Unwrapping The Castelli Secret

“Lily, stop this,” he ordered her, scowling. Or shaking. Or both.

“My name is not Lily.” Her frown deepened. “Did you fall and hit your head? It’s very icy and they aren’t as good about putting down salt as they—”

“I did not hit my head and you are, in fact, Lily Holloway,” he gritted out at her, though he wanted to shout it. He wanted to shout down the world. “Do you imagine I wouldn’t recognize you? I’ve known you since you were sixteen.”

“My name is Alison Herbert,” she replied, eyeing him as if he’d shouted after all, and perhaps in tongues. As he’d done any of the wild, dark things inside his head, none of which could be classified as remotely civilized. “You look like the kind of man people remember, but I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Lily—”

She moved back and opened the car door beside her, putting it between them. A barrier. A deliberate barrier. “I can call nine-one-one for you. Maybe you’re hurt.”

“Your name is Lily Holloway.” He threw it at her, but she didn’t react. She only gazed back at him with her too-blue eyes, and he realized he must have knocked that cap from her head when he’d kissed her so wildly, as her hair gleamed in the streetlight’s glow, a strawberry blond tangle. He recognized that, too. That indefinable color, only hers. “You grew up outside San Francisco. Your father died when you were a toddler, and your mother married my father, Gianni Castelli, when you were a teenager.”

She shook her head, which was better than that blank stare.

“You’re afraid of heights, spiders and the stomach flu. You’re allergic to shellfish but you love lobster. You graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English literature after writing an absolutely useless thesis on Anglo-Saxon elegies that will serve you in no way whatsoever in any job market. You have a regrettable tattoo of your namesake flower on your right hip and up along your side that you got as an act of drunken rebellion. You were on a spring break trip to Mexico that year and sampled entirely too much tequila. Do you think I’m making these things up to amuse myself?”

“I think you need help,” she said with a certain firmness that didn’t match his memories of her at all. “Medical help.”

“You lost your virginity when you were nineteen,” he threw at her, everything inside him a pitched and mighty roar. “To me. You might not remember it, but I bloody well do. I’m the love of your goddamn life!”

CHAPTER TWO

HE WAS HERE.

Five years later, he was here. Rafael. Right here.

Standing in front of her and looking at her as if she was a ghost, speaking of love as if he knew the meaning of the word.

Lily wanted to die on the spot—and for real this time. That kiss still thudded through her, setting her on fire in ways she’d convinced herself were fantasies, not memories, and certainly not the truth. She wanted to throw herself back in his arms, in that same sick, addicted, utterly heedless way she always had. Always. No matter what had happened or not happened between them. She wanted to disappear into him—

But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She had other responsibilities now, far bigger ones. Far more important things to think about than her own dizzy pleasure or this destructively self-centered man who had loomed far too large over too much of her life already.

Rafael Castelli was the demon she carried inside her, the dark, selfish thing she fought against every single day of her life. The emblem of her bad behavior, all her terrible choices, her inability to think of anyone or anything but herself. The hurt she’d caused, the pain she’d meted out, whether intentional or not. Rafael was intimately wrapped up in all of that. He was her incentive to live the new life she’d chosen, so far away from the literal wreck of the old. Her boogeyman. The monster beneath her bed in more ways than one.

She hadn’t expected that particular metaphor, that vivid memory she’d used as her guiding compass away from the person she’d been back when she’d known him, to bloom into life on a random Thursday evening in December. Right here in Charlottesville, where she’d believed she was safe. She’d finally started to believe she really could sink into the life she’d made as Alison Herbert. That she could fully become that other, better, new and improved version of herself and never look back.

“Should I go on?” Rafael asked in a tone of voice she couldn’t remember him ever using before. Hard, uncompromising. Very nearly ruthless. It should have scared her, and she told herself it did, but what shuddered through her was far more complicated than that as it pooled hot and deep in her belly. Lower. “I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the things I know about you. I could write a book.”

