“Did you?” Cristina sputtered.
He pinned the dying woman with his stare. Emma turned back when Cristina inhaled with great effort, seemingly clawing for air. Emma was reminded again of a drowning person flailing for one last breath, one last chance.
It wasn’t granted to Cristina. The hand that clutched Emma’s went lax.
“Cristina,” Emma cried out shakily, but Cristina never exhaled. She had died on an unfinished breath.
Emma went into automatic mode, standing and checking for a pulse. When she found none, she noted the time on her watch, then checked for a pulse a second time. Then a third.
After a stretched moment, she gently closed Cristina’s eyes and drew the sheet over her rigid face.
“She’s gone?” he asked.
“Yes,” Emma replied woodenly.
She faced him.
Vanni.
He wore a simple white T-shirt and jeans. The brilliant sunshine flooding the room made his short-sleeved T-shirt look superwhite against his tanned skin. It brought out golden streaks in his brown hair. She realized numbly that every time she’d seen him before, it had been in the subdued light of the enormous garage or beneath a night sky. She had seen those golden highlights in his hair, though—in the lamplight of his bedroom suite. The shirt was short-sleeved, allowing Emma to see the Asian-looking tattoo symbols on his muscular biceps.
A strange, unpleasant tingling sensation started at the base of her spine and ran the length of her backbone.
“Emma?” he asked, his gaze narrowed on her face. He reached out to touch her—steady her, perhaps, because dizziness had assailed her—but Emma backed away, clumsily running into the chair and tripping. She caught herself on the back of the chair.
“You’re him? Vanni? That’s you?” she asked in a strangled voice. Blood started to pound in her ears as she stared at the tattoo, unable to deny the truth with the evidence right there in front of her. He’d cut his hair since that night. Most of the sun-lightened streaks had been sheared away, leaving it much darker looking. When she’d been trapped in the armoire, it draped his face. She hadn’t recognized him sitting there like an aloof, lonely prince at the end of that grand dining room table or when he’d tapped on her window and offered his assistance. She hadn’t recognized him, as he’d made love so fiercely—so perfectly—to her in the darkness.
Had she?
His expression flattened. “I go by Vanni. Giovanni is my middle name. My father’s name was Michael, too, so—”
It was as if her brain overloaded. She began to shake. She didn’t know him. The thought kept thundering in her brain, the pounding force of it threatening to burst something vital.
He reached for her again, but his hand fell slowly when he saw her flinch back. The cold, detached expression she’d seen on his face as he spoke to Cristina settled on his features once again, the same expression he’d worn when Cristina had begged him for his forgiveness just now.
Forgiveness that he’d refused to grant.
A wave of nausea hit her as she recalled what she’d witnessed when she’d been trapped in that armoire, and then what had happened on that beach last night.
“You need to contact the funeral home,” she told him as she hastened past him.
“Emma, what is it?”
She made a beeline to the bathroom. She shut the door and turned on the tap with trembling fingers, not wanting him to hear her being sick.