‘I’ll call them back later,’ he murmured.
Afterwards he fought sleep and dressed, though he had to resolutely turn his back on her, for fear she would delay him further. He pulled on a shirt and began to button it, but his thoughts were full of her and he didn’t want them to be. He’d told himself time and time again that now Talia’s show was over, he needed to finish this. To let Willow go as gently as possible and to move on. It would be better for her. Better for both of them. He frowned. So what was stopping him?
He kept trying to work out what her particular magic was, and suddenly the answer came to him. Why he couldn’t seem to get enough of her.
It was because she made him feel special.
And he was not.
He was not the man she thought him to be.
He stared out of the window at the lake and felt the swell of something unfamiliar in his heart. Was this how his twin had felt when he’d met Anais—the sense of being poised on the brink of something significant, something so big that it threatened to take over your whole life?
‘Dante, what is it?’ Willow was whispering from over on the bed, her brow creased. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
He turned around to face her. Perhaps he had. The ghost of his stupid mistake, which had led to the severing of relations with his twin brother.
He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing.’
But she was rising from the rumpled sheets like a very slender Venus, her blond hair tumbling all the way down her back as she walked unselfconsciously across the room and looped her arms around his neck.
‘It’s clearly something,’ she said.
And although she was naked and perfectly poised for kissing, in that moment all Dante could see was compassion in her eyes and his instinct was to turn away from her. Because all his life he’d run from compassion...a quality he’d always associated with pity, and he was much too proud to tolerate pity—he’d had enough of that to last a lifetime. He’d seen it on the faces of those well-meaning psychologists his grandfather had employed after the fatal crash which had left them all orphaned. He’d seen it etched on the features of those matrons at boarding school, where they’d been sent when Giovanni had finally admitted he couldn’t cope any more. They’d all tried to get him to talk about stuff and to tell them how he felt. But he had clammed up, like those mussels he sometimes ate with frites in France—the ones with the tight shells you weren’t supposed to touch.
Yet something about Willow made him want to talk. Made him want to tell her everything.
‘You know I have a twin brother?’ he said suddenly.
Cautiously, she nodded. ‘But you don’t talk about him.’
‘That’s because we are estranged. We haven’t spoken in years.’
He untangled her arms from his neck and walked over to the bed, picking up a flimsy silk wrap and throwing it to her, disappointed yet relieved when she slipped it on because he couldn’t really think straight when she was naked like that.
He drew in a deep breath as he met the unspoken question in her eyes. ‘The two of us were sent away to a fancy boarding school in Europe,’ he said slowly. ‘And after we left, we started up a business together—catering for the desires of the super-rich. Our motto was “Nothing’s impossible,” and for a while nothing was. It was successful beyond our wildest dreams...and then my brother met a woman called Anais and married her.’
There was a pause. ‘And was that so bad?’
Dante looked into her clear grey eyes and it was as if he’d never really considered the matter dispassionately before. ‘I thought it was,’ he said slowly. ‘I was convinced that she wanted Dario’s ring on her finger for all the wrong reasons. Women have always been attracted to the Di Sione name in pursuit of power and privilege. But in Anais’s case, I thought it was for the sake of a green card. More than that, I could see that she had her hooks into my brother. I could tell he really cared about her—and I’d never seen him that way before.’
‘So what happened?’ she said, breaking the brittle silence which followed.
Dante met her eyes. He had done what he had done for a reason and at the time it had seemed like a good reason, only now he was starting to see clearly the havoc he had wrought. He suddenly realised that his dislike of his twin’s wife went much deeper than suspecting she just wanted a green card.
‘I didn’t trust her,’ he said. ‘But then, I didn’t trust any woman.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Life is complicated, Dante.’
His mouth twisted. ‘It’s not a story I’m particularly proud of, but when we were at college, I was sleeping with a woman called Lucy. She was quite something. Or at least, so I thought—until I discovered she’d been sleeping with my twin brother as well.’
Willow stared at him. ‘That’s terrible,’ she whispered.
He shrugged. ‘I laughed it off and made out like it didn’t matter. But it did. Maybe it turned her on to have sex with two men who looked identical. Or maybe she was just after the family name and didn’t care which brother should be the one to give her that name.’ He hesitated. ‘All I know is that, afterwards, things were never quite the same between me and Dario. Something had come between us, though neither of us acknowledged it at the time. And after that, I always viewed women with suspicion.’