She looked up. The wariness in her large, dark eyes ate at him. Her wavy, golden hair fluttered around her delicate features. He gave in to a need he often had upon seeing her, palming the back of her skull and sinking his fingers into the soft tendrils of her hair. He’d never known a woman to have such a pretty, sexy head. Every time he saw her he wanted to cup it in his palm, delve his finger into threads of coiling, golden-blond silk.

The truth was, if a similarly impossible scenario as the one that had presented itself with Emma came up with another woman, Vanni wouldn’t have bothered to explain. He would have just chalked it up to bad luck and moved on. He didn’t invest in relationships. There were other women. Why should he have to make an effort to rationalize his actions or his nature?

But here he was with Emma, determined to try. What made it even more incredible, at least from where he was standing, was that he was embarrassed about what she’d seen. It wasn’t because he’d dominated Astrid sexually on that night that shamed him; that was background noise to him, even though he understood it wasn’t to Emma. No, it was his bored, lackluster performance, the evidence of how his black mood permeated even his sexual life of late. That was what shamed him more than anything.

His gaze lowered to her pink mouth. That’s how he knew just how strongly he wanted Emma. He was willing to sacrifice a fair portion of his pride in order to have her. What’s more, he wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed. The circumstances were unprecedented. He didn’t have a lot of experience explaining himself to women. Either they got him, or they didn’t. Fitting himself into some preconceived idea of what a woman expected of him wasn’t something he was remotely interested in doing.

He saw the anxiety flicker across her face and sighed, dropping his hand from her skull, cupping her shoulder instead. She’d really curled up in that armoire and listened while he selfishly took his pleasure with another woman. She really was undone by this whole thing.

Yet here she was, willingly choosing to be with him. He admired her courage.

Another feeling rose up in him, a surprising, slicing one: Jealousy.

He couldn’t recall being as anxious as Emma looked in that moment. Not even for a majority of his childhood. His hide was too tough. He was the strong one, or so everyone said. He was the survivor. He was too bitter, too jaded to ever wear that expression again, to ever feel that vulnerable. There had to have been a time when he was that open, that unguarded to the world, though.

Hadn’t there been?

He shut his eyes briefly, shielding himself from her luminous face. It would be so much easier just to forget about it all. He’d have to examine himself far too closely for comfort in order to have Emma. It would be messy and just . . . too much of an effort.

Way too much. He should take her home this instant.

“I’m just a man, Emma. I’m not so twisted that you can’t see that, am I?” he asked quietly instead, opening his eyes.

“I see you,” she whispered.

The hair on his nape stood on end as she studied him. He suddenly felt anxious.

“And you’re not twisted,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

He exhaled, realizing he’d been waiting for her assessment like an irreversible, binding judgment, stupid and illogical as that was.

He looked into shining, velvety-soft eyes. Innocent. Enigmatic. Her lush, unadorned lips trembled slightly. He experienced an overwhelming urge to plunge his tongue into her mouth, to pierce her everywhere he could . . . anything to feel her as deeply as was humanly possible, to be so tight and high inside her that for a brief, mindless moment of bliss, he possessed her.

Christ. He was kidding himself if he thought he was the master of this situation. Did he really think he could ever defile her? Not even in his wildest depravity could he begin to span the depths of this wisp of a girl’s eyes.

He inhaled sharply, gathering himself. He put his hands on her waist and lifted. She gave a little of cry of surprise when he set her on top of the brick wall in front of him. Her face was almost level with his now. He stepped between her parted thighs, keeping his hands on her narrow waist.

“Okay,” he said, holding her startled stare. “What should we talk about first?”

Her mouth trembled with amusement. “It’s come to my attention lately that I have a problematic habit of denying reality,” she said. “I’ve been known to prefer my own comfortable version of the world. I think it’s best I face the truth when it comes to you, don’t you?”

His expression flattened. She really was unexpected.

“Absolutely,” he said. “You were disturbed by what you saw that night. And in the aftermath, you convinced yourself that I wasn’t the same man you’d seen.”

Emma nodded.

