“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 didn’t quite laugh. “That’s never going to happen. Don’t be so naive, Anais. Or do I mean self-absorbed?” Dario shook his head. And though it wasn’t an entirely fair representation of what had happened, he continued. “Do you really believe you’re the first woman Dante poached from me?”
She swallowed hard enough that he could see it, and it didn’t help matters to focus on the delicate line of her throat and the sheer perfection of that collarbone he’d spent many a night exploring with his own mouth. It didn’t help at all.
“Damian is your son,” she said after a moment. “I’m not going to argue about it. You either believe that or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s no reason for us to bother talking to each other.”
“Then what we need to talk about is what any parents in these situations talk about,” he said casually, as if this was an academic discussion with no painful personal history behind it. And as if he hadn’t spent entirely too long today on the phone with his own lawyers, running through various scenarios. “Visitation. Custody. Child support. The usual things.”
He thought she stiffened at that, or her dark gaze sharpened, but she only placed her wineglass back on the counter with a sharp clink and then folded her hands in front of her.
“Before you go too far down any kind of legal road, you should probably know that your name isn’t on Damian’s birth certificate.”
He hadn’t known he had a son a day ago, and yet hearing her say that made Dario want to howl at the sky. Break his glass and every other one in the villa. He didn’t know how he managed to keep himself from doing all of those things at once. How he sucked it all back in and tucked it away and managed to sound nothing but faintly icy when he responded.
“I beg your pardon?”
“If you’d like to claim paternity,” she said calmly, though her gaze was hard, “you’ll have to first prove it, and then, of course, pay all the back child support you owe me since his birth.”
“How mercenary.”
“Not at all. If you want to claim your son, you need to do something to make up for the fact you’ve ignored five years of his life. You can’t go back in time and be less horrible to his mother, more’s the pity, but you can pay. Maybe that’s all you’re good for, and that’s okay.” She smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. “Damian deserves a robust college fund out of this, if nothing else. It’s not mercenary. It’s an insurance policy.”
“Other terms come to mind.”
“You’re filled with all kinds of unpleasant terms, aren’t you?” She shrugged again. Dario was beginning to think that shrug might be the most infuriating gesture he’d ever seen. “That’s not exactly a surprise.”
“I never called you names, Anais, and I could have.”
Her dark eyes glinted. “Don’t sell yourself short, Dario. Your nonverbal communication was deafening.”
“To be clear,” he said when he could speak in an even tone, “you claim you’re not using the child as a pawn, but you are perfectly prepared to hold him for ransom. Am I getting that right?”
“He’s just a concept to you, Dare,” she said after a moment, and he wondered if she knew she’d reverted to that nickname only she had ever used. He didn’t let himself think too much about why he’d noticed. Especially when she was looking at him as if it hurt her to do so. “But to me? Damian is everything.”
She shook her head at him as if she found him deeply lacking, and there wasn’t a single reason in the world he should care what this woman thought of him. What her opinion of him was. Not a single, solitary reason.
More than that, he wasn’t doing this to hash out things between them. He told himself he didn’t care. This was about the child she’d hidden from him. That was the only reason he hadn’t flown back to New York the moment he’d had those damned earrings in his possession.
He’d made a plan and he had every intention of carrying it out to the letter, and it didn’t make one bit of difference what she thought of him or what she called him or anything of the sort. None of that mattered at all.
Why was he finding it so hard to remember?
* * *
Anais couldn’t handle the way he looked at her then, so she turned away and walked toward the open doors that led out to his private lanai, with its gloriously unobstructed view of the sea and the fiery red sun sinking toward the distant horizon. He had his own beach if he wanted it, at the far end of a winding little path. She could see the white sand gleaming in the last of the daylight, and the waves rocked gently against the shore as if it was doing it for them alone.
And somehow, she managed to wrestle that great ache inside of her into something more compact as she stood there and gazed out at the water, the sunset. Something she could breathe through. Something