Unwrapping The Castelli Secret

And then had come that fateful New Year’s Eve party at the château in Sonoma. Rafael had perhaps had too much of the Castelli champagne. He’d long told himself he was simply drunk and she must have been, too, but he’d had five long years thinking she was dead and gone to admit to himself that he hadn’t been anything like drunk. He’d known exactly what he’d been doing when she’d sauntered past him in the upstairs hall of the family wing, in what he’d openly called “hooker shoes” earlier and a dress he’d thought trashily short. Her hair had been tumbling down the way it always had back then, sliding this way and that. The scent of her, a sugared heat, had been maddening.

“If you’re looking for Calliope,” she’d said, and had managed to make his then girlfriend’s ridiculous name sound like an insult, “she’s probably in the nursery with the other children. Your father hired a babysitting service.” She’d smirked at him. “He was obviously expecting you.”

Rafael had known that the last thing in the world he should have done was reach over, slide his palm around her neck and yank that smart mouth to his. Of course he’d known. He’d imagined he would kiss her, she would punch him and he would laugh at her and tell her that if she wasn’t angling to take Calliope’s place, she should keep quiet.

But one touch of her mouth with his, and everything had changed.

Everything.

And you ruined it, he told himself savagely then, as an old farmhouse came into view at the end of the lane. Because that is what you do.

The car pulled up in front of the bright old house and was promptly surrounded by a pack of baying dogs. Rafael climbed out of the car as a silver-haired woman charged out of the house and straight toward them in some misguided attempt to corral her charges.

But despite the barking and howling and general din, Rafael knew it the moment Lily appeared on the step behind the older woman, as if everything else fell quiet. He drank her in. Again. She was no longer wearing her coat and scarf, and he couldn’t keep himself from tracing the fine, elegant lines of that willowy body of hers. Her jeans were snug, making his mouth water, and the long-sleeved shirt she wore hugged her breasts and made him realize how hard and hungry he was for her—even in this sea of animals.

And even if she looked horrified to see him.

“This is stalking!” she threw at him from her place on the steps. “You can’t hunt me down at my home. You don’t have any right!”

Before Rafael could reply, a streaking shape shoved past her and would have hurtled itself down the steps and into the chaos had Lily not reached out and grabbed it.

Not an it. A boy. A small one.

“I told you to stay inside no matter what,” Lily told him sharply.

“Arlo is barely five,” the older woman said from somewhere off to the side where, Rafael was dimly aware, she’d managed to move all the dogs into a fenced-off pen. But he couldn’t look away from Lily. And the boy. “He doesn’t get ‘no matter what.’”

The little boy looked at the older woman, then angled his head back to look up at Lily, who still held him by the collar of his shirt.

“Sorry, Mama,” he said, angelically, and then he grinned up at her.

It was a mischievous grin. It was filled with light and laughter and the expectation that his sins would be forgiven in an instant, simply because he’d wielded it. Rafael knew that smile well. He’d seen a version of it on his brother’s face throughout Luca’s whole life. He’d seen it in his own mirror a thousand times more.

His heart stopped beating. Then started again with a deafening, terrible kick that should have knocked him to the ground. He couldn’t quite understand why it hadn’t.

“You don’t have the right to be here,” Lily said again, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glittering, and Rafael didn’t know how he could want her this badly. He’d never understood it. And it was back as if she’d never been gone, a yearning so deep it was like an ache inside him.

But it didn’t matter any longer. None of that mattered. The little boy didn’t resemble the fair woman he’d called Mama at all. He had Rafael’s dark curls and the Castelli dark eyes. He looked like every picture Rafael had ever seen of himself as a child, scattered all over the ancestral Castelli home in northern Italy.

“Are you so certain I don’t have the right to be here, Alison?” Rafael asked, amazed he could speak when everything inside him was a shout again, long and loud and drowning out the world. “Because unless I am very much mistaken, that appears to be my son.”

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_6728fd1b-6571-5cc2-94c5-8ed98cc1a274)

THEY LANDED AT the private Castelli airstrip, high in the far reaches of northern Italy in the shadow of the towering Dolomites, just after dawn the following morning. Daylight was only beginning to stretch out pink and crystalline over the jagged spires and craggy, snowcapped heights of the sharply imposing mountains on either side of the narrow valley. Lily stared out of the window as the plane taxied down the scenic little runway, feeling as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

She’d never imagined she’d see this place again. For years now she’d told herself she didn’t want to see it or anything else the Castellis owned again, including those wine bottles with their distinctive labels in the liquor store—yet there was no mistaking the way her heart leaped as the private jet touched down. There was no denying the fact that this felt a whole lot more like a homecoming than it should. Certainly more than was safe.

Last night had been the second-worst night of her life, all things considered.

She’d known on the long drive home from Charlottesville after she’d left Rafael in that café that he wasn’t likely to simply disappear. Not Rafael. He might have been spoiled rotten when she’d known him, a being created entirely out of wealth and privilege and more than happy to exploit both to serve his own ends—but he’d always gotten what he’d wanted. Lily being but one in a long line of things he’d taken because he could.

She’d sped along the dark country roads, hardly seeing the cold winter beauty of this place she’d come to call home. Lost in that kiss again. Lost in him. If it had been only her, she would have left then and there. Just kept on driving until she became someone else, somewhere else. She’d done it before. She knew exactly what it took to disappear without a trace.

But she wasn’t twenty-three and desperate any longer, and there was Arlo now. Her beautiful, magical little boy. She’d turned it over and over in her head all throughout that drive, but she couldn’t see how she could legitimately uproot Arlo and make him