coral from the exultant dawn still fading away as she watched—and the man who waited for her at the foot of the steps as darkly gorgeous and even more dangerous than the view.
Rafael slid his mobile into his pocket as she stepped onto the solid, frozen ground beside him. Lily refused to look at him, and then despaired of herself if something so small and pointless was her only potential rebellion. Pathetic. She could feel her heart in her throat, and for the first time in her entire life, thought it was within the realm of possibility that she might faint.
Don’t you dare! she snapped at herself. And not because fainting was a weakness, though it likely was and she didn’t want to show any weakness here. But because she knew Rafael would catch her and the very last place she needed to be, ever again, was in his arms.
She kept her gaze trained on Arlo, who was chasing his uncle up and down the otherwise empty runway, kept as it was for the family’s use alone. A gleaming black Range Rover waited at a discreet distance, poised to sweep them all down to the grand old house that lounged across several acres at one end of the crystal-blue mountain-rimmed alpine lake the locals called Lago di Lacrime.
Lake of Tears, Lily thought darkly, glaring in the direction where she knew the lake waited, out of sight behind the nearest wall of alpine rock. How appropriate.
“I’m afraid the results of the blood tests are in and allow no further room for debate,” Rafael told her then, his voice quietly triumphant in a way that made her skin feel shrunken down too tight against her own bones. “You are Lily Holloway. And Arlo is very much our son.”
She should feel something big, Lily thought then. Panic. Desperation. Even the polar opposite of that—a pervasive sense of relief, perhaps. Or perhaps of homecoming, after all these years of hiding.
But what she felt, instead, was profoundly sad.
Our son, he’d said, as if they were like other people. As if that was a possibility. As if they hadn’t ruined each other, down deep into their cores, so comprehensively that even the past five years hadn’t healed it or changed it at all.
Lily didn’t think anything ever could.
They stood there together in one of the most gorgeous and remote spots in the world. The thrust of the fierce mountains was exhilarating, the sky bluer by the moment while the crisp wind danced through her hair and moved over her face like a caress, and it was beautiful. It was more than beautiful. And yet all she could see was the dark, twisted past that had brought them here. Her terrible addiction to him and his profound selfishness. Their dirty, tawdry secrets. The awful choices she’d made to escape him, as necessary as they were unforgivable.
This was no new start. It was a prison sentence. And the only thing she knew for sure was that while Rafael was responsible for her son—the single greatest thing in her life and, as far as she could tell, her singular purpose on this earth—Rafael was also the reason she’d had to burn down every bridge and walk away from everything she’d ever loved.
And Arlo was worth that. Arlo was worth anything.
But that didn’t mean she had the slightest idea how she would survive proximity to Rafael again now.
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” she told him, long after the silence between them had grown strained and awkward and possibly revealing, too. That was what made her tell him as much of the truth as she could. “I don’t feel like Lily Holloway. I don’t know who that is. I certainly don’t understand who she was to you.”
“Never fear,” Rafael said, his voice soft but somehow containing all the might of those mountains looming up above them, solid rock and sheer, dizzying magnitude, and all of that dark heat besides. “I’ll teach you.”
* * *
Rafael had no idea what to do with himself now that he’d brought Lily and her son—his son—back to Italy.
It was a novel, distinctly unpleasant sensation.
He heard his brother walk into the cozy, private study he used as his office in the great old house, but he didn’t turn away from the window where he stood. He’d been there some time, still gripped in the same tight fist that had held him fast since Virginia. Before him, the pristine alpine lake stretched off into the low afternoon mists that concealed the small, picturesque village that adorned its far end and the tall mountains that thrust up like a fortress behind it, as if to protect it.
And much closer, down in the gardens that were little more than a suggestion beneath packed and frozen earth this time of year, the five-year-old child who was indisputably his own ran in loopy circles around the woman who claimed she could not remember Rafael at all.
He was certain she could. More than certain. He’d seen it in those lovely eyes of hers the way he’d always seen her need. Her surrender. He knew she was lying as sure as he’d known who she was when he’d seen her on the street.
What Rafael didn’t know was why.
“Are you planning to speak?” he asked Luca with perhaps more aggression than necessary. “Or will you loom there like one of the mountains, silent and disapproving?”
“I can speak, if you like,” Luca replied, sounding wholly unaffected by Rafael’s tone, much as he always did. “But the stories I have to tell are far less interesting than yours, I think.”
Rafael turned then and eyed his little brother. “I thought you were heading down to Rome tonight.”
“I am. I imagine you and Lily have a bit more to talk about than she and I do.” The sound of a child’s excited laughter wafted up from the gardens then, as if on cue, and hung there between them. Luca only smiled. “All of those interesting stories, for example, that you still haven’t seen fit to tell me.”
They looked at each other across the relatively small room. The fire licked at the grate. The December wind shook the windows, sweeping down from the heights of the mountains and off the surface of the freezing lake. And outside, a little boy was running hard enough to make himself dizzy in the very same spot they’d done so themselves, though in their case, it had been entirely without any parental supervision from the increasingly unwell woman who had never wanted to be a mother in the first place.
Rafael had never intended to have a child of his own. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do now it turned out he had one, without his permission. Without his knowledge, even. Thanks to a woman who had run from him and then concealed that child’s very existence from him for all these years.
Deliberately. She had done this deliberately.
He didn’t know what he felt. Or more precisely, which dark thing he should feel first.
“Have you come to ask me something?” Rafael asked after a moment or two dragged by. “Or is this the sort of tactic you use in negotiations, hoping the other party will fall to pieces in the silence?”
Luca laughed, but he didn’t deny that. “I would ask you to confirm that you did, in fact, sleep with our sister—”
“Stepsister,” Rafael growled. “A crucial distinction, I think you are aware.”
“—but that would be for dramatic effect, nothing more.” Luca waved a languid hand. “I already know the answer. Unless you have a contorted tale of a petri
