Kate Hewitt - Billionaires - The Rebel

“A sign that you should use the night to catch up on work,” she muttered to herself, scowling at her cell phone after she tossed it back down on the nearest case file. “Not gallivant about with the dangerous past.”

It wasn’t until she was back home that evening and finally able to clean up the evidence of Damian’s morning tantrum that she started to rethink that stance. She imagined Dario had visions of some appropriate movie child in his head, all serene smiles and quiet playtime with noninvasive toys under someone else’s cheerful supervision. That was a lovely daydream of a perfect little angel. She’d shared it herself before she’d become a mother. But it wasn’t reality and it definitely wasn’t her son.

She found she couldn’t wait to tell Dario so—and even a guilty look at the stacks of files waiting for her on her coffee table failed to sway her. The man who she suspected had sheets of ice where his heart should have been couldn’t possibly want a child, no matter what he might have said on her doorstep. Hadn’t he said so a thousand times when they’d been together? There was no reason that should have changed in all the time since. And Damian deserved more than a father who would, sooner or later, begrudge his very existence.

Anais had lived that bleak, miserable life. She wouldn’t condemn her own son to it. She wouldn’t.

The front desk was expecting her when she finally made it through the last of the summer traffic down through bustling Kihei and into Wailea, then followed the unobtrusive signs into the parking area of the exclusive resort. A staff member announced that Mr. Di Sione was waiting for her in one of the resort’s private, waterfront villas and proceeded to lead her there as if one or the other of them was visiting royalty.

Of course. Nothing but the best for Dario.

But if she was honest, wasn’t that part of the reason she’d found him so fascinating? He’d been a shot of controlled recklessness. Bright color in the middle of her black-and-white life. He’d been raised wealthy and indulged, and then he and Dante had made their own, personal fortunes while they were still in college. It had meant neither one of them had to pay any attention to the kind of boundaries other people had no choice but to obey.

And Anais had been feral, more or less. She’d raised herself in the crossfire of her parents’ endless wars, and she hadn’t had the slightest idea how to have fun, or fall in love, or be silly for absolutely no reason—all the things Dario had taught her.

Taught her, then taken away, as if all those things belonged to him and had only ever been on loan to the likes of her.

Anais got more and more furious as she walked, following the diffident staff member across one of the most stunning hotel grounds on Maui as the sun dropped toward the water, all sweeping views juxtaposed with sleek, modern designs that somehow evoked ancient Hawaii in the gathering dark—not that any of it registered. The truth was, she was lucky. She’d been an attorney for years now in one of the most beautiful places in the world. She liked her job, her clients and the life she’d built here. Practicing law was comfortable and it allowed her to take care of Damian and help out her aunt and uncle, too, when she could.

She was damned proud of those things. This was the life she’d built all on her own. Her parents had stopped even the pretense of any obligations to her the day she’d turned eighteen. Her husband had abandoned her seven years later, right after she’d finally learned to trust him. Yes, her aunt and uncle helped her as best they could and that had been everything to her at times, but ultimately Anais had made herself by herself.

Anais had never had Dario’s kind of money, however, and she never would. She’d spent a long time telling herself she was glad of that—that it was all the money he and Dante had made while they were still in college that had ruined him, in the end. It had made him expect too much from the world and everyone in it, as if he could make everything he looked at what he wanted it to be, simply because he wanted it that way. It had also trained him to see the very worst in people, as they schemed to get close to him and use him for their own ends.

She’d been arrogant enough to think she was the antidote to that, but it had turned out that once a man was poisoned, that was how he stayed. Unless the man in question wanted something different for himself. Dario had pretended he had, but he hadn’t.

In the end, he hadn’t wanted anything he’d claimed he did. Particularly not Anais.

And for some reason the exquisite four-bedroom villa that would have been more than suitable for a king and the whole of his royal court seemed to press that fact deeper into her as she found herself knocking at his door, the staff member having long since melted away into the exultant, flowered shrubbery festooned with torches and dancing with real flames against the sunset.

She knocked with a wide-open hand, loudly and rudely, and of course Dario didn’t rush to answer her. It gave her far too much time to stand there and think better of this. To wonder what she thought she might gain from acquiescing to his demands no matter what her reasons might have been.

And worse, what she stood to lose.

Nothing with Dario had ever been straightforward. They’d skipped regular dating altogether—having fallen hard into something far more intense neither one of them had dared name. Then they’d gotten married much too fast, each telling the other and maybe themselves it was a cool, rational decision based on Anais’s immigration status as a French citizen instead of that insane fire that had consumed them both in bed. Dario had told her very little about his family, except that his twin was the only one he truly cared about at all—and yet Dante had been openly suspicious of her from the start. She’d tried to ignore that, too swept up in her first year of law practice and the head-spinning reality of her first lover who was also the husband she didn’t dare admit she’d fallen head over heels in love with.

Maybe it wasn’t surprising that it had taken exactly one year for it all to fall apart.

There was nothing good to be gained by poking her fingers into those old wounds, she told herself then, scowling at the villa’s front door.

This is for Damian, she reminded herself. She chanted it a few times, just to make sure she was listening to her own words, and knocked again. Louder.

And this time Dario swung the door open and took her breath away.

It only made her that much more furious with him. She kept telling herself that, too, with even less success.

Dario wore nothing but a loose pair of linen trousers that hung low—much too low—on his lean hips and made it impossible to do anything but gape at that remarkable chest of his. She’d assured herself that he couldn’t possibly be as good-looking as she remembered, as perfectly formed, like something that ought to have been carved from marble and propped up in a museum. She’d had six years to decide she’d built him up in her head.

She hadn’t.

If anything, he was far, far better than she remembered, all flat planes of muscle and that ridged abdomen, smooth olive skin and a dusting of dark hair that arrowed down beneath those low-hanging, decadent trousers. Even his bare feet were gorgeous, big and inescapably male, and she hated everything about this.

Mostly, she hated that terrible yearning that ripped through her, tearing her wide open and making it impossible to lie to herself about it. She wanted him. She’d always wanted him. That connection between them had been everything to her, for a time.

There had never been anything as huge or powerful or all-consuming in all her life, until she’d held Damian for the first time in the hospital.