LITMIR.BIZ

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of light or three a.m. conspiracy theories or his own despairing heart playing games with him, could change that.

      It had been five years. Lily was gone.

      He understood, finally, that they weren’t ghosts at all, these flashing glimpses of what might have been. They were his bitter, consuming regret mapped onto a hundred strangers, and none of them the woman he wanted.

      But this ghost was different.

      And the last, Rafael vowed as a deep, black fury surged through him. Five years was long enough to grieve what had never been, thanks to his own selfishness. More than long enough. It was time to move on.

      It was a December late afternoon in Charlottesville, Virginia, a picturesque American university town nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, some three hours by car from Washington, DC, and a world away from his native Italy. Rafael had made the trip from the nation’s capital by helicopter today, the better to tour the region’s vineyards from above with an eye toward expanding the global reach of the Castelli family’s historic wine business. As acting CEO—because his ailing father’s immense pride did not allow for an official transfer of leadership to Rafael or his younger brother, Luca, while the old man still drew breath, which was as unsurprising as it was irritating—Rafael had taken many such trips in the past few years. Portugal. South Africa. Chile.

      This latest trip to the central Virginia wine region was more of the same. The late-afternoon stop in self-consciously charming Charlottesville en route to a later dinner event with one of the local wine associations was the typical excursion to help promote the charm of the area. Rafael had expected it and in truth, the bustle of the holiday season made the entire town feel like an interactive Christmas card.

      It was not unpleasant, he’d thought as they’d walked the outdoor mall, though he had never much cared for the holiday frenzy. Carolers were strewn along the pedestrianized street, their voices mingling and competing in the crisp air. Shoppers milled in and out of the brightly lit shops beneath festive lights and around clusters of street vendors hawking their wares, and Rafael’s small group had ducked inside one of the cafés for strong local coffee to ward off the cold. And to battle any traces of jet lag, no doubt. Rafael had made his order a triple shot of espresso, per piacere.

      And then he’d seen her.

      The woman moved like poetry against the falling dark, the particular rhythm of her stride chiming deep inside him even though he knew better, drowning out the barrage of Christmas carols assaulting him from the café’s overloud sound system.

      It had been five years, but Rafael knew that walk in an instant. He knew the swing of those hips and the stretch of those legs. That irresistible roll as she strode past the window where he stood. He caught the flash of her cheek, nothing more.

      But that walk.

      This must stop, he ordered himself coldly. Lily is dead.

      “Are you all right, Mr. Castelli?” the local wine association host asked worriedly from beside him. His brother, Luca, here in his capacity as global marketing director of Castelli Wine, was too busy on his mobile to do more then frown distractedly in Rafael’s direction.

      “I will be fine,” Rafael gritted out. “Excuse me for a moment.”

      And he stalked out of the café, pushing his way through the milling holiday crowds and into the waning light.

      For a moment, he thought he’d lost her, and he knew that was the best possible outcome of this tired old madness—but then he saw her again, moving on the far side of the mall with that gait that recalled Lily like a shout across the busy street, and that dark current of pure rage sparked in him all over again.

      It wasn’t Lily. It was never Lily. And yet every time this happened, Rafael raced after the poor stranger who looked a bit too much like his memories and made a goddamned fool of himself.

      “This will be the last time you indulge this weakness,” he muttered to himself, and then he set out after this latest incarnation of the woman he knew—he knew—he’d never see again.

      One more time to stamp out the last spark of that nasty little flame of hope that still refused to die. One last time to prove what he already knew: Lily was gone, she was never coming back, and he would never, ever see her equal.

      And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t look for her in all these strangers’ faces if he hadn’t been such a bastard to her in the first place.

      Rafael doubted he’d ever shift the guilt of all he’d done from its usual place, crouched fat and greasy and bristling with malice in the spot where his soul should have been. But tonight, in this charming little town in a part of America he’d never visited before and likely wouldn’t visit again, he would lay what he could of his wretched history to rest.

      He didn’t expect peace. He didn’t deserve it. But he was done chasing phantoms.

       She will be a stranger. She is always a stranger. And after you confirm that for the hundredth time, you will never doubt it again.

      This had to end. He had to end it.

      He couldn’t see the face of his quarry, only the fine line of her back and the hint of her willowy form as she walked briskly away from him. She was wrapped up against the December chill in a long black coat and a bright scarf, with only hints of honey-colored hair peeking out from beneath the black knit hat she wore tugged low over her ears. Her hands were thrust deep into her pockets. She was weaving her way through the crowds in a manner that suggested she knew exactly where she was going, and she didn’t look back.

      And the memories rolled through him like waves against the rocks, crashing over him one after the next. Lily, the only woman who’d ever captured him so completely. Lily, whom he’d lost. Lily, his forbidden lover, his secret and dirty passion, whom he’d hidden from the world and then had to mourn as if she was no more than the daughter of his father’s fourth wife. As if she had been nothing more to him than that.

      He’d hated himself for so long now it was indistinguishable from that grief that never quite left him. That grief that had transformed him—turning him from a too-rich dilettante who’d been content to throw his family money around rather than make any himself into one of the most formidable businessmen in Italy.

      That, too, had taken years. It had been another form of penance.

      “Inside you is the seed of a far better man,” Lily had said to him the last time he’d seen her, after he’d made her come and then made her cry: his specialty. “I know it. But if you keep going the way you’re going, you’ll kill it off before it ever has a chance to grow.”

      “You mistake me for someone who wants to grow,” Rafael had replied with all that confidently lazy indifference he’d had no idea he’d spend the rest of his life hating himself for feeling. “I don’t need to be a bloody garden, Lily. I’m happy as I am.”

      It was one of the last conversations they’d ever had.

      His heart was a hard, almost painful drum inside his chest. His breath came like clouds against the deepening night. He tracked her past this novelty shop, that restaurant and a band of singers in period dress singing “Ave Maria” while he drank in that walk as if it was a prayer.

      As if this time around, after all these years of regret, he could appreciate that it was the last time he’d ever see it.

      He followed her as she left the clamor and bright mess of the downtown mall and started down one of the side streets, marveling at her hauntingly familiar silhouette, that figure he could have drawn in his sleep, the sheer perfection of this woman who was not Lily yet looked exactly the way he remembered her.

      His Lily, stalking off down a foggy San Francisco street, claiming she wanted nothing more than to get the hell away from him and their twisted relationship at last. Back then he’d laughed, so arrogantly certain she’d come back to him the way she always did. The way she’d been coming back to him since the

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