Unwrapping The Castelli Secret

“You assaulted her?” Luca’s dark brows edged up his forehead as he shifted his gaze to his brother. “That doesn’t sound much like you.”

“Of course not.” But Rafael still did not look away from Lily as he said that.

Inside, in the warmth and the light of the café, she could see the hints of gold in those dark eyes of his that had once fascinated her beyond measure. And she could feel his mouth against hers again, a wild bright thing in all that December dark. She told herself what moved in her then was a memory, that was all. Nothing more than a memory.

“I don’t think—” She almost said your brother but caught herself in the nick of time.

Would a stranger to these men know they were brothers at a glance? She thought the family resemblance was like a shout in a quiet room—unmistakable and obvious. Their imposing height, their strong shoulders, their rangy, rampantly masculine forms and all that absurd muscle that made them look carved to perfection. The thick black hair that, when left to its own devices, flirted with the tendency to curl.

Luca wore his in a haphazard manner he’d already raked back from his brow several times as they stood there. Rafael, by contrast, looked like some kind of lethal monk, with his hair so short and that grim look on his face. But they shared the same mouth, carnal and full, and she knew they even laughed in that same captivating, stunning way—using the whole of their bodies as if giving themselves over to pleasure was why they’d been placed on this earth.

Not that she could imagine this stark, furious, older version of Rafael laughing about anything—and she told herself she felt nothing at that thought. No pang. No sharp thing in the vicinity of her chest. Nothing at all.

She directed her attention toward Luca. “I don’t think your friend is well.”

“That’s a nice touch,” Rafael said flatly. “‘Friend.’ Very convincing. But I am not the one who is in some doubt as to his identity.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Lily continued, still looking at Luca, though it was almost as if he appeared in silhouette, with Rafael the dark and brooding sun that was the only thing she could see no matter where she looked. “I’m not sure, but he might need medical attention.”

Rafael said something in a sleek torrent of Italian that made Luca blink, then nod once, sharply. Clearly Rafael had issued an order. And it seemed that in this incarnation of the Castelli family, Rafael expected his orders to be followed and, more astonishing by far, they were. Because Luca turned away, toward a man and woman she’d completely failed to notice were sitting on the stools a few feet away watching this interaction with varying degrees of interest, and started talking to them in a manner clearly designed to turn their attention to him.

And off Lily and Rafael.

“I’m going to leave you in your friend’s hands now,” Lily told Rafael then, in a falsely bright sort of voice that she hoped carried over the shout of the espresso machine and some pop star’s whiny rendition of a Christmas carol on the sound system.

Rafael’s mouth moved again, another one of those too-hard quirks that felt wired directly to every last nerve in her body. It set them all alight and shivering. “Do you think so?”

“I have a life.” She shouldn’t have snapped that. It sounded defensive. A true stranger wouldn’t be defensive, would she? “I have—” She had to be careful. So very careful “—things to do that don’t include tending to strange men and their confusion over matters that have nothing to do with me.”

“Why did you come here?” he asked, much too quietly, when she could see temper and pain and something far darker in gaze.

Maybe that was why she didn’t throw herself out the door. That darkness that she could feel inside her, too. The guilt she couldn’t quite shake. But she did deliberately misunderstand him.

“This is my favorite coffee shop in Charlottesville. I was hoping a peppermint mocha might wash away all of that weirdness out in the street, and give you time to sober up.”

Amusement lit his dark gaze and it walloped her hard in the gut. So hard she saw stars for a moment.

“Am I drunk?”

“I don’t know what you are.” She tilted her head slightly. “I don’t know who you are.”

“So you have said.”

Lily waved a dismissive hand in the air. “I think this must be a rich-man thing. You think you see someone you know in the street, so you hunt them down and demand that they admit they’re that person, despite their insistence—and documented proof—that they’re someone else. I’d end up in jail if I tried that—or on a psychiatric ward. But I imagine that’s not a concern for someone as wealthy as you are.”

