Eventually, she assured herself, you’ll be perfectly fine.
Her clothes were draped over the chaise in the corner near the open glass doors, the screen letting in the ocean’s song and the summer sunlight but none of Hawaii’s less pleasant realities.
Reality is better, no matter how unpleasant, she told herself firmly as she dressed. This place—Dario—it’s all a fantasy that has nothing to do with you or your actual life. It never did. It all might as well be another dream.
That made her feel better—or at least ready to face him. She raked her fingers through her hair, letting it fall where it would and happy that it conformed to its usual sleek, straight, depressingly unchangeable style without her having to do anything more than that. She’d never before realized how lucky she was to have such hair that allowed her to look a lot more pulled together than a woman wearing last night’s outfit should.
She slipped her shoes back on as if they were armor and she then squared her shoulders before she pushed through the door and marched out into the vast living area prepared to do battle—but it was empty.
That confused her. It seemed so unlike him. She stood there for a moment, listening for the usual sounds that indicated Dario was near—the brusque clicking of the keys on his laptop, the sound of his voice issuing orders on the phone. But there was nothing. The villa was hushed. Still.
Empty, she thought. But she couldn’t quite believe that.
There was what looked like a stack of papers on the kitchen counter, but she ignored it as she walked to each of the bedrooms and looked inside. Each was as beautifully decorated and as empty as the next. He wasn’t in the little den with its massive flat-screen television, or in the separate office space equipped with a massive steel desk. He wasn’t on the lanai or out on his secluded beach. He wasn’t in the private pool on the far side of the villa, either.
He was gone.
Almost as if he’d never been here on Maui at all.
And Anais could admit it. It surprised her. And, more than that, felt a lot like a slap. The hurt feelings were silly, she recognized, but the other feeling bubbling up inside of her was a complicated sort of disappointment—as if she’d wanted what would likely have been another tense, unpleasant scene with Dario.
“Surely not,” she murmured to herself, her voice the only sound in the villa.
She shook her head as she crossed the living area again, amazed at herself. At her own capacity for self-delusion and what amounted to self-harm. And she knew—she knew—there was a storm waiting there in the distance, bunched up on the horizon, dark and menacing. Thunder rolled deep inside her and the skies were threatening and low, but she was ignoring all of it. She was refusing to play through the images in her head of last night’s abandon.
The way he’d touched her, the ways she’d tasted him—no.
She was pretending everything was fine—that she was fine. She was pretending that she could handle what she’d done last night and the fact he’d disappeared this morning, even though she’d half expected he would. She was desperately pretending she couldn’t feel that cold harbinger wind on her skin, making every hair on her body stand on end, letting her know in no uncertain terms that there was no outrunning the storm—the terrible reckoning for all her recklessness—that was headed straight for her.
But maybe she could delay it awhile. Just a little while.
At the kitchen counter, she picked up the bag she’d forgotten she’d even brought with her last night and pulled out her car keys. And she couldn’t help but glance over at the stack of papers, which it took her a beat or two longer than it should have to realize was actually a legal document.
With her name on it.
Her stomach flipped over, then plummeted straight down to her feet.
She reached over and pulled the papers toward her, and felt something like frozen solid as she scanned the first page. Once. Twice. It was only the third attempt that she was able to really, truly comprehend that she was looking at divorce papers.
Divorce papers for her and Dario, to be precise.
All drawn up and ready for her signature, demanding the divorce on the grounds of Anais’s infidelity and naming his brother Dante as her lover. Just as he’d promised before in what she’d truly believed was simply a hateful, throwaway comment.
It took her another long moment to realize she was shaking. That the words were blurring there before her on the page.
There was a single sticky note attached to the last page, where the line for her signature sat, blank and cruel, next to the bold dash of Dario’s name in an offensively bright blue shade of ink. The shiny yellow note contained nothing but a phone number with a New York City area code.
Dario’s, she was certain. Not that she could understand why he’d left her divorce papers and his phone number. It didn’t make any sense.
That terrible storm drew closer, the thunder growling ferociously at her as it came. She could feel the leading edge of the rain, battering at her where she stood...
Her phone began to ring in her bag, forcing her to breathe. To look away from the papers and that damned phone number. To shove back that storm as best she could. She tried to gather herself as she rummaged in her bag, and she’d at least taken a few calming breaths by the time she pulled out her smartphone to see her aunt’s number on the screen.
“Bonjour, Tante,” she murmured as she answered it, trying to sound calm. Normal. In one piece.
“Is Damian with you?” her aunt demanded in panicked French, without bothering to greet Anais at all, which could not have been more unlike her.
And Anais forgot about storms and papers and everything else.
“What? Damian? No—”
“The school just called,” her aunt told her, her voice a streak of high-pitched upset, hardly intelligible. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but he’s gone. He went out with the other children for their midmorning recess and he never came back in. They’re going to call the police, but I said I’d check with you—”
And that was when she understood. The harsh truth fell through her like a guillotine, swift and gleaming and lethal.
Dario’s change in behavior last night. The abrupt switch from antagonist to lover. His absence this morning, the divorce papers, the damned phone number.
He’d planned the whole thing.
Including and especially her sensual surrender to him in bed, not once or even twice, but three times before she’d dropped off into an exhausted, dreamless sleep in the blue light before dawn.
“No, Tante,” she managed to say. She would never know how she managed to keep herself from breaking down, right there on the phone. “Tell them not to call the police. Tell them it’s fine. I know where he is.”
“But, Anais—”
“I’ll explain everything when I get home,” she managed to grit out, and that wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Though she had no idea where she’d start.
She ended the call with her aunt and yanked the divorce papers toward her, flipping through the pages with numb fingers until she reached the signatures and that scrawled taunt of a phone number. It took her two tries to enter it correctly because her hands shook so badly and her thumbs seemed suddenly twice their previous size.
It rang. Endlessly. Anais thought she aged a thousand years before she heard the line connect and then Dario’s smooth, calm voice, as effective as a gut punch. She doubled over, right there at the counter.
“Anais.”
“Where is he?” Her voice was rough. Terrible. “What did you do?”
“He’s perfectly fine,” Dario said coolly. “He’s