Around Dario, she couldn’t.
The sad truth was that she’d fallen in love with him a very long time ago. Not quite at first sight, but not long after, and nothing had changed that since. Not the way he’d broken the lonely heart she’d only ever shared with him. Not the way he’d abandoned her so cruelly, as if she’d been unworthy of a backward glance. Not the way she’d tried to hate him in all these years since, and failed, again and again.
How could she hate this man when she saw so much of him in her little boy’s face? In that bigger than life laugh that was one hundred percent Dario in her son’s body? It wasn’t possible. She’d thought she’d come to a place of acceptance with that a long time ago. But of course, that had been when she’d never expected to see Dario again.
She still didn’t want to stand this close to him. It made her entirely too aware of her own, eternal weakness where he was concerned.
“Great,” she managed to say now, and she eased herself back and put a little more space between them, the better to look him in the eye, as if that would cut him down to size somehow. “Then when he throws a full-scale fit on the floor because he wants to wear a blue shirt instead of a red one the way he did this morning, I’m sure you’ll handle it calmly.”
Dario’s mouth curved, and that wasn’t helpful. It only reminded her all over again how susceptible she was to him. How badly some part of her wanted to believe that this—whatever this was—was real. God, how she wanted to believe that.
“If I can handle fractious board members and morally dubious CEOs, one small child shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I’m glad you’re so confident.”
The air between them felt taut then. It shimmered like heat. Dario thrust his hands in his pockets in a way that suggested he wanted to do something else entirely with them, and Anais had to fight to conceal her delicious—and traitorous—shiver of reaction.
“I want you to come with me,” he told her. “Let’s eat a meal like civilized people. Let’s talk to each other.” That curve in his mouth deepened, and the truth was, Anais wasn’t strong enough to resist him. She never had been. And just then, with all his deep blue attention trained on her, she couldn’t remember a single reason why that should change. Why she’d want it to change. “Let’s do this the right way.”
MUCH LATER THAT NIGHT, Anais pushed back from the table in the private corner of the resort’s outdoor restaurant and tried, yet again, to caution herself. To go slow, to keep her perspective—something.
The night had been perfect. Anais was a local, yet she felt like some kind of princess tonight, immersed in old Hawaiian magic on all sides. They’d been whisked to this romantic corner of the hotel restaurant, where there was nothing between them and the sea but a strip of volcanic rock, any other diners lost in the darkness behind them. Torches danced in the thick air all around, and the breeze tugged strands of hair free from her easy chignon to slide over her cheeks like a lover’s soft fingers.
But Anais had only ever had one lover, and his fingers were hard, tapered and demanding, no matter how soft his caress.
The meal had been exquisite. The typical Hawaiian fusion of unexpected flavors and marvelous tastes, artfully arranged and beautifully presented, and Anais tried. She tried to sternly keep her attention on her son, not on his father. She tried to withstand the insidious magic of all this grace and ease and quietly luxurious wealth, and the man who had made it happen. She tried her best to keep her walls high, to read nothing into any of this, to stay the glacier she should have been no matter how enticing each bite of food.
No matter the far more worrying beguilement of the man across from her.
Dario had undergone some kind of transformation during the walk from his villa to the restaurant. Gone was that harsh, unforgiving man she’d met at the Fuginawa estate yesterday. In his place was, if not the man she’d married years ago exactly, certainly the closest thing to him she could imagine after these six long years apart.
And what the sound of Dario’s laughter after all this time didn’t manage to do to her heart, the fine wine he kept pouring did to her head.
She regarded him from across the table now, watching the way the light from the flickering torch flames caressed his beautiful face and made him seem that much more like the many dreams she’d had all these lonely years. That much more the man she’d begun to think she’d made up from the start.
They’d talked about everything and nothing over their meal. She’d talked about Damian—who he was, funny things he did, the sort of stories that highlighted what a delightful little kid she thought he was, most of the time. Dario had talked about the work that clearly consumed his life, in a way that made it clear he was doing exactly what he should. He’d asked her about practicing law and how she enjoyed it all these years into it. She’d asked how he liked becoming so well-known in his own right, having nothing to do with his family. They talked as easily as they ever had, in and around all the submerged rocks and treacherous undercurrents that lurked between them, dancing over the surface of things instead of slamming into the obstacles.
It was all real enough, she supposed. Even...nice. It was lulling her into what she knew damn well was a false sense of security. What she didn’t know was what she could do to make her traitorous heart pay attention to warning signs and potential alarms when all it saw—all it wanted to see—was the only man she’d ever loved here with her at last, treating her the way he had when she’d imagined he might love her back.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked softly.
“Eating dinner?” He leaned back in his own chair. “I try to do it at least once an evening. It’s an odd personality quirk of mine.”
“No.” And it terrified her how much—how strongly—she didn’t want to do this just then. How terribly she wanted to simply drift off into this fantasy world where there was nothing but faint Hawaiian music on the sweet night air and where Dario, still her husband, looked at her as if he’d never hated her and never could. As if the six years of separation had been the dream, not what had preceded it. “You know what I mean.”
He didn’t answer. He stood instead, smoothing a hand over the front of his soft black shirt, and Anais’s heart sank. She’d ruined it, hadn’t she? Would it have really mattered all that much if she’d let this keep on going for another few minutes? An hour? If she’d let herself bask in this no matter how much of a dream it was? Who would it have hurt?
But she already knew the answer to that question. Not Damian—she’d protect him with her last breath. Only her.
Only and ever her.
And yet there was something about the sweet night air that made her imagine she could take it. That a few stolen moments with Dario would be worth whatever pain followed.
Dario stood beside her chair and she braced herself for him to say something hideous and cutting, to slap them both back down to that place they’d been in earlier. His face looked harder than before, no trace of that laughter of his that still split the night open with its rough joy and was clearly where Damian’s came from, but she made herself hold his gaze no matter how difficult it was. She owed herself at least that much.
His hard, beautiful mouth moved as if he meant to speak, but he didn’t. Instead, he held out his hand.
And Anais knew better. Of course she knew better. She’d been a single mother all this time, while he’d been off building empires and never looking back at all to see what destruction he’d left in his wake. She could have recited the reasons why this—any more time spent with him, especially time spent touching—was a terrible idea the same way she could rattle off pertinent case law when necessary at work.
Here,