Billionaires: The Rebel: The Return of the Di Sione Wife / Di Sione's Virgin Mistress / A Di Sione for the Greek's Pleasure

And she’d been alone so long. So deeply, profoundly alone. Before her marriage and after it. She’d been strong and she’d been brave. Too damned much of both, because she’d had to be to survive her childhood, her lonely early adulthood, the end of her marriage and her new role as Damian’s mother and sole source of support. Her whole life had been a series of had to be.

Anais wasn’t an idiot. This man had abandoned her. The likelihood was he’d do it again, probably before dawn. But she wasn’t the naive creature she’d been back then, so shocked and destroyed when he’d turned on her, and the only good thing about that was that he wasn’t likely to surprise her with that kind of betrayal a second time.

She didn’t have to trust him to want him.

And she’d always wanted him. He was the only man who had ever touched her, the only man she’d ever let close to her, the only person she’d ever let inside. No matter how many dates her aunt and uncle and well-meaning friends had sent her on, no matter how many nice men had said nice things to her, no matter how many times she’d told herself that she wasn’t really married despite the fact she also wasn’t divorced—she’d never been able to bring herself to let another man close. She’d never let them know her at all, much less put their hands on her.

She missed it. She missed him.

He’s still your husband, a dangerous voice inside of her whispered, as seductive as the whole of this long, perfect evening. Whatever else happened between you, you loved him once. Maybe he loved you, too. Maybe nothing else matters but that.

So she swayed closer to him and told herself it didn’t matter what happened later. Tomorrow, two weeks from now, whenever. Nothing mattered but this. Here, now, where nobody could see them and no one would know.

She was so tired of being so alone. Maybe that made her weak. She decided she didn’t care what it made her. Not when he could make it all go away.

He could. She knew he could. He’d made whole cities disappear with a laugh, the whole world with a kiss. He was far more magical than he deserved to be. She just wanted to taste a little of that oblivion again.

Hell, she’d earned it, hadn’t she?

Anais reached up and wound her arms around Dario’s neck, angling herself against him. His hands moved up and down the length of her spine in a lazy rhythm, tracing her. Relearning her. Sending a wild heat spiraling all through her until it pooled between her legs, a swollen, delirious ache.

And she was the one who lifted herself up and pressed her mouth to his.

She kissed him with all those dreams she’d kept pent up inside her across so many long years. She poured all the rants she’d aimed at her reflection instead of to him into it, all the tears and the fear and the loss. She kissed him with her broken heart and her new mother’s terror. She kissed him and she kissed him, lonely and resolute, as strong as she was afraid, two sides of the same coin.

Finally, all these years later, she kissed Dario goodbye.

And he let her.

He slipped a hand around to the nape of her neck and he met her, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, what this was.

Anais was shaking. That might have been a tear that scraped its way down her cheek. She didn’t care. This was a bloodletting. A ritual of loss and leaving, six years overdue.

And when she was finished, she pulled back, not exactly meaning to rest her forehead against his as she gasped for breath. But she didn’t pull away when she realized she was doing it.

“Better?” he asked in a rough voice that hardly sounded like his.

It didn’t occur to her to tell him anything but the truth, as if the Hawaiian night that brushed against her skin was its own kind of confessional. “No. Not really.”

“Good.” A small laugh, entirely male, snaked its way down her spine and made her shiver. “My turn.”

And then he hauled her mouth back to his, and took control.

* * *

Dario should have felt triumph wash over him. He should have been wild with his victory, with a sense of accomplishment. He’d set out to seduce his errant wife and he’d done it.

But all he could concentrate on was the taste of her mouth beneath his, and better, the way she pressed her sweet body against his. Her breasts underneath that soft cream silk were like torture against his chest. Her arms were around his neck as she arched into him and it still wasn’t close enough.

He couldn’t get close enough no matter how he kissed her, and he couldn’t pretend what he was feeling then had anything to do with revenge.

Dario shoved that unnerving truth aside and threw himself straight into the lightning storm instead.

