LITMIR.BIZ

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and took it. She waited until her heart felt less painful in her chest as it beat. Until she could speak without that betraying thickness clogging up her throat.

      “I felt too much,” she told him. “Too much of everything. Too much to bear.”

      His lips pressed flat, and his gaze was a dark condemnation far worse than anything he could have said. “You’ll forgive me if I am unconvinced. Your actions speak their own truth, Lily.”

      “And what of yours?”

      “I loved you.” He didn’t shout that, either, not quite, and yet Lily thought it rattled the walls, made the whole palazzo shake on its uncertain foundation. “I have never been whole since.”

      “I think you’ve fallen in love with a ghost,” she told him, her voice shaking slightly. “In retrospect.” He made a rough noise, but she ignored it and kept going. “You had five years to make your lost Lily up in your head. Was she virtuous and pure? Did you love her so desperately no living woman can compare? Was her loss a blow from which you’ve never quite recovered?” She shrugged when he scowled at her. “She sounds like a paragon. But that’s not me, Rafael. And that was certainly not you.”

      “I loved you,” he gritted out again, and though he was quieter this time, she still felt it slam through her. “You can’t make that go away because it isn’t convenient for you.”

      “I remember exactly how you loved me, Rafael,” she told him in the same sort of voice, holding herself tightly in check, as if that might keep her safe from all these truths filling the room. “I remember all the women you slept with while you claimed we had to remain a secret. You said you had to maintain your cover. You laughed when it upset me. Tell me, did you love me this much while you were inside them?”

      And for a moment Lily didn’t know which was worse—the possibility that he wouldn’t answer her...or that he would.

      “If this is your version of an explanation, it’s terrible,” he snarled at her after a long beat, and then he tossed back the contents of his glass in a single smooth motion. He slapped the tumbler down on the cabinet behind him with a loud crack that made Lily jump. “I’m not the liar in this room.”

      “On the contrary,” she replied, hoping there was none of that jumpiness in her voice. “There are two liars in this room. You’re not the story you’ve been telling yourself, Rafael.”

      “Is this the real Lily talking now or this ghost I made up in my head?” he asked, his dark gaze glittering with fury. “I’m finding it difficult to keep track.”

      She shook her head at him. “Liars are all we’ve ever been, starting that first night when you took my virginity on a pile of coats in the guest room of your father’s château and then strolled back into the party to kiss your girlfriend at midnight as if it had never happened.” Lily laughed softly at his expression, not sure where the will to do so came from, when he looked so fierce. “I’m sorry, had you prettied that up in your imagination? Made it all wine and roses and no cheating or sneaking around? Well, that wasn’t us. And I’m as bad as you are, make no mistake, because I knew perfectly well you had a girlfriend and I didn’t try to stop it.”

      He stared at her, all outraged male and dark ruthlessness besides, and she watched as that sank in. As it moved through him. And she’d imagined this moment so many times. She’d envisioned bludgeoning him with the truth and that changing everything, somehow.

      But instead she felt worse. Incalculably worse.

      “We were terrible people,” she said then, with an urgency that made her voice shake slightly.

      “We must have been,” he said as he moved toward her, a kind of bleakness in his voice she’d never heard before. “Look at where we are.”

      “Maybe,” she told him, her voice low, “you should have let us both forget.”

      He shook his head, an expression she’d never seen before moving over his dark face.

      “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Neither one of us has forgotten a thing.”

      That felt like a dig. Lily stiffened. “That doesn’t mean we have to wallow in the past.”

      “Is that what you think this is?” Rafael asked. He shrugged, an edgy movement that did nothing to mask that thunderous, broken thing in his gaze. “Maybe so. But I’m not going to apologize for how I mourned you, Lily. How I coped with your loss. You walked away. You knew what you were doing. I didn’t have that choice.”

      “Your choices came before that,” she retorted, stung and hurt and furious at the both of them, that all of this could still hurt like this after so much time had passed. After so much had changed. “And you chose secrets. Lies. Other women.”

      “I won’t deny that I was a selfish man, Lily,” he bit out, his gaze like fire, and she didn’t know when he’d ventured so close to her. “I can’t. I regret it every day. But we had no commitment. I may not have treated you as well as I should have, but I didn’t betray you.”

      She pulled in a breath, amazed at the burst of white-hot pain that caused when there was nothing fresh or new in this. Nothing but an old wound, a dull blade.

      And the same familiar hand to wield it.

      “Of course you didn’t.” She wished she could hate him. She truly did. Surely that would be better. Simpler. “Oh, and along those lines, I never concealed Arlo from you. Technically. Had I seen you, I would have told you.”

      That shimmered in the air between them, like anguish.

      If she could die from this, Lily thought, she would have already. Years ago. God knew, she’d come close.

      Rafael said something harsh in Italian, vicious and low. He hauled her to him with a wholly inelegant hand around her neck, sending her sprawling into his hard chest. Then he stopped talking and took her mouth with his.

      And this time, there was no party nearby. No parents who might be horrified at what their stepprogeny were about. No one to walk in on them. No one to hear.

      This time, Rafael took his time.

      He kissed her like this really was love. Like she’d been wrong all along. His mouth was condemnation and caress at once, taking her over and drawing her near, and Lily lost herself the way she always did.

      Heedless. Hungry. Needy and desperate and entirely his.

      Just as it had always been.

      Rafael shrugged his way out of his coat, letting it drop to the thick carpet beneath them, and still he kissed her. He sank his hands deep into her hair, scattering the combs that held it in place until the heavy mass of it tumbled down around them and the sparkling accessories rained out across the floor, and still he stroked her tongue with his, deeper and more intense, as if nothing in the world could ever matter as much as the delirious friction of his mouth against hers.

      Lily traced the planes of his chest, unable to control herself and not certain she wanted to try. She dug her fingers into the gaps between his buttons and pulled, gratified when the buttons burst free and exposed the smooth, hard planes of his sculpted chest. And then she succumbed to that same old need and ran her palms against his hot, smooth skin like red-hot steel with its dusting of dark hair. She was aware of his scent, soap and Rafael, his devil’s mouth teasing hers to endless wickedness, and the truth of her own mounting desire for this man she shouldn’t want like a near-painful ache low in her belly.

      She wrenched her mouth from his and they both panted as they stared at each other, all the twisted wrongness of their connection, all the lies they’d told and the things they’d done, like a thick mist between them, blurring the edges of things.

      He said something despairing in Italian that hurt to hear, and she didn’t even understand the words. Lily didn’t know what to do. It was easier to hurl old, embittered words at him. It was easier to try to hate him.

      It was

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