“Has my net worth penetrated the shroud of your broken memory?” His voice should have left marks, it was so scathing. “I find that is often the case. It’s amazing how many women I’ve never met can estimate my net worth to the penny.”

“You told me you were rich.” She used a tone she was quite certain no one had ever used on him before. One that suggested he was extraordinarily dim, though he looked more entertained by that than he did furious. “Not to mention, you’re not exactly dressed like a vagrant, are you?”

“When will this performance end?” he asked softly.

“Right now.” She straightened. “I’m going home. And I’m not asking you if that’s all right with you. I’m informing you. I suggest you get a good night’s sleep—maybe then you’ll stop seeing things.”

“What is amusing about that, Lily, is that tonight is the first time in five years that I haven’t seen a ghost when I thought I saw you.” He didn’t look as if he found that even remotely amusing. She knew she didn’t. “You are entirely real and standing right here in front of me, at long last.”

She forced a smile. “They say everyone has a twin.”

“If I were to open your coat and look beneath your shirt right now, what would I find?” he asked in the same softly menacing way.

“An assault charge,” she retorted, her tone brisk. “And a potential jail sentence, God willing.”

His mouth shifted into something not quite a smile. “A scarlet lily nestled in a climbing black vine, crawling over your right hip and stretching up your side, perhaps?”

His dark gaze was so intent, so absolutely certain, that it took her breath away. And it was far harder than it should have been to simply stand there. To do nothing. To keep herself from touching her side in wordless acknowledgment, jerking back as if he’d caught her or any of a hundred other little tells that would show him her guilt.

Not that he appeared to be in any doubt about her guilt. Or her identity.

“There are a number of good psychiatrists in the Charlottesville area,” she told him when she was certain she could speak without any of that turmoil in her voice. Only the politeness she’d offer any random person she encountered, with a little compassion for someone so obviously nutty. “I’m sure one of them would see you for an emergency session. Your net worth will undoubtedly help with that.”

He really smiled then, though it was nothing like the Rafael smiles of old, so bright and carefree he could have lit up the whole of Europe if he’d wanted. This one was hard. Focused. Determined—and still it echoed deep inside her like a touch.

She was so busy telling herself that he didn’t affect her and he didn’t get to her at all that she didn’t move out of the way fast enough. She didn’t even see the danger until it was too late. His hand was on her too quickly, his fingers brushing over her temple, and Lily didn’t know how to react as sensation seared through her.

Would a stranger leap away? Or stand there, frozen in shock and disbelief?

“Get your hand off me right now,” she gritted out, going with the frozen option—because that was what she was. Head to toe. She didn’t think she could move if she’d wanted to, she was so rooted to the ground in what she told herself was outrage. She could feel his touch everywhere. Everywhere. Hot and right and perfect. As if all these years later, the merest brush of his fingers was all he had to do to prove that she’d been stumbling around in the cold black-and-white dark without him.

This was heat. This was color and light and—

This is dangerous! everything inside her shrieked in belated alarm.

“You got this scar skiing in Tahoe one winter,” he murmured, his voice pitched low, as if those were words of love or sex instead of accusation as he traced the tiny mark she’d long since forgotten was there. Up, then down. The effect was narcotic. “You hit a patch of ice and then, shortly after that, a tree. You were lucky you didn’t break anything except one ski. You had to walk down the side of the mountain, and you terrified the entire family when you appeared in the chalet, bleeding.”

He moved closer, those dark eyes of his intense and moody, focused on that little scar she didn’t even see anymore when she looked at herself. And surely the stranger she was pretending to be would have been paralyzed just as she was, then—suspended between the need to run screaming into the street and the desire to stay right where she was. Surely anyone would do the same.

Anyone for whom this man has always been a terrible addiction, a harsh voice inside told her.

But she still didn’t move.

“And I had to make the sarcastic remarks of the bored older brother I never was to you,” Rafael said gruffly. “Playing it off for our parents. Until later.”

