say that all of this is true.” She studied him. “Why would you fall in love with me? The person you describe is a disaster at best.”
“Love makes us all fools, Lily,” he said quietly.
“You as much as admitted you made all of that up,” she pointed out. “Or you wouldn’t ask me for a different version.”
“Tell me which part,” he dared her.
She sat up then, so abruptly it made him blink. She stamped her feet back into her boots, one after the next with a certain nearly leashed violence, and then stood up in a rush. Rafael wanted nothing more than to do the same—but stayed where he was, lounging there as if he’d never in his life been more at his ease.
“This is crazy,” she muttered, as much to herself as to him. But then her blue eyes slammed into his. “What kind of person are you, to play games like this?”
“Do you really want to know the truth?” he asked her, and he wasn’t at all languid any longer. He couldn’t even pretend. He sat up, never shifting his hard gaze from hers.
“I thought that was the point of you bringing me here. All the truth, all the time. Whether I like it or not.”
“Because you knew the truth once, Lily,” he said, with a harshness that surprised him even as he spoke. He couldn’t seem to contain it. “You lived it. And then you sent your car over the side of a cliff and walked away from it. You had a baby, changed your name and hid in a place no one you’d known before would ever think to look for you. Maybe you don’t want to know the truth.”
Lily shook her head, more as if she was shaking this off than negating what he’d said, and he viewed that as a victory, too.
“Or,” he said in the same tone, with that same edge, “you already know the truth and all of this is a game you’re playing for reasons of your own. What kind of person would that make you?”
She stiffened as if he’d slapped her.
“I think you’re not right in the head,” she threw at him as she started for the door. “Why would you tell me a bunch of lies? How could fake stories of a made-up past do anything but make things worse?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rafael replied, and even he could hear the danger in his voice. The menace. And it took everything he had to stay where he was. To let her go when that was the last thing he wanted, ever again. “Chances are, you’ll forget that, too.”
THE HISTORIC CASTELLI palazzo was small by Venetian standards, set on the stately Grand Canal in the shadow of far loftier residences once inhabited by the great and noble families of old Venice. But no matter how many times Lily told herself that, no matter how she reminded herself of the offhanded way her former stepfather had referred to this place as a pile of sentiment and rising tides as if it was beyond him why anyone would come here, her first sight of it from the water of the Grand Canal made her breath catch in her throat.
Catch, then hold too tight, as if that much beauty in one place might damage her heart within her chest.
She told herself it was the view. The rise of the old stone building from the depths of the canal as if it was floating there, the quality of the pure gold light that beamed out from within and spilled across the water, like a dark dream made real on this cold, breezy evening. It was the view, she assured herself, not the man who stood so tall and brooding and forbiddingly silent beside her in the private water taxi, as if the wind that ruffled at her hair and made her wrap herself even more tightly in her winter coat was yet one more detail that was far beneath his notice.
He looked like a dark prince, she thought then, as if she was channeling the teenaged poet she’d never been. Made of shifting shadows and the graceful lights that moved over the water like songs. He looked otherworldly. More fable than man.
You need to get a grip, she told herself sternly. Lose control with this man and you lose everything.
“It is beautiful, is it not?” Rafael’s voice was silky, like the falling night in this nearly submerged city of echoes and arches, mysteries and dreams, and there was no reason at all that it should shiver down the length of Lily’s spine like that, then pool too hot at its base. “And not yet sunk into the sea.”
“It’s lovely, of course, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” she replied, sounding stiff and unfriendly to her own ears. “I’m sure every guidebook printed in the last three hundred years agrees. But I still don’t understand why we’re here.”
“I told you.” He shifted his position against the polished hull of the small, sleek boat that cut through the water as efficiently as he seemed to slice deep into her with that dark look he kept trained on her. Lily wished she’d sat down in the sheltered interior, away from him. But she’d wanted to see Venice more than she’d wanted to avoid him, and contending with Rafael was the price of that decision. “It is the Christmas season. I must make my annual appearance at our neighbors’ ball or the world as we know it will come to a shuddering halt. My ancestors will rise from their graves in protest and the Castelli name will ring in infamy throughout the ages. Or so my father has informed me in a series of theatrical voice mail messages.”
Her hands clenched tight deep inside her pockets against a certain warmth that threaded its way through her chest and would be her downfall, she knew it. “I don’t see what any of that has to do with me. Or why I had to leave my son with strangers to accompany you on some family errand.”
Rafael’s hard mouth moved then, into that little crook that undid her. “Do you not? You are the mother of my child—who could not be happier where he is, with a veritable army of nannies to tend to his every whim, as I think you are well aware. Where else should you be but at my side, for all the world to see and marvel at your resurrection?”
Lily didn’t know what scraped at her more—that he’d called her the mother of his child with such matter-of-fact possessiveness it made her head spin, or that he claimed he wanted her with him, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
When the Rafael she’d known had refused, point-blank, to ever keep her anything but his own dirty secret.
Of course, she wasn’t supposed to remember that. And for a taut moment, she let herself imagine what it might have been like if she truly couldn’t remember him. If she could take all of this—him—at face value. If she could believe him this time around.
But that way lay nothing but madness. Heartbreak and betrayal. She tried to shake it off.
“When you say, ‘for all the world to see,’ I hope you don’t mean that whole paparazzi thing.” She frowned, and shook her head. “I work in a kennel in Virginia. I don’t want strangers looking at me.”
She couldn’t read that dark gleam in his gaze then, or the way his hard, lean jaw moved as if he was biting something back.
“You can wear a mask if you like, even if it is not yet Carnevale,” he said, after a moment. “Many do, though perhaps not out of the same misplaced sense of modesty you seem to feel. Given that you are but a kennel worker. From Virginia.”
Lily looked sharply at him at that too-dry tone, then away, as the boat reached the palazzo’s low dock and the driver leaped out to pull the ropes taut and bring the sleek vessel in close so they could disembark. Though it seemed Rafael’s voice was the tighter noose, wrapped like a hand around her throat.
“But make no mistake, Lily. I will always know who you are.”
His voice was like a touch, and she hated that traitorous part of her that wished it really was. More than wished it—longed for him in all those ways she was afraid to admit, even to herself. Afraid that once she did, it would be the emotional equivalent of hurling herself off the side of a cliff for real this