He took her mouth with a ruthlessness that might have concerned him if he’d let himself consider it too closely, but he was lost in the storm. The electric burst of sensation between them. There was nothing but this slick perfection, the tangle of her tongue with his, the sensation of Anais in his arms again at last. It didn’t matter why or how or what needed to happen next.

It only mattered that he possess her, totally. Now.

Forever, some traitorous part of him whispered.

Before he lost her all over again.

He didn’t know how he managed to pull his mouth from hers when it was the last thing he wanted. He hardly heard the band as they rolled easily into another song. He barely knew where they were and he didn’t much care. He only knew he needed her naked and that no matter how accommodating the resort had been so far, they’d likely take a dim view of it if he stripped her here and lost himself in her against the nearest palm tree.

Which meant they needed to go somewhere else.

Immediately.

Dario swept her up and into his arms without a second thought. He begrudged every step he took as he held her high against his chest and strode down the path toward his villa. Every second that he wasn’t deep inside her, braced above her, wrapped around her the way he ought to be, was torture. The weight of her against him wasn’t enough. The way she looped her arm around his neck was little more than a tease. The way she tipped back her head to watch him with that solemn expression that did nothing to hide the stark, unmistakable need in her gaze made the hunger inside of him threaten to take him to his knees.

It wasn’t until he’d shouldered his way back into his villa, striding across the living room and into the sprawling master suite, that he faced the fact that he wasn’t acting according to his hastily hammered out plan at all. This was no deliberate seduction, designed to tear her into a thousand pieces and leave her inert and destroyed and unable to lift a finger to stop what happened afterward. This was mutually assured destruction, and he had no idea what the hell he was doing.

He knew he should back off. Stop this right now. He set her down on her sleek red shoes at the foot of his platform bed and forced himself to let go of her. This was the perfect moment to rethink. Regroup. He wasn’t in control here and that was unacceptable.

But he couldn’t seem to care about that.

Because all these long years after he’d given up imagining any way it could ever happen again, Anais was standing there before him. Her smooth perfection was once again marred by his own hands, and he was so hard it bordered on pain. He reached over and dug his fingers into her thick, black hair, pulling on the bun so the pins scattered everywhere as it all tumbled down to swirl around her shoulders. Her lips were full and lush and faintly swollen from his. Her soft blouse looked crumpled against her breasts.

He still loved it as much as he always had. He was the only one who’d ever seen her like this...

No. A cold voice in his head stopped that line of thought. Not the only one.

And the fury that rose in him at that was nothing new, but the way it wound itself around all that need and hunger was. It rolled and twisted all over each other, becoming something new. Something darker and wilder.

He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to reason it through.

He just wanted her.

God help him, but he’d never stopped wanting her.

As if she could read the turmoil inside of him like a book, a faint shadow moved over her lovely face and a line appeared between her brows.

“Dario?”

He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t know the difference anymore between his hunger and his fury, his sense of betrayal and his mounting need; he only knew that there was a single cure. He didn’t want to think about the implications. He told himself that it didn’t matter what he felt while this was happening, as long as in the end it achieved the desired result.

Dario had never believed that the ends justified the means—hadn’t he learned that when he’d uncovered all the shifty practices his former silent partner in ICE had signed off on before he’d started there?—but here, now, there was no other way. He refused to allow himself even a moment of regret.

He realized he was staring holes through her when Anais shivered slightly, but the truth of things was the way her nipples poked hard against the soft silk of her top, telling him everything he needed to know about her own need. Her own hunger that had always matched his own. Dario concentrated on that now. He moved closer to her, indulging himself. He traced the stiff little peaks with his fingers, rubbing the silk against her own flesh and smiling slightly when she let out a moan.

Anais let her head fall back, and another beast roared in him then. Pure lust. Sheer desire. He stopped trying to pretend there was anything else inside of him—anything else that mattered. He buried one hand in the fall of her hair and got his lips on the line of her throat, tasting her. Testing the firmness of her skin. Reveling in the scent of her, as delicate and uniquely her as he remembered. With his free hand he tugged at her blouse, until he was forced to let go of her hair to tug it the rest of the way over her head.

