Sinful Seduction (15 page)

Paralyzed by that poisonous jealousy, he couldn’t hate her enough, much less choke out a response.

“—and you should be angry. I don’t blame you.”

“How generous.”

She paused, nostrils flaring, and he could almost feel the reins of her temper slip through her fingers. “But it was a goodbye kiss, Sandro. That’s all.”

His face felt so hard and so hot that he could barely get his lips to move. “There was a lot more hello than goodbye in that kiss, Sky.”

That caused the explosion he’d been hoping for and needing. With a harsh cry, she slammed her palms on the desk, making the bottle and glass jump.

“What are you doing? Why are you acting this way? You know I love you.”

“Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but Tony knew you loved him, too, didn’t he? Looks to me like there’s still some of that loving going on even though you’re trying to put a good face on it.”

“‘A good face’—
what?
What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “I suppose it means that you don’t want to dump me right away.”

Her jaw dropped with sudden comprehension. “Dump you? I’m not going to dump you!”

“Don’t be too hasty. The perfect Davies twin is back and he still wants you. What’s a girl to do? Decisions, decisions.”

“There’s no decision to make.”

Hallelujah. She finally got it. Lunging across the desk, he caught her upper arm in a hard grip that made her yelp. “You’re damn right there’s no decision to make. He can’t have you.”

Several beats of excruciating silence passed, broken only by the harsh rattle of her shocked breath. “You can’t seriously believe—” she began slowly and quietly, her voice cracking so badly that she had to stop and start again. “After the time we’ve spent together and the things we said and did together last night, you can’t seriously question my feelings for you.”

Oh, he had a lot of questions, but as far as he was concerned, there was only one answer. He tightened his grip on her arm.

“He can’t have you.”

“I’m leaving.” With a low growl and glittering eyes, she snatched her arm free and pivoted for the open door. “I can’t stand to look at you right now.”

Chapter 13

A
frozen moment passed, and all Sandro could do was stare after her and wonder how things had gotten this screwed up in such a head-spinningly short period of time. Then the panic set in.

“Skylar.” Galvanized, he surged to his feet and hurried around his desk. If he could catch her before she—shit.

He stumbled through the doorway and into the hall, his feet tripped up by an indignant mewling fur ball that didn’t appreciate the near loss of one of its nine lives. Perfect timing. Like he had time for kittens right now.

He grabbed the thing up by its scruff and hung on while it tried to squirm free, but then he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. “Nikolas? Is that you?”

His son stepped from the shadows and hit a patch of streaming moonlight from one of the hall windows. The sudden illumination let Sandro see the boy’s stark expression. The poor kid was shell-shocked, and Sandro should know because he’d seen the look often enough in Afghanistan.

Things were, Sandro realized with a heart-contracting burst of clarity, about to get a hell of a lot worse.

The boy’s blankness twisted and turned, knotting into anger fueled by fear. “Is she leaving?”

Sandro didn’t know the answer to that question. He might be a sorry father, but he wasn’t a liar, so he took the only other option and told the sad truth.

“I don’t know.”

Nikolas’s jaw dropped. “You don’t know? Are you shitting me right now?”

“Nikolas.”

But it would take more than a firm voice to stop this volcanic burst of emotion that had been months, maybe years, in the making.

“You’re unbelievable.” The boy’s deep voice boomed in the late night silence, reverberating off the walls and filling Sandro with a taste of his son’s misery. “You take anything that’s good and you screw it up! It’s like a talent you have! Do you work at it, or what? I mean, seriously—how do you manage it?”

“I didn’t—”

“Mom left. Sky’s leaving. Hell, half the time I want to run away and get out of this gloomy-ass house! Why don’t you go back to Afghanistan, man? Things were better when you were gone!”

Something was happening now that Sandro hadn’t seen in a good ten years or more. Nikolas, a tough kid who took his lumps and didn’t let much in life faze him, whether it was his mother’s decision to walk out on the family or his expulsion from summer camp, started to cry.

Since he was equal parts man and boy now, the tears shamed him; Sandro could see it in the desperate way he swiped the back of his hand across his eyes and pressed his lips together while still struggling to talk. Suddenly all Sandro’s turmoil about Tony’s return and his future with Skylar—he would have a future with Skylar, and not even his irrational jealousy was going to ruin it—receded because his boy was in pain and needed whatever comfort he could offer.

“Why don’t you leave, man? Why don’t you get the hell out of here—”

“Nikolas.” Holding the struggling kitten in a firm grip against his chest, Sandro reached out and grabbed the boy around the shoulders, reeling him in. Like the kitten, he flailed and resisted, trying to get away, but Sandro was bigger and his determination stronger. “Come here,” he soothed, acting on pure paternal instinct, because God knew he was no Einstein when it came to dealing with tricky emotional scenes. “Come here. It’s okay.”

“Leave, man! Leave!”

