Unwrapping The Castelli Secret. Caitlin Crews

lose herself in awful, narcotic men at her mother’s knee.

      “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “For everyone involved. That sounds horrific.”

      “Your mother never recovered.”

      But Lily didn’t want to talk about her mother. Her bright and fragile and largely absent mother, who had shivered at the slightest wind, susceptible to every emotional storm that rolled her way. Her mother, who had self-medicated with ever more dangerous combinations of prescription pills, always under the aegis of this or that quack of a doctor.

      “Did you know that she died eighteen months ago?” Rafael continued. “That wouldn’t have happened if she’d known her daughter was still alive.”

      That one would leave deep, deep scars, Lily knew. But she didn’t crack. What she felt about her doomed and careless mother paled in comparison to what she had to keep safe here.

      “My mother is in jail,” she told him, and she had no idea how she managed to sound so even. “Last I heard she’d found Jesus, for the third time. Maybe this time it’ll stick.”

      “These are all lies.” He was too intense. His gaze was too penetrating. She was terribly afraid he could see straight through her, see everything. “What I can’t understand is how you imagine you can tell them to my face. You can’t really think I’m likely to believe them, can you?”

      Lily didn’t know what might have happened then. They were at a stalemate and she had no idea how to extricate herself from this—but then she heard voices calling to her from across the street.

      Two of Pepper’s clients stood there, a married couple who called her Alison and made polite enough conversation while she held herself still, icy with terror, waiting for them to ask after Arlo. But when they did, as they inevitably did because this was the South and people still took manners seriously here, she realized there was no need to panic. The man beside her didn’t move a muscle. And why would he? It wasn’t as if Rafael knew that name. He couldn’t possibly know what it meant.

      She was something like giddy with her relief when the couple moved on.

      “I hope that clears things up for you,” she said.

      “Because they called you by this assumed name of yours?” Rafael’s voice was mild. “Questions only lead to more questions. You’ve been living here for some time, clearly. You’ve made yourself part of this community.” His expression was harsh. Something like unforgiving. “You had no intention of ever coming home, did you? You were content to let us mourn your death as if it was real.”

      He’d let go of her car door, and she slammed it shut then, aware of the way his dark eyes narrowed on her as she did. She ignored him, beeping the alarm on and swinging around again, heading back toward the mall. Where there would be lights and people. More people who knew her. More people to put between them and use as a barrier.

      “Where are you going?” he asked, not particularly nicely. “Is this what you do now, Lily? You run away? Where will I find you next time—roaming the streets of Paraguay? Mozambique? Under an entirely different assumed name?”

      She kept walking, and he fell into step beside her, which wasn’t any kind of help. It made her remember far too many things best left shut away inside her. It made her think about things that could only hurt. He matched his athletic stride to hers, the way he always had. He was so close that if she merely leaned a little bit to the left, she could nudge up against his arm, which was the closest they’d ever come to public displays of affection back in the day.

      She felt blinded with grief, then, and with that old, sick need that had taken over so much of her life back then. But she kept her eyes straight ahead and told herself it was the cold weather stinging at her eyes, nothing more.

      There had to be a way out of this. There had to be a way to get rid of him. She had to keep Arlo safe. That was the only thing that mattered in the past five years and it was the only thing that she could let matter now.

      She felt safer once they reached the crowd on the festive mall. Not that she thought Rafael was likely to abduct her or anything that required so much commitment—but if he’d had any thoughts in that direction, it would be a great deal harder surrounded by so many people.

      “Are we shopping?” Rafael’s voice was sardonic, managing to slice through the noise, the singing. The barricades she’d been erecting inside her as they’d walked. “This reminds me far more of the lonely little heiress I once knew.”

      “I thought I’d get something hot to drink and get out of the cold for a moment,” she said, refusing to react outwardly to what he’d said. Though she had to blink hard to get the red haze to roll back, and it actually hurt to bite her tongue.

      She hadn’t been a lonely little heiress. There’d been little enough to inherit, first of all, outside her mother’s house. But the poor little rich kid in this scenario had been bored, sybaritic party boy Rafael, beloved of C-list actresses, reality television pseudostars and a host of lingerie models. Those had been the women he’d paraded around with in public. Those had been the women he’d brought home with him, the women he’d taunted Lily with on all those terrible family vacations at Lake Tahoe, letting them drape their cosmetically enhanced bodies all over him and then making her admit her jealousy before he’d ease her pain a little with his clever fingers, that awful mouth of his and the things he could do with a few stolen moments against a locked door.

      He was a terrible man, she reminded herself fiercely as they ducked out of the way of a kid on a skateboard. He’d been hideous to her, and worse, she’d let him. There was nothing here to be conflicted about. Everything between them had been twisted and wrong. She loathed who she’d been around him. The lies she’d told, the secrets she’d kept. She’d hated that life she’d been trapped in.

      She refused to go back to it. She refused to accept that her only fate was to become her sad mother, one way or another. She refused to let the poison of that life, those people, infect Arlo. She refused.

      Lily didn’t wait to see if Rafael was following her—she knew he was, she could feel that he was right on her heels like an agent of doom—she simply marched down the mall until she reached her favorite café, then she tossed open the door and walked in.

      Straight into another male body.

      She heard an Italian curse that Rafael had taught her when she was a teenager—as pretty to the ear as it was profoundly filthy—and she jerked back, only to look up into another set of those dark Castelli eyes.

       Damn it.

      Luca, younger than Rafael by three years. The quieter, more solid stepbrother, to her recollection, but then, she’d never seen much besides Rafael. Luca looked as if she’d sucker punched him. Lily felt as if she’d sustained the same blow. It might have been possible to convince only Rafael that she was someone else—or so she’d been desperate to believe the whole walk here. But both Castelli brothers? There was no way.

      She was completely and utterly screwed.

      “Ah, yes,” Rafael said from behind her, that sardonic tone of his wrapping around her, far hotter than the heat of the café or the shock in his brother’s gaze. “Luca, you remember our late stepsister, Lily. It turns out she’s been alive and well and right here in Virginia this whole time. Hale and hearty, as you can see.”

      “I’m not Lily,” she snapped, though she suspected that was more desperate than strategic, especially with both men scowling at her. But there was only one man’s scowl she could feel inside her, like acid. “I’m getting tired of telling you that.”

      Rafael’s gaze was a blast of dark fire as he stepped to the side and then steered her out of the way of oncoming foot traffic, there in the café doorway, with a hand on her arm she couldn’t shake off fast enough. But perhaps that was even less strategic, she thought, when his lush mouth quirked slightly—very much as if he knew exactly what his touch did to her, even all these years later.

      As