of deranged stalker—she couldn’t believe that, deep down, she still expected Dario to be a better man. Even now, some part of her was waiting for him to crack. To see reason. To stop this madness at last.
Anais told herself it was because of Damian. She wanted her son’s father to be a good man at heart, even if that took some excavating, like any mother would. She wanted his father to be the man she’d once believed he was, when she’d been foolish enough to fall in love with him. Because that would be a good thing for her child, not for herself.
Or not entirely for yourself, whispered that voice inside of her that knew exactly how selfish she was.
But life wasn’t about what she wanted. She’d learned that as a child in Paris, the pawn of two bitter parents who had never wanted her and had only wanted each other for that one night that had created her and thrown them together, like it or not. Life was about what she had. Like her cruel, flamboyantly unfaithful French father and the embittered Japanese mother whose name she’d taken when she’d turned eighteen because she’d been the lesser of two evils, those two things had never matched. It was high time she stopped imagining they ever would.
She tapped her fingers on the leather folder. “These are the contracts. Please sign them. Once you do, the earrings are yours, as promised.”
“Are we back to doing business, Anais?” he asked softly. She didn’t mistake that tone of his. She could hear the steel beneath it. “I might get whiplash.”
She allowed herself a careless shrug and wished she actually felt even slightly at her ease. “Business appears to be the only thing you know how to do.”
“Unlike all the things you know how to do, I imagine. Or should I ask my brother about that? He was always the more adventurous one.”
Anais would never know how she managed to keep from screaming out loud at that—at the unfairness and the cruelty of it, from a man whom she’d once believed would never, ever, say the kinds of things to her that her parents had hurled at each other all her life. She felt a vicious red haze slam down over her, holding her tight, like a terrible fist. But somehow, she beat it back. She thought of Damian, her beautiful little boy, and stayed on her feet. She managed, somehow, to keep herself from screaming like some kind of banshee at this man she couldn’t believe she’d married.
Not that he didn’t deserve a little bit of banshee, the way he’d acted back then and was still acting now. Still, that didn’t mean she had to give him the satisfaction of acting insane.
She met his condemning gaze with her own.
“I have nothing to be ashamed about,” she told him. Icily. Distinctly. “I did not sleep with your brother. I don’t care if Dante has spent the past six years telling you otherwise. I didn’t. He’s a liar.”
“I wouldn’t know what he is,” Dario said with cool nonchalance. “I haven’t spoken to him since I found him with you in my bedroom. Don’t tell me you two lovebirds didn’t make it. How heartbreaking for you both.”
That shocked Anais in a way she’d have thought was impossible. The Di Sione twins she’d known had been inseparable. Until you, she reminded herself. Dante hated you on sight. She tried to blink it away.
“The fact you thought anything happened between us—and still think it, all these years later, to such an extent that you feel justified in hurling insults at me—says more about what a vile, dark little man you are than it could ever say about me.”
Dario seemed almost amused by that. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be comfortable there in your fantasy world. But the truth is the truth, no matter how many lies you pile on top of it. So many it looks like you’ve convinced yourself. Congratulations on that, but you haven’t convinced me.”
If he’d been thrown by her appearance here, he was over it now, clearly. This was the Dario she remembered. The stranger who had walked into their home that awful day and had inhabited the body of the husband she’d adored a whole lot more than she should have. This cruel, mocking man who looked at her and saw nothing but the worthless creature her parents had always told her she was. As if that twisted truth had merely been lurking there inside of her, waiting to come out, and after their wild year together, he’d finally seen what they’d always seen when they’d looked at her.
Dario had done a great many unforgivable things, many far worse than how he’d looked at her that day, but that had been the first. The shot over the bow that had changed everything. Anais found she still wasn’t over it.
At all.
His lips thinned as he looked at her and he reached for the leather folder, pulling out the stack of documents. Then he acted as if she was another piece of furniture. He ignored her. He pulled out a chair and sat down, then proceeded to read through the dense, legal pages as if he was looking for further evidence of her trickery.
Anais thought sitting down with him at the table as if this was a normal, civilized meeting might actually break something inside of her, so she stood where she was instead. Calmly. Easily. On the outside, anyway. Letting the breeze toy with the ends of her hair as she stared out at the water and pretended she was somewhere else. Or that he was somebody else. Or that his being here didn’t present her with a huge ethical dilemma.
She didn’t want to tell him.
He didn’t deserve to know.
What if he turned this cruelty, this viciousness, on his own son?
But even as she thought it, she knew she was trying to rationalize her dilemma away instead of addressing it head-on, the way she should. Because he kept hurting her feelings all these years later, not because she truly believed Dario would ever do anything to hurt a child.
Not telling him now would change everything. She recognized that. Up until today, the fact that Damian didn’t know his father had been entirely Dario’s own fault. He’d made sure Anais couldn’t contact him, and she hadn’t seen how taking out an advertisement in the papers—as her aunt had suggested one night after a few too many of Anais’s tears and rants to the heedless walls—could help her child. By feeding Damian to the hungry tabloids? By making his life a circus? No, thank you. And she’d have eaten a burning hot coal before she’d have called Dante for any help, that manipulative bastard.
Dario had maintained his silence ever since that day back in New York. That wasn’t her fault.
But letting him leave here today no wiser? That would be.
She felt her hands bunch into fists and couldn’t quite make herself smooth them out again, even though she knew he’d see it. He could think what he liked, she told herself stoutly. He would, anyway.
“I have something to tell you,” she said woodenly, forcing the words out past lips that felt like ice and keeping her eyes trained on the sea. The beautiful Hawaiian sea that didn’t care about her troubles. The sea that washed them all away, or seemed to, if she stared at it long enough. The sea that had saved her once and could again, if she let it. Even from this.
Even from him. Again.
“I’m not interested.”
“I don’t really care if you’re interested or not. This might come as a surprise to you, but there are some things in this world that are more important than your feelings of persecution.”
He
