Unwrapping the Castelli Secret Read online

He dragged in a deep breath, then let it out. Another. And it was still her.

  “Lily,” he whispered.

  Then he was moving. He closed the distance between them in a moment, and there was nothing but noise inside him. A great din, pounding at him and tearing at him and ripping him apart, and his hands shook when he reached to take her by the shoulders. She made a startled sort of sound, but he was drinking her in, looking for signs. For evidence, like that faint freckle to the left of her mouth, to mark that dent in her cheek when she smiled.

  And his hands knew the shape of her shoulders even beneath that thick coat, slender yet strong. He had the sense of that easy fit he remembered, his body and hers, as if they’d been fashioned as puzzle pieces that interlocked. He recognized the way her head fell back, the way her lips parted.

  “What are you doing?”

  He saw her lips form the words, read them from her mouth, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He only knew that was her voice—her voice—the voice he’d never expected to hear again, faintly husky and indisputably Lily’s. It was like a sledgehammer through him, inside him. Wrecking him and remaking him at once.

  And the scent of her, that indefinable fragrance that was some combination of hand lotion and moisturizer, shampoo and perfume, all rolled together and mixed with the simple truth of her beneath it all. All Lily. His Lily.

  She was alive. Or this was a psychotic break. And Rafael didn’t give much of a damn which.

  He simply hauled her toward him and took her mouth with his.

  She tasted the way she always had, like light. Like laughter. Like the deepest, darkest cravings and the heaviest need. He was careful at first, tasting her, testing her, his whole body exulting in this impossibility, this thing he’d dreamed a thousand times only to wake up without her, again and again across whole years.

  But then, the way it always had, that electric thing that arced between them shifted, blasted into heat lightning and took him whole. So he merely angled his head for that perfect fit he remembered so well and devoured her.

  His lost love. His true love.

  Finalmente, he thought, his grasp on the English he’d been fluent in since he was a boy eluding him, as if only Italian could make any sense of this. At last.

  His hands were in her hair, against her cheeks, when she jerked her mouth from his. Their breath mingled into another cloud between them. Her eyes were that impossible blue that had haunted him for half a decade, the color of the crisp San Francisco sky.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he grated out at her, sounding more heavily Italian than he had in years. “What the hell is this?”

  “Let go of me.”

  “What?” He didn’t understand.

  “You seem very upset,” she said, in that voice that was etched into his soul, as much a part of him as his own. Her blue eyes were dark with something that looked like panic, which didn’t make any kind of sense. “But I need you to let me go. Right now. I promise I won’t call the police.”

  “The police.” He couldn’t make any sense of this, and only partly because of that great buzzing still in his head. “Why would you call the police?”

  Rafael studied her, that lovely face he’d believed he’d never see again. Not in this life. There was heat on her cheeks now, staining them pink. Her mouth was slick from his. But she wasn’t melting against him the way she always had before at his slightest touch, and if he wasn’t entirely mistaken, the hands she’d lifted to his chest were pushing at him.

  At him.

  As if, for the first time in almost as long as he’d known her, she was trying to push him away.

  Everything in him rebelled, but he let her go. And he more than half expected her to disappear into the darkness drawing tight around them, or a plume of smoke, but she didn’t. She held his gaze for a long, cool moment, and then, very deliberately, she wiped her mouth with one hand.

  Rafael couldn’t define the thing that seared through him then, too bright and much too hot. He only knew it wasn’t the least bit civilized.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded, in the voice he only ever had to use once with his staff. Never twice.

  Lily stiffened, but she was still looking at him strangely. Too strangely.

  “Please step back.” Her voice was low and intense. “We might appear to be alone here, but I assure you, there are all kinds of people who will hear me scream.”

  “Scream?” He felt something like ill. Or dull. Or—but there were no words for the devastation inside him. There was nothing but need and fury, grief and despair. And that terrible hope he’d held on to all this time, though he’d known it was unhealthy. He’d known it was a weakness he could ill afford. He’d known it was sentimental and morbid.

  He’d considered it the least of his penance. But she was alive.

  Lily was alive.

  “If you assault me again—”

  But the fact she was standing here, on a side street in Charlottesville, Virginia, made about as little sense to him as her apparent death had five years ago. He brushed aside whatever she was saying, scowling down at her as the haze began to recede and the shock of this eased. Slightly.

  “How did you survive that accident?” he demanded. “How did you end up here, of all places? Where have you been all this time?” Her words caught up with him and he blinked. “Did you say assault?”

  He hadn’t imagined it. She edged away from him, one hand on the side of the car. Her gaze was dark and troubled, and she certainly hadn’t greeted him the way he might have expected Lily would—if, of course, he’d ever allowed himself to imagine that she could really still be alive.

  Not a ghost this time. The real, flesh-and-blood Lily, standing before him on a cold, dark street.

  Even if she was looking at him as if he was a monster.