“Is this the problematic habit you referred to? The one where you refuse to see certain things?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think you didn’t want to allow yourself to know it was me?” he asked, taking a step closer to her and holding her stare.

She swallowed thickly at the sensation of his body brushing against her open thighs. His gaze bore straight down to the center of her.

“Because it was safer to assume you weren’t the man who did those things,” she said honestly. He didn’t reply, seeming to sense there was more. She bit her lip and looked away. “And because I was disturbed by what I saw.”

“Disturbed,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“And disgusted.”

She nodded.

“Were you aroused?”

The silence stretched, interrupted only by the sound of the gentle, soughing surf against the rocks below. Her pulse started to leap at her throat like it wanted to escape her skin. Face reality.

“Yes,” she said softly, her cheeks burning. Her gaze leapt to his. “But I was upset. It seemed wrong, what you were doing. And I was mad at you.”

“Mad?” he clarified, his fingers moving subtly on her waist, the sensation distracting her. “For flogging Astrid? For restraining her?”

“Yes,” she hissed, frowning at him for his ease at broaching the most volatile of topics. “But not just for that.”

“What then?” he asked intently. “Emma?” he prompted when she just sat there.

“For making me feel so much,” she admitted in a rush. “For making me feel things I didn’t even know existed. I was disgusted, and confused, and curious, and angry, and . . . aroused,” she forced herself to say the word. “It was too much to consider, you being that man when I met you face-to-face the next night. Too much to handle. I didn’t do it consciously. I just ignored the facts.”

“What facts?”

“Lots of things,” she mused, studying his tie. “Like why would a guest room have a monitor for Cristina in it, or worse yet, that . . . that apparatus, that thing you tied . . .”

She faded off, embarrassment overwhelming her.

“Yes, I see what you mean,” he said. “Why would a guest room have that? What else did you ignore?”

She gave him an exasperated look. “Why does it matter?”

“It matters,” he said quietly. “Unless I understand your state of mind, it’s hard to know how to relieve your anxiety.”

She lowered her head. “Lots of things,” she murmured. “I told myself not only was your hair shorter than the man’s I’d seen, the color was darker as well. But of course when you cut your hair, the highlights went, too, for the most part. Every other time I saw you afterward, it was in dim light, so it looked even darker.” She inhaled through her nose slowly. “Your scent,” she added in a whisper. “Sandalwood with just a hint of citrus and leather. My mother loved things like candles and potpourri. Her sense of smell was very sharp. She could tell what certain stews and soups needed just by smelling the broth. I got her nose. When I was in the armoire,” she mumbled, “I could smell you, but there was something just a tad different mixing with your scent: motor oil. The garments I was sitting in when I was in the armoire—I couldn’t see them, because it was dark—but they were your coveralls, weren’t they? The ones you wear when you’re working on cars?”

“Yes.”

Her throat ached when she swallowed. “I knew it,” she said softly. “Or part of me did. I recognized your scent and the texture of the fabric when you held me last week in the garage and you were wearing the coveralls.”

He said nothing. She looked up at him uncertainly. Expectantly. His long bangs had fallen forward in the lake breeze, so that his gleaming eyes were shadowed.

“What do you imagine that I’m going to tell you now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess you’re a person who likes BDSM, and that’s your lifestyle choice? And that it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s your sexual preference? That it’s consensual and no one gets hurt?”

“Very politically correct,” he said, his small smile gentle despite his mild sarcasm.

“Well what would you say?”

His hands moved on her waist, stroking her in a seemingly distracted fashion while he thought. “I’m sorry,” he said, perhaps noticing her impatience. “Believe it or not, I don’t sit around thinking up excuses for why I want something, or why I want it a certain way. But I will tell you this. You were right to be disgusted that night.”

“What?” she asked, taken aback. She hadn’t expected him to agree with her.

“I did behave coldly. Selfishly. You believe that your disgust came from sexual practices you weren’t familiar with, which is part of it. But I think the reason you were disgusted is that you caught me behaving badly,” he stated starkly. He met her incredulous stare. “You caught me in the act, Emma, of depravity. It’s one thing to prefer to dominate a woman and to care about her security and her pleasure, to want to claim it. There was nothing wrong technically in the things I did that night. It was consensual, and I would never harm a woman. But because I didn’t really care, one way or the other about Astrid’s pleasure—or even remotely about her—it was wrong,” he admitted.