Lily blinked. She remembered later. He’d used the key she shouldn’t have given him to her hotel room and found her in the shower. She could remember it too easily, too well, in too much detail. The steam. The sting of the hot water against her chilled skin. Rafael shouldering his way into the glassed-in little cubicle still fully dressed, his mouth uncharacteristically grim and a harsh light in his beautiful eyes.

Then his mouth had been on hers, and she’d wrapped herself around him, melting into him the way she always had. His hands had slicked over the curve of her hips, that damned tattoo she’d claimed she hated and he’d claimed he loved, until he’d simply dispensed with his wet trousers, picked her up and surged deep inside her with one slick, sure thrust.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he’d muttered into her hair, and then he’d pounded them both into a wild, screaming oblivion. Then he’d carried her out of the shower, laid her out on the hotel bed and done it all over again. Twice.

She’d found that desperately romantic at the time, but then, she’d been a pathetic twenty-two-year-old under this man’s spell that winter. Now, she told herself firmly, it was nothing more than another bad memory wrapped up in too much sex she shouldn’t have been having with a man she never, ever should have touched.

“That is a very disturbing story with some deeply troubling family dynamics,” she said now, batting his hand away from her face. “But it still doesn’t make me this other woman, no matter how many stories you tell to convince yourself otherwise.”

“Then you must take a DNA test and prove it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Thank you, but I’ll pass.”

“It wasn’t a suggestion.”

“It was an order?” She laughed then, and kept it light somehow. She could see Luca looking over, and those people with him, and knew she’d stayed too long. She had to walk away, because a stranger would have done that long ago. “I’m sure you’re used to giving lots of orders. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me, either.” She caught Luca’s gaze and forced a tight smile. “He’s all yours.”

Lily started for the door then, and she expected Rafael to stop her. She expected a hand on her arm, or worse, and she told herself she absolutely did not feel anything like a letdown when nothing happened. She threw the door open and then, though she knew better, she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder.

Rafael stood where she’d left him and watched her, dark and beautiful and harsher than she’d ever seen him before. She repressed a shiver and told herself it was the December evening. Not him.

“Mi appartieni,” he said, soft and fierce at once. And she understood that little scrap of Italian. He’d taught it to her a long time ago. You belong to me.

Lily sniffed, the cold night in her hair and slapping at her cheeks.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” she managed to say, though her voice was rougher than it should have been had she really not been able to tell the difference between Spanish and Italian. “I’m not her.”

* * *

Once she was gone, swallowed back up by the thick Virginia night, everything inside Rafael went still. Quiet. From that insane buzzing when he’d realized it was really, truly her to a sharp clarity he couldn’t recall ever feeling before.

His brother and their wine association host were talking, and his assistant was trying to show him something business related on his mobile screen, but Rafael simply slashed a hand through the air and they all subsided.

“There is a kennel outside of town run by someone called Pepper,” he told his aide in rapid-fire Italian. “Find it.” He shifted his gaze to Luca. “Call Father’s personal doctor and ask him how a person could have walked away from that accident five years ago and what kind of head injuries she might have sustained when she did.”

“Do you believe she truly has amnesia?” Luca asked. “It sounds like something out of a soap opera. But it is Lily, certainly.”

“There is no doubt about that whatsoever,” Rafael agreed. He’d known it was Lily the moment he’d seen her walk past this window. All the rest was mere confirmation of a truth he already knew, and the taste of her in his mouth after much too long.

Luca stared at him for a moment. “Your grief at her death was extreme. I am closer to her in age and I was less affected. You altered the whole of your life afterward, very much as if...”

Rafael only stared back at his younger brother, brows raised in challenge, daring him to finish that sentence. He didn’t know what Luca saw on his face, but the younger man only nodded, very wisely checked what looked like a smile and then pulled out his mobile.

It took very little time to get the answers he’d requested, dispatch the wine association woman off to tender their apologies to their would-be dinner companions and set out to find Lily in the car his assistant had waiting for them a block outside the pedestrianized area.

