Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8. Кейт Хьюит

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      Was she responding as Lily? Or as someone who didn’t know who Lily was? Having to worry over every single word she said or expression she let show on her face was like talking through a stone wall, and she was beginning to feel the weight of it inside her, dragging her down.

      “And why not?” she asked crisply. “When you know that’s what I want?”

      “Because,” he said softly, “I am a father.”

      “Arlo doesn’t know you from a can of paint,” she snapped at him.

      “And whose fault is that?”

      The silky rejoinder stopped her short. She could feel her temper pounding in her temples, her throat, down in her gut, goading her on. When she knew the very last thing she could be around Rafael was out of control in any way. Temper would take her down as fast as passion. Faster. At least if she was kissing him, she couldn’t run her mouth at the same time.

      Lily blinked. Where had that come from?

      But of course, she knew. She was in a small room, alone with Rafael. Five years ago he would already have been inside her. There would have been no hesitation, no hands thrust into his pockets and that wary distance. He’d once hitched her up on the back of the deep leather sofa to her right and had her biting her own hand within seconds of closing the door behind them.

      She went and sat on that same sofa now and saw a gleam of something edgy and very male in his gaze as she did, telling her he was remembering the same thing. She toed off the short boots she wore, pulled her legs in their warm leggings beneath her where she sat and wrapped her arms around her middle and the oversize tunic of a sweater she wore, with the great big cowl neck that was perfect for drafty old European halls like this one.

      “So, tell me your theories,” she said, with a calm she didn’t feel at all.

      Rafael stood where she’d left him, over near the wall of books. He didn’t cross over and sit down in the chair across from her. He only studied her.

      Looking for weaknesses, she thought, and tried to steel herself.

      Because she was well aware that Rafael didn’t buy her amnesia story for an instant.

      “What theory would you prefer to hear?” he asked after a moment. “I have so many.”

      This angle, staring up at him from below, was unsettling. It was impossible not to be entirely too aware of every hard plane of his perfect chest, or that ridged abdomen of his. It was hard not to lose herself in the stark male lines of his fine, athletic form, much less that ruthlessness he’d always exuded. But where it had been purely sexual five years ago, now it was tempered. Steelier. Harder. More focused and intent. It made him that much more devastating.

      And Lily had to find a way to ignore it. All of it. When she’d never managed to do so before.

      You’re an addict like any other, she told herself now. Like her mother. Hadn’t she sat in those meetings from time to time in those first days on the run, pretending it had been something else that had overtaken and ruined her life so totally? You know how to do this. One excruciating moment at a time.

      Though heroin didn’t talk back, she imagined.

      “What do you think happened to me?” she asked him then. “If I’m this Lily person, why do I think I’m someone else?”

      His dark eyes glittered, and she knew he was biting back the urge to tell her there was no if about it. That she was Lily Holloway, whether she liked it or not. She could practically hear him say it—but to his credit, he didn’t.

      “What did you think when I asked you about your tattoo in that café?” he asked instead. “Didn’t you think it was odd that a total stranger could describe it so perfectly when, according to you, we’d never met before?”

      “Of course I did. But I thought everything about you was odd.”

      “That was it? It didn’t cross your mind that what I was saying might be true?”

      “Not at all.” She eyed him, hoping the tension in her arms as she hugged her legs closer into her chest wasn’t obvious. “If I walked up to you and said, oh, hello, your name is actually Eugene Marigold and I know you from our days in Wisconsin, would you believe me?”

      His eyes gleamed with a hint of golden amusement that danced down the length of her spine, making her shiver deep within. “It would depend on the evidence.”

      She shrugged. “I’m here to tell you that the evidence doesn’t help. I guess I thought you must have seen my tattoo before.”

      “You often parade around with it showing, do you?”

      Lily stilled. She knew that tone. Possessive. And darkly thrilling to her in a way that felt physical, when she knew she should have found it appalling. The only appalling thing here is you, she snapped at herself.

      “I wear a bathing suit at the lake sometimes, if that’s what you mean by ‘parading around.’”

      “A rather skimpy bathing costume.”

      “In America we call them bikinis.”

      He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and then he moved toward her, which made her throat go dry in an instant and every part of her body go stiff—but he only dropped down in the chair across from her.

      And that suddenly, Lily was tossed back in time. It was the way he lounged there, so surpassingly indolent, as if nothing on earth could ever truly bother him. She remembered that too well. This was the Rafael she’d known. Provocative. Sensual. Even now, with that considering sort of gleam in his gaze that told her he wasn’t the least bit relaxed no matter how he happened to be stretched out in that chair, her body reacted to the memory.

      More than simply reacted. She burst into long, hot, blistering flames. They shuddered through her, one lick after the next, making her want to writhe where she sat. But she didn’t dare move. She hardly dared breathe. And she had to hope against hope he thought she was blushing about the mention of bikinis. Or from the crackling fire in the nearby grate. Who was she kidding? He knew exactly why she’d flushed red, and she knew he did, too.

      But none of this was about what Rafael knew. It was about what he could prove.

      “How did you come up with the name Alison Herbert in the first place?” he asked, much too quietly, after another heavy moment dragged by, leaving furrows of stone deep in her gut. “You had a very specific biography at the ready. Where did it come from?”

      Where indeed, Lily thought darkly. The truth—that she’d bought that driver’s license off a girl she’d vaguely resembled in a truck stop parking lot with a week’s worth of tips, and had helped herself to that same girl’s hastily told life story, too—was obviously out of the question. And she had to bite her tongue against the urge to overexplain and overcomplicate, because that could only make this harder.

      She shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

      “I think you can do better than that.” A crook of his sensual lips when she frowned at him. He propped up his head against the fingers of one hand like some emperor of old and СКАЧАТЬ