Chapter Nine #3
“It depends on the story. Did you deliberately hide yourself away all this time? Or did you hit your head and forget who you were?” He kept his gaze trained on hers.
“The former leads to all manner of unpleasant inquiries about why you might have felt it necessary to do such an irrevocable thing and who might have been responsible. The latter, meanwhile, is a special interest story that will no doubt capture the public’s interest for a while, as these things do, but will then fade away. ”
“So to be clear, we’re not talking about the truth right now, despite how many times you’ve called me a liar in the past two weeks.” She raised a challenging brow. “We’re talking about manipulating the media for your own murky ends.”
“No, Lily.” His tone was harsh. He made no attempt to soften it. “We’re talking about Arlo.”
She looked shocked by that. “What does this have to do with Arlo?”
“He will eventually be able to read all about this,” Rafael pointed out.
“Assuming someone doesn’t share the whole of it with him on a playground, as children are wont to do.
It will be part of the very public story that he and anyone else can access at will.
I’d prefer that story not be about his mother thinking so little of his father that she pretended to kill herself and then hid herself away for half a decade.
What good could possibly come of his knowing that? ”
Something glittered in that too-blue gaze of hers. “I’m not going to lie to him. I can’t believe you’d really think I would.”
“Please spare me the moral outrage. You’ve already lied to him. You’ve lied to everyone you’ve ever met, before and after that accident. At least this time, the lie would be in his best interests.”
“You’re assuming a lot,” she said in a clipped tone, that glitter in her gaze even more hectic and a dark thing in her voice besides. “You barely know him. And one night with me after five years hardly gives you the right to make any kind of decision about what’s in his best interests.”
“I’m not assuming anything,” Rafael said, soft and harsh, giving absolutely no quarter.
“Arlo is my son. You either hid him away from me deliberately, in which case any court in the land is likely to award me custody in the face of such a contemptible parental act—or you didn’t know what you were doing until I found you, which suggests a brain injury that hardly sets you up as mother of the year.
I’d think long and hard about that, if I were you.
I don’t want to treat you like a business rival and take you down by any available means necessary. But if I have to, I will.”
She eyed him as if she’d never seen him before and didn’t much like what she saw now.
“Is that what last night was about?” There was no particular inflection in her voice, though he could see all manner of shadows in her gaze as she set her coffee back down on the nearby side table with a bit too much precision.
“Trying to sneak your way beneath my defenses so you could better knock me flat today?”
“Lily.” He said her name the way he heard it in his head, delicate and light, that same song that had been torturing him for all these years. “I have no reason whatsoever to think anything I did could reach you. Ever.”
He saw her hands shake then, very slightly, before she clenched them into the fabric slipping and sliding around her. And it made him feel worse, not better. Hollow.
“So the fact it sounds a lot like you’re threatening me is what, then?” she asked, her voice crisp, as if he’d imagined that small, telling tremor. “My overactive imagination? A remnant of that convent school poet you made up for your own amusement?”
“I wasn’t threatening you. I’m merely pointing out the realities of the situation we find ourselves in.”
“A man standing half-naked in a Venetian palazzo passed down through his family line for centuries maybe shouldn’t set himself up as the last word on reality,” she retorted.
“It makes you sound silly.” She lifted a hand when he started to respond to that.
“I understand that your feelings are hurt, Rafael. That sex only made it all that much more raw, and maybe that much worse.”
“You have no idea.” He hadn’t meant to say that.
But he had, and so he thought he might as well keep going.
“I want you, Lily. I can’t deny that. It doesn’t go anywhere, no matter how many times I lose myself in you.
But that doesn’t change what we did to each other.
How we behaved and what came of it. As you said yourself last night. ”
“Neither does using my son—our son—as a weapon.” She held his gaze. “What does that make you?”
“Determined,” he retorted, a little more temper in his voice than he liked. As if he still had absolutely no control over himself where she was concerned. “I lost five years of his life. I won’t lose a moment more.”
“I haven’t denied you access to him,” she said stiffly. “I won’t. We can work something out, I’m sure. People who can’t manage to spend three seconds in a room together without drawing blood can do it. So can we.”
“You’re not understanding me.” He waited for her to focus on him again. “There will be no split custody, no separate homes. He stays with me.”
Lily’s mouth actually dropped open. “You must have lost your mind.”
“That leaves you with a very few options, I’m afraid, and I’m sorry for that,” he said, and there was a part of him that hated that she’d gone pale, that this clearly surprised and hurt her.
But not enough to stop. “You can stay with him, with me. But that will require we make this official—and while I won’t pretend I’ll manage to keep my hands off you, I can’t promise I’ll ever give you more than sex.
I can’t imagine I’ll ever trust you.” He shrugged as if that was of no matter to him.
“Alternatively, you can go back to your life in Virginia or come up with a new one if you prefer, and you can call yourself any name you like until the end of time. But if you choose that option, you’ll do so alone. ”
She didn’t move, though he had the impression she swayed on her feet, and he wished this was different.
He wished he could gather her in his arms, make her smile.
Make all of this all right. But the saddest truth of all was that he didn’t know how.
Theirs was the high drama, the angst and the deeply thrust knife of betrayal.
He didn’t know how to make her smile. He only knew how to bring out the worst in her—and how to make her cry.
He’d done nothing but that, over and over again.
She’s not the only one who needs forgiving, a tiny voice inside him suggested then, like a chill through his body. There are monsters enough in both of you, more than enough to go around.
But he didn’t know how to stop this. How to fix it. How to save either one of them.
“I’m not leaving Arlo with you,” she said, very precisely, as if she was worried she might scream if she didn’t choose each word that carefully. “That will never happen, Rafael.”
“My son will have my name, Lily,” he warned her, yielding to his temper rather than that other voice that whispered things he didn’t want to hear. “One way or another. You can be a part of this family or not, as you choose. But you’re running out of time to decide.”
“Running out of time?” She stared at him as if he’d grown a monster’s misshapen head as he stood there, and he wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if he had.
“Arlo didn’t know you existed two weeks ago.
You thought I was dead. You can’t make these kind of ultimatums and expect me to take you seriously. ”
“Here’s the thing, cara,” he murmured, feeling that familiar kick of ruthlessness move in him, spreading out and taking over everything.
It felt a lot like peace. He crossed his arms over his chest and told himself she was the enemy, like all the rivals he’d decimated in his years as acting CEO of the family business.
He assured himself she was his to conquer as he chose.
And more, that she’d earned it. “I’m sorry that this is hard for you.
I feel for you, I do. But it won’t change a thing. ”
Though it might have changed things if that glitter in her gaze had spilled over into tears.
It might have reminded him that he could be merciful.
That he really had loved her all along. But this was Lily, stubborn to the bitter end.
She blinked, then again, and then those blue eyes were clear and hard as they met his.
She tipped up that chin and she looked at him almost regally, as if there was nothing he could do to touch her, not really.
The same way she’d looked at him in that hallway when she was nineteen.
And he had the same riotous urge now as he had then: to prove that he damn well could. That he could do a great deal more than touch her. That he could mess her up but good.
He told himself that this time, at least, it was far healthier than it had been then, because it wasn’t about either one of them. It was about their son.
Which was why he kept his distance. The way he hadn’t done then.
And so what if it was killing him? That was the price. He assured himself Arlo was worth paying it.
“You have until Christmas,” Rafael told her matter-of-factly. “Then you will either marry me or you’ll get the hell out of my life, for good this time. And his.”