“If she is faking this memory loss,” Luca said as he lounged in the back of the sleek vehicle with Rafael, “she might be gone already. Why would she stay? She obviously didn’t want to be found.”

Rafael kept his gaze out the window as the car slipped through the streets and then out into the fields, barren this time of year and gleaming beneath a pale moon. He didn’t think Lily would have moved on yet, with that same gut-deep certainty that told him she was faking this whole thing. She’d been so adamant that she was this other woman, this Alison. He thought the stubborn girl he’d known was far more likely to dig in her heels and brave it out than turn and run—

But the truth is, you don’t know her at all, a dark little voice inside him whispered harshly. Because the girl you knew would never have walked away from you.

“We have a responsibility, as the closest thing Lily has left to any kind of family, to determine that she is not suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress brought on by the accident,” Rafael said. “At the very least.”

The words came so easily to him, when deep down, he knew they were excuses. Lily was alive. That meant he would do whatever he must to claim her the way he should have done five years ago.

But he didn’t want to say that to his brother. Not yet.

It was all for the best, he thought, that Luca did not respond.

The roads were emptier the farther they got from the center of Charlottesville, and the land on either side of the car was beautiful. Stark trees with their empty branches rose over fields still white from the last snow. This was rich, arable land, Rafael knew. Lily had always loved the extensive Castelli vineyards in the northern Sonoma Valley. Perhaps it should not surprise him that she’d found a place to live that was reminiscent. Gnarled vines and plump grapes had been a part of her life since she’d been sixteen and not at all pleased her mother was remarrying.

And even less pleased with him.

He could remember it all so clearly as the car made its way through the frozen Virginia fields. Rafael had been twenty-two. Their parents had gathered them together in the sprawling château that served as the Castelli Wine hub of operation and foremost winery in the States.

And Francine Holloway had been exactly what they’d expected. Beautiful, if fragile and fine featured, with masses of white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes. She’d trembled like a high-strung Thoroughbred and spoken in the kind of soft, high-pitched voice that made a certain sort of man lean in closer. Rafael’s father was precisely that type. He’d loved nothing more than wading in and solving the problems of broken, pretty things like Francine—a preference that dated back to Rafael’s mother, who had spent many years, before and after the divorce, institutionalized in a high-end facility in Switzerland.

Rafael had expected the teenaged daughter to be much the same as the mother, especially with such a wispy, feminine name. But this Lily was fierce. Laughably so, he’d thought, as she’d sat stiffly on an overwrought settee in the formal sitting room at the château and scowled through the introductions.

“You do not appear to hold our parents’ mutual happiness foremost in your heart,” he’d teased her after an endless dinner during which his father had delivered the sort of speeches that might have been moving had Francine not been the old man’s fourth wife, and had Rafael not heard them all before.

“I don’t care about our parents’ happiness at all,” she’d retorted, without looking at him. That had been different. Most girls her age took one look at him and melted into shallow little puddles at his feet. That hadn’t been arrogance on his part. It had been pure, glorious fact—though he’d been, by his own estimation, far too worldly and sophisticated to sample the charms of such young, silly creatures. This one, apparently immune, had sniffed, her gaze trained somewhere far off in the distance through the great windows. “Which is about how much they care about ours, I imagine.”

“I’m sure they care,” Rafael had said, thinking he might soothe her girlish fears with the wisdom of his years. “You have to give them a chance to get over how perfect they imagine they are for each other so they can pay attention to their lives again.”

But Lily had turned to face him, that heart-shaped face of hers still faintly rounded with youth, those impossible eyes scornful. She’d been dressed in a perfectly appropriate sundress that showed nothing untoward at all and yet there had been something about the way she’d worn the masses of her strawberry blond hair tumbling in every direction, or the fact that her shoulders were far too smooth, that had made Rafael wonder what it would be like to touch her—

He’d been horrified.

