into their lives and pretended nothing had happened. He’d played the attentive boyfriend to whatever silly girlfriend he’d had then. She’d pretended to be as disgusted with him and the entire Castelli family as she always had been.
Then the holiday had passed, and it had been time for her to head back to Berkeley, to carry on with her sophomore year of college. He’d caught up to her in the grand front foyer of the château as she’d headed out toward her car with her bags. His girlfriend had been laughing it up in the next room with the rest of their families. They could have been discovered at any moment.
Rafael hadn’t spoken. He’d hardly looked at her since New Year’s Eve. But he’d held out his hand like this, and she’d met it. And it had felt a lot like crying, that heaviness within, that constriction and that ache, all bound up in such a simple touch. But they’d stood like that for what had felt like a very long time.
Now, all these years later, Lily understood it better. This was their connection in its least destructive form. This touch. This thing. It still arced between them, tying them together, rendering all the rest of what they were unimportant beside it.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said quietly, so quietly she almost thought she’d imagined it. But then his dark eyes met hers and held. “I thought you were gone forever.”
The sheer brutality of what she’d done hit her, then. She’d understood she’d hurt him, yes. She’d hurt a lot of people. She’d told herself she’d accepted that, and that Arlo was worth it. But she’d never thought about this. The warmth of his flesh against hers. This connection of theirs that defied all thought, all reason, all efforts to squash it. What would she have done if she’d thought he’d died? How could she possibly have lived with that?
Her throat was too tight to speak. She didn’t try. Instead, she leaned forward and pressed a kiss in the center of his chest. She felt his breath rush out, but she didn’t stop. She pushed him back against the bed, aware that he let her move him like that, that she couldn’t have shifted his powerful frame if he hadn’t allowed it.
She still couldn’t speak. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t apologize in her way.
Lily poured her sorrow and her regret all over him, making it into heat. He leaned back on his hands and she crawled over him, pressing kisses down the strong column of his throat, over that strong, hard pulse that she knew beat for her, then lower, to celebrate the sheer masculine perfection of his chest. She let her hair slip this way and that as she slid down the length of him, tasting him and celebrating him, pouring herself over him like sunlight until she unbuckled his trousers, pulled them down, then shoved them out of her way.
She paused then, flicking a look at him as she took his hard length in her hands. His gaze was black with need, his face set in stark and glorious lines of pure hunger, and apology merged with simple desire as she bent and sucked him deep into her mouth.
Rafael groaned. Or maybe that was her name.
Lily sank down between his legs, reveling in him. The taste of his hardness, salt and man. Satin poured over steel, and he trembled faintly the more she played with him, the deeper she took him.
He sank his hands in her hair and held her there as she taunted him with her tongue then took him deep yet again. He murmured Italian phrases that sounded like prayers but were, she knew, words of sex and need. Encouragement and stark male approval.
“Enough.”
His voice was so gruff she hardly recognized it, but she understood it when he pulled her from him and lifted her against him, rolling them back and onto the wide bed. For a moment she thought he would simply take over, but he rolled once more, settling her there on top of him so he nudged up against her slick folds.
His gaze was like fire, or maybe the fire was in her. Maybe this was all fire.
She reached between them and took him in her hand. She felt his swift intake of breath, or perhaps it was a curse, and then they both groaned when she shifted and took him deep inside her.
Naked, she thought, as if the word was an incantation. Or a prayer.
They were both naked. This wasn’t a coatroom, an alcove outside a dance or any of the other semipublic places they’d done this over the years. This was no illicit hotel room when they’d both claimed to be somewhere else. No one was looking for them and even if they were, it wouldn’t matter if they were found.
This was simply them, skin to skin, at last.
And then Lily began to move.
That same fire burned high, but this was a sweeter blaze. The pace she set was lazy. Dangerous. Rafael lay beneath her, his hands at her hips, his gaze locked to hers.
Perfect, Lily thought. He has always been perfect.
And then she rode them both right off the side of the earth, and into bliss.
LILY WOKE TO find herself all alone in that great bed, the sheets a tangle below her and the canopy like a filmy tent high above.
For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was.
It came back to her slowly at first, then with a great rush. That quick plane ride down from the remote lake in the Dolomites yesterday afternoon, then the boat that had whisked them through the eerie, echoing wonder of the Venice canals, past winding, narrow byways and under more than one distractingly elegant bridge. After which she’d spent hours getting ready for a ball she hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place, surrounded by servants like some kind of latter-day queen, finding herself less and less averse to the night ahead the more she liked the way they made her look in the beveled mirror in front her.
There was the most unpalatable truth of all: that she really was that vain.
But it had been worth it when she’d seen that stunned, famished look on Rafael’s face as she’d made her way down the long stair to his side. It had all been worth it.
Looking back, Lily thought she could trace all the rest of her questionable decisions last night to that moment. The long walk down, her gaze fastened to his, while he looked at her as if she was the answer to a very fervent prayer.
She sat up slowly now, the long night evident in the small tugs and pulls all over her body, unable to regret a single one of them. She imagined that would come. But in the meantime, she rolled from the bed and drew the coverlet around her as she stood. The fire was low in the grate, while the thin light of dawn made the air seem blue. Rafael was nowhere to be found and when she cocked her head to listen intently, she couldn’t hear him in the bath suite either. Outside, last night’s snow dusted all the boats moored along the edges of the canal and the tops of the grand palazzos opposite, making a particularly Venetian Christmas card out of the already lovely view.
Lily placed her hand against the glass the same way she’d placed it against Rafael’s hand the night before, felt that deep ache in her heart, and understood entirely too many things at once.
She was in love with him. Of course she was. She had always been in love with him, and it was as wretched a thing now as it had been when she’d been nineteen.
Because nothing had changed.
