penance. But she was alive.
Lily was alive.
“If you assault me again—”
But the fact she was standing here, on a side street in Charlottesville, Virginia, made about as little sense to him as her apparent death had five years ago. He brushed aside whatever she was saying, scowling down at her as the haze began to recede and the shock of this eased. Slightly.
“How did you survive that accident?” he demanded. “How did you end up here, of all places? Where have you been all this time?” Her words caught up with him and he blinked. “Did you say assault?”
He hadn’t imagined it. She edged away from him, one hand on the side of the car. Her gaze was dark and troubled, and she certainly hadn’t greeted him the way he might have expected Lily would—if, of course, he’d ever allowed himself to imagine that she could really still be alive.
Not a ghost this time. The real, flesh-and-blood Lily, standing before him on a cold, dark street.
Even if she was looking at him as if he was a monster.
“Why,” he asked, very softly, “are you looking at me as if you don’t know who I am?”
She frowned. “Because I don’t.”
Rafael laughed, though it was a cracked and battered sort of sound.
“You don’t,” he repeated, as if he was sounding out the words. “You don’t know me.”
“I’m getting in my car now,” she told him, too carefully, as if he was some kind of wild animal or psychotic. “You should know that I have my hand on the panic button on my key chain. If you make another move toward me, I will—”
“Lily, stop this,” he ordered her, scowling. Or shaking. Or both.
“My name is not Lily.” Her frown deepened. “Did you fall and hit your head? It’s very icy and they aren’t as good about putting down salt as they—”
“I did not hit my head and you are, in fact, Lily Holloway,” he gritted out at her, though he wanted to shout it. He wanted to shout down the world. “Do you imagine I wouldn’t recognize you? I’ve known you since you were sixteen.”
“My name is Alison Herbert,” she replied, eyeing him as if he’d shouted after all, and perhaps in tongues. As he’d done any of the wild, dark things inside his head, none of which could be classified as remotely civilized. “You look like the kind of man people remember, but I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Lily—”
She moved back and opened the car door beside her, putting it between them. A barrier. A deliberate barrier. “I can call nine-one-one for you. Maybe you’re hurt.”
“Your name is Lily Holloway.” He threw it at her, but she didn’t react. She only gazed back at him with her too-blue eyes, and he realized he must have knocked that cap from her head when he’d kissed her so wildly, as her hair gleamed in the streetlight’s glow, a strawberry blond tangle. He recognized that, too. That indefinable color, only hers. “You grew up outside San Francisco. Your father died when you were a toddler, and your mother married my father, Gianni Castelli, when you were a teenager.”
She shook her head, which was better than that blank stare.
“You’re afraid of heights, spiders and the stomach flu. You’re allergic to shellfish but you love lobster. You graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English literature after writing an absolutely useless thesis on Anglo-Saxon elegies that will serve you in no way whatsoever in any job market. You have a regrettable tattoo of your namesake flower on your right hip and up along your side that you got as an act of drunken rebellion. You were on a spring break trip to Mexico that year and sampled entirely too much tequila. Do you think I’m making these things up to amuse myself?”
“I think you need help,” she said with a certain firmness that didn’t match his memories of her at all. “Medical help.”
“You lost your virginity when you were nineteen,” he threw at her, everything inside him a pitched and mighty roar. “To me. You might not remember it, but I bloody well do. I’m the love of your goddamn life!”
HE WAS HERE.
Five years later, he was here. Rafael. Right here.
Standing in front of her and looking at her as if she was a ghost, speaking of love as if he knew the meaning of the word.
Lily wanted to die on the spot—and for real this time. That kiss still thudded through her, setting her on fire in ways she’d convinced herself were fantasies, not memories, and certainly not the truth. She wanted to throw herself back in his arms, in that same sick, addicted, utterly heedless way she always had. Always. No matter what had happened or not happened between them. She wanted to disappear into him—
But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She had other responsibilities now, far bigger ones. Far more important things to think about than her own dizzy pleasure or this destructively self-centered man who had loomed far too large over too much of her life already.
Rafael Castelli was the demon she carried inside her, the dark, selfish thing she fought against every single day of her life. The emblem of her bad behavior, all her terrible choices, her inability to think of anyone or anything but herself. The hurt she’d caused, the pain she’d meted out, whether intentional or not. Rafael was intimately wrapped up in all of that. He was her incentive to live the new life she’d chosen, so far away from the literal wreck of the old. Her boogeyman. The monster beneath her bed in more ways than one.
She hadn’t expected that particular metaphor, that vivid memory she’d used as her guiding compass away from the person she’d been back when she’d known him, to bloom into life on a random Thursday evening in December. Right here in Charlottesville, where she’d believed she was safe. She’d finally started to believe she really could sink into the life she’d made as Alison Herbert. That she could fully become that other, better, new and improved version of herself and never look back.
“Should I go on?” Rafael asked in a tone of voice she couldn’t remember him ever using before. Hard, uncompromising. Very nearly ruthless. It should have scared her, and she told herself it did, but what shuddered through her was far more complicated than that as it pooled hot and deep in her belly. Lower. “I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the things I know about you. I could write a book.”
Lily hadn’t meant to pretend she didn’t know him. Not exactly. She’d been stunned. Frozen in some mix of horror and delight, and then horror at that delight. She’d been walking back to her car after running a few errands, had heard a noise behind her on the darkening street as she’d unlocked the car and there he’d been like a dark angel straight out of her nightmares.
Rafael.
She’d hardly had time to take him in. She’d had that flash of recognition—his lean and muscled form that she’d know anywhere in a sleek and extraordinarily well-cut black coat, his gorgeous face a symphony of male beauty from the thick, dark hair he wore cut closer than she remembered it to that mouth of his that had laughed with so little care and then tempted her beyond measure and tormented her beyond imagining—and that stunned, haunted, wondering look in his searing dark gaze.
And then none of that mattered, because he’d been kissing her.
His mouth on hers, after all this time. His taste, his touch. His heat.
Everything had disappeared. The street. The faint music from the outdoor mall in the air around them. The whole city, state, country.
The past five years, gone in a single blast of heat and hunger that had roared through her, blowing apart every single