to speak. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to this. Your feelings about the child you could have known all his life if you hadn’t deliberately hidden yourself away aren’t my problem. I didn’t tell you because I want something from you. I told you because it was the right thing to do.”
“Anais...”
“And now I’m leaving,” she interrupted him, her dark eyes glittering with emotions he couldn’t name. He shouldn’t want to name them. He shouldn’t believe they existed at all. “I don’t really care what you do with this information. Go lick your self-inflicted wounds some more. Pretend you still don’t know. Whatever lets you feed that persecution complex of yours, I’m sure you’ll do it.”
He couldn’t bear it. There was that fury in him and something much darker and deeper and worse. Much, much worse. Raw and aching and terrible. She eyed him as if she was looking for something on his face, but then her gaze shuttered and she started to turn away again—and he really couldn’t bear that.
So he did the only thing he could think of to do.
Maybe he wasn’t thinking at all.
He reached out, slid his hand over her delicate neck to cup her nape and pull her close and then he took her mouth with his.
It was the same madness he remembered. That same wild burn that sizzled through him, lighting him up and making him crazy, eating him alive. She still tasted sweet and perfect, the way she always had, as if no time at all had passed.
Dario moved closer, slid his hands onto the thick fall of her hair, then tugged her mouth into a better angle beneath his and kissed her deeper, harder.
And she kissed him back, the way he remembered she always, always had.
She met him, a tangle of tongues and need while the fire between them raged, and their whole history seemed to dance between them in the flames. It was as raw as it was hot, as greedy as it was painful, and Dario knew this was the worst idea he’d had in a long, long time.
But still he kissed her, over and over, as if he could glut himself on her. As if he could block out not only what she’d told him and all the accusations she’d thrown at him, but the six years since he’d touched anyone like this or let himself be touched in turn. He hadn’t wanted anyone near him. He hadn’t wanted anything that resembled intimacy, with anyone.
And yet here, now, with that damned soft breeze still dancing all over him, and Anais’s perfect mouth hot and demanding beneath his, he couldn’t seem to remember why that was.
She wrenched herself away. He heard the small sound of distress she made and he hated that it lodged itself in his chest, like one more bullet in this strange afternoon bristling with them. She stumbled back a step until her back hit the wall, and she stared at him.
She looked as shaken as he was. He hated that, too—the idea that she could actually be affected, that she might not be acting...
Of course she’s acting. Everything about her is an act.
He hated everything about this. This wild, untamed place. That insidious breeze that was messing with his head and making him feel restless and edgy. Anais and her lies and her deception, six years ago and today, and the fact she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever beheld only made it worse. He hated that he could taste her now. That he could feel her again, as if her perfect lips were some kind of brand and she’d marked him. Changed him.
And he hated that she’d made him feel again, when he’d tamped that down and shut it off in those tortured days following the end of their marriage. He hated that most of all.
“While we’re on the topic,” he said, not even sounding like himself, because that was what she did to him, still, “I want a divorce.”
Dario wanted nothing more than to make her feel as ripped wide open as he did, to take all the hurt and the fury and that spinning in his head, that unacceptable need that still surged in him, and make her feel it, too.
So he grinned while he said it, to make sure she got his point. To make sure it was painful. And because it was true and there should be a record of it. “On the grounds of your infidelity, of course. With my brother as the named third party.”
THE KNOCK ON the front door of Anais’s little house in Kihei, a few blocks up the hill from the ocean in a strictly residential, tourist-free neighborhood, came after nine o’clock that same night.
Anais scowled at the door as if it had transformed into a snarling monster.
Her comfortable two-bedroom house was arranged in a breezy open plan. That meant she didn’t have to get up from the living area’s couch where she had files spread out on the coffee table before her to see that the figure standing on her front step and visible through the panes of clouded glass in the door could not possibly be her aunt or uncle or any of her friends.
He was too tall. Too solid. Too obviously him, and besides, that knock had been brusque and demanding, not anything like friendly.
She gritted her teeth and wished she hadn’t changed into her comfortable evening-at-home clothes after she’d put Damian to bed hours ago. Yoga pants and a tank top didn’t seem like adequate armor against Dario. Not here in her own home. Not when she could still feel his mouth against hers from earlier, the way he’d tasted her and tempted her and taken her over, leaving her with nothing but that fire she’d convinced herself over the past six years had been entirely in her imagination.
Her imagination was pretty vivid, it turned out. So vivid her breasts seemed to swell at the thought of him now, and she felt that deep, restless ache low in her belly that only Dario had ever brought out in her.
Anais got to her feet reluctantly. She threw a glance over her shoulder toward the half-closed door to Damian’s room, but she knew her little boy could sleep through a rock concert. And she also knew enough about Dario to realize that if he’d tracked down her home address and shown up at this hour, he didn’t plan to wander off quietly into the night simply because she hadn’t answered his first knock.
He knocked again, louder, and she blew out a breath as she crossed the room. She smoothed a hand over her high ponytail and wished she really was the cool, practical woman she’d gotten so good at pretending she was. The kind who could take anything in stride, including the reappearance of her son’s father on her doorstep. The kind who wouldn’t spare a single thought for how she looked under the circumstances.
That woman does not exist, she told herself staunchly. That woman is nothing but other women just like me, faking it.
Then she steeled herself and wrenched open the door.
Dario stood there before her on the lower step, looking edgier and more dangerous than he had out on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai earlier in the day. It was dark now, a thick Hawaiian summer night that seemed to cling to the edges of things. It made Dario look as ruthless as he did powerful, somehow. He stared at her, unsmiling and intense, and she was unreasonably glad his hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans. As if that made him safer when she knew better than that.
He should have looked disreputable, in jeans and an untucked shirt. Instead, he looked like a particularly gorgeous object lesson in wealthy