Lily hadn’t meant to pretend she didn’t know him. Not exactly. She’d been stunned. Frozen in some mix of horror and delight, and then horror at that delight. She’d been walking back to her car after running a few errands, had heard a noise behind her on the darkening street as she’d unlocked the car and there he’d been like a dark angel straight out of her nightmares.

Rafael.

She’d hardly had time to take him in. She’d had that flash of recognition—his lean and muscled form that she’d know anywhere in a sleek and extraordinarily well-cut black coat, his gorgeous face a symphony of male beauty from the thick, dark hair he wore cut closer than she remembered it to that mouth of his that had laughed with so little care and then tempted her beyond measure and tormented her beyond imagining—and that stunned, haunted, wondering look in his searing dark gaze.

And then none of that mattered, because he’d been kissing her.

His mouth on hers, after all this time. His taste, his touch. His heat.

Everything had disappeared. The street. The faint music from the outdoor mall in the air around them. The whole city, state, country.

The past five years, gone in a single blast of heat and hunger that had roared through her, blowing apart every single lie she’d been telling herself all this time. That she’d been infatuated with him and nothing more. That time and distance would erode that mad light between them, dimming it into nothing more than girlish silliness. That there was nothing to fear from this man who had been no more than a spoiled little rich boy who’d refused to give up a favorite toy—

The truth was so hot, so demanding, it burned. It told her things she didn’t want to know—proved she was as much an addict as she’d ever been, and worse, as her own mother had always been. Clean for five years and that quickly a junkie again. It had shaken her so deeply, so profoundly, that she didn’t know what might have happened next—but then she’d remembered.

With a thud so hard it should have toppled her, though it didn’t. She’d yanked her mouth from his, appalled at herself.

Because she’d remembered why she couldn’t simply fall into this man the way everything inside her yearned to do. Why she couldn’t trust herself around him, not even for an instant. Why she had to make him go away again, no matter what it took.

But he was not looking at her as if he had the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort.

“It would be a work of fiction, then,” she managed to say now. “If you wrote a book. Because none of those things ever happened to me.”

His face changed, then. That haunted expression dimmed, and something far more considering gleamed gold there in the depths of his dark gaze.

“My apologies,” he said softly. She felt how dangerous it would be to believe that tone of voice in the goose bumps that prickled all over her, though she kept herself from shivering in reaction. Barely. “Who did you say you were?”

“I’m not sure I want to share my personal information with some ranting madman on the street.”

“I am Rafael Castelli,” he said, and the way he said his name lilted through her like a song, lyrical and right. Yet another reason to hate herself. “If you don’t know me, as you claim, the pertinent details would be these—I am the eldest son of Gianni Castelli and heir to the ancient Castelli fortune. I am acting CEO of the Castelli Wine Company, renowned the world over for my business acumen. I do not hunt women down in the streets. I do not have to do such things.”

“Because rich men are so well-known for their reasonable behavior.”

“Because if I was in the habit of accosting strange women in the street, it would have been noted before now,” he said dryly. “I suspect countries would think twice before letting me cross their borders.”

Lily shifted and tried to look the appropriate mixture of blank and confused. “I really think I should call nine-one-one,” she murmured. “You’re not making any sense.”

“There is no need,” he said, sounding more Italian than he had a moment ago, which made everything inside her feel edgy. Jagged. That and the tightness of his lean jaw were the only hints she could see of his anger, but she knew it was there. She could feel it. “I will call them myself. You were reported dead five years ago, Lily. Do you really imagine I will be the only person interested in your resurrection?”

“I have to go.”

He reached out a hand and wrapped it over the top of her car door as if he intended to keep her there simply by holding the vehicle itself in place. Her curse was that she believed he probably could.

“There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight.”

