It wasn’t UPS. The unshaven man on her doorstep loomed over her, his dark gaze searching and familiar. There was something about the way he tilted his head—
“Antonio!” The strangled word barely made it past her throat as it seized up.
No! It couldn’t be. Antonio had died in the same plane crash as Vanessa, over a year ago. Her brain fuzzed with disappointment, even as her heart latched on to the idea of her children’s father standing before her in the flesh. Lack of sleep was catching up with her.
“Antonio,” the man repeated and his eyes widened. “Do I know you?”
His raspy voice washed over her, turning inside her chest warmly, and tears pricked her eyelids. He even sounded like Antonio. She’d always loved his voice. “No, I don’t think so. For a moment, I thought you were—”
A ghost. She choked it back.
His blank stare shouldn’t have tripped her senses, but all at once, even with a full beard and weighing twenty pounds less, he looked so much like Antonio she couldn’t stop greedily drinking him in.
“This is my house,” he insisted firmly with a hint of wonderment as he glanced around the foyer beyond the open door. “I recognize it. But the Christmas tree is in the wrong place.”
Automatically, she glanced behind her to note the location of the twelve-foot-high blue spruce she’d painstakingly arranged in the living room near the floor-to-ceiling glass wall facing the ocean.
“No, it’s not,” Caitlyn retorted.
Vanessa had always put the tree in the foyer so people could see it when they came in, but Caitlyn liked it by the sea. Then, every time you looked at the tree, you saw the water, too. Seemed logical to her, and this was her house now.
“I don’t remember you.” He cocked his head as if puzzled. “Did I sell you this house?”
She shook her head. “I...uh, live here with the owners.”
The Malibu mansion was actually part of the babies’ estate. She hadn’t wanted to move them from their parents’ house and, according to the terms of Vanessa’s and Antonio’s wills, Caitlyn got to make all the decisions for the children.
“I remember a red-haired woman. Beautiful.” His expression turned hard and slightly desperate. “Who is she?”
“Vanessa,” Caitlyn responded without thinking. She shouldn’t be so free with information. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” he said between clenched teeth. “I remember flashes, incomplete pictures, and none of it makes sense. Tell me who I am.”
Oh, my God. “You don’t know who you are?” People didn’t really get amnesia the way they did in movies. Did they?
Hand to her mouth, she evaluated this dirty, disheveled man wearing simple cotton pants rolled at the ankles and a torn cotton shirt. It couldn’t be true. Antonio was dead.
If Antonio wasn’t dead, where had he been since the plane crash? If he’d really lost his memory, it could explain why he’d been missing all this time.
But not why he’d suddenly shown up over a year later. Maybe he was one of those con men who preyed on grieving family members, and loss of memory was a convenient out to avoid incriminatory questions that would prove his identity, yet he couldn’t answer.
But he’d known the Christmas tree was in the wrong place. What if he was telling the truth?
Her heart latched on to the idea and wouldn’t let go.
Because— Oh, goodness. She’d always been half in love with her sister’s husband and it all came rushing back. The guilt. The despondency at being passed over for the lush, gorgeous older Hopewell sister, the one who always got everything her heart desired. The covert sidelong glances at Antonio’s profile during family dinners. Fantasies about what it would be like if he’d married her instead of Vanessa. The secret thrill at carrying Antonio’s babies because Vanessa couldn’t, and harboring secret dreams of Antonio falling at her feet, begging Caitlyn to be the mother of his children instead.
Okay, and she’d had a few secret dreams that involved some...carnal scenarios, like how Antonio’s skin would feel against hers. What it would be like to kiss him. And love him in every sense of the word.
For the past six years, Caitlyn had lived with an almost biblical sense of shame, in a “thou shalt not covet thy sister’s husband” kind of way. But she couldn’t help it—Antonio had a wickedly sexy warrior’s body and an enigmatic, watchful gaze that sliced through her when he turned it in her direction. Oh, she had it bad, and she’d never fully reconciled because it was intertwined with guilt—maybe she’d wished her sister ill and that was why the plane had crashed.