“I don’t need a big brother,” she’d told him baldly, compounding his shock at the direction of his own thoughts. “I don’t want the unsolicited advice, especially from someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Someone who dates people purely to end up on tabloid television shows, which I’m sure keeps you super relevant in the world of the vapid and the rich. Congrats. And I don’t need you to fill me in on my mother’s ridiculous patterns. I know them all too well, thank you. Your father is the latest in a long line of white knights who never quite manage to save her. It won’t last.”

She’d turned back to the view, her manner clearly dismissive, but Rafael had not been accustomed to being dismissed. Especially not by teenage girls who were usually much more apt to follow him around and giggle. He hadn’t been able to imagine Lily Holloway doing anything of the sort.

“Ah,” he’d said, “but I think you’ll find it will last.”

She’d heaved a sigh but hadn’t looked at him again. “My mother’s relationships have the shelf life of organic produce. Just FYI.”

“But my father is a Castelli.” He’d only shrugged when she’d looked back at him then, her nose wrinkled as if he was more than a little distasteful. “We always get what we want, Lily. Always.”

Sitting in the back of his car as it turned from the main country road and headed down a smaller, private lane lit with quiet lights shaped like lanterns, Rafael still didn’t know why he’d said that. Had he known then? Had he suspected what was to come? Lily had hated him openly and happily for three more years, which had distinguished her from pretty much every other woman on the planet. She’d insulted him, laughed at him, mocked him and dismissed him a thousand times. He’d told himself she was obnoxious. He’d told himself she was jealous.

“She is unbearable,” he’d growled at Luca once, when Lily had spent an evening singing pointed old songs at him and his date.

“But your date really is acting her shoe size instead of her age,” his brother had replied, with a lazy grin. “Lily’s not wrong.”

And then had come that fateful New Year’s Eve party at the château in Sonoma. Rafael had perhaps had too much of the Castelli champagne. He’d long told himself he was simply drunk and she must have been, too, but he’d had five long years thinking she was dead and gone to admit to himself that he hadn’t been anything like drunk. He’d known exactly what he’d been doing when she’d sauntered past him in the upstairs hall of the family wing, in what he’d openly called “hooker shoes” earlier and a dress he’d thought trashily short. Her hair had been tumbling down the way it always had back then, sliding this way and that. The scent of her, a sugared heat, had been maddening.

“If you’re looking for Calliope,” she’d said, and had managed to make his then girlfriend’s ridiculous name sound like an insult, “she’s probably in the nursery with the other children. Your father hired a babysitting service.” She’d smirked at him. “He was obviously expecting you.”

Rafael had known that the last thing in the world he should have done was reach over, slide his palm around her neck and yank that smart mouth to his. Of course he’d known. He’d imagined he would kiss her, she would punch him and he would laugh at her and tell her that if she wasn’t angling to take Calliope’s place, she should keep quiet.

But one touch of her mouth with his, and everything had changed.

Everything.

And you ruined it, he told himself savagely then, as an old farmhouse came into view at the end of the lane. Because that is what you do.

The car pulled up in front of the bright old house and was promptly surrounded by a pack of baying dogs. Rafael climbed out of the car as a silver-haired woman charged out of the house and straight toward them in some misguided attempt to corral her charges.

But despite the barking and howling and general din, Rafael knew it the moment Lily appeared on the step behind the older woman, as if everything else fell quiet. He drank her in. Again. She was no longer wearing her coat and scarf, and he couldn’t keep himself from tracing the fine, elegant lines of that willowy body of hers. Her jeans were snug, making his mouth water, and the long-sleeved shirt she wore hugged her breasts and made him realize how hard and hungry he was for her—even in this sea of animals.

And even if she looked horrified to see him.

“This is stalking!” she threw at him from her place on the steps. “You can’t hunt me down at my home. You don’t have any right!”

Before Rafael could reply, a streaking shape shoved past her and would have hurtled itself down the steps and into the chaos had Lily not reached out and grabbed it.