Dario hadn’t liked that. His easy relationship with his twin had never been quite the same after an incident with a woman they hadn’t known they’d both been sleeping with at the same time when they were younger. They’d forgiven each other, if not the woman in question—but Dario hadn’t quite trusted Dante in the same way as he had before. It had bled over into their business. Dario had been overwhelmed back then, fighting to figure out the future of the company in that year before they sold—and he hadn’t felt that Dante had been willing to shoulder his half of the responsibility. It had made him want to punch his twin right there in the library for even looking at the same pretty girl in a way Dario didn’t like. He’d shoved it aside then, but he hadn’t forgotten it.
Later, when Anais had packed up her things and headed out and Dario had made to follow her and chance an “accidental” meeting, his brother had outright laughed at him.
“Don’t blame me when she ruins your whole life,” Dante had said. “Which I can pretty much guarantee she will.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Dario had shrugged on his coat. He had not punched his twin. “It’s like your own, personal perversion.”
“A city full of women who would throw their panties at you if you smiled,” Dante had murmured, shaking his head. “They have. And yet you want to chase the one who disliked you on sight. Maybe I’m not the perverted one.”
Dario blinked now, astounded that the memories he normally kept locked away and inaccessible had taken him over like that. He wanted to think about his brother about as much as he wanted to think about his marriage. Meaning, he didn’t. More blame he could lay at her feet, he thought furiously.
He turned back into the villa and walked toward the kitchen area, where the hotel staff had left him a selection of fine wines. He heard her close the door behind her and follow him, those high red heels loud against the smooth floors, and he poured them both a glass. Red for him. White for her. The way it had always been, back then.
And he didn’t think he imagined the way she swallowed hard when he handed her glass to her, as if the memories were getting to her, too. He hoped they were as unwelcome as his were, and as uncomfortable.
“What is this?” she asked, but she didn’t put her glass back down.
He crooked a brow. “Wine.”
“You didn’t think to dress, but you had different kinds of wine delivered? What a fascinating approach to a meeting. No wonder ICE is doing so well.” She tipped her glass toward his chest. “Do you tantalize your investors and stockholders like this? Maybe put on a little cabaret number to seal the deal? Everything begins to make a lot more sense.”
He bit back the insulting words that flooded his mouth, because that was no way to play this game. And Dario had always been very, very good at games. He won them without trying very hard. He’d spent all day in heated conversations with his lawyers discussing the different ways he could win this one, too. Decisively.
But it was amazing how different the game looked to him when it was dressed like this, all womanly curves and that mouth of hers he could still taste against his.
That didn’t exactly bode well for what he had to accomplish here. But Dario ignored that with the ruthlessness that had allowed him to come into ICE and change the company from the ground up over the course of the past six years. He’d made it his. That was what he did.
“How does this work?” His voice was low, smooth. Appropriate, for a change. He was trying to make it seem as if he’d had time to calm down. To get his temper and his emotions under control.
To accept that this woman had kept his child a secret from him for five years.
Five years.
He told that tiny voice inside of him that knew he’d blocked her every attempt at contact, that knew he’d made contacting him impossible, to be silent. The point wasn’t what he might have done—he hadn’t had all the information she had. The point was what she’d done, and hadn’t done, when she’d been the only one who knew everything.
She took a sip of her wine, then smiled at him. Almost politely, as if they were cordial strangers at a cocktail party. “Because, presumably, I’m the expert on paternity issues?”
He eyed her a moment and reminded himself this was a game. That he needed to win it—and that meant controlling his temper. “Because you’re the lawyer.”
“How this works is, we talk,” she said. She stood on the other side of the marble bar that separated the sleek kitchen from the expansive teak-and-glass living area and gazed back at him. And if she was even remotely chastened, he couldn’t see it. “Rationally and reasonably, if we can manage it. We come to mutually acceptable arrangements.”
Dario was contemplating how much he loathed the fact that she still seemed so unaffected by all of this—and particularly by him, if he was brutally honest—when she tilted her head to one side.
“Do you think you can handle that?”
That sweet tone of hers with all that bite beneath it was better. It told him exactly where they stood. On the same uneven ground.
“If he’s mine...”
“If you say if one more time, this conversation is over. For good.”
He wanted to ignore that, but something in the way she watched him just then made him think better of it. Would she really walk out on him? He didn’t want to believe she could. And he really didn’t want to investigate why he thought that.
“I don’t know what you want from me, Anais,” he said after a moment. “You can claim the moral high ground. You can tell yourself that the fact I blocked your access to me is the issue here. We could argue about that for years.”
“I’d rather not.”
“It doesn’t change what I saw.”
He saw something flash in her dark eyes then, he was sure of it.
“You saw a man walk out of your bedroom buttoning up a shirt.”
“I saw my brother walking out of my bedroom with my wife,” he gritted out. He slammed his wineglass down on the counter, and he’d never know why it didn’t shatter and send red wine and glass everywhere. “Shrugging his half-naked body into one of my shirts.”
It took him a long moment to realize that while she did nothing but glare at him, with that otherwise unreadable expression on her face, she was trembling. Fury? Shame? Anger at being called out on her unfaithful behavior all these years later? Something as complicated as what surged in him—as much desire as what he desperately hoped was distaste? He didn’t know.
“Yes,” she said, after a minute. “That’s what you saw. You didn’t see Dante and me naked and writhing around. You didn’t even see us touching. You saw your brother changing his shirt, and you ended our marriage on the spot.”
But Dario had been angrier with Dante by the day back then. Dario had walked in and seen what he’d seen and it had all made so much sense. That tension between Dante and Anais that Anais had assured him was dislike. The distance between the twins where their business was concerned, that Dante had claimed was about different philosophies. All such lies and misdirection. This is the truth, he’d thought then, like a death knell inside of him. All his late hours, all his work, all the responsibility he’d been carrying—it had all been a ruse, to keep him out of the way, so these two people who supposedly loved him and hated each other could meet. In his bedroom.
It still made him furious, as a matter of fact, when he should have been over it years ago.
He thought she could hear it in his voice when he spoke again. “Is this where you think I’m going to beg you to tell me what was really going on that day? So you can spin some fairy tale for me?”
“Or tell you the truth.”
He