LITMIR.BIZ

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they schemed to get close to him and use him for their own ends.

      She’d been arrogant enough to think she was the antidote to that, but it had turned out that once a man was poisoned, that was how he stayed. Unless the man in question wanted something different for himself. Dario had pretended he had, but he hadn’t.

      In the end, he hadn’t wanted anything he’d claimed he did. Particularly not Anais.

      And for some reason the exquisite four-bedroom villa that would have been more than suitable for a king and the whole of his royal court seemed to press that fact deeper into her as she found herself knocking at his door, the staff member having long since melted away into the exultant, flowered shrubbery festooned with torches and dancing with real flames against the sunset.

      She knocked with a wide-open hand, loudly and rudely, and of course Dario didn’t rush to answer her. It gave her far too much time to stand there and think better of this. To wonder what she thought she might gain from acquiescing to his demands no matter what her reasons might have been.

      And worse, what she stood to lose.

      Nothing with Dario had ever been straightforward. They’d skipped regular dating altogether—having fallen hard into something far more intense neither one of them had dared name. Then they’d gotten married much too fast, each telling the other and maybe themselves it was a cool, rational decision based on Anais’s immigration status as a French citizen instead of that insane fire that had consumed them both in bed. Dario had told her very little about his family, except that his twin was the only one he truly cared about at all—and yet Dante had been openly suspicious of her from the start. She’d tried to ignore that, too swept up in her first year of law practice and the head-spinning reality of her first lover who was also the husband she didn’t dare admit she’d fallen head over heels in love with.

      Maybe it wasn’t surprising that it had taken exactly one year for it all to fall apart.

      There was nothing good to be gained by poking her fingers into those old wounds, she told herself then, scowling at the villa’s front door.

      This is for Damian, she reminded herself. She chanted it a few times, just to make sure she was listening to her own words, and knocked again. Louder.

      And this time Dario swung the door open and took her breath away.

      It only made her that much more furious with him. She kept telling herself that, too, with even less success.

      Dario wore nothing but a loose pair of linen trousers that hung low—much too low—on his lean hips and made it impossible to do anything but gape at that remarkable chest of his. She’d assured herself that he couldn’t possibly be as good-looking as she remembered, as perfectly formed, like something that ought to have been carved from marble and propped up in a museum. She’d had six years to decide she’d built him up in her head.

      She hadn’t.

      If anything, he was far, far better than she remembered, all flat planes of muscle and that ridged abdomen, smooth olive skin and a dusting of dark hair that arrowed down beneath those low-hanging, decadent trousers. Even his bare feet were gorgeous, big and inescapably male, and she hated everything about this.

      Mostly, she hated that terrible yearning that ripped through her, tearing her wide open and making it impossible to lie to herself about it. She wanted him. She’d always wanted him. That connection between them had been everything to her, for a time.

      There had never been anything as huge or powerful or all-consuming in all her life, until she’d held Damian for the first time in the hospital.

      She’d been silly enough to think that connection was what had forged the true bond between them, back then. That their marriage had been conducted for all the practical reasons they’d agreed upon in their analytical way—for Anais’s green card, because Dario had liked the idea of a lawyer in the immediate family to handle the company he and his brother ran, etc. It had all made such sense on paper.

      But the truth of it, the truth of them, had been what happened in the fire that raged between them. Always. At the slightest touch. At the ways they tore each other apart and put each other back together, night after night. The things they talked about in the cold light of day were their cover, their pretense. The nights were their truth.

      That was what she’d told herself. It was what she’d believed. What she’d felt, deep inside, in that cold place no one else had ever touched.

      Until he’d smashed it all into a million little pieces when he’d walked away from her without a backward glance.

      “I hope you didn’t undress just for me,” she said, smiling faintly at him as if she found his bare chest—truly, one of the great wonders of the world, to her way of thinking, and she hated that she still thought it—embarrassing. For him. “I wouldn’t touch you again with a ten-foot pole covered in all your wealth and status. Look what happened the last time.”

       CHAPTER FOUR

      “STARTING RIGHT IN with the lies?” Dario asked.

      And because she hadn’t let him into her house last night—which annoyed him a lot more than he cared to admit, and had gotten under his skin the more he’d thought about it—he blocked the doorway to his villa now. She could see how she liked it, and if there was a part of him that was ashamed at his own childishness, he ignored it.

      He ignored a whole host of unfortunate truths, many of them making themselves known physically, as he gazed at her. “Touching me was never the issue, as I think we both know.”

      She looked at him as if she pitied him, which made him want to...do all kinds of things he wouldn’t let himself do.

      Yet.

      “I was foolish and young back then,” she said in that prim voice of hers that had always, always, driven him crazy with lust and need. Today was no different, damn her. “I thought the package mattered a lot more than what was inside it. But people change.”

      “Selective memory isn’t change. It’s a lie you tell yourself.”

      “Happily, you don’t know me well enough either way.” She shrugged. If it bothered her that he hadn’t stepped aside to let her in yet, she didn’t show it. That, in turn, cranked up his irritation even higher. “I could have undergone a huge personal transformation. I could be lying through my teeth. Neither one has anything to do with the cold, hard fact of your paternity, does it?”

      Dario had woken up at eight in the morning New York time, which was six hours earlier than here in this lost corner of the world. He’d spent a couple of hours on the phone and another hour or so on his laptop, and then he’d dealt with the restless anger beating at him by going for a very long run on a dark island road that wound down to beaches made of hard, black volcanic rock. He’d greeted his first Hawaiian sunrise with a swim in the shockingly warm sea, and then he’d come back to his villa and banged out a hundred furious laps in the significantly cooler pool, just to make sure he had a handle on himself.

      Except he hadn’t.

      He’d spent the day on a series of calls and video chats with employees all over the world, and then he’d gone on a second, much harder run up into the hills, and even that hadn’t done a damn thing.

      Not when Anais appeared in front of him again.

      She looked as effortlessly sexy as she always did, and he bitterly resented it. He resented her. She’d been beautiful yesterday on that remote estate. She’d been ridiculously appealing last night in nothing but a tank top and stretchy pants that had clung to every inch of her long, shapely legs. And today it was worse.

      Much worse.

      She’d put her hair up into one of those complicated, seemingly messy buns that he’d used to love to watch her create with her clever fingers and a series of pins she shoved into the masses of her silken hair seemingly

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