LITMIR.BIZ

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door was forever closed to her.

      It had been bad enough that she’d had a relationship with Rafael for all those years, no matter who else he’d been seeing and no matter how badly their families would have reacted to it if they’d known. It had been twisted and it had been wrong, given the fact her mother had insisted on referring to Rafael and Luca as your big brothers at every opportunity. How could she bring a baby into that gnarled, sick mess? Not to mention, she’d had no idea how Rafael might behave in the face of real adversity. Would he deny he was the father? Would he order her to terminate the pregnancy?

      How had her life come to this? she’d wondered. That she’d felt she had no option but to walk away from everything she knew—only to discover that she’d made a new life with a man she obviously didn’t know at all if she had so little idea how he might react or what he might do.

      She’d vowed then and there that she would raise this child better than this squalid little beginning in a truck stop bathroom. That she would give her baby a fresh start in a new place where her sick need for Rafael—like her own mother’s varied addictions that had marked Lily’s own life so deeply—was no longer a factor. Where the child could come first, and not her—the very opposite of how she’d been raised.

      And she’d done a good job sticking to all of those vows, she’d thought last night as she’d pulled up in front of the farmhouse. Arlo had come hurtling outside as she’d parked, heedless of the wintry weather the way he always was—as excited and bouncy as the dogs who romped along with him. She’d caught his hot and squirmy little body against hers in a hard hug, and had poured all her regrets and apologies into the way she squeezed him tight until he wriggled free.

      Because she’d known it was only a matter of time, and sure enough, they hadn’t even started their usual nightly dinner with Pepper when the car had pulled up outside. She’d tried to hold back the inevitable that little bit longer—but there had been no stopping it. On some level, she’d known that since she’d looked up and seen Rafael on the street.

      And it had been even worse than she’d imagined.

      She’d known that Arlo took after his father, of course, but it had been one thing to know it and another entirely to see it in the flesh. It had made her heart flip over in her chest and her eyes prickle with heat...

      But then Rafael had turned that frozen, astonished glare on her, his eyes so dark they’d made the deep December night around him seem bright by comparison. And while it hadn’t been as terrifying or dramatic as that car crash five years ago, Lily had known that it amounted to the same thing.

      One life was over. A new one was beginning—whether she wanted it or not.

      It had all been very cut-and-dried. There had been no mistaking the connection between father and son. It was written on both their faces, as obvious as the sun. And though Lily had valiantly stuck to her Alison story, which included a part about a drug dealer boyfriend who’d conveniently died after helping make Arlo, Pepper had been involved in the conversation this time.

      Pepper, who’d confirmed that yes, Alison had that exact tattoo that Rafael mentioned, which had made Rafael’s mouth curve in a way that had in turn made Lily’s heart kick at her. And no, Pepper had said when pressed, she’d never met a single person from Alison’s life before Charlottesville. And therefore, no, there was no corroboration to any of the Alison stories at all.

      Only what Lily had told her.

      “I told you what I know,” Lily had said at that point, and she’d worried that the lies were like tattoos she wore on her face. That they were that bright, that indelible. “Everything I know.”

      Lily had been involved in a serious car accident on the winding California coastal road five years ago, Rafael had said—for Pepper’s benefit, presumably—and Luca had confirmed. Her body had never been found. Now they knew why.

      “How can you explain the fact that I’m here and don’t remember you?” Lily had demanded, as Pepper had stared at her from across the table as if looking for the truth on her face. Or those terrible tattoos Lily was sure she could feel stamped across her cheekbones. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

      “I don’t know how a woman could go over the side of a cliff on the Sonoma Coast and yet turn up unharmed five years later on the other side of the country, with a memory of a completely different woman’s life and a child who is inarguably mine,” Rafael had said, a seething fury in his voice and in his eyes though he’d sat at Pepper’s table so easily. So calmly. As if he was a friend instead of a foe—but Lily couldn’t accuse him of that if she was pretending she didn’t know him, could she? Maybe a stranger wouldn’t be able to read him as well as she could. “I only know that you are the same woman. That means it happened, whether it makes sense or not.”

      And the truth was, there had been no need to trot out all the old pictures Rafael apparently kept cached on his mobile and ready to show, because this game had ended the moment Pepper had seen Rafael next to his son.

       His son.

      “This is a good thing,” Pepper had whispered fiercely, hugging Lily as the Castelli brothers had led them away from the only home Arlo had ever known. “Everyone should know who they really are, honey. And that little boy needs his father.”

      Lily had questioned whether anybody needed Rafael Castelli, especially the child she had no intention of allowing him to corrupt, but she’d known better than to say that out loud. And it had been out of her hands. She’d been utterly outmaneuvered. The only card she could possibly have played was a demand for a blood test as some kind of stalling tactic—but to what end? She already knew what it would say.

      And anyway, Rafael had anticipated that move.

      “We will take the helicopter back to Washington, DC,” he’d told her in that cool way of his, at such odds with her memories of his tempestuousness and that ferocious gleam in his gaze. “Where a suitably discreet doctor is waiting to perform the necessary blood work. We will know the whole biological truth before we land in Italy. If there has been some mistake, I promise you that the Castelli family will see to it that you and your son have a lovely holiday in Italy before we return you back here to your home, safe and sound.”

      “Wonderful,” she’d retorted, baring her teeth in some approximation of a smile. “I’ve always wanted to see Venice. Before it sinks.”

      The jet rolled to a stop on the Castelli airfield, jerking her back into the wholly unwelcome present. Arlo was already bouncing up and down in his seat beside her with his usual boundless energy, and she could hardly blame him for taking off at a dead run once the plane’s door opened and the cold, crisp mountain air poured in.

      She took her time, but there was only so much dawdling she could do before she, too, had to step off the plane and climb down the metal steps. Putting her well and truly back in Italy. The truth of that felt like a blow. And it was even more beautiful here than she remembered it, so stunning it actually hurt—the soaring heights of the Alps dressed up in their winter whites, the blue sky with hints of pink and coral from the exultant dawn still fading away as she watched—and the man who waited for her at the foot of the steps as darkly gorgeous and even more dangerous than the view.

      Rafael slid his mobile into his pocket as she stepped onto the solid, frozen ground beside him. Lily refused to look at him, and then despaired of herself if something so small and pointless was her only potential rebellion. Pathetic. She could feel her heart in her throat, and for the first time in her entire life, thought it was within the realm of possibility that she might faint.

      Don’t you dare! she snapped at herself. And not because fainting was a weakness, though it likely was and she didn’t want to show any weakness here. But because she knew Rafael would catch her and the very last place she needed to be, ever again, was in his arms.

      She kept her gaze trained on Arlo, who was chasing his uncle up and down the otherwise empty runway, kept as it was for the family’s use alone. A gleaming black Range Rover waited at a discreet distance,

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