as if she was worried she might scream if she didn’t choose each word that carefully. “That will never happen, Rafael.”
“My son will have my name, Lily,” he warned her, yielding to his temper rather than that other voice that whispered things he didn’t want to hear. “One way or another. You can be a part of this family or not, as you choose. But you’re running out of time to decide.”
“Running out of time?” She stared at him as if he’d grown a monster’s misshapen head as he stood there, and he wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if he had. “Arlo didn’t know you existed two weeks ago. You thought I was dead. You can’t make these kind of ultimatums and expect me to take you seriously.”
“Here’s the thing, cara,” he murmured, feeling that familiar kick of ruthlessness move in him, spreading out and taking over everything. It felt a lot like peace. He crossed his arms over his chest and told himself she was the enemy, like all the rivals he’d decimated in his years as acting CEO of the family business. He assured himself she was his to conquer as he chose. And more, that she’d earned it. “I’m sorry that this is hard for you. I feel for you, I do. But it won’t change a thing.”
Though it might have changed things if that glitter in her gaze had spilled over into tears. It might have reminded him that he could be merciful. That he really had loved her all along. But this was Lily, stubborn to the bitter end. She blinked, then again, and then those blue eyes were clear and hard as they met his. She tipped up that chin and she looked at him almost regally, as if there was nothing he could do to touch her, not really.
The same way she’d looked at him in that hallway when she was nineteen.
And he had the same riotous urge now as he had then: to prove that he damn well could. That he could do a great deal more than touch her. That he could mess her up but good.
He told himself that this time, at least, it was far healthier than it had been then, because it wasn’t about either one of them. It was about their son.
Which was why he kept his distance. The way he hadn’t done then.
And so what if it was killing him? That was the price. He assured himself Arlo was worth paying it.
“You have until Christmas,” Rafael told her matter-of-factly. “Then you will either marry me or you’ll get the hell out of my life, for good this time. And his.”
“HAVE YOU DECIDED what you’ll do?” Rafael asked her the first morning after their somewhat subdued return from Venice later that frigid morning, smiling at her in that mocking way of his over the breakfast table. “The Dolomites themselves await your answer, I’m sure. As do I.”
It was the feigned politeness, Lily thought, that made her want to fling the nearest plate of sausages at his head, if not at the mountains themselves. As if he was truly interested in her answer instead of merely needling her for his own amusement.
“Go to hell,” she mouthed over Arlo’s head, and only just managed to restrain herself from an inappropriate hand gesture to match.
But that only made his smile deepen.
It didn’t help that Lily didn’t know what she was going to do. There was no way she could ever leave Arlo, of course. Surely that went without saying. The very idea made her stomach cramp up in protest. But how could she marry Rafael? Especially when the kind of marriage he’d mentioned in Venice was a far cry indeed from the sort she’d imagined when she’d been young and silly and still thought things between them might work out one day.
Well, this was one day, and this was not at all what she’d call worked out, was it? This was, she was certain, pretty much the exact opposite of that.
“Perhaps we should make a list of pros and cons,” he suggested on another afternoon even closer to Christmas, coming to stand beside her. She was on the warm and cozy side of the glass doors overlooking the garden, where Arlo and two of his nannies were building a legion of snowmen in what little gloomy light there was left at the tail end of the year. “Maybe a spreadsheet would help?”
Again, that courteous tone, as if she was deciding on nothing more pressing than which one of his wines she might choose to complement her dinner. It set her teeth on edge.
“Is this a game to you?” Lily asked him then, amazed that she could keep her voice so even when she wanted to take a swing at him. When she thought she might have, had that not involved touching him—which she knew better than to do, thank you. That way led only to madness and tears. Hers. “This isn’t only my life we’re talking about, you know. I get that you don’t care about that. But it’s Arlo’s life, too, whom you do claim to care about, and you’re messing with everything he holds dear.”
She didn’t expect him to touch her—much less reach over and take her chin in his hard hand, forcing her to look deep into his dark, dark eyes. Lily had to fight back that sweet, deep shudder that would have told him a thousand truths she didn’t want him to know, and all of them things she’d already showed him in detail in that bed in Venice.
“We both made the choices that led us here,” Rafael said softly, his hard fingers like a brand, blistering hot and something like delicious at once, damn him. “I can’t help it if you don’t like the way I’m handling the fallout, Lily. Do you have a better solution?”
“Anything would be a better solution!” she threw at him.
He dropped his hand, though he didn’t step back for another jolting beat or two. That was her heart, she understood, not the world itself, though it was hard to tell the difference. She couldn’t look at him—she couldn’t bear it—so she directed her gaze out through the glass again instead, where the best thing they’d ever done together rolled a ball of snow that was bigger than he was across the snowy garden.
This is about Arlo, she reminded herself. This is all about Arlo. Everything else that happens is secondary.
“Name one, then,” Rafael said, dark and too close. Daring her, she thought. Or begging her—but no. That wasn’t Rafael. He didn’t beg. “Name a better solution.”
She shot him a look, then looked back toward their son. Their beautiful son, whom she’d loved hard and deep and forever since the moment she’d known he existed. Right there in that truck stop bathroom. She’d been terrified, certainly. And so alone. But she’d had Arlo and she’d loved him, long before she’d met him.
“You can think whatever you like,” Lily said, low and fierce. “But none of the choices I made were easy. Not one of them. They all left scars.”
“None of that changes where we are, does it?” he asked, his own voice quiet, and yet it still tore through her. “Our scars are of our own making, Lily. Each and every one of them. I find I can’t forgive that, either.”
Lily didn’t answer him. And the next time she glanced over, he’d gone.
She told herself that was just as well.
And maybe it wasn’t entirely surprising that the nightmares came back that night. And the next. And the night after that, too.
The screech of brakes, the sickening
