“I knew you’d use him as a pawn. Why am I not surprised that you’re precisely this shameless?”
“He is five years old. He wants a father more than you can possibly imagine. I’m not using him as a pawn. I’m protecting him.”
“From me?” If possible, his face got even darker. She thought his arms tightened, as if he was clenching his hands into fists in his pockets. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Anais couldn’t pretend to keep calm any longer. She couldn’t stay cool and smooth and hard. And she didn’t much care what he might make of that. She didn’t care about him, to be honest. Not when it came to Damian’s feelings. Not when Dario could crush her little boy so easily. And likely would.
“It means I know what you do to hearts.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She wished she’d bitten off her tongue instead, especially when he made that derisive sound that might as well have been a punch to the gut, the way it hit her.
“This is exactly the kind of crap I expected you to say and I don’t have time for it. I’m not going to participate in whatever great melodrama you have planned here, Anais. I want to see the child.” He shifted, as if it hurt him. Or as if maybe he wasn’t as hard as he seemed, either—but it was dangerous to imagine such things. She’d already made that mistake six years ago, and look what had happened. “My child, or so you claim.”
“Listen to me.” She stepped forward, out of her doorway and onto the wide top step, not caring that it put her much too close to him again, even raised to his eye level. She shoved her finger in his face and she wished it was something more substantial, like a kitchen knife. “This is not about you. I understand that you must be feeling all kinds of things right now. I’m not particularly sympathetic, but I understand. Still, Damian doesn’t know you. You’ve been missing in action his entire life. It doesn’t benefit him in any way to be woken from a sound sleep so that a strange man can brood at him. And if it doesn’t benefit him, it’s not happening.”
Her voice had gotten loud there. Or maybe it only felt that way, as if it echoed back from the gentle movement of the palm trees and the thick, dark night pressing in against them. And either way, Dario did nothing but study her, as if he was assessing her weaknesses and looking for evidence to use against her. He probably was. She only acted glacial in short, controlled bursts. She’d long suspected that the truth about Dario was that, deep down, he truly was nothing but a block of ice masquerading as a man.
She didn’t know how long they stood there, with nothing but the tropical night between them and all around them, the breeze dancing over them as if it was playing tag with the moonlight.
Dario was the one to break the silence, his voice dark, yet calm. “Why did you bother to tell me about him if you were only going to keep him from me?”
If he could put on that calm act, she could, too. She made herself do it.
“I’m not keeping him from you. I’m simply choosing not to wake him up so I can parade him in front of you right this very minute. They’re not the same thing.”
“You planned all of this, didn’t you?” He sounded as if he was marveling at the very idea, but his blue gaze was frigid as it held hers. “You want to stab a knife in my ribs any way you can. This is revenge served cold, six years later, because I didn’t stick around to play your deceitful little games with you.”
Anais made herself breathe, even though her temper and her sense of injustice at the unfairness of all this roared inside of her. She didn’t know how she kept herself from hauling off and slapping him. Only that whisper of something else deep inside her, that worried what she’d do if she touched him again because she doubted it would be as violent as he deserved, kept her from it.
That and the little boy who slept even now only a few yards behind her, completely unaware that his life had irrevocably changed today. That nothing could ever be the same, because now Dario knew that he existed. His father finally knew about him. That made everything different.
“I’m not going to do this with you,” she gritted out when she could trust herself to speak. Not to scream at him as he deserved, but to speak the way Damian deserved his parents to speak to each other. If she’d learned nothing else from her own parents, it was that. “You’re the one who made yourself unreachable for six years, not me. You don’t get to show up here and throw your weight around because you’ve suddenly decided that there’s something worth paying attention to in this life you walked away from so callously.”
“So you are planning to use him as bait. There’s the calculating, manipulative Anais I know.”
“You can see him.” And it was for her to know how much she wanted to tell him the opposite, purely out of the kind of spite she knew made her a truly terrible person, down deep inside where she tried hard to hide it. “But it will be on my schedule, not yours. I decide he’s ready, not you. Do you understand me?” When he only glared at her, his face like stone, she continued. “This isn’t about your pride or your ego or your miserable existence, Dario. This is a little boy’s life.”
The air between them went flat and taut. Then electric.
Temper, history. Fury and need.
It seared through Anais, from her exposed arms all the way down to her bare feet. She saw the way Dario held himself, as if he was this close to putting his hands on her again, and what worried her was that she didn’t know if she’d push him away or pull him closer. The trouble with Dario was that she didn’t know herself at all when she was near him.
But he stepped back instead, and Anais had to confront the fact that she didn’t feel any sense of relief at that, the way she should. She felt...disappointed.
You are sick, she told herself in no little despair.
He raked a hand through his black hair, making it look even messier against the jaw he still hadn’t bothered to shave. She didn’t understand how that could make him look more attractive, not less. Or why she couldn’t seem to keep herself from noticing things like that at a time like this.
Or maybe she did understand, and hated herself for that, too.
Dario considered her for what seemed like days, and then he bit out the name of one of the grand luxury resorts further south on this side of the island in exclusive Wailea.
“Do you know it?”
“Of course I know it.”
Not that she’d stayed there, of course. The prices were astronomical, even by exalted Maui resort standards. And she’d hardly had a lot of call to stay at luxury resorts in the past few years.
“That’s where I’m staying.” He studied her for a moment. “I’ll expect you tomorrow evening at seven o’clock.”
“I’m afraid I have a...”
“Cancel it, whatever it is.” His full mouth thinned and the way his blue eyes glittered made her heart leap in her chest. It made her the liar he’d always claimed she was. “Don’t make me hunt you down, Anais. You’ll like it even less than I will.”
And then he melted off into the night. She heard the sound of a car engine turning over in the street, outside her line of sight, but she couldn’t seem to move. She stood there on her own front step for much too long, as off balance as if she was out at sea on a rickety boat, trying and failing to handle the swell.
He’d left her with nothing to do but furiously debate whether or not she planned to follow his peremptory orders.
Of course not, she told herself sharply, shaking herself out of whatever daze this was and walking back inside. It took a great deal more strength than it should have to keep from slamming the door shut, loud enough to bring the house down around her ears.