“I’m afraid the results of the blood tests are in and allow no further room for debate,” Rafael told her then, his voice quietly triumphant in a way that made her skin feel shrunken down too tight against her own bones. “You are Lily Holloway. And Arlo is very much our son.”
She should feel something big, Lily thought then. Panic. Desperation. Even the polar opposite of that—a pervasive sense of relief, perhaps. Or perhaps of homecoming, after all these years of hiding.
But what she felt, instead, was profoundly sad.
Our son, he’d said, as if they were like other people. As if that was a possibility. As if they hadn’t ruined each other, down deep into their cores, so comprehensively that even the past five years hadn’t healed it or changed it at all.
Lily didn’t think anything ever could.
They stood there together in one of the most gorgeous and remote spots in the world. The thrust of the fierce mountains was exhilarating, the sky bluer by the moment while the crisp wind danced through her hair and moved over her face like a caress, and it was beautiful. It was more than beautiful. And yet all she could see was the dark, twisted past that had brought them here. Her terrible addiction to him and his profound selfishness. Their dirty, tawdry secrets. The awful choices she’d made to escape him, as necessary as they were unforgivable.
This was no new start. It was a prison sentence. And the only thing she knew for sure was that while Rafael was responsible for her son—the single greatest thing in her life and, as far as she could tell, her singular purpose on this earth—Rafael was also the reason she’d had to burn down every bridge and walk away from everything she’d ever loved.
And Arlo was worth that. Arlo was worth anything.
But that didn’t mean she had the slightest idea how she would survive proximity to Rafael again now.
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” she told him, long after the silence between them had grown strained and awkward and possibly revealing, too. That was what made her tell him as much of the truth as she could. “I don’t feel like Lily Holloway. I don’t know who that is. I certainly don’t understand who she was to you.”
“Never fear,” Rafael said, his voice soft but somehow containing all the might of those mountains looming up above them, solid rock and sheer, dizzying magnitude, and all of that dark heat besides. “I’ll teach you.”
* * *
Rafael had no idea what to do with himself now that he’d brought Lily and her son—his son—back to Italy.
It was a novel, distinctly unpleasant sensation.
He heard his brother walk into the cozy, private study he used as his office in the great old house, but he didn’t turn away from the window where he stood. He’d been there some time, still gripped in the same tight fist that had held him fast since Virginia. Before him, the pristine alpine lake stretched off into the low afternoon mists that concealed the small, picturesque village that adorned its far end and the tall mountains that thrust up like a fortress behind it, as if to protect it.
And much closer, down in the gardens that were little more than a suggestion beneath packed and frozen earth this time of year, the five-year-old child who was indisputably his own ran in loopy circles around the woman who claimed she could not remember Rafael at all.
He was certain she could. More than certain. He’d seen it in those lovely eyes of hers the way he’d always seen her need. Her surrender. He knew she was lying as sure as he’d known who she was when he’d seen her on the street.
What Rafael didn’t know was why.
“Are you planning to speak?” he asked Luca with perhaps more aggression than necessary. “Or will you loom there like one of the mountains, silent and disapproving?”
“I can speak, if you like,” Luca replied, sounding wholly unaffected by Rafael’s tone, much as he always did. “But the stories I have to tell are far less interesting than yours, I think.”
Rafael turned then and eyed his little brother. “I thought you were heading down to Rome tonight.”
“I am. I imagine you and Lily have a bit more to talk about than she and I do.” The sound of a child’s excited laughter wafted up from the gardens then, as if on cue, and hung there between them. Luca only smiled. “All of those interesting stories, for example, that you still haven’t seen fit to tell me.”
They looked at each other across the relatively small room. The fire licked at the grate. The December wind shook the windows, sweeping down from the heights of the mountains and off the surface of the freezing lake. And outside, a little boy was running hard enough to make himself dizzy in the very same spot they’d done so themselves, though in their case, it had been entirely without any parental supervision from the increasingly unwell woman who had never wanted to be a mother in the first place.
Rafael had never intended to have a child of his own. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do now it turned out he had one, without his permission. Without his knowledge, even. Thanks to a woman who had run from him and then concealed that child’s very existence from him for all these years.
Deliberately. She had done this deliberately.
He didn’t know what he felt. Or more precisely, which dark thing he should feel first.
“Have you come to ask me something?” Rafael asked after a moment or two dragged by. “Or is this the sort of tactic you use in negotiations, hoping the other party will fall to pieces in the silence?”
Luca laughed, but he didn’t deny that. “I would ask you to confirm that you did, in fact, sleep with our sister—”
“Stepsister,” Rafael growled. “A crucial distinction, I think you are aware.”
“—but that would be for dramatic effect, nothing more.” Luca waved a languid hand. “I already know the answer. Unless you have a contorted tale of a petri dish and a turkey baster you’d like to tell me, in which case, I am all ears.”
Luca proceeded to drape himself over the nearest chair, lounging there as if this really was a bit of mildly entertaining theater and not Rafael’s life. But then, he supposed that for Luca, it was.
Rafael sighed. “Was there a question in there somewhere?”
“Is this why she ran away, then?” Luca’s voice was light. Almost carefree, but Rafael didn’t quite believe it. He’d seen the shock on Luca’s face when she’d walked into that café.
“I couldn’t say why she ran away,” Rafael replied evenly. Or faked her own death, if he was to call this situation what it truly was. That was what she’d done, after all. Why pretty it up? “And she doesn’t appear to have any intention of telling me.”
Luca watched him for a moment, as if weighing his words. “It’s uncanny, how much that little boy looks like you. Father might well have a heart attack when he sees him. Or lapse further into dementia, never to return, mumbling on about ghosts in the family wing.”
“I will be certain to schedule time to worry about that,” Rafael assured him, his lips twitching despite himself. “But as I do not expect the old man and his brand-new child bride until much nearer Christmas, I think we can hold off on the family melodrama until then.”
“Buon Natale, brother,” Luca murmured, and then laughed again. “It will be the most joyous Christmas yet, I’m sure. Ghosts and resurrections and a surprise grandson, too. It’s nearly biblical.”
“I’m glad you find this amusing.”
“I wouldn’t say this is amusing, exactly,” Luca said then, the laughter disappearing. “But what would be the point in beating you