LITMIR.BIZ

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rich boy who’d refused to give up a favorite toy—

      The truth was so hot, so demanding, it burned. It told her things she didn’t want to know—proved she was as much an addict as she’d ever been, and worse, as her own mother had always been. Clean for five years and that quickly a junkie again. It had shaken her so deeply, so profoundly, that she didn’t know what might have happened next—but then she’d remembered.

      With a thud so hard it should have toppled her, though it didn’t. She’d yanked her mouth from his, appalled at herself.

      Because she’d remembered why she couldn’t simply fall into this man the way everything inside her yearned to do. Why she couldn’t trust herself around him, not even for an instant. Why she had to make him go away again, no matter what it took.

      But he was not looking at her as if he had the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort.

      “It would be a work of fiction, then,” she managed to say now. “If you wrote a book. Because none of those things ever happened to me.”

      His face changed, then. That haunted expression dimmed, and something far more considering gleamed gold there in the depths of his dark gaze.

      “My apologies,” he said softly. She felt how dangerous it would be to believe that tone of voice in the goose bumps that prickled all over her, though she kept herself from shivering in reaction. Barely. “Who did you say you were?”

      “I’m not sure I want to share my personal information with some ranting madman on the street.”

      “I am Rafael Castelli,” he said, and the way he said his name lilted through her like a song, lyrical and right. Yet another reason to hate herself. “If you don’t know me, as you claim, the pertinent details would be these—I am the eldest son of Gianni Castelli and heir to the ancient Castelli fortune. I am acting CEO of the Castelli Wine Company, renowned the world over for my business acumen. I do not hunt women down in the streets. I do not have to do such things.”

      “Because rich men are so well-known for their reasonable behavior.”

      “Because if I was in the habit of accosting strange women in the street, it would have been noted before now,” he said dryly. “I suspect countries would think twice before letting me cross their borders.”

      Lily shifted and tried to look the appropriate mixture of blank and confused. “I really think I should call nine-one-one,” she murmured. “You’re not making any sense.”

      “There is no need,” he said, sounding more Italian than he had a moment ago, which made everything inside her feel edgy. Jagged. That and the tightness of his lean jaw were the only hints she could see of his anger, but she knew it was there. She could feel it. “I will call them myself. You were reported dead five years ago, Lily. Do you really imagine I will be the only person interested in your resurrection?”

      “I have to go.”

      He reached out a hand and wrapped it over the top of her car door as if he intended to keep her there simply by holding the vehicle itself in place. Her curse was that she believed he probably could.

      “There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight.”

      Lily stared back at him, a war raging inside that she fervently hoped wasn’t visible on her face. He had to leave. He had to. There was no other option. But this was Rafael. He’d never done a single thing he didn’t want to do in as long as she’d known him—even back when he’d seemed far more languid and perpetually unbothered than this man who stood before her now, radiating a kind of authority she really didn’t want to investigate any further.

      “My name is Alison Herbert,” she said again. She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and then she told him the Alison story in all its particulars—save one crucial detail. “I’m originally from Tennessee. I’ve never been to California and I didn’t go to college. I live on a farm outside of town with my friend and landlady, Pepper, who runs a dog boarding and day care facility. I walk the dogs. I play with them. I clean up after them and live in a little cottage there. I have for years. I don’t know anything about wine and to be honest, I prefer a good beer.” She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it. “I’m not who you think I am.”

      “Then you will have no problem submitting to a DNA test, to set my mind at ease.”

      “Why on earth would the state of your mind be of interest to me?”

      “Lily has people who care about her.” Rafael’s shrug seemed far more lethal than hers, a weapon more than a gesture. “There are legal issues. If you are not the woman I would swear you are, prove it.”

      “Or,” she said, distinctly, “I could reach into my pocket and produce the driver’s license that proves I’m exactly who I say I am.”

      “Licenses can be forged. Blood work is much more honest.”

      “I’m not taking a DNA test because some crazy man on a street thinks I should,” Lily snapped. “Listen. I’ve been more than nice, considering the fact you grabbed me, terrified me and—”

      “Was that terror I tasted on your tongue?” His voice was like silk. It slid over her, through her, demolishing what few defenses she had in an instant. Reminding her again why this man was more dangerous to her than heroin. “I rather thought it was something else.”

      “Step away from this car,” she ordered him. She couldn’t let herself react. She couldn’t let him see that he got under her skin. “I’m going to get in it and drive away, and you’re going to let me.”

      “Not one of those things is going to happen.”

      “What do you want?” she hurled at him. “I told you I don’t know who you are!”

      “I want the last five years of my life back!” he thundered, his voice a loud, dark thing in the quiet of the street, bouncing back from the walls of the surrounding buildings and making Lily feel flattened. Punctured. “I want you. I’ve been chasing your ghost for half a decade.”

      “I’m not—”

      “I went to your funeral.” The thunder was a stark thing, then, and far more painful because of it. It punched through her, leaving her winded. Wobbly. “I stood there and played your stepbrother, nothing more. As if my heart hadn’t been ripped from my body and battered apart on the rocks where that car went off the road. I didn’t sleep for months, for years, imagining you losing control of the wheel and plummeting over—” His fine lips pressed together, hard and grim, as he cut himself off. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “Every time I closed my eyes I pictured you screaming.”

      She would never know how she stood there and stared back at him, as if he was talking about someone else. He is, she told herself fiercely. The Lily Holloway he knew really did die that day. She’s never coming back.

      And the Rafael she’d known had never cared about her—or anything—that much. Who was he kidding? She’d been but one of his many women at the time, and she’d accepted that because what else had she known? She’d learned how to lose herself in awful, narcotic men at her mother’s knee.

      “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “For everyone involved. That sounds horrific.”

      “Your mother never recovered.”

      But Lily didn’t want to talk about her mother. Her bright and fragile and largely absent mother, who had shivered at the slightest wind, susceptible to every emotional storm that rolled her way. Her mother, who had self-medicated with ever more dangerous combinations of prescription pills, always under the aegis of this or that quack of a doctor.

      “Did you know that she died eighteen months ago?” Rafael continued. “That wouldn’t have happened if she’d known her daughter was still alive.”

      That one would leave deep, deep scars, Lily knew. But she didn’t crack. What she felt about

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