you ruined it, he told himself savagely then, as an old farmhouse came into view at the end of the lane. Because that is what you do.
The car pulled up in front of the bright old house and was promptly surrounded by a pack of baying dogs. Rafael climbed out of the car as a silver-haired woman charged out of the house and straight toward them in some misguided attempt to corral her charges.
But despite the barking and howling and general din, Rafael knew it the moment Lily appeared on the step behind the older woman, as if everything else fell quiet. He drank her in. Again. She was no longer wearing her coat and scarf, and he couldn’t keep himself from tracing the fine, elegant lines of that willowy body of hers. Her jeans were snug, making his mouth water, and the long-sleeved shirt she wore hugged her breasts and made him realize how hard and hungry he was for her—even in this sea of animals.
And even if she looked horrified to see him.
“This is stalking!” she threw at him from her place on the steps. “You can’t hunt me down at my home. You don’t have any right!”
Before Rafael could reply, a streaking shape shoved past her and would have hurtled itself down the steps and into the chaos had Lily not reached out and grabbed it.
Not an it. A boy. A small one.
“I told you to stay inside no matter what,” Lily told him sharply.
“Arlo is barely five,” the older woman said from somewhere off to the side where, Rafael was dimly aware, she’d managed to move all the dogs into a fenced-off pen. But he couldn’t look away from Lily. And the boy. “He doesn’t get ‘no matter what.’”
The little boy looked at the older woman, then angled his head back to look up at Lily, who still held him by the collar of his shirt.
“Sorry, Mama,” he said, angelically, and then he grinned up at her.
It was a mischievous grin. It was filled with light and laughter and the expectation that his sins would be forgiven in an instant, simply because he’d wielded it. Rafael knew that smile well. He’d seen a version of it on his brother’s face throughout Luca’s whole life. He’d seen it in his own mirror a thousand times more.
His heart stopped beating. Then started again with a deafening, terrible kick that should have knocked him to the ground. He couldn’t quite understand why it hadn’t.
“You don’t have the right to be here,” Lily said again, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glittering, and Rafael didn’t know how he could want her this badly. He’d never understood it. And it was back as if she’d never been gone, a yearning so deep it was like an ache inside him.
But it didn’t matter any longer. None of that mattered. The little boy didn’t resemble the fair woman he’d called Mama at all. He had Rafael’s dark curls and the Castelli dark eyes. He looked like every picture Rafael had ever seen of himself as a child, scattered all over the ancestral Castelli home in northern Italy.
“Are you so certain I don’t have the right to be here, Alison?” Rafael asked, amazed he could speak when everything inside him was a shout again, long and loud and drowning out the world. “Because unless I am very much mistaken, that appears to be my son.”
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