Her arms were still up in the air when he put his mouth back on her, and he felt as well as heard the way she shuddered into him with a ragged sound. Her small, perfectly formed breasts were as exquisite as he remembered them, and he was delighted to find she still didn’t bother with a bra. That meant it was as easy as a memory to hold her where he wanted her with his hands curved over her shoulder blades, and then to get his mouth on one dark-tipped breast.

Then he sucked. Hard.

Anais made a tiny noise that Dario hadn’t realized had haunted him for years, that small sound of greed and yearning. And the taste of her was impossibly addicting, sweet musk and a hint of salt against his tongue. He moved his mouth to her other breast to be sure, using his tongue and the hint of his teeth until she was moaning out loud with her head thrown back, her hands gripping his biceps as if she wanted to leave her fingerprints behind on his skin.

He stepped back, then spun her around, so she was braced against the foot of the bed with her bottom in the air. She was still as beautifully formed as he remembered her, and he told himself that wasn’t a stab of something like pain he felt. It wasn’t loss. He focused on the silken line of her back, the indentation of her spine and the flare of her hips. He couldn’t stand the obstacle of her skirt and reached over to unzip it, pulling it from her until it pooled at her feet and she was left in nothing but those wicked, cherry red shoes and a thong in the same bright color.

Dario thought he might explode right there.

Instead, he shrugged out of his shirt and kicked off his trousers, then moved behind her, reveling in the harsh sounds of her uneven breaths in the quiet room.

“What about my shoes?” she whispered when he smoothed his hands over her hips, as if he was trying to memorize them anew, imprint them into his palms.

“Leave them on,” he muttered.

And he lost himself in her. He threw the past out of his head and he simply drowned in her the way he wanted to do. The feel of her warm, soft skin beneath his hands. The noises she made, tiny gasps and sweet moans, all leading to that critical point where her breathing became panting instead.

He flipped her over, then tossed her farther up the wide mattress and followed her down. He kissed her again. Deeper, wilder. And this time it didn’t matter where they were. This time, he didn’t have to stop.

Dario couldn’t imagine there would ever be another night with her, not after what he planned to do tomorrow. And this wasn’t like the last night he’d spent with her six years ago when he’d had no idea that she was betraying him or that it would be the last time he’d get to touch her. This time he was ready.

This time, he knew exactly what he’d be missing and how much it would hurt, loath as he was to admit it to himself.

So he kissed her like a drowning man, and when he couldn’t take any more of it, he moved to lavish attention on her breasts again. And when she was writhing beneath him, her arms thrown over her head in abandon and her back arched high, he moved even lower.

He trailed fire over her belly, then moved over that bright red thong at last. He pulled her long legs over his shoulders, then used his own width to keep her thighs apart. He liked the way she trembled, the way her breath sawed in and out of her and how she came up on her elbows to watch him.

Dario caught her gaze for a moment. If he didn’t know better, he’d have believed that sheen of vulnerability in her dark eyes, that faint hint of emotion in her full lower lip. If he was still the fool he’d been, that might have ripped him apart. He could feel something hollow inside of him, as if it had.

But that was nothing more than another ghost, and there was no place here for that.

There was only tonight. There was only this.

Sex, he told himself harshly. Nothing more.

And then he pressed his mouth to the V between her legs, covered in that red lace, and made her call out his name.

She shook beneath him, the sharp heels of the high shoes digging at his back, and only when she made that high-pitched sound he liked too much did he tug the bright red thong aside, and lick his way into her heat at last.

* * *

He was like a storm.

Anais couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t recover. Couldn’t do a single thing in all the world but lose herself in the tumult and fire of Dario’s wicked, masterful mouth against the part of her that ached so hot and needy she worried it might actually kill her. Or he would, and she doubted she’d mind.