  “Why,” he asked, very softly, “are you looking at me as if you don’t know who I am?”

  She frowned. “Because I don’t.”

  Rafael laughed, though it was a cracked and battered sort of sound.

  “You don’t,” he repeated, as if he was sounding out the words. “You don’t know me.”

  “I’m getting in my car now,” she told him, too carefully, as if he was some kind of wild animal or psychotic. “You should know that I have my hand on the panic button on my key chain. If you make another move toward me, I will—”

  “Lily, stop this,” he ordered her, scowling. Or shaking. Or both.

  “My name is not Lily.” Her frown deepened. “Did you fall and hit your head? It’s very icy and they aren’t as good about putting down salt as they—”

  “I did not hit my head and you are, in fact, Lily Holloway,” he gritted out at her, though he wanted to shout it. He wanted to shout down the world. “Do you imagine I wouldn’t recognize you? I’ve known you since you were sixteen.”

  “My name is Alison Herbert,” she replied, eyeing him as if he’d shouted after all, and perhaps in tongues. As he’d done any of the wild, dark things inside his head, none of which could be classified as remotely civilized. “You look like the kind of man people remember, but I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Lily—”

  She moved back and opened the car door beside her, putting it between them. A barrier. A deliberate barrier. “I can call nine-one-one for you. Maybe you’re hurt.”

  “Your name is Lily Holloway.” He threw it at her, but she didn’t react. She only gazed back at him with her too-blue eyes, and he realized he must have knocked that cap from her head when he’d kissed her so wildly, as her hair gleamed in the streetlight’s glow, a strawberry blond tangle. He recognized that, too. That indefinable color, only hers. “You grew up outside San Francisco. Your father died when you were a toddler, and your mother married my father, Gianni Castelli, when you were a teenage
r.”

  She shook her head, which was better than that blank stare.

  “You’re afraid of heights, spiders and the stomach flu. You’re allergic to shellfish but you love lobster. You graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English literature after writing an absolutely useless thesis on Anglo-Saxon elegies that will serve you in no way whatsoever in any job market. You have a regrettable tattoo of your namesake flower on your right hip and up along your side that you got as an act of drunken rebellion. You were on a spring break trip to Mexico that year and sampled entirely too much tequila. Do you think I’m making these things up to amuse myself?”

  “I think you need help,” she said with a certain firmness that didn’t match his memories of her at all. “Medical help.”

  “You lost your virginity when you were nineteen,” he threw at her, everything inside him a pitched and mighty roar. “To me. You might not remember it, but I bloody well do. I’m the love of your goddamn life!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE WAS HERE.

  Five years later, he was here. Rafael. Right here.

  Standing in front of her and looking at her as if she was a ghost, speaking of love as if he knew the meaning of the word.

  Lily wanted to die on the spot—and for real this time. That kiss still thudded through her, setting her on fire in ways she’d convinced herself were fantasies, not memories, and certainly not the truth. She wanted to throw herself back in his arms, in that same sick, addicted, utterly heedless way she always had. Always. No matter what had happened or not happened between them. She wanted to disappear into him—

  But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She had other responsibilities now, far bigger ones. Far more important things to think about than her own dizzy pleasure or this destructively self-centered man who had loomed far too large over too much of her life already.

  Rafael Castelli was the demon she carried inside her, the dark, selfish thing she fought against every single day of her life. The emblem of her bad behavior, all her terrible choices, her inability to think of anyone or anything but herself. The hurt she’d caused, the pain she’d meted out, whether intentional or not. Rafael was intimately wrapped up in all of that. He was her incentive to live the new life she’d chosen, so far away from the literal wreck of the old. Her boogeyman. The monster beneath her bed in more ways than one.

  She hadn’t expected that particular metaphor, that vivid memory she’d used as her guiding compass away from the person she’d been back when she’d known him, to bloom into life on a random Thursday evening in December. Right here in Charlottesville, where she’d believed she was safe. She’d finally started to believe she really could sink into the life she’d made as Alison Herbert. That she could fully become that other, better, new and improved version of herself and never look back.

  “Should I go on?” Rafael asked in a tone of voice she couldn’t remember him ever using before. Hard, uncompromising. Very nearly ruthless. It should have scared her, and she told herself it did, but what shuddered through her was far more complicated than that as it pooled hot and deep in her belly. Lower. “I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the things I know about you. I could write a book.”

  Lily hadn’t meant to pretend she didn’t know him. Not exactly. She’d been stunned. Frozen in some mix of horror and delight, and then horror at that delight. She’d been walking back to her car after running a few errands, had heard a noise behind her on the darkening street as she’d unlocked the car and there he’d been like a dark angel straight out of her nightmares.

  Rafael.

  She’d hardly had time to take him in. She’d had that flash of recognition—his lean and muscled form that she’d know anywhere in a sleek and extraordinarily well-cut black coat, his gorgeous face a symphony of male beauty from the thick, dark hair he wore cut closer than she remembered it to that mouth of his that had laughed with so little care and then tempted her beyond measure and tormented her beyond imagining—and that stunned, haunted, wondering look in his searing dark gaze.

