And worse, she thought he could see straight through her and deep into her chest, where her poor, battered heart felt swollen and broken at once, all over again—as if this was all something new, these things he conjured up in her.
Anais took a deep, shuddering breath, and then couldn’t seem to keep herself from slipping her hand into his.
She didn’t gasp out loud at the instant electric surge, at that hot touch as his hard fingers curled around hers, but she thought he felt the jolt of it as it seared through her. He tugged her to her feet and she went to him willingly, and for a moment they stood there with barely a whisper of the sultry summer air between them.
Her shoes were high enough to put her almost at eye level with him, and that made her veins thrum with something that was half music, half delight. His blue eyes looked much too dark, especially when they dropped to her mouth, and she felt that same wild current in him, too, lighting her up from the place their hands were clasped together.
Dario stepped back, though he kept hold of her hand. There was a rueful curve to his mouth and a hard hunger in his gaze, and then he started to walk, pulling her along with him so she fit there at his side.
It took Anais much too long to realize they were weaving their way through the tables of the restaurant she’d forgotten was there. She felt as if she was walking through a dream, or as if the only real thing in the world was the way his fingers held hers tight and their palms touched. As if everything she’d ever felt about this man was boiled down into that tiny little touch, almost innocuous, and yet...not. At all.
The band kicked into a typical Elvis cover, syrupy and deeply Hawaiian, and Dario stopped walking when he reached the line of high palms that rustled there on the outskirts of the restaurant. The singer spoke of wise men and fools, and as Dario tugged her around to face him, Anais knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was very much the latter.
“I can’t help it, either,” he said in a low voice as he took her in his arms, and it took her a moment to realize he was responding to the famous song, not the words she didn’t think she’d said out loud. “I’ve never been able to help myself when it came to you, Anais.”
And it would have taken a far colder and harder woman than she was to pull away from him then. She didn’t even try. Anais had never been the glacier she thought she should have been with him, not even all those years ago when she’d known she should have resisted him and hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she had it in her.
Certainly not when Dario was so close to her in the late-summer dark, his strong arms closing around her as he pulled her flush against him.
It was the middle of the night, she told herself, and she was pretending to be the kind of woman who had dinner with a man like him at all, much less at a stunning resort like this, and who cared if she’d actually married him in a different life? Those quick, painfully bright and deeply hurtful years seemed as if they’d happened to someone else. Surely nothing that happened in the lush dark here, on an island tucked away in the Pacific Ocean so many miles from anywhere, counted.
And she’d been alone so long. So deeply, profoundly alone. Before her marriage and after it. She’d been strong and she’d been brave. Too damned much of both, because she’d had to be to survive her childhood, her lonely early adulthood, the end of her marriage and her new role as Damian’s mother and sole source of support. Her whole life had been a series of had to be.
Anais wasn’t an idiot. This man had abandoned her. The likelihood was he’d do it again, probably before dawn. But she wasn’t the naive creature she’d been back then, so shocked and destroyed when he’d turned on her, and the only good thing about that was that he wasn’t likely to surprise her with that kind of betrayal a second time.
She didn’t have to trust him to want him.
And she’d always wanted him. He was the only man who had ever touched her, the only man she’d ever let close to her, the only person she’d ever let inside. No matter how many dates her aunt and uncle and well-meaning friends had sent her on, no matter how many nice men had said nice things to her, no matter how many times she’d told herself that she wasn’t really married despite the fact she also wasn’t divorced—she’d never been able to bring herself to let another man close. She’d never let them know her at all, much less put their hands on her.
She missed it. She missed him.
He’s still your husband, a dangerous voice inside of her whispered, as seductive as the whole of this long, perfect evening. Whatever else happened between you, you loved him once. Maybe he loved you, too. Maybe nothing else matters but that.
So she swayed closer to him and told herself it didn’t matter what happened later. Tomorrow, two weeks from now, whenever. Nothing mattered but this. Here, now, where nobody could see them and no one would know.
She was so tired of being so alone. Maybe that made her weak. She decided she didn’t care what it made her. Not when he could make it all go away.
He could. She knew he could. He’d made whole cities disappear with a laugh, the whole world with a kiss. He was far more magical than he deserved to be. She just wanted to taste a little of that oblivion again.
Hell, she’d earned it, hadn’t she?
Anais reached up and wound her arms around Dario’s neck, angling herself against him. His hands moved up and down the length of her spine in a lazy rhythm, tracing her. Relearning her. Sending a wild heat spiraling all through her until it pooled between her legs, a swollen, delirious ache.
And she was the one who lifted herself up and pressed her mouth to his.
She kissed him with all those dreams she’d kept pent up inside her across so many long years. She poured all the rants she’d aimed at her reflection instead of to him into it, all the tears and the fear and the loss. She kissed him with her broken heart and her new mother’s terror. She kissed him and she kissed him, lonely and resolute, as strong as she was afraid, two sides of the same coin.
Finally, all these years later, she kissed Dario goodbye.
And he let her.
He slipped a hand around to the nape of her neck and he met her, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, what this was.
Anais was shaking. That might have been a tear that scraped its way down her cheek. She didn’t care. This was a bloodletting. A ritual of loss and leaving, six years overdue.
And when she was finished, she pulled back, not exactly meaning to rest her forehead against his as she gasped for breath. But she didn’t pull away when she realized she was doing it.
“Better?” he asked in a rough voice that hardly sounded like his.
It didn’t occur to her to tell him anything but the truth, as if the Hawaiian night that brushed against her skin was its own kind of confessional. “No. Not really.”
“Good.” A small laugh, entirely male, snaked its way down her spine and made her shiver. “My turn.”
And then he hauled her mouth back to his, and took control.
* * *
Dario should have felt triumph wash over him. He should have been wild with his victory, with a sense of accomplishment. He’d set out to seduce his errant wife and he’d done it.
But all he could concentrate on was the taste of her mouth beneath his, and better, the way she pressed her sweet body against his. Her breasts underneath that soft cream silk were like torture against his chest. Her arms were around his neck as she arched into him and it still wasn’t close enough.
He couldn’t get close enough no matter how he kissed her, and he couldn’t pretend what he was feeling then had anything to do with revenge.
Dario shoved that unnerving truth aside and threw himself straight into the lightning storm instead.
He