Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James

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СКАЧАТЬ had lied, if Dario had gotten the wrong idea, if more than half a decade had ticked by like this, rolling on from that single day in his old apartment...

      But he knew that was impossible. Dante had been many things back then, but he’d never been a liar—and he’d certainly never looked Dario straight in the eye and lied to him, not once in all their lives. Not even by omission.

      Dario knew it was impossible.

      Yet somehow, he still felt like a monster.

      “What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself, almost under his breath. Because he didn’t understand how Anais could be the awkward virgin he’d run after on the Columbia campus and also the woman who’d slept with his twin brother. He’d never understood that progression—and he’d never wanted to hang around and ask for explanations, either. Over time he’d thought he’d figured it out. She’d been so starved for attention, for affection, after the childhood she’d had—no wonder one man hadn’t been enough for her. That was what he’d told himself. That was what he’d believed.

      But a picture of him next to a child’s bed didn’t fit in with the character he’d imagined. With who he’d told himself she’d become by having sex with Dante for God only knew how long before he’d discovered them.

      He didn’t know what to make of it, and he hated that. Anais belonged in the box she’d built with her own deceitful behavior. This past week had been bad enough. Running into her so unexpectedly in that remote house on Maui, then discovering she had a child she claimed was his—it all required a somewhat larger, more unwieldy box than he’d prefer.

      Still, this was worse. This struck him as an act of charity and he couldn’t understand how such a thing fit with the woman who’d callously pitted one twin against the other. Who might have been doing so all throughout Dario’s relationship, for all he knew.

      He raked a hand through his hair and picked up his cell phone, aware that calling her was the exact opposite of how he’d normally handle something like this. Why did this woman tie him in knots when she wasn’t even in the same room?

      But that was when the housekeeper bustled in, placing a stack of new tabloids in front of him and taking Damian by the hand to lead him out. 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 СКАЧАТЬ