Chapter Five #2
Rafael’s smile had dimmed, then disappeared altogether, and he’d taken his time looking back at her.
His gaze had been dark and something much too bleak and furious at once, and it had hurt as much as if he’d thrown something back at her.
More, perhaps. Lily kept thinking she couldn’t feel any more horrible than she already did, and then sure enough, she found there was a darker, deeper, far worse place.
This is what you do, she’d told herself. When you’re with him, this is who you are. She’d wanted to say that out loud. To remind him that they’d always ended in the same ugly place—but she couldn’t say a word. She’d had to sit and stew in it instead.
“It’s clear enough to walk down to the village today,” Rafael had said after a long, heavy sort of moment, when she’d thought he could see all the ugliness inside her.
When she’d imagined it filled the whole room—the whole sprawling length of the house.
Arlo, happily, had seemed completely oblivious, still clinging to his father’s legs and chanting something new and bright.
“I thought it would be a pleasant family excursion, assuming you’re not too busy coming up with further vicious comments to fling at me. ”
Lily had refused to apologize to him, but still, her throat hurt as if she had more than one apology stacked there.
She’d swallowed hard against it. And maybe it would have been different if she hadn’t tried to take him out at the knees.
Maybe then she might have come up with some way to resist him.
But she’d made that glorious smile of his go away because she was a terrible person, and she didn’t seem to have any resistance in her just then.
And he’d used the word family.
“That sounds lovely,” she’d said, her voice hoarse with all the things she couldn’t say. The things she didn’t want to admit she could feel. The memories she’d been terribly afraid he could see all over her face. “Thank you.”
Lily jolted back into the present to find Rafael studying her expression in that way of his that made her forget to breathe.
She kept herself from scowling her reaction at him by sheer force of will, and realized only after a long, shuddering beat of her treacherous heart that he was holding out his hand to her. And waiting for her to take it.
She wanted to touch him about as much as she wanted to fling herself off the side of the boat into the frigid waters of the Grand Canal and swim for it, but she swallowed that down, aware that he was measuring her reaction.
That he was clocking exactly how much time it took her to look from that extended hand back up to his face.
That, worse, he could probably read every last thought she had as she did it.
Because she was perfectly aware that he knew she could remember him.
He still couldn’t prove that she could.
“I only want to help you from the boat, Lily,” he said softly, the hint of a dark amusement in his voice.
“That is another lie.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She should have swallowed that down with all the rest of it, she knew that. And maybe to prove how little he bothered her, to herself if nothing else, she slid her hand into his.
It was a mistake. She’d known it would be.
It didn’t matter that they both wore gloves to ward off the cold.
It didn’t matter that she couldn’t feel the slide of his skin against her palm or the true heat of his hand.
She could feel his strength. She could feel that leashed power of his like a deep, dark ricochet inside her, flooding her with sensation she didn’t want, as dangerous as the mysterious Venetian night all around them.
There was no curve at all to that hard mouth of his, then. Rafael’s gaze locked to hers.
Heat. Passion. Need.
It slammed into her. It made her feel distorted.
Altered. She moved then, jerky and uncertain, as if the world was as rickety beneath her feet as the boat.
As the dock that extended out from the palazzo’s first-level loggia.
As the grand houses of Venice themselves, arrayed around them up and down the canal on their ancient and uncertain ground—some dark with disuse and age, some lit from within like sets of perfect Christmas ornaments made from local Murano glass—and none of them as safe as they were beautiful.
Just like Rafael.
Lily climbed up onto the dock with more alacrity than grace and then dropped his hand as if he’d burned her.
And he didn’t have to laugh at her, though she could sense more than hear the deep, dark rumble of it.
It was already inside her, where she was still so attuned to him, a part of him.
As if they were still connected that way—deeper than sex, like a fire in the blood nothing had ever been able to quench.
Not time, not distance. Not betrayal. Not her own supposed death.
She began to understand that nothing ever would.
That she’d been kidding herself all these long years, imagining it could ever be otherwise.