Lily stared back at him, a war raging inside that she fervently hoped wasn’t visible on her face. He had to leave. He had to. There was no other option. But this was Rafael. He’d never done a single thing he didn’t want to do in as long as she’d known him—even back when he’d seemed far more languid and perpetually unbothered than this man who stood before her now, radiating a kind of authority she really didn’t want to investigate any further.

“My name is Alison Herbert,” she said again. She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and then she told him the Alison story in all its particulars—save one crucial detail. “I’m originally from Tennessee. I’ve never been to California and I didn’t go to college. I live on a farm outside of town with my friend and landlady, Pepper, who runs a dog boarding and day care facility. I walk the dogs. I play with them. I clean up after them and live in a little cottage there. I have for years. I don’t know anything about wine and to be honest, I prefer a good beer.” She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Then you will have no problem submitting to a DNA test, to set my mind at ease.”

“Why on earth would the state of your mind be of interest to me?”

“Lily has people who care about her.” Rafael’s shrug seemed far more lethal than hers, a weapon more than a gesture. “There are legal issues. If you are not the woman I would swear you are, prove it.”

“Or,” she said, distinctly, “I could reach into my pocket and produce the driver’s license that proves I’m exactly who I say I am.”

“Licenses can be forged. Blood work is much more honest.”

“I’m not taking a DNA test because some crazy man on a street thinks I should,” Lily snapped. “Listen. I’ve been more than nice, considering the fact you grabbed me, terrified me and—”

“Was that terror I tasted on your tongue?” His voice was like silk. It slid over her, through her, demolishing what few defenses she had in an instant. Reminding her again why this man was more dangerous to her than heroin. “I rather thought it was something else.”

“Step away from this car,” she ordered him. She couldn’t let herself react. She couldn’t let him see that he got under her skin. “I’m going to get in it and drive away, and you’re going to let me.”

“Not one of those things is going to happen.”

“What do you want?” she hurled at him. “I told you I don’t know who you are!”

“I want the last five years of my life back!” he thundered, his voice a loud, dark thing in the quiet of the street, bouncing back from the walls of the surrounding buildings and making Lily feel flattened. Punctured. “I want you. I’ve been chasing your ghost for half a decade.”

“I’m not—”

“I went to your funeral.” The thunder was a stark thing, then, and far more painful because of it. It punched through her, leaving her winded. Wobbly. “I stood there and played your stepbrother, nothing more. As if my heart hadn’t been ripped from my body and battered apart on the rocks where that car went off the road. I didn’t sleep for months, for years, imagining you losing control of the wheel and plummeting over—” His fine lips pressed together, hard and grim, as he cut himself off. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “Every time I closed my eyes I pictured you screaming.”

She would never know how she stood there and stared back at him, as if he was talking about someone else. He is, she told herself fiercely. The Lily Holloway he knew really did die that day. She’s never coming back.

And the Rafael she’d known had never cared about her—or anything—that much. Who was he kidding? She’d been but one of his many women at the time, and she’d accepted that because what else had she known? She’d learned how to lose herself in awful, narcotic men at her mother’s knee.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “For everyone involved. That sounds horrific.”

“Your mother never recovered.”

But Lily didn’t want to talk about her mother. Her bright and fragile and largely absent mother, who had shivered at the slightest wind, susceptible to every emotional storm that rolled her way. Her mother, who had self-medicated with ever more dangerous combinations of prescription pills, always under the aegis of this or that quack of a doctor.

“Did you know that she died eighteen months ago?” Rafael continued. “That wouldn’t have happened if she’d known her daughter was still alive.”

That one would leave deep, deep scars, Lily knew. But she didn’t crack. What she felt about her doomed and careless mother paled in comparison to what she had to keep safe here.

“My mother is in jail,” she told him, and she had no idea how she managed to sound so even. “Last I heard she’d found Jesus, for the third time. Maybe this time it’ll stick.”

“These are all lies.” He was too intense. His gaze was too penetrating. She was terribly afraid he could see straight through her, see everything. “What I can’t understand is how you imagine you can tell them to my face. You can’t really think I’m likely to believe them, can you?”

