It was funny how that didn’t make him feel any better, the way he’d told himself it had before.
He strode into the penthouse, sweaty and agitated, and stopped when he heard Damian talking. Heedless and excited, the way Damian always seemed to be—because this child had no inkling of the possibility that anyone alive might not find him utterly delightful.
Dario remembered his own childhood. His parents’ sick dependence on each other, the wildness and unpredictability that had haunted every moment of it before they’d died and the sadness that had wreathed it afterward. He’d had nothing to cling to in all the world but the twin brother who would grow up to betray him with his own wife.
His wife.
He found that word didn’t infuriate him the way it had for years. Quite the opposite, in fact. He liked it.
He moved quietly through the entry hall and through the great living room, still following Damian’s voice. He found the little boy in the kitchen, standing on a pulled-up chair so he could watch his mother make pancakes on the great stove Dario had never personally used.
“We have a housekeeper for that,” he said, aware of two things even as he said it.
First, that his voice was all wrong. Ragged and much too dark. It revealed entirely too many things better left hidden.
And second, that he’d said we. As if the fact he hadn’t divorced her yet, or the fact they’d been living here together as if nothing that had happened between them mattered, made them some kind of unit they’d never been.
Six years ago I was so in love with you I couldn’t see straight, she’d said that strange night in the hallway. Then she’d kissed him, sweet and devastating, in a way he could still feel inside of him. He’d spent the time since convincing himself it had been nothing more than Anais up to her usual tricks. He’d almost come around to believing it, too. The only trouble was, he’d seen that raw look in her eyes. He’d heard it in her voice.
And God help him, he’d felt it in her kiss.
He still did.
The truth was, Dario didn’t know how to handle any of this. He understood the life he’d lived for the past six years because everything had been in neat, if painfully bleak, boxes and there was none of this blurring of long-drawn lines. In a way, the boxes were easier. There were no surprises, ever.
He didn’t understand how his grandfather, who had once told Dario he intended to beat death at its own game by living forever, could possibly be dying this time—no matter how old he was, or how sick. It seemed impossible. Just as he didn’t understand how the woman he’d married so quickly, met anew in Hawaii when he’d least expected it, then lived with again these past, peaceful weeks, could be the same woman who had betrayed him so thoroughly.
He wanted this, he thought then. That was the trouble. The real truth beneath all the rest of it. He wanted this woman in his house, making pancakes because she felt like it or because it made a little boy smile. And he wanted that little boy. For the first time since Anais had dropped the news of Damian’s existence on him on Maui, Dario didn’t care that no genetic test could prove who the real father was. That went both ways. No one could prove Damian wasn’t his.
And if his grandfather was, in fact, dying, if this really was the end of the only family Dario knew—however inadequate it had been over the years—he knew that what he really wanted was for the old man to meet this small, wild boy with a Di Sione face and his mother’s eyes. Even if it was only the once.
“What is it?” There was a frown in Anais’s voice, if not on her face, as she slid the last pancake onto Damian’s plate and then directed him to the kitchen island to eat. “You look as if there were ghosts out there on your run.”
“No ghosts,” he said, still not sounding like himself.
Or maybe it was that he’d known exactly who he was for six long years. He’d reveled in that definition and he’d convinced himself it was the truth of not only who he was, but who he could ever become.
And now he had no idea how he’d ever been happy with that.
Because he understood, standing there sweaty and thrown in the room in his home he used the least, watching a domestic scene that should have turned his stomach, that he’d never be happy like that again. That it hadn’t been happiness, that in-between state he’d lived in all those years.
Everything had changed that day in Hawaii. Everything was different.
Him most of all. “Not just yet.”
ANAIS HAD ONLY the vaguest memories of the Di Sione estate out in the Hamptons from her scant few visits way back when, but the old man who was the center of the family and the great house’s patriarch had remained larger than life in her mind all this time.
Giovanni was exactly as she remembered him, if significantly more frail. He sat in an armchair in one of the drawing rooms of the grand old house, covered in a thick blanket, though the September day outside was warm. And he smiled as they walked in to greet him, that same old glint Anais remembered making his eyes seem much too bright for a man said to be on the brink of death.
“I should have told the world I was dying thirty years ago,” Giovanni said, his voice more feeble than Anais remembered it, making the possibility of his death seem much more real, suddenly. “It brings you all running.” His canny gaze shifted to Anais, then down to Damian in front of her. “And with such gifts.”
“This is Damian,” she said, smiling at the old man who she could never remember being anything but kind to her, no matter that her relationship with his grandson had been a mad little whirlwind with an unhappy ending. Then she smiled down at her son, taking her hand from his shoulder as she did. “Damian, this is your great-grandfather.”
She thought her heart might burst wide open when her self-possessed little boy walked right up to the oldest man he’d likely ever seen and held out his hand, very much like the man she knew he’d one day become. And this time, there was someone to share that sort of wild maternal pride. This time, she caught Dario’s eye and was sure he saw the same thing she did—maybe even felt it himself.
That unexpected moment of communion shook her, deep and hard, making her bones ache.
“It’s nice to meet you, young man,” Giovanni said with an extra bit of solemnity in his voice, as if speaking to the future man instead of the current boy. But he looked at Dario when he continued, and that glint in his eye seemed more pronounced. “Very nice indeed.”
“Behave,” Dario told him as Anais took a seat on the couch opposite Giovanni. Her stomach flipped over and she realized it was because there was actual laughter in Dario’s voice. It made him sound like a different person. It made him sound alive. It made him sound like that young man who’d chased her out of the Columbia University library on a gray winter’s afternoon and had talked her into having coffee with him when she’d been convinced he was playing a trick on her. “Or I won’t give you the earrings you sent me halfway across the planet to fetch for you.”
“Ah,” Giovanni said, sounding not in the least bit worried that Dario would do anything but what he’d asked. “My lovely Lost Mistresses are coming back to me at last. Tell me they still sparkle the way I remember them.”
“Of course they do, old man,” Dario replied, still with all that rich amusement in his voice. It was mesmerizing. It seemed to wrap around her and pull taut, like a slipknot she feared she’d never work loose. “They’re made almost entirely of diamonds. They make the night sky look dull in comparison.”
The old man smiled and then coughed. And coughed. So hard his whole body shook and his hands trembled, and that was when Anais understood that this wasn’t some kind of merry joke. Giovanni was truly ill. The force