were going to be here, I wouldn’t be.”
And his voice was precisely as cutting as she remembered it from that horrible day when he’d walked out of their marriage, and her life, without warning and without a backward glance.
As if no time had passed. As if nothing had changed.
As if he really did think she was the cheating whore she still couldn’t quite believe he’d so easily, so quickly, so utterly accepted she was based on one easily explained and wholly innocent moment with his awful brother. Just as she couldn’t believe he’d never stuck around for that explanation—or even a fight. He’d simply...left.
Which meant all her silly expectations about this meeting today were nothing more than the same foolish dreams she’d nurtured all this time, all the while pretending she’d gotten over him and his shocking betrayal. That maybe he regretted what he’d done. That maybe he’d finally put aside his pride. That maybe he’d come to his senses at last. It was bad enough that she’d entertained such fantasies. It told her all kinds of uncomfortable things about how pathetic she was, how desperate and sad.
But much worse than her own hurt feelings and obviously messed-up heart, it meant that he still had no idea.
He still didn’t know about Damian.
He really had come all the way to this remote corner of Maui for a pair of earrings, not for her.
And certainly not for their son.
“HAVE YOU LAPSED into a coma?” Dario asked, the silk and menace in his voice hitting her like a lash and cutting deep. “Or is this remorse at last?”
And Anais hadn’t entirely realized how much hope she’d allowed herself to feel in the weeks leading up to this meeting with him, after all these years of silence, until now. When he took it all away again.
She should have known better.
“Remorse?” she echoed. She moved farther out onto the lanai, dropping the leather folder on the table between them and ordering her legs to stay steady beneath her when they felt like one of the palm trees being buffeted this way and that by the relentless trade winds. “For what, exactly? Your extended temper tantrum six years ago? I have a lot of feelings about that actually, but remorse isn’t one of them.”
Dario’s mouth moved into a hard, cynical sort of smile that made her stomach clutch. She’d had no idea he could look like that. So etched through with bitterness. She told herself he deserved it, but still. It made her ache.
“It’s good to know you’re as shameless as ever,” he said. “But why change? It got you what you wanted.”
“Yes.