Lily didn’t know what might have happened then. They were at a stalemate and she had no idea how to extricate herself from this—but then she heard voices calling to her from across the street.

Two of Pepper’s clients stood there, a married couple who called her Alison and made polite enough conversation while she held herself still, icy with terror, waiting for them to ask after Arlo. But when they did, as they inevitably did because this was the South and people still took manners seriously here, she realized there was no need to panic. The man beside her didn’t move a muscle. And why would he? It wasn’t as if Rafael knew that name. He couldn’t possibly know what it meant.

She was something like giddy with her relief when the couple moved on.

“I hope that clears things up for you,” she said.

“Because they called you by this assumed name of yours?” Rafael’s voice was mild. “Questions only lead to more questions. You’ve been living here for some time, clearly. You’ve made yourself part of this community.” His expression was harsh. Something like unforgiving. “You had no intention of ever coming home, did you? You were content to let us mourn your death as if it was real.”

He’d let go of her car door, and she slammed it shut then, aware of the way his dark eyes narrowed on her as she did. She ignored him, beeping the alarm on and swinging around again, heading back toward the mall. Where there would be lights and people. More people who knew her. More people to put between them and use as a barrier.

“Where are you going?” he asked, not particularly nicely. “Is this what you do now, Lily? You run away? Where will I find you next time—roaming the streets of Paraguay? Mozambique? Under an entirely different assumed name?”

She kept walking, and he fell into step beside her, which wasn’t any kind of help. It made her remember far too many things best left shut away inside her. It made her think about things that could only hurt. He matched his athletic stride to hers, the way he always had. He was so close that if she merely leaned a little bit to the left, she could nudge up against his arm, which was the closest they’d ever come to public displays of affection back in the day.

She felt blinded with grief, then, and with that old, sick need that had taken over so much of her life back then. But she kept her eyes straight ahead and told herself it was the cold weather stinging at her eyes, nothing more.

There had to be a way out of this. There had to be a way to get rid of him. She had to keep Arlo safe. That was the only thing that mattered in the past five years and it was the only thing that she could let matter now.

She felt safer once they reached the crowd on the festive mall. Not that she thought Rafael was likely to abduct her or anything that required so much commitment—but if he’d had any thoughts in that direction, it would be a great deal harder surrounded by so many people.

“Are we shopping?” Rafael’s voice was sardonic, managing to slice through the noise, the singing. The barricades she’d been erecting inside her as they’d walked. “This reminds me far more of the lonely little heiress I once knew.”

“I thought I’d get something hot to drink and get out of the cold for a moment,” she said, refusing to react outwardly to what he’d said. Though she had to blink hard to get the red haze to roll back, and it actually hurt to bite her tongue.

She hadn’t been a lonely little heiress. There’d been little enough to inherit, first of all, outside her mother’s house. But the poor little rich kid in this scenario had been bored, sybaritic party boy Rafael, beloved of C-list actresses, reality television pseudostars and a host of lingerie models. Those had been the women he’d paraded around with in public. Those had been the women he’d brought home with him, the women he’d taunted Lily with on all those terrible family vacations at Lake Tahoe, letting them drape their cosmetically enhanced bodies all over him and then making her admit her jealousy before he’d ease her pain a little with his clever fingers, that awful mouth of his and the things he could do with a few stolen moments against a locked door.

He was a terrible man, she reminded herself fiercely as they ducked out of the way of a kid on a skateboard. He’d been hideous to her, and worse, she’d let him. There was nothing here to be conflicted about. Everything between them had been twisted and wrong. She loathed who she’d been around him. The lies she’d told, the secrets she’d kept. She’d hated that life she’d been trapped in.

She refused to go back to it. She refused to accept that her only fate was to become her sad mother, one way or another. She refused to let the poison of that life, those people, infect Arlo. She refused.

