she imagined.
“What do you think happened to me?” she asked him then. “If I’m this Lily person, why do I think I’m someone else?”
His dark eyes glittered, and she knew he was biting back the urge to tell her there was no if about it. That she was Lily Holloway, whether she liked it or not. She could practically hear him say it—but to his credit, he didn’t.
“What did you think when I asked you about your tattoo in that café?” he asked instead. “Didn’t you think it was odd that a total stranger could describe it so perfectly when, according to you, we’d never met before?”
“Of course I did. But I thought everything about you was odd.”
“That was it? It didn’t cross your mind that what I was saying might be true?”
“Not at all.” She eyed him, hoping the tension in her arms as she hugged her legs closer into her chest wasn’t obvious. “If I walked up to you and said, oh, hello, your name is actually Eugene Marigold and I know you from our days in Wisconsin, would you believe me?”
His eyes gleamed with a hint of golden amusement that danced down the length of her spine, making her shiver deep within. “It would depend on the evidence.”
She shrugged. “I’m here to tell you that the evidence doesn’t help. I guess I thought you must have seen my tattoo before.”
“You often parade around with it showing, do you?”
Lily stilled. She knew that tone. Possessive. And darkly thrilling to her in a way that felt physical, when she knew she should have found it appalling. The only appalling thing here is you, she snapped at herself.
“I wear a bathing suit at the lake sometimes, if that’s what you mean by ‘parading around.’”
“A rather skimpy bathing costume.”
“In America we call them bikinis.”
He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and then he moved toward her, which made her throat go dry in an instant and every part of her body go stiff—but he only dropped down in the chair across from her.
And that suddenly, Lily was tossed back in time. It was the way he lounged there, so surpassingly indolent, as if nothing on earth could ever truly bother him. She remembered that too well. This was the Rafael she’d known. Provocative. Sensual. Even now, with that considering sort of gleam in his gaze that told her he wasn’t the least bit relaxed no matter how he happened to be stretched out in that chair, her body reacted to the memory.
More than simply reacted. She burst into long, hot, blistering flames. They shuddered through her, one lick after the next, making her want to writhe where she sat. But she didn’t dare move. She hardly dared breathe. And she had to hope against hope he thought she was blushing about the mention of bikinis. Or from the crackling fire in the nearby grate. Who was she kidding? He knew exactly why she’d flushed red, and she knew he did, too.
But none of this was about what Rafael knew. It was about what he could prove.
“How did you come up with the name Alison Herbert in the first place?” he asked, much too quietly, after another heavy moment dragged by, leaving furrows of stone deep in her gut. “You had a very specific biography at the ready. Where did it come from?”
Where indeed, Lily thought darkly. The truth—that she’d bought that driver’s license off a girl she’d vaguely resembled in a truck stop parking lot with a week’s worth of tips, and had helped herself to that same girl’s hastily told life story, too—was obviously out of the question. And she had to bite her tongue against the urge to overexplain and overcomplicate, because that could only make this harder.
She shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
“I think you can do better than that.” A crook of his sensual lips when she frowned at him. He propped up his head against the fingers of one hand like some emperor of old and didn’t shift his hard gaze from hers for a moment. “Do you remember your childhood as this Alison?”
She’d had a little more than a week to prepare for this particular performance, and had thought of little else in that time. So she scowled at him now, bristling a bit where she sat.
“Of course.” He waited when she paused. She made herself breathe in, then out. Count to ten. “I mean... I think I do.”
“Ah.”
Lily didn’t understand how he could steal all the air from the room when she was looking straight at him and could see with her own eyes that he hadn’t moved at all. She frowned harder in his direction, though it didn’t seem to help. If anything, she found it harder to breathe.
“I don’t see the point in talking about this,” she said then. She jerked her gaze away from his, sure he could read entirely too much on her face, and scowled down at the cuff of her sweater as if it contained the answers to these mysteries. She picked at it with her other hand. “Obviously, what I remember or don’t remember is irrelevant. You have the blood work.”
“I do.”
“And that’s why we’re here.” Lily swallowed, then lifted her head again to meet his gaze. This time, she held it. “But what about you?”
“Me?” He looked faintly amused, or as amused as anyone could look with so much thunder in his gaze. “I know exactly who I am.”
“But you were my stepbrother,” Lily said, and tilted her head slightly to one side, hoping she looked curious rather than challenging. “How did any of this happen?”
* * *
She looked fragile and something like otherworldly tonight, Rafael thought, with her thick strawberry blond hair piled high on her head. It only called attention to the delicate elegance of her fine neck, something he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention to five years ago. Here, now, he couldn’t think of anything else. She was swallowed up in that oversize sweater, which he imagined was the point of it. The bigger and baggier the sweater, the less of her he could see.
He doubted she realized that without the distraction of that lithe, intoxicating body of hers that still drove him mad, he had nothing to do but parse every single expression that crossed her face and every last telling look in her lovely eyes.
Rafael didn’t believe for one moment that she couldn’t remember him.
And if she didn’t remember him as she claimed, then she couldn’t remember what had actually happened between them, and he could paint it any way he liked. If she could remember him, well, it was up to her to interrupt and set the record straight, wasn’t it?
After all, this was the woman who had failed to tell him he was a father, that he had a son, for five years—and had certainly not come clean about it on her own. If he hadn’t seen her on that street in Virginia, would she ever have told him about Arlo? He doubted it. He would never have known.
He almost wished she really did have amnesia. For her sake.
Rafael smiled at her then and felt rather more like a wolf than was wise.
“It’s really a very sweet story,” he said. He was sure he saw her stiffen. “You were an awkward sort of teenager when our parents got together, ungainly and shy. You hardly spoke.”
“What?” She coughed when he looked at her, and she managed to look so guileless that he almost doubted that he’d heard that sharpness in her voice then. Almost. “I’m sorry. Did you say ungainly?”
“Many teenage girls have those rough patches,” he said, as if he was trying to be comforting. “But I think being around Luca and me helped you a bit. Smoothed out the edges.”
“Because you were both such excellent brothers to me?” she asked, and wrinkled her nose in that way he’d always liked a little too much. He still did. “That pushes us straight into icky territory, doesn’t