LITMIR.BIZ

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it at the time. And after that, I always viewed women with suspicion.’

      ‘I suppose so,’ said Willow, and her hand reached up to touch his jaw. ‘But after what had happened, it was natural you would be suspicious and examine the motives of the woman he eventually married. You were obviously looking out for him—you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.’

      But Dante shook his head, forcing himself to look at the situation squarely for the first time. To see things as they were and not how he’d wanted them to be. And Willow needed to hear this. He didn’t want her building up fantasies about him being the kind of caring brother who was just looking out for his twin. She needed to hear the truth.

      ‘It wasn’t just that,’ he admitted slowly. ‘The truth was that I wasn’t crazy about Dario’s new wife. I didn’t like the power she had once she had his ring on her finger. She was so damned...opinionated and I hated the way Dario started listening to her, instead of me. Maybe I was just plain jealous.’ He gave a ragged sigh. ‘When he was out one morning I went round to confront Anais about her real motives in marrying him. I accused her of using him to get herself a green card and we had one hell of a row, which ended up with her throwing a glass of water over me. I guess I deserved it. We both backed down and that might have been the end of it—in fact, we’d both started talking—had Dario not walked in and found me walking out of his bedroom, buttoning up one of his shirts. He thought we’d been having sex.’ He looked into Willow’s widened eyes. ‘He asked whether we’d been having sex.’

      ‘And what...what did you say?’

      ‘I didn’t,’ said Dante slowly. ‘I didn’t say anything. I used my silence to allow him come to his own conclusions, only they were the wrong conclusions. Because even though we’d both slept with Lucy, there was no way I would have ever touched his wife. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I felt this fierce kind of anger that he had accused me of such a thing. I thought that their relationship couldn’t be so great if he thought his wife would jump straight into bed with his brother at the first opportunity. I thought the only way for things to get back to normal would be for them to break up—and they did. The marriage imploded and Dario cut all ties with me. He held me responsible and I couldn’t blame him for that.’

      ‘And did you...did you ever try to make amends?’

      He nodded. ‘At first I did. I was eaten up with guilt and remorse. But no matter how many times I tried to contact him, his mind was made up and he wouldn’t see me, or speak to me. It was like trying to smash my way through a concrete wall with nothing but my bare hands, and in the end I gave up trying.’

      He waited for her judgement. For the shock and outrage he would expect from a woman whose innocence he had taken and whose total tally of sexual partners was just one. Wouldn’t she be disgusted by what he had done? Wouldn’t she want to walk away from him, no matter how good he was between the sheets?

      But there was no judgement there. The concern had not left her eyes. And for the first time in his life he was finding compassion tolerable.

      ‘Why don’t you go to him?’ she asked.

      ‘Because he won’t see me.’

      ‘Couldn’t you at least...try? Because...’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Dante...one thing I learnt when I was so ill was just how important family are. They should be the people you can depend on, no matter what. And you never, ever know what’s around the corner. If something happened to Dario and you were still estranged, you’d never forgive yourself. Would you? And it’s not too late to try again.’ Her words became urgent. ‘It’s never too late.’

      He shook his head, because hadn’t he grown weary with being stonewalled? And all these years down the line, surely rejection would be all the harder to take. But as Dante looked into Willow’s face, he realised he needed to be bigger than his pride and his ego. He thought about all the things she’d been through—things she hadn’t wanted to tell him but which eventually he’d managed to prise from her. He thought about how she’d minimised her sickness with a few flippant sentences, making it sound no more inconvenient than a temporary power cut. Despite her slight frame and ethereal appearance, she was brave and resilient and he admired her for those strengths.

      Walking over to the writing desk, he picked up his phone, but when he saw the name which had flashed onto the screen, he felt a sense of disbelief as he scrolled down to read the message. He looked up, to where Willow hadn’t moved, a question darkening her grey eyes.

      ‘What’s wrong?’

      ‘It’s from Dario,’ he said incredulously. ‘And he wants to meet me.’

      Her expression echoed his own disbelief. ‘Just like that? Right out of the blue? Just after we’d been talking about him?’

      ‘He says he heard I was at the house and decided to contact me.’

      She gave a slightly nervous laugh. ‘So it’s just coincidence.’

      ‘Yeah. Just coincidence.’ But Dante found himself thinking about something he hadn’t allowed himself to think about for a long time. About the intuition which had always existed between Dario and him—that mythical twin intuition which used to drive everyone crazy with frustration. They’d used it to play tricks on people. They’d loved making their teachers guess which twin they were talking to. But there had been another side too. The internal side which had nothing to do with playacting. His pain had been his brother’s pain. Their joy and dreams had been equally shared, until a woman had come between them.

      And maybe that was how it was supposed to be. Maybe he had wasted all that energy fighting against the inevitable. For now he could see that not only had he been jealous of Anais, he’d been angry that for once in his life he’d been unable to control the outcome of something he wanted. Because the little boy who’d been unable to save his mother had grown into a man with a need to orchestrate the world and the way it worked. A man who wanted to control people and places and things. And life wasn’t like that. It never could be.

      He looked at Willow and once again felt that strange kick to his heart. And even though part of him wanted to act like it wasn’t happening, something was stubbornly refusing to let him off the hook so easily. Was it so bad to acknowledge the truth? To admit that she made him feel stuff he’d never felt before—stuff he hadn’t imagined himself capable of feeling. That she had given him a flicker of hope in a future which before had always seemed so unremittingly dark?

      ‘What does your brother say?’ she was asking.

      ‘That he wants to meet me.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘As soon as possible. He lives in New York. I could leave right away.’

      ‘Then shouldn’t you get going?’

      The words were soft, and the way she said them curled over his skin, like warm smoke. Smoky like her eyes. He wanted to take her back to bed. To forget all about the damned text and touch her until he was drowning in her body and feeling that strange kind of peace he felt whenever they were together, but he knew he couldn’t. Because this meeting with Dario was long overdue. The rift was as deep as a canyon, and he needed to address it. To face it and accept the outcome, whatever that might be, and then go forward.

      ‘I shouldn’t be more than a few hours,’ he said.

      ‘Take as long as you like.’

      His eyes narrowed. She was giving him a permission he hadn’t asked for and his default setting would usually have kicked against her interference. Because he hated the idea of a woman closing in on him...trapping him...trying to get her claws hooked right into him. Yet he would have welcomed Willow clawing him—raking those neatly filed fingernails all the way down his back and making him buck with pleasure.

      He wondered when it was that his opinion of her had changed so radically. When he’d realised she wasn’t some overprivileged aristocrat who wanted the world to jump whenever she snapped her pretty fingers—but someone

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