Unwrapping The Castelli Secret

Lily blinked. She remembered later. He’d used the key she shouldn’t have given him to her hotel room and found her in the shower. She could remember it too easily, too well, in too much detail. The steam. The sting of the hot water against her chilled skin. Rafael shouldering his way into the glassed-in little cubicle still fully dressed, his mouth uncharacteristically grim and a harsh light in his beautiful eyes.

Then his mouth had been on hers, and she’d wrapped herself around him, melting into him the way she always had. His hands had slicked over the curve of her hips, that damned tattoo she’d claimed she hated and he’d claimed he loved, until he’d simply dispensed with his wet trousers, picked her up and surged deep inside her with one slick, sure thrust.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he’d muttered into her hair, and then he’d pounded them both into a wild, screaming oblivion. Then he’d carried her out of the shower, laid her out on the hotel bed and done it all over again. Twice.

She’d found that desperately romantic at the time, but then, she’d been a pathetic twenty-two-year-old under this man’s spell that winter. Now, she told herself firmly, it was nothing more than another bad memory wrapped up in too much sex she shouldn’t have been having with a man she never, ever should have touched.

“That is a very disturbing story with some deeply troubling family dynamics,” she said now, batting his hand away from her face. “But it still doesn’t make me this other woman, no matter how many stories you tell to convince yourself otherwise.”

“Then you must take a DNA test and prove it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Thank you, but I’ll pass.”

“It wasn’t a suggestion.”

“It was an order?” She laughed then, and kept it light somehow. She could see Luca looking over, and those people with him, and knew she’d stayed too long. She had to walk away, because a stranger would have done that long ago. “I’m sure you’re used to giving lots of orders. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me, either.” She caught Luca’s gaze and forced a tight smile. “He’s all yours.”

Lily started for the door then, and she expected Rafael to stop her. She expected a hand on her arm, or worse, and she told herself she absolutely did not feel anything like a letdown when nothing happened. She threw the door open and then, though she knew better, she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder.

Rafael stood where she’d left him and watched her, dark and beautiful and harsher than she’d ever seen him before. She repressed a shiver and told herself it was the December evening. Not him.

“Mi appartieni,” he said, soft and fierce at once. And she understood that little scrap of Italian. He’d taught it to her a long time ago. You belong to me.

Lily sniffed, the cold night in her hair and slapping at her cheeks.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” she managed to say, though her voice was rougher than it should have been had she really not been able to tell the difference between Spanish and Italian. “I’m not her.”

* * *

Once she was gone, swallowed back up by the thick Virginia night, everything inside Rafael went still. Quiet. From that insane buzzing when he’d realized it was really, truly her to a sharp clarity he couldn’t recall ever feeling before.

His brother and their wine association host were talking, and his assistant was trying to show him something business related on his mobile screen, but Rafael simply slashed a hand through the air and they all subsided.

“There is a kennel outside of town run by someone called Pepper,” he told his aide in rapid-fire Italian. “Find it.” He shifted his gaze to Luca. “Call Father’s personal doctor and ask him how a person could have walked away from that accident five years ago and what kind of head injuries she might have sustained when she did.”

“Do you believe she truly has amnesia?” Luca asked. “It sounds like something out of a soap opera. But it is Lily, certainly.”

“There is no doubt about that whatsoever,” Rafael agreed. He’d known it was Lily the moment he’d seen her walk past this window. All the rest was mere confirmation of a truth he already knew, and the taste of her in his mouth after much too long.

Luca stared at him for a moment. “Your grief at her death was extreme. I am closer to her in age and I was less affected. You altered the whole of your life afterward, very much as if...”

Rafael only stared back at his younger brother, brows raised in challenge, daring him to finish that sentence. He didn’t know what Luca saw on his face, but the younger man only nodded, very wisely checked what looked like a smile and then pulled out his mobile.

It took very little time to get the answers he’d requested, dispatch the wine association woman off to tender their apologies to their would-be dinner companions and set out to find Lily in the car his assistant had waiting for them a block outside the pedestrianized area.

“If she is faking this memory loss,” Luca said as he lounged in the back of the sleek vehicle with Rafael, “she might be gone already. Why would she stay? She obviously didn’t want to be found.”

Rafael kept his gaze out the window as the car slipped through the streets and then out into the fields, barren this time of year and gleaming beneath a pale moon. He didn’t think Lily would have moved on yet, with that same gut-deep certainty that told him she was faking this whole thing. She’d been so adamant that she was this other woman, this Alison. He thought the stubborn girl he’d known was far more likely to dig in her heels and brave it out than turn and run—

But the truth is, you don’t know her at all, a dark little voice inside him whispered harshly. Because the girl you knew would never have walked away from you.

“We have a responsibility, as the closest thing Lily has left to any kind of family, to determine that she is not suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress brought on by the accident,” Rafael said. “At the very least.”

