Unwrapping The Castelli Secret

There was a buzzing in his head, a dizzy, lurching thing that almost cut him in half. She jerked against the car door and left it shut, and he had the dim realization that he’d barked out some kind of order. Or had it been her name? She froze where she stood, staring back at him across the hood of a stout little American wagon that could fit six or seven Italian cars, the frigid sidewalk, the whole of the night.

But there was no mistaking who she was.

Lily.

It could be no other. Not with those fine, sculpted cheekbones that perfectly framed her wide, carnal mouth that he’d tasted a thousand times. Not with that perfect heart-shaped face that belonged in a painting in the Uffizi. Her eyes were still that dreamy, sleepy blue that reminded him of California winters. Her hair poked out from beneath her knit hat to tumble down over her shoulders, still that rich summer honey, golds and auburns combined. Her brows were the same shade, arched slightly to give her the look of a seventeenth-century Madonna, and she looked as if she had not aged a single day in five years.

He thought his heart might have dropped from his chest. He felt it plummet to the ground. He took a breath, then another, expecting her features to rearrange themselves into a stranger’s as he stared. Expecting to jolt awake somewhere to find this all a dream. Expecting something—

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.”