LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      “HAVE YOU LAPSED into a coma?” Dario asked, the silk and menace in his voice hitting her like a lash and cutting deep. “Or is this remorse at last?”

      And Anais hadn’t entirely realized how much hope she’d allowed herself to feel in the weeks leading up to this meeting with him, after all these years of silence, until now. When he took it all away again.

      She should have known better.

      “Remorse?” she echoed. She moved farther out onto the lanai, dropping the leather folder on the table between them and ordering her legs to stay steady beneath her when they felt like one of the palm trees being buffeted this way and that by the relentless trade winds. “For what, exactly? Your extended temper tantrum six years ago? I have a lot of feelings about that actually, but remorse isn’t one of them.”

      Dario’s mouth moved into a hard, cynical sort of smile that made her stomach clutch. She’d had no idea he could look like that. So etched through with bitterness. She told herself he deserved it, but still. It made her ache.

      “It’s good to know you’re as shameless as ever,” he said. “But why change? It got you what you wanted.”

      “Yes. How silly of me. You storming off into the ether was exactly what I wanted. It’s like you read my mind.”

      “My mistake, of course. Maybe you were angling for a threesome? You must have read too many tabloids. You should have asked, Anais. I would have told you that I don’t like sharing anything with anyone, least of all my twin brother.”

      “I see you’re still hell-bent on being as insulting and disgusting as you were back then. What a happy reunion this is. I’m beginning to understand why it took six years.”

      After the way he’d treated her, after the way he’d acted as if she’d never existed in the first place—refusing all contact with her and barring her from entering his office or apartment building as if she was some kind of deranged stalker—she couldn’t believe that, deep down, she still expected Dario to be a better man. Even now, some part of her was waiting for him to crack. To see reason. To stop this madness at last.

      Anais told herself it was because of Damian. She wanted her son’s father to be a good man at heart, even if that took some excavating, like any mother would. She wanted his father to be the man she’d once believed he was, when she’d been foolish enough to fall in love with him. Because that would be a good thing for her child, not for herself.

      Or not entirely for yourself, whispered that voice inside of her that knew exactly how selfish she was.

      But life wasn’t about what she wanted. She’d learned that as a child in Paris, the pawn of two bitter parents who had never wanted her and had only wanted each other for that one night that had created her and thrown them together, like it or not. Life was about what she had. Like her cruel, flamboyantly unfaithful French father and the embittered Japanese mother whose name she’d taken when she’d turned eighteen because she’d been the lesser of two evils, those two things had never matched. It was high time she stopped imagining they ever would.

      She tapped her fingers on the leather folder. “These are the contracts. Please sign them. Once you do, the earrings are yours, as promised.”

      “Are we back to doing business, Anais?” he asked softly. She didn’t mistake that tone of his. She could hear the steel beneath it. “I might get whiplash.”

      She allowed herself a careless shrug and wished she actually felt even slightly at her ease. “Business appears to be the only thing you know how to do.”

      “Unlike all the things you know how to do, I imagine. Or should I ask my brother about that? He was always the more adventurous one.”

      Anais would never know how she managed to keep from screaming out loud at that—at the unfairness and the cruelty of it, from a man whom she’d once believed would never, ever, say the kinds of things to her that her parents had hurled at each other all her life. She felt a vicious red haze slam down over her, holding her tight, like a terrible fist. But somehow, she beat it back. She thought of Damian, her beautiful little boy, and stayed on her feet. She managed, somehow, to keep herself from screaming like some kind of banshee at this man she couldn’t believe she’d married.

      Not that he didn’t deserve a little bit of banshee, the way he’d acted back then and was still acting now. Still, that didn’t mean she had to give him the satisfaction of acting insane.

      She met his condemning gaze with her own.

      “I have nothing to be ashamed about,” she told him. Icily. Distinctly. “I did not sleep with your brother. I don’t care if Dante has spent the past six years telling you otherwise. I didn’t. He’s a liar.”

      “I wouldn’t know what he is,” Dario said with cool nonchalance. “I haven’t spoken to him since I found him with you in my bedroom. Don’t tell me you two lovebirds didn’t make it. How heartbreaking for you both.”

      That shocked Anais in a way she’d have thought was impossible. The Di Sione twins she’d known had been inseparable. Until you, she reminded herself. Dante hated you on sight. She tried to blink it away.

      “The fact you thought anything happened between us—and still think it, all these years later, to such an extent that you feel justified in hurling insults at me—says more about what a vile, dark little man you are than it could ever say about me.”

      Dario seemed almost amused by that. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be comfortable there in your fantasy world. But the truth is the truth, no matter how many lies you pile on top of it. So many it looks like you’ve convinced yourself. Congratulations on that, but you haven’t convinced me.”

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