The words came so easily to him, when deep down, he knew they were excuses. Lily was alive. That meant he would do whatever he must to claim her the way he should have done five years ago.

But he didn’t want to say that to his brother. Not yet.

It was all for the best, he thought, that Luca did not respond.

The roads were emptier the farther they got from the center of Charlottesville, and the land on either side of the car was beautiful. Stark trees with their empty branches rose over fields still white from the last snow. This was rich, arable land, Rafael knew. Lily had always loved the extensive Castelli vineyards in the northern Sonoma Valley. Perhaps it should not surprise him that she’d found a place to live that was reminiscent. Gnarled vines and plump grapes had been a part of her life since she’d been sixteen and not at all pleased her mother was remarrying.

And even less pleased with him.

He could remember it all so clearly as the car made its way through the frozen Virginia fields. Rafael had been twenty-two. Their parents had gathered them together in the sprawling château that served as the Castelli Wine hub of operation and foremost winery in the States.

And Francine Holloway had been exactly what they’d expected. Beautiful, if fragile and fine featured, with masses of white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes. She’d trembled like a high-strung Thoroughbred and spoken in the kind of soft, high-pitched voice that made a certain sort of man lean in closer. Rafael’s father was precisely that type. He’d loved nothing more than wading in and solving the problems of broken, pretty things like Francine—a preference that dated back to Rafael’s mother, who had spent many years, before and after the divorce, institutionalized in a high-end facility in Switzerland.

Rafael had expected the teenaged daughter to be much the same as the mother, especially with such a wispy, feminine name. But this Lily was fierce. Laughably so, he’d thought, as she’d sat stiffly on an overwrought settee in the formal sitting room at the château and scowled through the introductions.

“You do not appear to hold our parents’ mutual happiness foremost in your heart,” he’d teased her after an endless dinner during which his father had delivered the sort of speeches that might have been moving had Francine not been the old man’s fourth wife, and had Rafael not heard them all before.

“I don’t care about our parents’ happiness at all,” she’d retorted, without looking at him. That had been different. Most girls her age took one look at him and melted into shallow little puddles at his feet. That hadn’t been arrogance on his part. It had been pure, glorious fact—though he’d been, by his own estimation, far too worldly and sophisticated to sample the charms of such young, silly creatures. This one, apparently immune, had sniffed, her gaze trained somewhere far off in the distance through the great windows. “Which is about how much they care about ours, I imagine.”

“I’m sure they care,” Rafael had said, thinking he might soothe her girlish fears with the wisdom of his years. “You have to give them a chance to get over how perfect they imagine they are for each other so they can pay attention to their lives again.”

But Lily had turned to face him, that heart-shaped face of hers still faintly rounded with youth, those impossible eyes scornful. She’d been dressed in a perfectly appropriate sundress that showed nothing untoward at all and yet there had been something about the way she’d worn the masses of her strawberry blond hair tumbling in every direction, or the fact that her shoulders were far too smooth, that had made Rafael wonder what it would be like to touch her—

He’d been horrified.

“I don’t need a big brother,” she’d told him baldly, compounding his shock at the direction of his own thoughts. “I don’t want the unsolicited advice, especially from someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Someone who dates people purely to end up on tabloid television shows, which I’m sure keeps you super relevant in the world of the vapid and the rich. Congrats. And I don’t need you to fill me in on my mother’s ridiculous patterns. I know them all too well, thank you. Your father is the latest in a long line of white knights who never quite manage to save her. It won’t last.”

She’d turned back to the view, her manner clearly dismissive, but Rafael had not been accustomed to being dismissed. Especially not by teenage girls who were usually much more apt to follow him around and giggle. He hadn’t been able to imagine Lily Holloway doing anything of the sort.

“Ah,” he’d said, “but I think you’ll find it will last.”

She’d heaved a sigh but hadn’t looked at him again. “My mother’s relationships have the shelf life of organic produce. Just FYI.”

“But my father is a Castelli.” He’d only shrugged when she’d looked back at him then, her nose wrinkled as if he was more than a little distasteful. “We always get what we want, Lily. Always.”

Sitting in the back of his car as it turned from the main country road and headed down a smaller, private lane lit with quiet lights shaped like lanterns, Rafael still didn’t know why he’d said that. Had he known then? Had he suspected what was to come? Lily had hated him openly and happily for three more years, which had distinguished her from pretty much every other woman on the planet. She’d insulted him, laughed at him, mocked him and dismissed him a thousand times. He’d told himself she was obnoxious. He’d told himself she was jealous.

“She is unbearable,” he’d growled at Luca once, when Lily had spent an evening singing pointed old songs at him and his date.

“But your date really is acting her shoe size instead of her age,” his brother had replied, with a lazy grin. “Lily’s not wrong.”