The Billionaires Collection. Оливия Гейтс

her that would have done absolutely anything to keep from rocking that boat. So she’d smiled and laughed. She’d meant it, the way she did each time, and then they’d put Damian to bed as if they’d been working together like this, like a perfect team, since the day he’d been born.

      Anais couldn’t control the rueful little laugh she let out at that notion, as Dario pulled the door to Damian’s room shut behind him and they started back down the hall. She remembered going into labor all by herself entirely too well. It had been Team Her for a long time, no matter the show they were putting on now.

      “Is something funny?” he asked.

      She should have shrugged it off. Dario looked deliciously rumpled, the way he always did in the evenings. He’d shrugged out of his jacket the moment he’d stepped into the penthouse’s foyer after work, leaving the cuffs of his dress shirt rolled up over those strong, muscled forearms. He’d raked his hands through his dark hair a thousand times or more over the course of their family evening, leaving it in that marvelously disheveled state, and his jaw sported its usual shadow at the end of the day.

      Surely she shouldn’t find all of that quite as delectable as she did. Surely she shouldn’t even notice it any longer, much less after all the things he’d done to her. Anais kept waiting to grow used to Dario. To his undeniable appeal, all that tousled black hair and electric blue eyes. To find him a part of the scenery, nothing more. To stop being so...aware of him the way she always was.

      It hadn’t happened yet.

      Maybe, she thought now, his eyes were simply too blue.

      “Nothing’s funny,” she said. “Not really.” Damian’s door was closed and all three levels of the penthouse were quiet, hushed and still. And yet her heart was beating loud and hard against her chest as if it knew things she didn’t. And she suspected it had more than a little to do with the way he stood there, watching her, an expression she couldn’t quite read on his beautiful face. “We make a good team, it turns out. I suppose that surprises me.”

      She didn’t say, the way we congratulated ourselves for being years ago, before we’d ever been tested. She didn’t ask him if he remembered how sure they’d been that their cool version of marriage, spiced up by those long, hot nights, could handle anything and everything.

      It was one more thing to hang in all the shadows between them and pretend she couldn’t see.

      Anais thought he’d change the subject instantly, pretend he hadn’t heard her, steer the conversation back to safe ground. But he only stood there, the light from farther down the hallway playing over his features, making him seem something other than hard as she looked up at him. Something other than the avenging angel he’d been playing for six long years, without ever relenting at all. Something she might have called wistful, had he been a different man.

      She told herself she was imagining it.

      “I’m no good on a team,” Dario said after a while. Almost as if it hurt him to say it out loud. “I’m much better on my own.”

      “You don’t seem better on your own, Dare,” she said without thinking. Without paying attention to the precipice it seemed they were standing on suddenly, when she’d thought they were on solid ground. When she’d hoped they were. “You seem alone.”

      He moved as if he meant to reach out to her, then he slipped his hands in the pockets of his trousers instead, and she thought the sheen in his gaze then was much too close to misery. It echoed that feeling inside her own chest too well.

      “I am alone.” He shook his head when she started to speak, and Anais didn’t know if he was trying to keep her from arguing with him or if it was himself he feared. “I prefer it that way.”

      “You’re an island all your own?” It was an effort to make her voice dry, to try to sound more amused than shaken. “When you used to be a package deal? That seems a strange evolution.”

      “It suits me.” His voice took on an edge then. “Surely you realized that six years ago.”

      “Six years ago I was so in love with you I couldn’t see straight.” Anais regretted it the moment she said it—particularly like that. So casually. Almost as an aside. He shifted, an arrested expression on his face, and she had no choice but to keep going. “I’m not sure I realized anything but that, to be honest.”

      And this time, the silence between them was anything but comforting. Anais was sure she could see the same old accusations right there between them, dancing in the light and landing hard on the floor. She waited for him to strike out, to knock her down with one of his well-placed barbs, to make her wish she’d never said anything at all. She already wished that.

      She’d spent these strange days poking at this odd little peace they’d made, waiting for it to shatter around them, and now she wanted nothing more than for it to carry on forever.

      But the look he gave her was shuttered, not cruel.

      “It turns out that I have an affinity for solitude,” he said in a low voice. “It’s what I do best.”

      And that statement swelled inside of her, like a sob trapped in her chest. Only she didn’t know what to cry for. The way their marriage had ended? The years Dario would never get back with his son? Or the way he stood before her now, so obviously lonely and broken and fierce, claiming he liked it that way?

      Anais didn’t know what she felt, what that sob was. What good her tears would do even if she dared let them fall. And she knew, somehow, that if she gave in to that great sobbing thing pressed so hard against her heart, if she let it burst open and drown them both, it would end this strange peace between them as if it had never been.

      So instead she closed the distance between them, went up on her toes before she could think better of it and kissed him.

      It wasn’t a long kiss, or even a particularly carnal one. She pressed her lips to his and felt him jolt at that, felt the usual fire sear through her at that electric, simmering bit of contact. She put one hand to his rough jaw and she let the kiss linger, drinking him in, aware all the while of the way he stood too still, too tense.

      When she stepped back, his blue gaze was nearly black with need.

      “What the hell was that?” he growled.

      “I don’t know.” She didn’t put her hand to her mouth, though she wanted to, to see if she’d tattooed herself somehow. That was how full her lips felt, tingling with almost too much sensation. “You looked as if you needed it.”

      “I didn’t.” He bit that out, but she didn’t believe him. And more, she didn’t think he believed himself. “I don’t.”

      And then he stalked away, leaving her to stand there with that great big sob still trapped in her chest, the brand of that damned kiss on her mouth and no idea what on earth she was doing here.

      With him.

      Playing games neither one of them could win.

      * * *

      The call came a few mornings later while Dario was out on his morning run. Only his secretary’s personal cell phone was programmed to come through the Do Not Disturb setting he used while he ran his daily lap around Central Park, and she knew better than to use it without a damned good reason.

      Before today, she’d used it maybe three other times that he could recall. Dario took his morning run—and his peace and quiet—very seriously.

      “It’s your grandfather,” Marnie said when he answered. “He’s taken a turn for the worse. He wants to see you.”

      After he ended the call and ran the last mile hard to get home faster, Dario realized he had no idea if he’d responded to that or if he’d simply hung up in a daze. Not that he should have been in any kind of a daze at all, he told himself sharply as the elevator rushed him up toward the penthouse again. Giovanni Di Sione was a very old man, even without the leukemia that had beset him this past year, adding insult to the laudable