At the very least, the fallout of those feelings had turned her into someone she despised.
“It’s a clear day,” Rafael had said on a bright morning this past week, walking into the private salon in the family wing of the old house where Lily and Arlo had become accustomed to having their breakfast.
Lily had glanced up and lost her breath for a moment at the unexpected hit of him. That rangy body of his that he’d dressed that morning in the kind of deceptively casual clothing she knew only appeared to be simple and straightforward. The stretch of exquisite luxury wools across his perfect chest, the way those trousers clung to the lean muscles in his thighs. He looked like some kind of infinitely powerful adventurer, some modern-day Italian prince, as likely to leap over one of the looming mountains outside as he was to take to the nearest throne—
Maybe, she’d thought then, all those ridiculous lies he told you about your absurd and overdramatic teenaged behavior weren’t so far off the mark.
“Thank you,” she’d said, with as little inflection as she could manage, as if maintaining an even tone could repel him. As if anything could have. She’d looked past him toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, where she could see what kind of day it was all by herself, then back. “I appreciate the weather report.”
Rafael’s mouth had moved in that same curve, not quite a smirk, that had lit her on fire no matter how she’d tried to tell herself that was simply the old house’s unwieldy heating, not him at all.
“Your appreciation is overwhelming,” he’d murmured, and she didn’t understand how he could make that sound like sex. How he could make anything sound like sex when he said it in that voice of his.
Arlo, meanwhile, appreciated all things Rafael in a pure and straightforward way that made Lily’s heart squeeze too tight in her chest. And something like shame form a thick, oily slick deep in her belly. That morning, Arlo had tossed his arms above his head and started singing at the top of his lungs, completely unaware of all those dangerous undercurrents swirling through the room.
Lily had forced a smile when Rafael raised a querying brow at her.
“That is the hello song,” she’d told him with as much dignity as she could muster while sitting next to a five-year-old who was singing and dancing and wriggling madly in his seat. “He learned it in his preschool. They sing it every morning.”
“I’m honored,” Rafael had said, smiling at his son. A real smile, she’d noted. One of those pure Rafael smiles she remembered from before that could have knocked them straight into spring, it had been so bright.
And Lily had officially hated herself, then. Because the smile he’d used when he’d looked at Arlo had been genuine. It had been beautiful. It was lit with pride and longing and a sweetness she’d have said Rafael Castelli could not—did not—possess. Arlo had catapulted himself off the side of his chair and raced around the table at the sight of it, tossing himself at Rafael’s legs to bestow one of his heedless, reckless full-body hugs.
Lily hadn’t known whether to smile or cry. Especially when Rafael had looked so stunned for a second. He’d put his hand on his son’s head as if it belonged there and then he’d smiled down at the little boy as if Arlo was a burst of pure summer sunshine on such a chilly December morning.
And so she’d ruined it.
“He does that to every man he meets,” Lily had heard herself say, ugly and sharp.
The words had hung there in the air of the salon between them. They’d seemed to grow louder with every second, as if they were amplified off the graceful old walls. If she could have reached into the air and plucked them back, thought better of them and kept them to herself, she would have done it.
But there was no repairing the kind of damage she’d always done to this man, and him to her. There was only the living with it.
Rafael’s smile had dimmed, then disappeared altogether, and he’d taken his time looking back at her. His gaze had been dark and something much too bleak and furious at once, and it had hurt as much as if he’d thrown something back at her. More, perhaps. Lily kept thinking she couldn’t feel any more horrible than she already did, and then sure enough, she found there was a darker, deeper, far worse place.
This is what you do, she’d told herself. When you’re with him, this is who you are. She’d wanted to say that out loud. To remind him that they’d always ended in the same ugly place—but she couldn’t say a word. She’d had to sit and stew in it instead.
“It’s clear enough to walk down to the village today,” Rafael had said after a long, heavy sort of moment, when she’d thought he could see all the ugliness inside her. When she’d imagined it filled the whole room—the whole sprawling length of the house. Arlo, happily, had seemed completely oblivious, still clinging to his father’s legs and chanting something new and bright. “I thought it would be a pleasant family excursion, assuming you’re not too busy coming up with further vicious comments to fling at me.”
Lily had refused to apologize to him, but still, her throat hurt as if she had more than one apology stacked there. She’d swallowed hard against it. And maybe it would have been different if she hadn’t tried to take him out at the knees. Maybe then she might have come up with some way to resist him. But she’d made that glorious smile of his go away because she was a terrible person, and she didn’t seem to have any resistance in her just then.
And he’d used the word family.
“That sounds lovely,” she’d said, her voice hoarse with all the things she couldn’t say. The things she didn’t want to admit she could feel. The memories she’d been terribly afraid he could see all over her face. “Thank you.”
Lily jolted back into the present to find Rafael studying her expression in that way of his that made her forget to breathe. She kept herself from scowling her reaction at him by sheer force of will, and realized only after a long, shuddering beat of her treacherous heart that he was holding out his hand to her. And waiting for her to take it.
She wanted to touch him about as much as she wanted to fling herself off the side of the boat into the frigid waters of the Grand Canal and swim for it, but she swallowed that down, aware that he was measuring her reaction. That he was clocking exactly how much time it took her to look from that extended hand back up to his face. That, worse, he could probably read every last thought she had as she did it.
Because she was perfectly aware that he knew she could remember him.
He still couldn’t prove that she could.
“I only want to help you from the boat, Lily,” he said softly, the hint of a dark amusement in his voice.
“That is another lie.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She should have swallowed that down with all the rest of it, she knew that. And maybe to prove how little he bothered her, to herself if nothing else, she slid her hand into his.
It was a mistake. She’d known it would be.
It didn’t matter that they both wore gloves to ward off the cold. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t feel the slide of his skin against her palm or the true heat of his hand. She could feel his strength. She could feel that leashed power of his like a deep, dark ricochet inside her, flooding her with sensation she didn’t want, as dangerous as the mysterious Venetian night all around them.
There was no curve at all to that hard mouth of his, then. Rafael’s gaze locked to hers.
Heat. Passion. Need.
It slammed into her. It made her feel distorted. Altered. She moved then, jerky and uncertain, as if the world was as rickety beneath her feet as the boat. As the dock that extended out from the palazzo’s first-level loggia. As the grand houses of Venice themselves, arrayed around them up and down the canal on their ancient and uncertain