He built up that fire, using his lips and tongue and the scrape of the jaw he still hadn’t shaved. It was as if he’d plugged her into an electrical outlet. She hummed. She burned. She burst into flame again and again.

She dug her hands into his hair and held on while he licked her straight over the edge and into oblivion.

She’d almost forgotten the shattering. The sweet splintering. The monstrous ache that only Dario could ease, and the terrible need that only he brought out in her and only he ever assuaged.

And when she came back to herself he was already moving, tugging her thong from her legs and pulling her shoes from her feet, throwing one and then the next aside. She thought she heard them thunk against the hardwood floor, but then again, perhaps it was only her poor heart as it beat hard against the cage of her ribs and left her feeling a delicious sort of helpless as she tried to slow her breathing.

She couldn’t seem to move. Or think. Or care too much about her inability to do either. One tremor chased another, leaving her boneless in the center of his bed. She heard the crinkle of foil that told her he was sheathing himself and then Dario was crawling over her, hauling her with him into the center of the bed before he propped himself above her on his elbows.

And for a searing moment, all he did was gaze down at her.

His face was drawn and his blue eyes glittered dark with the same passion she could feel sweeping through her, as bright as if she’d never broken apart beneath his talented mouth. As if he’d never thrown her over that cliff once already.

She moved then, lifting the hand that had once worn his ring so proudly and placing it against his beautiful face. She didn’t speak. She wasn’t sure she could. She didn’t know what on earth she’d say even if she could find the words.

Dario reached between them and positioned himself at her entrance, never shifting that intense blue gaze from hers. And then slowly, so slowly, he pushed himself inside her. Inch by glorious, impossible inch.

At last, she thought, at last...

Still he continued to slide himself into her as if he had all the time in the world to let her body accommodate him, for her channel to stretch to fit him. She couldn’t help but remember their first time, when she’d been so scared and overwhelmed and in love with him. And he’d taken his time then, too. He’d built that wildfire between them higher and higher, thrown her into bliss twice, before he’d moved to claim her completely.

Just like now, he’d gone slow. So slow. So that his possession had felt inevitable. So that she’d shook beneath him, craving him, desperate to feel him sheathed inside her as far as he could go.

She didn’t think she was the only one remembering that faraway night, the two of them wrapped up in each other in his Manhattan bedroom with the whole great city a glittering flame outside his window. Anais had clung to him and welcomed him and found herself in him, and nothing had ever been the same after that.

So, too, would nothing be the same after this. But at least she knew that now. She wasn’t that overawed virgin anymore. She knew exactly what she was doing.

If she kept telling herself that, maybe it would eventually be true.

Dario settled himself completely against her, stretching her. Anais could see the tension that corded his neck and made his arms like granite. She could see the mad glitter in his eyes that reminded her of the whole of Manhattan outside that window in his old apartment, and she could feel him, bold and male and uncompromising, so deep inside her it was hard to tell which one of them was which.

As if it was her first time all over again, she felt moisture gather in the corners of her eyes. And the way she had then, she moved her hips experimentally, to see if it made him blow out a breath the way it had before.

When it did, that mouth of his crooked up in the corner.

“This is no time for games, Anais,” he told her in that gorgeously dark voice of his that swept through her like a new caress, setting her alight.

And only then did he begin to move.

He set a hard pace, and she met him. He dropped down to take her mouth again, slipping his hands beneath her bottom to lift her and hold her precisely where he wanted her as he thrust into her.

She clung to his shoulders and she wrapped her legs around his hips and she knew this dance. She knew precisely how they fit together, exactly how they moved. As if they’d been made for this. As if no time had passed.

And it took no time at all, or it took a lifetime, before Anais was strung out on that same high cliff all over again. She heard her own voice calling out wordless prayers into the dark, and she heard his low laugh, and then she was shattering all around him all over again.

And this time, he followed her over the edge—and she was sure she heard him shout her name as he fell.

