LITMIR.BIZ

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started to speak, to reassure her again, but then stopped. Froze, more like, into a column of sheer and solid ice where he stood. He felt something like light-headed. As if the great stone palazzo had turned on its end and landed square in the center of his chest.

      “What did you say?” He realized he’d asked that in Italian and translated it into clipped English, his pulse like a clanging bell in his temples.

      “I can’t do this!” she hurled at him, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know exactly where this leads. Me, alone on the side of the road, with no choice but to run away from my entire life. You’re heroin and I’m little better than a junkie and everything between us is toxic, Rafael. It always has been.”

      And then she whirled and threw herself back toward the crowd, not seeming to notice or care that she was still unsteady on her feet. The mad, elegant whirl was still carrying on just on the far side of the nearest archway, bright and loud, and she lurched toward it as if she might fall over in her haste to escape him—as if she wouldn’t much care if she did.

      While Rafael stood there in the dim hallway, as stunned as if she’d clubbed him over the head. She might as well have.

       She remembered. She knew.

      It had been one thing to suspect she remembered. It was another to have her confirm it.

      He heard a low, inarticulate noise and understood he’d made it. That it had welled up from deep inside him, from that dark place where he’d locked these things away—

      Then, feeling blinded somehow by the intensity of what pounded into him in waves, blinded and yet focused and understanding that was as much the force of his temper as anything else, he went after her.

      He caught up to her on the steps of the palazzo, outside near the canal. She whirled around before he could take her elbow, as if she’d heard him coming and had known it was him by the sound of his feet against the stone, and she dashed moisture from her cheeks with her hands clenched in fists.

      Rafael told himself he didn’t care if she cried. That the very least she could do, after what she’d done to him, was shed a few tears.

      It took him long moments to recognize that the moisture on her face was not tears at all. It was snow. It fell all around them, soft and silent, disappearing as it met the water of the canal, the dock at their feet, the lovely bridge lit up in the distance. It was possibly the only thing in the world more beautiful than this treacherous liar in front of him, and he couldn’t bring himself to care about that, either.

      “You lied.” He hardly sounded like himself, and he didn’t dare reach for her. He didn’t trust himself to touch her just then. She had finally admitted the truth. That she had betrayed him so terribly he could hardly make sense of it, and in that moment he was so hollow and so desperate he didn’t know what he might do. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know himself at all. “You lied all this time. You hid from me, on purpose. You deliberately kept my son from me for five years. Then you lied even more when I found you.”

      He didn’t realize, until he heard the echo of his own voice on the water, that he was not exactly speaking softly. Standing on the steps of a Venice palazzo in the snow with a woman long presumed dead, who had been his stepsister when alive, was not exactly discreet.

      But she didn’t cower. Lily—and she was wholly Lily, his Lily, and she had never been anything else, goddamn her—laughed. There was nothing like joy in it. It was a terrible sound, as wretched as he felt, and he thought it must have hurt her. He hated that he cared about that. That her pain mattered to him when his clearly did not register with her at all.

      “Which glass house should we throw stones at tonight, Rafael?” she demanded, her voice as awful as that brittle, broken laugh, as his own had been. “This is what we do. This is who we are and who we’ve always been. We hurt each other. Again and again and again. What does it matter how?”

      “You faked your death!” he roared at her, through the snow and the cold and the echo of the music pouring out from inside the grand palace that rose up behind them in all its Christmas finery. Then he checked himself, though it cost him. “How is anything I did to you equivalent?”

      “I didn’t fake it.” She was breathing so hard it was as if she was running, but she was standing still, just as he was. As if they were both frozen together here in this horrid moment of truth. As if there could be no escaping it, no avoiding it, for either one of them. “I simply didn’t come forward and correct anybody when they thought the worst. It’s not the same thing.”

      He didn’t recognize the harsh, nearly violent feeling that rushed through him then, nearly taking him from his feet. He took a step back, and the world rushed back at him, reminding him again that they were standing outside, in public, in view of most of Venice and half the world, airing laundry so dirty he thought exposure to it could contaminate the whole of Italy.

      He had to contain this. He had to lock this down before it consumed him whole. Before he looked behind the stunned fury that worked in him and truly let himself feel what lurked there on the other side—

      But that was for another time. Another place. Rafael whistled for his water taxi, and his driver appeared from the shadows so quickly he couldn’t help but wonder how much the man had overheard. He couldn’t do anything about that, so he took Lily’s arm again instead.

      He thought the sheer audacity of her betrayal might have dimmed his raging, timeless, insatiable lust for her—but it was the opposite. The moment he touched her, he hungered for her as if he hadn’t just had her. It was almost as if he wanted her more, knowing what she’d done to him.

      You’ve never been anything but wildly obsessed where she was concerned, he told himself then. Why should this surprise you?

      “Not here,” he bit out at her, and he didn’t let himself look at her. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep himself from snarling at her—or worse, kissing her until all of this ugly truth faded away. “I think we’ve put on quite enough of a show for one night.”

      She tried to extricate herself from his grip, then scowled at him when he didn’t give her an inch as he pulled her along with him down the stairs, through the swirling snow and toward the dock.

      “So near-public sex is fine, but heaven forbid anyone overhear an argument?” Lily demanded. She balked when they approached the boat, digging her heels into the slippery dock surface, but he kept moving and therefore, so did she. It was that or let him drag her, and he wasn’t surprised she chose the former. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You must be insane!”

      “I am a long way past insane, Lily,” Rafael said, and he saw her eyes go wide at his tone, soft and lethal. He leaned in close, holding her gaze with his, and made no attempt at all to hide his dark, seething fury. “I mourned you. I missed you. My life was little more than mausoleum erected to your memory, and it was all a lie. A lie you told by your purposeful absence for years and then, when I found you completely by accident, you told deliberately, to my face.”

      He could feel her shake beneath his hand, and he didn’t think it was that same heat that had worked in her before, that shimmering need he knew as well as his own. He could see that complicated storm in her blue eyes, in the way her lovely mouth trembled and hinted at her reasons, and he didn’t want this. Any of this. He’d spent five years dreaming of her return to him, safe and unharmed and his again, but he’d never spent much time worrying about how that might happen. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

      Maybe there were some doors better left closed.

      “Rafael—” she began, with a catch in her voice that would be his undoing, if he let it. He refused to let it. And this wasn’t the place, no matter what.

      He didn’t quite bare his teeth as he cut her off.

      “If I were you, I’d get in the goddamned boat.”

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