Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James

And instead of calling Anais to thank her for a kindness he didn’t understand in the first place, he sat where he was and read capital letter denunciations of his character in as overdramatic language as it was possible to find.

      The ICE Man Cometh—and He Took My Baby!

      And that was when another thought occurred to him, much darker than the previous ones.

      He only knew that Anais had placed a photograph next to Damian’s bed. Damian hadn’t specified what was in that photograph. Which meant Dario had no way of knowing which Di Sione twin was in that photograph, did he?

      * * *

      It was late into the night on that same day when the nanny pushed open the door to Dario’s home office suite, startling him where he sat on the leather couch with his laptop and a tumbler of whiskey.

      He hit a key to pause the video he was watching—of Anais on some appalling talk show, playing the part of wounded, helpless ingenue swept into all this darkness by a corporate wolf like Dario. He had to admit she was good at it. She’d almost had him convinced he was an evil, heartless bastard and he knew better.

      “I was so sheltered,” she’d said, her voice choked up. “No, he never divorced me. He simply reappeared long after I’d given up hope. I thought... I hoped... It sounds so naive to say it out loud, doesn’t it? But it was all a trick. A game. He just wanted our son.”

      Dario had listened to that part at least fifteen times. If he didn’t know better, if he hadn’t lived the truth of things with Anais, he’d have sworn she hadn’t been acting. And even though he knew that was impossible, he’d found himself reacting as if she really wasn’t putting on a show. As if he really had swooped down upon her like some angel of death, six years ago and now, and ruined her life each time.

      She has some kind of magic power, Dante had shouted at him a long time ago, when Dario had first wanted to accept the offer from ICE and Dante had been so adamantly opposed to the very idea. He’d made the mistake of mentioning that Anais thought it made good business sense. To make you think up is down and black is white. What’s next, brother? Will she make me your enemy?

      But no. The two of them had done that together, in Dario’s own bedroom.

      He had to force himself back into the present, where the nanny was looking at him in concern and he had no idea how long it had taken him to focus on her.

      “What is it?” he asked, aware he even sounded off. Wrong. Very much like a man who didn’t know if he was crazy or sane any longer, and worse, was almost entirely certain he didn’t much care either way.

      “It’s Damian,” the nanny said in a hushed, hurried, almost apologetic voice that wiped all that history straight out of his mind. “I’m afraid he’s sick.”

      “What do you mean?” Dario frowned at the woman. “He was turning cartwheels on the roof deck after dinner.”

      But he was already up and moving, following the nanny down the guest hall toward the room he’d set up for Damian. He walked inside and found the boy curled up on the bed, shivering and crying and obviously not all right at all.

      He was much too hot to the touch, and Dario felt as helpless as he ever had in his life. He sat down on the bed and put his hand on Damian’s small back, as if that might give the boy some comfort. He had a dim memory of his grandfather doing the same for him during some long-ago ailment.

      “I want my mom,” Damian cried.

      And Dario had never felt worse than he did then. Had he really been using this five-year-old as some kind of pawn? To get his revenge on the child’s mother? What was the matter with him? He’d thrown it in Anais’s face that she was as bad as the father who’d never wanted to marry her mother and had cheated all throughout their marriage. But meanwhile, he was as bad as his own father, the most selfish creature who’d ever walked the face of the planet. He was worse. At least his father hadn’t cared in the slightest about any of his kids—it would never have occurred to him to use them for anything.

      He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed her number, not sure he’d be able to speak past the constriction of pure self-loathing blocking his throat when she answered at once.

      “Dario?”

      “You’d better come,” he told her with no preamble. He didn’t bother to keep his voice even or calm. What could that matter? “Damian is sick.”

      He didn’t know how long it took her. It could have been a handful of minutes. It could have been hours. Time lost meaning to him as he sat there in the dimly lit room with a sick boy in his lap, trying to make soothing noises. He got Damian to stop crying, which made an exultant sort of triumph race through him—far brighter and deeper than anything he’d felt during ICE’s last big product launch, which he’d previously imagined was the pinnacle of his life thus far.

      Dario didn’t know how to process that. He didn’t know what it meant, only that somehow this small human who smelled of sweat and something sticky had managed to worm his way into places inside of Dario that he hadn’t known were there. And he didn’t think Damian even liked him. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t holding his own nephew, not his son.

      That didn’t appear to have a single thing to do with it.

      And then he looked up and Anais was there.

      She charged through the door, her eyes snapping to Damian and staying there. She moved so fast her hair flowed behind her like a cloak and she came straight to him, up on her knees on the bed beside Dario to get her hands on the child’s hot cheeks.

      “Mommy,” the little boy whimpered. He didn’t seem surprised to see her, and Dario wondered what that was like. To have no doubt that the adults would turn up when they were needed. To expect it. “I’m sick.”

      “I know, baby,” she murmured. Her hands moved all over him as she eased him from Dario’s hold. She checked his forehead, his cheeks, and then she clucked her tongue and wrapped her arms around him to rock him. “You have a little fever, that’s all. Do you have a headache?”

      He moaned something unintelligible with his mouth against her shoulder and she nodded as if he’d made perfect sense. “That’s not surprising. Let’s cool you down a little bit and see if you can sleep.”

      She asked the nanny to get her a wet washcloth and while she waited she stripped Damian out of his sweat-soaked pajamas and then got him into a clean pair. Then she laid him down on the bed with the cool cloth on his head, her movements practiced and easy, reminding Dario without a single word what she’d been doing these last five years. She even curled up beside the little boy so he could hold on to her, and then she sang to him.

      It was the most hauntingly beautiful thing Dario had ever heard. It broke the heart he’d thought she’d turned to stone and ash years before. Over and over again.

      He sat there on the foot of the bed as this mother sang her little boy to sleep, and it took him long, shuddering moments to understand that whatever the truth was, he wanted this to be real. To be his in all its uncertainty and noise, silliness and sweetness. He wanted her to have come back to him with this funny little boy who was a perfect blend of both of them. He’d never wanted a family—he barely tolerated his own—but here, now, he wanted this family more than he wanted his next breath.

      He wanted it almost more than he could bear.

      And he could have left when Damian drifted off to sleep, but he didn’t. Anais stopped singing eventually, but she didn’t move, still curled up next to the boy like some kind of fierce lioness who would shred anyone who ventured near. He had absolutely no doubt that she would. And that he’d help.

      “‘The ICE Man Cometh’?” Dario asked into the quiet.

      “If you ever try to take my child away from me again,” she replied in a very soft voice that did nothing to conceal the steel in it, “I’ll gut you with something a whole lot sharper than a tabloid newspaper.”