CHAPTER SIX

ANAIS WOKE TO find the sun streaming across her face and the sound of the surf in her ears. She blinked in all the brightness and then sat up too quickly, taking in the vast room, the sleek furnishings, the astonishing softness of the dizzyingly high-thread-count sheets against her skin.

She wasn’t particularly surprised to find herself alone. She wasn’t necessarily happy about it, of course, but she couldn’t claim she was surprised. No matter the places they could take each other in bed, out of it she and Dario seemed destined to do nothing but hurt each other.

Over and over again.

Anais moved very slowly, very carefully, to the edge of the bed and was faintly disappointed that nothing sang out in pain as she did. No twinges or tugs to remind her in that raw, physical way of how she’d spent most of the previous night, or with whom. Nothing that would last.

She told herself that was better. Memories were bad enough. They could lurk about for years, as she knew all too well. They snuck into the corners of things and blended into the shadows. They could ruin a woman without her even realizing it, popping up in dreams whenever she closed her eyes and making her unwilling to even consider moving on the way she should. No matter that he had, and years before.

But this was neither the place nor the time to worry about the ways Dario would likely haunt her now. Besides, she’d had six years to find a way to handle it before and she’d managed it. This would be no different. She’d be fine.

Eventually, she assured herself, you’ll be perfectly fine.

Her clothes were draped over the chaise in the corner near the open glass doors, the screen letting in the ocean’s song and the summer sunlight but none of Hawaii’s less pleasant realities.

Reality is better, no matter how unpleasant, she told herself firmly as she dressed. This place—Dario—it’s all a fantasy that has nothing to do with you or your actual life. It never did. It all might as well be another dream.

That made her feel better—or at least ready to face him. She raked her fingers through her hair, letting it fall where it would and happy that it conformed to its usual sleek, straight, depressingly unchangeable style without her having to do anything more than that. She’d never before realized how lucky she was to have such hair that allowed her to look a lot more pulled together than a woman wearing last night’s outfit should.

She slipped her shoes back on as if they were armor and she then squared her shoulders before she pushed through the door and marched out into the vast living area prepared to do battle—but it was empty.

That confused her. It seemed so unlike him. She stood there for a moment, listening for the usual sounds that indicated Dario was near—the brusque clicking of the keys on his laptop, the sound of his voice issuing orders on the phone. But there was nothing. The villa was hushed. Still.

Empty, she thought. But she couldn’t quite believe that.

There was what looked like a stack of papers on the kitchen counter, but she ignored it as she walked to each of the bedrooms and looked inside. Each was as beautifully decorated and as empty as the next. He wasn’t in the little den with its massive flat-screen television, or in the separate office space equipped with a massive steel desk. He wasn’t on the lanai or out on his secluded beach. He wasn’t in the private pool on the far side of the villa, either.

He was gone.

Almost as if he’d never been here on Maui at all.

And Anais could admit it. It surprised her. And, more than that, felt a lot like a slap. The hurt feelings were silly, she recognized, but the other feeling bubbling up inside of her was a complicated sort of disappointment—as if she’d wanted what would likely have been another tense, unpleasant scene with Dario.

“Surely not,” she murmured to herself, her voice the only sound in the villa.

She shook her head as she crossed the living area again, amazed at herself. At her own capacity for self-delusion and what amounted to self-harm. And she knew—she knew—there was a storm waiting there in the distance, bunched up on the horizon, dark and menacing. Thunder rolled deep inside her and the skies were threatening and low, but she was ignoring all of it. She was refusing to play through the images in her head of last night’s abandon.

The way he’d touched her, the ways she’d tasted him—no.

She was pretending everything was fine—that she was fine. She was pretending that she could handle what she’d done last night and the fact he’d disappeared this morning, even though she’d half expected he would. She was desperately pretending she couldn’t feel that cold harbinger wind on her skin, making every hair on her body stand on end, letting her know in no uncertain terms that there was no outrunning the storm—the terrible reckoning for all her recklessness—that was headed straight for her.