“She certainly didn’t seem to find her pleasure lacking,” Emma said dryly, resisting an urge to touch his tension-filled face.

“I would have been better off masturbating instead of being with her.”

“She was using you as well,” Emma said after she’d recovered from his bald statement.

“We all use each other to some degree,” he said quietly. His long fingers stretched, gently kneading her back muscles. Her undeniable attraction to him, her need, swelled in her breast. She wanted very much to pull him closer to her, to press against him.

Instead, she forced herself to focus on what he was saying. “So you’re saying that I probably would have been upset even if I’d witnessed you having sex with Astrid by more conventional means?” she asked carefully.

“I’m guessing that’s what disgusted you the most, yes, although not being familiar with the particulars, you were shocked by them as well. You knew I didn’t care, that I felt no sense of connection or even true desire for her. You sensed I was bored and cynical—”

“I thought you were behaving beneath yourself,” she said abruptly, interrupting him. “And it pissed me off.”

They faced off in the silence that followed. His face was a mask, but the heat in his eyes told her she might have angered him.

“It’s not a pleasant thing for me to consider, either,” he said. “Do you even realize that? I wouldn’t have thought twice about that night if you hadn’t intruded, aside from some passing self-disgust. Your eyes were an uninvited, extremely uncomfortable mirror,” he bit out, “and yet here I look into them.”

His voice rang and rattled in her head.

No, she hadn’t considered how difficult it might be for him to think of her watching him in the midst of his bitterness. He’d been vulnerable while having sex that night, but not to Astrid.

To Emma.

She blinked and felt the burn in her eyes. She realized something else.

“I thought you were beautiful,” she said. “Despite it all.”

His features stiffened. His hands tightened at her waist.

“I have never wanted a woman the way I do you,” he said. “Tell me what you need to make this right.”

Her heart began to pound in her ears.

“There are so many things I don’t understand,” she admitted.

“Then ask.”

“Okay,” she said tremulously. “Who is Adrian?”

He blinked. He definitely hadn’t expected her to ask that question.

Ask for Adrian’s forgiveness, she recalled him saying in Cristina’s last moments. Vanni had demanded that Cristina ask for his mother and Adrian’s forgiveness, then denied her his own. Cristina had mentioned the name, too. Emma had been wildly curious since she’d heard the name. She knew from Googling the Montand name, and Vanni’s explanation for his nickname, that Michael was the name of his father, so he wasn’t Adrian. In her imagination, the name Adrian had taken on some kind of forbidden charge, a name that was thought but never said . . . one of the unspoken words hanging like a dense cloud at Cristina’s burial.

She drew three shaky breaths in the silence that followed, her anxiety ratcheting up. His face looked rigid. For a few seconds, she thought he wouldn’t answer. She shouldn’t have asked.

“My brother. My twin brother. He’s dead.”

Her mouth sagged open. “You had a twin?” she asked, shocked. “How . . . how did he die?”

“He drowned, but Cristina killed him.”

Emma gasped at the quiet, yet brutal, slicing quality of his tone.

Vanni exhaled and dropped his hands from her waist, placing them on the wall near her hips, his thumbs touching her skirt. He lowered his head so that she couldn’t see his eyes.

“We were swimming in Lake Michigan. We were nine years old and shouldn’t have been in the water that day at all, but if so, only under close supervision. That was what Cristina was supposed to be doing, but she was too busy with more important matters,” Vanni said in a weary, bitter tone. “Cristina was kind enough to Adrian and me when my father was around, but when he wasn’t, she could be vindictive and negligent. It was the latter that ended up being the most deadly of her sins, although I always felt there was a fair share of the former in the instance of Adrian’s death. More likely, she hadn’t thought things through much, if that was the case. It was me she hated the most, and I was always physically stronger than Adrian. It was that way ever since we were born—”

He broke off. Emma just sat there, wretched at having brought up the awful topic, miserable at the glimpse of his pain.