  And then none of that mattered, because he’d been kissing her.

  His mouth on hers, after all this time. His taste, his touch. His heat.

  Everything had disappeared. The street. The faint music from the outdoor mall in the air around them. The whole city, state, country.

  The past five years, gone in a single blast of heat and hunger that had roared through her, blowing apart every single lie she’d been telling herself all this time. That she’d been infatuated with him and nothing more. That time and distance would erode that mad light between them, dimming it into nothing more than girlish silliness. That there was nothing to fear from this man who had been no more than a spoiled little rich boy who’d refused to give up a favorite toy—

  The truth was so hot, so demanding, it burned. It told her things she didn’t want to know—proved she was as much an addict as she’d ever been, and worse, as her own mother had always been. Clean for five years and that quickly a junkie again. It had shaken her so deeply, so profoundly, that she didn’t know what might have happened next—but then she’d remembered.

  With a thud so hard it should have toppled her, though it didn’t. She’d yanked her mouth from his, appalled at herself.

  Because she’d remembered why she couldn’t simply fall into this man the way everything inside her yearned to do. Why she couldn’t trust herself around him, not even for an instant. Why she had to make him go away again, no matter what it took.

  But he was not looking at her as if he had the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort.

  “It would be a work of fiction, then,” she managed to say now. “If you wrote a book. Because none of those things ever happened to me.”

  His face changed, then. That haunted expression dimmed, and something far more considering gleamed gold there in the depths of his dark gaze.

  “My apologies,” he said softly. She felt how dangerous it would be to believe that tone of voice in the goose bumps that prickled all over her, though she kept herself from shivering in reaction. Barely. “Who did you say you were?”

  “I’m not sure I want to share my personal information with some ranting madman on the street.”

  “I am Rafael Castelli,” he said, and the way he said his name lilted through her like a song, lyrical and right. Yet another reason to hate herself. “If you don’t know me, as you claim, the pertinent details would be these—I am the eldest son of Gianni Castelli and heir to the ancient Castelli fortune. I am acting CEO of the Castelli Wine Company, renowned the world over for my business acumen. I do not hunt women down in the streets. I do not have to do such things.”

  “Because rich men are so well-known for their reasonable behavior.”

  “Because if I was in the habit of accosting strange women in the street, it would have been noted before now,” he said dryly. “I suspect countries would think twice before letting me cross their borders.”

  Lily shifted and tried to look the appropriate mixture of blank and confused. “I really think I should call nine-one-one,” she murmured. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “There is no need,” he said, sounding more Italian than he had a moment ago, which made everything inside her feel edgy. Jagged. That and the tightness of his lean jaw were the only hints she could see of his anger, but she knew it was there. She could feel it. “I will call them myself. You were reported dead five years ago, Lily. Do you really imagine I will be the only person interested in your resurrection?”

  “I have to go.”

  He reached out a hand and wrapped it over the top of her car door as if he intended to keep her there simply by holding the vehicle itself in place. Her curse was that she believed he probably could.

  “There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight.”

  Lily stared back at h
im, a war raging inside that she fervently hoped wasn’t visible on her face. He had to leave. He had to. There was no other option. But this was Rafael. He’d never done a single thing he didn’t want to do in as long as she’d known him—even back when he’d seemed far more languid and perpetually unbothered than this man who stood before her now, radiating a kind of authority she really didn’t want to investigate any further.

  “My name is Alison Herbert,” she said again. She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and then she told him the Alison story in all its particulars—save one crucial detail. “I’m originally from Tennessee. I’ve never been to California and I didn’t go to college. I live on a farm outside of town with my friend and landlady, Pepper, who runs a dog boarding and day care facility. I walk the dogs. I play with them. I clean up after them and live in a little cottage there. I have for years. I don’t know anything about wine and to be honest, I prefer a good beer.” She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it. “I’m not who you think I am.”

  “Then you will have no problem submitting to a DNA test, to set my mind at ease.”

  “Why on earth would the state of your mind be of interest to me?”

  “Lily has people who care about her.” Rafael’s shrug seemed far more lethal than hers, a weapon more than a gesture. “There are legal issues. If you are not the woman I would swear you are, prove it.”

  “Or,” she said, distinctly, “I could reach into my pocket and produce the driver’s license that proves I’m exactly who I say I am.”

  “Licenses can be forged. Blood work is much more honest.”

  “I’m not taking a DNA test because some crazy man on a street thinks I should,” Lily snapped. “Listen. I’ve been more than nice, considering the fact you grabbed me, terrified me and—”

  “Was that terror I tasted on your tongue?” His voice was like silk. It slid over her, through her, demolishing what few defenses she had in an instant. Reminding her again why this man was more dangerous to her than heroin. “I rather thought it was something else.”