the fatal crash which had left them all orphaned. He’d seen it etched on the features of those matrons at boarding school, where they’d been sent when Giovanni had finally admitted he couldn’t cope any more. They’d all tried to get him to talk about stuff and to tell them how he felt. But he had clammed up, like those mussels he sometimes ate with frites in France—the ones with the tight shells you weren’t supposed to touch.
Yet something about Willow made him want to talk. Made him want to tell her everything.
‘You know I have a twin brother?’ he said suddenly.
Cautiously, she nodded. ‘But you don’t talk about him.’
‘That’s because we are estranged. We haven’t spoken in years.’
He untangled her arms from his neck and walked over to the bed, picking up a flimsy silk wrap and throwing it to her, disappointed yet relieved when she slipped it on because he couldn’t really think straight when she was naked like that.
He drew in a deep breath as he met the unspoken question in her eyes. ‘The two of us were sent away to a fancy boarding school in Europe,’ he said slowly. ‘And after we left, we started up a business together—catering for the desires of the super-rich. Our motto was “Nothing’s impossible,” and for a while nothing was. It was successful beyond our wildest dreams...and then my brother met a woman called Anais and married her.’
There was a pause. ‘And was that so bad?’
Dante looked into her clear grey eyes and it was as if he’d never really considered the matter dispassionately before. ‘I thought it was,’ he said slowly. ‘I was convinced that she wanted Dario’s ring on her finger for all the wrong reasons. Women have always been attracted to the Di Sione name in pursuit of power and privilege. But in Anais’s case, I thought it was for the sake of a green card. More than that, I could see that she had her hooks into my brother. I could tell he really cared about her—and I’d never seen him that way before.’
‘So what happened?’ she said, breaking the brittle silence which followed.
Dante met her eyes. He had done what he had done for a reason and at the time it had seemed like a good reason, only now he was starting to see clearly the havoc he had wrought. He suddenly realised that his dislike of his twin’s wife went much deeper than suspecting she just wanted a green card.
‘I didn’t trust her,’ he said. ‘But then, I didn’t trust any woman.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Life is complicated, Dante.’
His mouth twisted. ‘It’s not a story I’m particularly proud of, but when we were at college, I was sleeping with a woman called Lucy. She was quite something. Or at least, so I thought—until I discovered she’d been sleeping with my twin brother as well.’
Willow stared at him. ‘That’s terrible,’ she whispered.
He shrugged. ‘I laughed it off and made out like it didn’t matter. But it did. Maybe it turned her on to have sex with two men who looked identical. Or maybe she was just after the family name and didn’t care which brother should be the one to give her that name.’ He hesitated. ‘All I know is that, afterwards, things were never quite the same between me and Dario. Something had come between us, though neither of us acknowledged it at the time. And after that, I always viewed women with suspicion.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Willow, and her hand reached up to touch his jaw. ‘But after what had happened, it was natural you would be suspicious and examine the motives of the woman he eventually married. You were obviously looking out for him—you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.’
But Dante shook his head, forcing himself to look at the situation squarely for the first time. To see things as they were and not how he’d wanted them to be. And Willow needed to hear this. He didn’t want her building up fantasies about him being the kind of caring brother who was just looking out for his twin. She needed to hear the truth.
‘It wasn’t just that,’ he admitted slowly. ‘The truth was that I wasn’t crazy about Dario’s new wife. I didn’t like the power she had once she had his ring on her finger. She was so damned...opinionated and I hated the way Dario started listening to her, instead of me. Maybe I was just plain jealous.’ He gave a ragged sigh. ‘When he was out one morning I went round to confront Anais about her real motives in marrying him. I accused her of using him to get herself a green card and we had one hell of a row, which ended up with her throwing a glass of water over me. I guess I deserved it. We both backed down and that might have been the end of it—in fact, we’d both started talking—had Dario not walked in and found me walking out of his bedroom, buttoning up one of his shirts. He thought we’d been having sex.’ He looked into Willow’s widened eyes. ‘He asked whether we’d been having sex.’
‘And what...what did you say?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Dante slowly. ‘I didn’t say anything. I used my silence to allow him come to his own conclusions, only they were the wrong conclusions. Because even though we’d both slept with Lucy, there was no way I would have ever touched his wife. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I felt this fierce kind of anger that he had accused me of such a thing. I thought that their relationship couldn’t be so great if he thought his wife would jump straight into bed with his brother at the first opportunity. I thought the only way for things to get back to normal would be for them to break up—and they did. The marriage imploded and Dario cut all ties with me. He held me responsible and I couldn’t blame him for that.’
‘And did you...did you ever try to make amends?’
He nodded. ‘At first I did. I was eaten up with guilt and remorse. But no matter how many times I tried to contact him, his mind was made up and he wouldn’t see me, or speak to me. It was like trying to smash my way through a concrete wall with nothing but my bare hands, and in the end I gave up trying.’
He waited for her judgement. For the shock and outrage he would expect from a woman whose innocence he had taken and whose total tally of sexual partners was just one. Wouldn’t she be disgusted by what he had done? Wouldn’t she want to walk away from him, no matter how good he was between the sheets?
But there was no judgement there. The concern had not left her eyes. And for the first time in his life he was finding compassion tolerable.
‘Why don’t you go to him?’ she asked.
‘Because he won’t see me.’
‘Couldn’t you at least...try? Because...’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Dante...one thing I learnt when I was so ill was just how important family are. They should be the people you can depend on, no matter what. And you never, ever know what’s around the corner. If something happened to Dario and you were still estranged, you’d never forgive yourself. Would you? And it’s not too late to try again.’ Her words became urgent. ‘It’s never too late.’
He shook his head, because hadn’t he grown weary with being stonewalled? And all these years down the line, surely rejection would be all the harder to take. But as Dante looked into Willow’s face, he realised he needed to be bigger than his pride and his ego. He thought about all the things she’d been through—things she hadn’t wanted to tell him but which eventually he’d managed to prise from her. He thought about how she’d
