in a cheerfully cozy room on a snowy December morning.
“No,” he murmured, and she might have said it first, but she found she greatly disliked his ready agreement. “I shouldn’t have touched you. I had no idea what I was unleashing.” She thought he tensed where he stood. Maybe that was how he seemed to crowd out all the air in the room. “And I hated it. I hated you.”
She couldn’t breathe. “You hated me,” she repeated, flatly, as if that would make it hurt less.
“I thought if I could pretend it hadn’t happened, it would go away. But it kept happening.” That dark, ruthless gaze of his tore her up. It made her shake. But he didn’t stop. “I thought if I could contain it, control it, diminish it or dilute it, I could conquer it. Keep it hidden. Choke the life out of it before it swallowed me whole.”
“I didn’t ask you to tell me any of this,” she said then, feeling off balance. Something like dizzy, as if she was propped there on the edge of a cliff instead of an overstuffed chaise. “I wish you would stop.”
“But then you went over the side of a cliff you shouldn’t have been near, in a car you shouldn’t have been driving, going much too fast,” he said, his voice hoarse, and she could see from that look in his eyes that he had no intention of stopping. “I knew perfectly well that if you’d been upset, the way they claimed you must have been to drive like that, it was my fault. They said it was an accident, that you’d lost control and skidded, but I wondered. Was it really an accident? Or had I made your life so bloody miserable that your only chance at any kind of happiness was to escape me the only way you could? Just like she did.”
She was shaking outright then. “Rafael—”
“Except here you are,” he said softly, and she wished he would move. She wished he would do something more than simply stand there like some kind of creature of stone, breaking her heart more with every word. “And you still make my breath catch when you enter a room. And I’ve long since understood that it was never hate I felt for you, but that I was too immature or too afraid to understand the enormity of it any other way. And you have my child, this perfect and beautiful son I thought I didn’t want until I met him.” He shook his head slightly, as if the reality of Arlo still overwhelmed him. “And I don’t hate you, Lily. I want you in ways I’ve never wanted any other woman. I can’t imagine that changing if it hasn’t yet. But you’re right.”
His gaze was so bright, so hard, it hurt. And she’d been turned to stone herself.
“I don’t love you,” Rafael said. “If I can love anything at all, if I’m capable of such a thing, I love that ghost.”
Lily was dimly surprised that she was still in one piece after that. That the building hadn’t sunk into the water all around them. That there was still a sun to peek in the windows on this cold, ruined day. That she hadn’t simply turned to a column of ash and blown off into nothingness in the next breath.
And he wasn’t finished.
“I will always love that ghost,” he said, very distinctly, so there could be no mistake. So she could not misunderstand. “She’s in my head, my heart, as selfish and as worthless as I might be. Yet it’s the flesh and blood woman I can’t forgive, Lily. If I’m honest with you, I don’t know that I ever will.” His smile then was a razor, sad and lethal at once. “But don’t worry. I doubt I’ll forgive myself.”
* * *
Rafael watched her take that in, a kaleidoscope of emotion moving over her expressive face, and told himself it wasn’t a lie. Not quite. It was the truth—a truth. It was just that there was a greater truth he had no intention of sharing with her.
Because he couldn’t trust her, no matter the temptation to do exactly that. He knew her better than any other person alive, and he knew her not at all, and he’d understood over the course of that long, blisteringly hot night that he thought was branded into his very flesh that this was exactly the kind of heaviness he’d spent his life avoiding. For good reason.
There were other words for all those weighty things that rolled over him, pressing down on him like some kind of pitiless vise. He wasn’t afraid of them any longer. But he’d succumbed to his vulnerabilities last night. He wouldn’t do it again. There was Arlo to consider now.
And Rafael would be damned if he would ruin his son’s life the way his parents had so cavalierly wrecked his, by betting on feelings when it was the practical application of reason and strength that got things done. He’d spent the past five years proving exactly that in his business affairs. He could do no less for his only child.
He wouldn’t live his life for the ghost he hadn’t saved. He couldn’t.
“We are going to have to decide what story we wish to tell,” he said coolly, when it looked as if Lily had wrestled her reactions under control. She was wrapped up in that gold thing she must have pulled from his bed, her hair a glorious halo of strawberry blond all around her and falling over her shoulders, and he felt like a saint for maintaining his distance when it was the last thing he wanted to do. But it was necessary. No matter that her blue eyes looked slicked with hurt and it caused him physical pain to know he’d done that to her. Again. “Whatever the version, I have no intention of hiding the fact that I’m Arlo’s father. From the world or from him. You need to come to terms with that.”
She blinked, and then she rose somewhat stiffly to her feet, and he couldn’t tell if that was a remnant of the night they’d shared or if it was an emotional response to the things he’d told her. Or both.
“What do you mean?” she asked, and the gaze she fixed on him was blue and cool, no hint of any hurt or wetness. He was tempted to think he’d imagined it. “I’m in Italy, aren’t I? If I hadn’t come to terms with it, I imagine I’d still be back home in Virginia, knee-deep in dogs.”
“You are in Italy, yes,” Rafael said quietly. “Hidden away in a house off in the mountains where no one has seen you or him except a handful of villagers who would never question the family. And then masked in public here, so no one could recognize you. You can’t have it both ways for too much longer, I’m afraid.”
Lily yanked her gaze from his and moved over to the side table, where she poured herself a cup of coffee with a hand that looked perfectly steady—and a good man, he was aware, would not want to see this woman, the mother of his child, so upset she shook. He understood that once again, he’d proved he could never be anything like good. Especially not where Lily was involved.
“I don’t know why you think a certain reticence is trying to have it both ways,” she said after a moment. She glanced at him over her shoulder, looking as though she belonged in the paintings that graced the walls, draped in gold and her own wavy hair. “What story do you think we ought to tell, Rafael? The one you just bludgeoned me with?”
He acknowledged the truth in that with a shrug. “You can’t imagine that you can rise from the dead unremarked, can you?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, blowing on her coffee and then taking a sip before she turned to face him again. “It’s not anybody’s business.”
“Perhaps not. But the media attention will be unavoidable.” He sounded impatient even by his own reckoning, but that coverlet was sliding down her upper arm, now, coming perilously close to shifting just far enough to expose the rosy tip of her breast. He needed to focus. “You died tragically and very young. That you are alive and well and in possession of