The palazzo loomed before her, its graceful upper floors gleaming bright against the dark like some kind of beacon, and Lily assured herself it was nothing more than the cold wind sweeping down the canal from the lagoon in the distance and slapping against her face that made her eyes water.
It’s the cold, she assured herself. It’s only the cold.
But then she felt his hands on her, turning her to face him, and she knew better.
She was doomed. They were both doomed. They’d been destined to do nothing but rip each other apart since the moment they’d met and set themselves on this terrible collision course that destroyed them both. Over and over again.
She could see it in that stern set to his beautiful mouth.
That bold fire in his gaze. Worse, she could feel it in the way she simply.
..melted. Everything inside her turned soft and ran sweet, and she thought she’d never wanted anything more in all her life than the press of that mouth of his against hers again.
Just one more time, she told herself, almost wistfully, as she looked up at him.
But she knew that was the biggest lie of all.
“Don’t kiss me,” she whispered then, too quick and too revealing. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”
Rafael’s stern mouth was so close then—so close—and that look in his eyes was enough to raze whole cities, and there was no disguising the way it made her tremble, too. She didn’t try.
“Speaking of lies,” he said, and drew closer still, his arms moving around her to hold her there in a parody of a lover’s embrace.
Or perhaps it was no parody, after all.
She braced her hands against his chest, though she couldn’t have said if she was pushing him away or, far more worrying, simply holding him there. “It’s not a lie just because you don’t like it.”
He studied her for a moment, and Lily forgot where they were.
What continent, what year. What city. There was nothing but that dark gold brilliance in his gaze, the riot deep inside her, and her ever more fragile resistance.
He shifted, raising one gloved hand to smooth over her cheek, the leather both a caress and a punishment, as it was not the lick of heat his bare skin would have been.
She imagined he knew that, too.
“Relax,” he said, and he sounded far too amused, then. As if she was the only one torn asunder by this. The only one so affected. “I’m not going to kiss you here. It’s far too cold.”
“You mean public.”
There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “I mean cold.”
“I don’t understand what the temperature has to do with it.” She sounded far more cross than was wise. Rafael’s mouth curved.
“The next time I kiss you, Lily, I won’t be as thrown as I was on the street in Virginia. There will be nothing but our usual chemistry.” He shrugged, though the hand against her cheek tightened, and she knew then that he wasn’t nearly as unaffected as he seemed. “And you know what happens then.”
She did. A thousand images surged through her then, one brighter and more sinfully wicked than the next. A messy, slick tumult of his mouth, his hands. The thrust of his body deep into hers. The taste of his skin beneath her tongue, the hard perfection of him beneath her hands. Salt and steel.
The ache, the fire. The impossible, unconquerable fire.
“No,” she gritted out, glaring at him no matter how much emotion she feared was right there in her eyes to make a liar of her. “I don’t know what happens.”
He dragged his thumb over her bottom lip, his mouth cruel and harsh and no less beguiling, because he knew exactly what it did to her. The thick heat that wound tight and dropped low, nearly making her moan. Nearly.
“Then you’ll be in for quite a ride.” He looked at her as if he was already inside her. Already setting a lazy, mind-wrecking pace. “It’s uncontrollable. It always has been.”
Lily jerked her head back, out of his grip, much too aware that he let her. That he could have stopped her, if he chose. His hand dropped from her face and she wanted to slap that deeply male, wholly satisfied look straight off his face. She had to grit her teeth to keep from doing it.
“I don’t know what that means,” she told him, her voice as frigid as the air around them. As the dark, mysterious waters of the canal behind him. “I feel certain I don’t want to know what it means.”
His dark eyes were hooded as they met hers. He still looked like they were already having sex. As if it was a foregone conclusion. As if this was nothing more than foreplay—and every part of her body burst into jubilant flame at the sight.
“It means I kiss you, then I’m inside you,” he told her, in a voice straight out of those wild, feverish dreams she lied and told herself were nightmares. She’d been telling herself that for years. “Always.”