assault charge,” she retorted, her tone brisk. “And a potential jail sentence, God willing.”
His mouth shifted into something not quite a smile. “A scarlet lily nestled in a climbing black vine, crawling over your right hip and stretching up your side, perhaps?”
His dark gaze was so intent, so absolutely certain, that it took her breath away. And it was far harder than it should have been to simply stand there. To do nothing. To keep herself from touching her side in wordless acknowledgment, jerking back as if he’d caught her or any of a hundred other little tells that would show him her guilt.
Not that he appeared to be in any doubt about her guilt. Or her identity.
“There are a number of good psychiatrists in the Charlottesville area,” she told him when she was certain she could speak without any of that turmoil in her voice. Only the politeness she’d offer any random person she encountered, with a little compassion for someone so obviously nutty. “I’m sure one of them would see you for an emergency session. Your net worth will undoubtedly help with that.”
He really smiled then, though it was nothing like the Rafael smiles of old, so bright and carefree he could have lit up the whole of Europe if he’d wanted. This one was hard. Focused. Determined—and still it echoed deep inside her like a touch.
She was so busy telling herself that he didn’t affect her and he didn’t get to her at all that she didn’t move out of the way fast enough. She didn’t even see the danger until it was too late. His hand was on her too quickly, his fingers brushing over her temple, and Lily didn’t know how to react as sensation seared through her.
Would a stranger leap away? Or stand there, frozen in shock and disbelief?
“Get your hand off me right now,” she gritted out, going with the frozen option—because that was what she was. Head to toe. She didn’t think she could move if she’d wanted to, she was so rooted to the ground in what she told herself was outrage. She could feel his touch everywhere. Everywhere. Hot and right and perfect. As if all these years later, the merest brush of his fingers was all he had to do to prove that she’d been stumbling around in the cold black-and-white dark without him.
This was heat. This was color and light and—
This is dangerous! everything inside her shrieked in belated alarm.
“You got this scar skiing in Tahoe one winter,” he murmured, his voice pitched low, as if those were words of love or sex instead of accusation as he traced the tiny mark she’d long since forgotten was there. Up, then down. The effect was narcotic. “You hit a patch of ice and then, shortly after that, a tree. You were lucky you didn’t break anything except one ski. You had to walk down the side of the mountain, and you terrified the entire family when you appeared in the chalet, bleeding.”
He moved closer, those dark eyes of his intense and moody, focused on that little scar she didn’t even see anymore when she looked at herself. And surely the stranger she was pretending to be would have been paralyzed just as she was, then—suspended between the need to run screaming into the street and the desire to stay right where she was. Surely anyone would do the same.
Anyone for whom this man has always been a terrible addiction, a harsh voice inside told her.
But she still didn’t move.
“And I had to make the sarcastic remarks of the bored older brother I never was to you,” Rafael said gruffly. “Playing it off for our parents. Until later.”
Lily blinked. She remembered later. He’d used the key she shouldn’t have given him to her hotel room and found her in the shower. She could remember it too easily, too well, in too much detail. The steam. The sting of the hot water against her chilled skin. Rafael shouldering his way into the glassed-in little cubicle still fully dressed, his mouth uncharacteristically grim and a harsh light in his beautiful eyes.
Then his mouth had been on hers, and she’d wrapped herself around him, melting into him the way she always had. His hands had slicked over the curve of her hips, that damned tattoo she’d claimed she hated and he’d claimed he loved, until he’d simply dispensed with his wet trousers, picked her up and surged deep inside her with one slick, sure thrust.
“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he’d muttered into her hair, and then he’d pounded them both into a wild, screaming oblivion. Then he’d carried her out of the shower, laid her out on the hotel bed and done it all over again. Twice.
She’d found that desperately romantic at the time, but then, she’d been a pathetic twenty-two-year-old under this man’s spell that winter. Now, she told herself firmly, it was nothing more than another bad memory wrapped up in too much sex she shouldn’t have been having with a man she never, ever should have touched.
“That is a very disturbing story with some deeply troubling family dynamics,” she said now, batting his hand away from her face. “But it still doesn’t make me this other woman, no matter how many stories you tell to convince yourself otherwise.”
“Then you must take a DNA test and prove it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Thank you, but I’ll pass.”
“It wasn’t a suggestion.”
“It was an order?” She laughed then, and kept it light somehow. She could see Luca looking over, and those people with him, and knew she’d stayed too long. She had to walk away, because a stranger would have done that long ago. “I’m sure you’re used to giving lots of orders. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me, either.” She caught Luca’s gaze and forced a tight smile. “He’s all yours.”
Lily started for the door then, and she expected Rafael to stop her. She expected a hand on her arm, or worse, and she told herself she absolutely did not feel anything like a letdown when nothing happened. She threw the door open and then, though she knew better, she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder.
Rafael stood where she’d left him and watched her, dark and beautiful and harsher than she’d ever seen him before. She repressed a shiver and told herself it was the December evening. Not him.
“Mi appartieni,” he said, soft and fierce at once. And she understood that little scrap of Italian. He’d taught it to her a long time ago. You belong to me.
Lily sniffed, the cold night in her hair and slapping at her cheeks.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” she managed to say, though her voice was rougher than it should have been had she really not been able to tell the difference between Spanish and Italian. “I’m not her.”
* * *
Once she was gone, swallowed back up by the thick Virginia night, everything inside Rafael went still. Quiet. From that insane buzzing when he’d realized it was really, truly her to a sharp clarity he couldn’t recall ever feeling before.
His brother and their wine association host were talking, and his assistant was trying to show him something business related on his mobile screen, but Rafael simply slashed a hand through the air and they all subsided.
“There is a kennel outside of town run by someone called Pepper,” he told his aide in rapid-fire Italian. “Find it.” He shifted his gaze to Luca. “Call Father’s personal doctor and ask him how a person could have walked away from that accident five years ago and what kind of head injuries she might have sustained when she did.”
“Do you believe she truly has amnesia?” Luca asked. “It sounds like something out of a soap opera. But it is Lily, certainly.”
“There is no doubt about that whatsoever,” Rafael agreed. He’d known it was Lily the moment he’d seen her walk past this window. All the rest was mere confirmation of a truth he already knew, and the taste of her in his mouth after much too long.
Luca stared at him for a moment. “Your grief at her death was extreme. I am closer to her in age and I was less