“There was a strong undertow that day,” he continued in a flat tone that she hated. “Other beaches along the lakeshore had been closed, but that’s not the kind of thing Cristina would have bothered to find out before she told two nine-year-olds to go swim and then attended to matters of real importance—her social schedule. We were caught by a strong undertow and pulled out toward the breakers. He hit them, and was wounded. Afterward he was weakened. He didn’t have a chance of keeping his head up in the rough water with that undertow pulling at us.”

“Oh my God,” Emma whispered, horrified. “Vanni, I’m so sorry.”

And he’d been there. He’d seen it all, as had Cristina, most likely. Vanni had survived, and his twin hadn’t.

“Did it happen at the Breakers?” Emma whispered, a little frightened by the idea for Vanni’s sake.

“It was there, but a different house. I had the Breakers built after my father died several years ago, on the site of my childhood home.”

She just stared at him a moment, connecting dots, trying to make sense of it all and struggling. Such a beautiful place to die, she recalled Cristina saying on the day she’d passed. Emma had mistakenly thought she’d meant her own impending death. Now she understood that Cristina had meant Adrian’s.

“You say that you blame Cristina,” Emma said slowly, “but you insisted on the drapes being closed in her suite, blocking her from a vision that she would have undoubtedly found upsetting to endure, day in and day out. You say she was negligent, but you were very careful about keeping her well cared for and shielded from the site of Adrian’s death.” He remained unmoving, his head lowered. “And you were there when Adrian died, too,” she whispered, a prickly feeling of dread rising in her. “Yet you built a house where you have no choice but to stare at the place where he died. You can never escape from it . . .” He straightened, his hands falling to his sides. She faded off when she saw that hard, glacial look enter his eyes. Once again, she’d dared to tread where she shouldn’t.

Where she had no right.

She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the sudden feeling of intense sadness. “I’m so sorry, Vanni,” she said sincerely. “To lose not only a brother, but a twin at that age.”

“My other half,” he said, as if to himself. A grim smile pulled at his lips. “My better half. Much better.

“Do we have to discuss this now?” he asked after a moment. “I thought we were going to talk about your uncertainties. Do you want to be with me or not, Emma?”

This time, she didn’t stop herself from reaching up and touching his face.

“You know that I do.”

“Do I? I’m not so certain. You have no idea what I see in your eyes, do you? Right this second?” he said, his mouth twisting slightly. “You’re afraid of me.”

“No,” she said steadfastly. “If there is fear there, it’s for myself. I’m worried about what could happen to me, being with you. Don’t you think that’s natural?”

He looked like he’d just eaten something bitter. “I think it’s right that you should question it. Maybe it’s for the best,” he said, stepping back so that her hand fell from his jaw.

“I haven’t decided yet, Vanni,” Emma said starkly. He glanced up and she saw the surprise in his eyes, the flash of hope. The subsequent wariness.

“Give me some time to think about it, okay?” she asked more quietly. “I just want your word that if . . . if I agree—”

“I’ll keep you safe, Emma. I wouldn’t harm you. Ever. I only want to challenge you. I want to see you helpless with desire, just as helpless as you’re making me. I want to look into your face and see nothing but pure need.”

Her mouth dropped open. A rush of heat went through her, a fire set by his raw words and the spark in his gleaming eyes.

She nodded and stared at her knees. “Okay. Thank you for telling me,” she said through a tight throat. “I’ll think about it. I’m pretty busy with my schedule this week. Are you going to be here this weekend? I have Sunday and Monday off.”

“I’m leaving on Monday for France,” he said, and her heart plummeted.

“Sunday afternoon then?” she pressed hopefully.

He lifted her chin until she met his eyes. “I’ve given you the code to enter the house. I’ll wait for you at the Breakers at around four o’clock on Sunday. And Emma?” he said more intently, his long forefinger brushing against her jaw.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“If you decide you don’t want to be with me, don’t come. It’ll be easier for both of us that way.”

Emma swallowed thickly and nodded.