Lily didn’t wait to see if Rafael was following her—she knew he was, she could feel that he was right on her heels like an agent of doom—she simply marched down the mall until she reached her favorite café, then she tossed open the door and walked in.

Straight into another male body.

She heard an Italian curse that Rafael had taught her when she was a teenager—as pretty to the ear as it was profoundly filthy—and she jerked back, only to look up into another set of those dark Castelli eyes.

Damn it.

Luca, younger than Rafael by three years. The quieter, more solid stepbrother, to her recollection, but then, she’d never seen much besides Rafael. Luca looked as if she’d sucker punched him. Lily felt as if she’d sustained the same blow. It might have been possible to convince only Rafael that she was someone else—or so she’d been desperate to believe the whole walk here. But both Castelli brothers? There was no way.

She was completely and utterly screwed.

“Ah, yes,” Rafael said from behind her, that sardonic tone of his wrapping around her, far hotter than the heat of the café or the shock in his brother’s gaze. “Luca, you remember our late stepsister, Lily. It turns out she’s been alive and well and right here in Virginia this whole time. Hale and hearty, as you can see.”

“I’m not Lily,” she snapped, though she suspected that was more desperate than strategic, especially with both men scowling at her. But there was only one man’s scowl she could feel inside her, like acid. “I’m getting tired of telling you that.”

Rafael’s gaze was a blast of dark fire as he stepped to the side and then steered her out of the way of oncoming foot traffic, there in the café doorway, with a hand on her arm she couldn’t shake off fast enough. But perhaps that was even less strategic, she thought, when his lush mouth quirked slightly—very much as if he knew exactly what his touch did to her, even all these years later.

As if he could feel the lick of that fire as well as she could.

He directed his attention to his brother. “Though, you will note, she does appear to be suffering from a convenient case of amnesia.”

Which was not a solution, but was the best answer to her current situation, of course.

And it was how Lily decided, right there on the spot in that crowded little café, that amnesia was exactly what she had. In spades.

CHAPTER THREE

“THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE,” was all that Luca said, while Lily pretended she wasn’t affected by the shock on his face.

“Behold,” Rafael answered him darkly, though that hot, furious gaze of his was on Lily, making her skin feel much too hot beneath her winter layers. “I bring you tidings of comfort and joy. Our own Christmas miracle.”

“How?” Luca asked. It was the closest to shaken she’d ever heard him.

It made her feel awful. Hollow. But this was no time to indulge that.

The three of them shifted out of the flow of café traffic, over near the row of stools that sat at the window looking over the mall and all its holiday splendor. The Castelli brothers stood there like a six-foot-and-then-some wall of her past, staring at her with entirely too much emotion and intensity. She tried to look unbothered. Or perhaps slightly concerned, if that—the way a stranger would.

“How did she manage to walk away from that crash?” Luca asked. “How did she disappear for five years without a single trace?”

Lily had no intention of telling either one of them how easy that had been. All she’d needed to do was walk away. And then never, ever revisit her past. Never look back. Never revisit any of the people or places she’d known before. All she’d needed was a good enough reason to pretend that she’d had no history whatsoever—and then six weeks into her impetuous, spur-of-the-moment decision, she’d found she had the best reason of all. But how could she explain that to two Italian men who could trace their lineage back centuries?

Even if she’d wanted to explain. Which she didn’t.

You can’t, she reminded herself sharply. That was the trouble with the Castelli family. Any exposure to them at all and she stopped doing what she knew she should do and started doing whatever it was they wanted, instead.

“Oddly,” Rafael replied, in that same dark tone, still studying her though he was clearly speaking to Luca, “she is claiming that she is a different person and that none of that happened to her.”

“She is also standing right here in front of you and can speak for herself,” Lily said tartly then. “I’m not claiming anything. Your confusion over my identity is very much your problem, not mine. You assaulted me on a dark street. I think I’m being remarkably indulgent, given the circumstances.”