Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James

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 injury of having lived ninety-eight long years. The amazing thing was that the old man was alive at all, he assured himself, not that he’d finally met the thing that might have a chance at killing him.

      It was funny how that didn’t make him feel any better, the way he’d told himself it had before.

      He strode into the penthouse, sweaty and agitated, and stopped when he heard Damian talking. Heedless and excited, the way Damian always seemed to be—because this child had no inkling of the possibility that anyone alive might not find him utterly delightful.

      Dario remembered his own childhood. His parents’ sick dependence on each other, the wildness and unpredictability that had haunted every moment of it before they’d died and the sadness that had wreathed it afterward. He’d had nothing to cling to in all the world but the twin brother who would grow up to betray him with his own wife.

      His wife.

      He found that word didn’t infuriate him the way it had for years. Quite the opposite, in fact. He liked it.

      He moved quietly through the entry hall and through the great living room, still following Damian’s voice. He found the little boy in the kitchen, standing on a pulled-up chair so he could watch his mother make pancakes on the great stove Dario had never personally used.

      “We have a housekeeper for that,” he said, aware of two things even as he said it.

      First, that his voice was all wrong. Ragged and much too dark. It revealed entirely too many things better left hidden.

      And second, that he’d said we. As if the fact he hadn’t divorced her yet, or the fact they’d been living here together as if nothing that had happened between them mattered, made them some kind of unit they’d never been.

      Six years ago I was so in love with you I couldn’t see straight, she’d said that strange night in the hallway. Then she’d kissed him, sweet and devastating, in a way he could still feel inside of him. He’d spent the time since convincing himself it had been nothing more than Anais up to her usual tricks. He’d almost come around to believing it, too. The only trouble was, he’d seen that raw look in her eyes. He’d heard it in her voice.

      And God help him, he’d felt it in her kiss.

      He still did.

      The truth was, Dario didn’t know how to handle any of this. He understood the life he’d lived for the past six years because everything had been in neat, if painfully bleak, boxes and there was none of this blurring of long-drawn lines. In a way, the boxes were easier. There were no surprises, ever.

      He didn’t understand how his grandfather, who had once told Dario he intended to beat death at its own game by living forever, could possibly be dying this time—no matter how old he was, or how sick. It seemed impossible. Just as he didn’t understand how the woman he’d married so quickly, met anew in Hawaii when he’d least expected it, then lived with again these past, peaceful weeks, could be the same woman who had betrayed him so thoroughly.

      He wanted this, he thought then. That was the trouble. The real truth beneath all the rest of it. He wanted this woman in his house, making pancakes because she felt like it or because it made a little boy smile. And he wanted that little boy. For the first time since Anais had dropped the news of Damian’s existence on him on Maui, Dario didn’t care that no genetic test could prove who the real father was. That went both ways. No one could prove Damian wasn’t his.

      And if his grandfather was, in fact, dying, if this really was the end of the only family Dario knew—however inadequate it had been over the years—he knew that what he really wanted was for the old man to meet this small, wild boy with a Di Sione face and his mother’s eyes. Even if it was only the once.

      “What is it?” There was a frown in Anais’s voice, if not on her face, as she slid the last pancake onto Damian’s plate and then directed him to the kitchen island to eat. “You look as if there were ghosts out there on your run.”

      “No ghosts,” he said, still not sounding like himself.

      Or maybe it was that he’d known exactly who he was for six long years. He’d reveled in that definition and he’d convinced himself it was the truth of not only who he was, but who he could ever become.

      And now he had no idea how he’d ever been happy with that.

      Because he understood, standing there sweaty and thrown in the room in his home he used the least, watching a domestic scene that should have turned his stomach, that he’d never be happy like that again. That it hadn’t been happiness, that in-between state he’d lived in all those years.

      Everything had changed that day in Hawaii. Everything was different.

      Him most of all. “Not just yet.”

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