“It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

To his astonishment, Nikolas wound down or wore himself out—Sandro couldn’t tell which. But the next thing he knew, his son was submitting…relaxing…wrapping his wiry arms around Sandro’s waist and holding on for dear life as he sobbed out all the turmoil of a teenager who’d lost a mother and gained a prickly relationship with a father who was learning how to be a dad.

“It’s okay, buddy.” Sandro kept up the mantra, even when his throat grew tight and hoarse and his own unhappiness threatened to choke him. “We’re going to be okay. I’m not leaving you. I’m never leaving you again.”

Eventually, some internal switch deep within Nikolas was flipped, and it was over. Having cried himself out, the boy had nothing left to focus on but his embarrassment, which seemed to be overwhelming. He gave Sandro’s chest a hard push and broke free, hanging his head while he wiped his eyes and nose with the bottom edge of his T-shirt. Then he cleared his throat, shoved his hands deep into his pockets and shuffled his feet. He seemed to be waiting for something.

Sandro, feeling clumsy and inadequate and wishing he had a child psychologist on retainer to advise him during excruciating moments like these, cleared his throat, too.

The kitten continued to mewl.

This was one of those moments, wasn’t it? Where a good father, one like, say, Cliff Huxtable, would offer a couple more words of comfort and wisdom.

Too bad there was no sign of Bill Cosby around here.

“So…” Since his throat still wasn’t clear, he coughed this time, opened his mouth and prayed for a word or two to come. “Things are, aah, kind of crazy around here right now, but they’ll settle down.”

“I doubt it,” Nikolas grumbled, now studying his own toes. “You need to work things out with Sky. Don’t blow it, man. You’ll never do better than her. You know that, right?”

Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

“I know,” Sandro admitted, and since they were discussing hard truths tonight, he decided to throw another one into the mix. “I’m not sure I deserve her, though.”

Nikolas waved a hand, flapping away Sandro’s biggest vulnerability. “Oh, you don’t deserve her—”

“Thanks ever so much.”

“But she’s crazy about you. I don’t think she’ll want to leave here unless you drive her to it. So don’t drive her to it. And give me the kitten. You’re strangling her.”

With that, he snatched the kitten—Leia, right?—away from Sandro and headed down the hall toward the kitchen, cradling her against his chest in a protective grip.

Leaving Sandro to wonder how to get himself out of the hole he’d dug with Sky.

About an hour later, after much pacing and moody ruminating, but no further drinking, Sandro lingered at the top of the stairs, trying to decide what to do.

His first option was to head down the west wing to Skylar’s bedroom, where he’d spent the most incredible night of his life, prostrate himself at her feet and beg for her forgiveness for being a jealousy-racked jerk who couldn’t handle even the vaguest suggestion that he might lose the happiness he’d only just found.

Option two was to head down the east wing to his own room, spend the night in a lonely and hard bed of his own making, wait until morning to commence the begging, and pray that cooler heads would prevail by the time the sun came up.

Option three was to head down the east wing to Tony’s room and try to talk to him again, also begging forgiveness.

He hesitated in the dark hallway, trapped by indecision.

So what else was new? He was like Hamlet’s black twin.

Maybe he should just go to bed and try it all again—

A distant howl cut through the silence, so raw and wounded that it chilled him like a dive into an icy northern lake. He whipped around, straining his ears against the night’s utter stillness, and tried to isolate the source of all that pain. Sky? Nikolas? Mickey should be asleep in the guesthouse by now—

The noise came again, louder and more desperate this time, a shrill cry of unending pain. It went on for so long that he was able to get a bead on it.

Tony.

His body was already in action, operating on instinct and sprinting with a blind panic he hadn’t felt since his feet touched American soil again. He banged through Tony’s door and into the room, searching wildly for the danger even though he knew, deep down, that he wouldn’t find any.

A blast of frigid air hit him in the face, so cold that it burned his lungs on the inhale. What the—? The balcony doors were open, allowing the wind to whip up a frenzy of hard rain and flapping drapes. It was a meat locker in here, too icy for any human warmth to survive for long.

The moon’s dim glow penetrated enough for him to see that there was nothing out of place. There was also no Tony. The giant four-poster bed loomed out of the shadows, but Tony wasn’t in it and, judging by the smooth linens, had never been in it.

Listening with his entire being, he heard only absolute silence inside the room.

What the hell was going on here?

Pausing to click on the small lamp on top of the dresser, he strode to the balcony doors and snapped them shut. There. That was better. But where the hell was—

That eerie wail rose again, pleading and indecipherable. Sandro’s flesh crawled with sympathetic anguish as his ears zeroed in on the source.

The sofa. The noise was coming from behind the sofa.

He was there in two strides, crouching at one end of the sofa, where it had been slid away from the wall just enough for an underweight man to stretch out on a nest of blankets. There was no pillow. Tony writhed, facedown, and struggled against the night terror that wouldn’t let him go.

Jesus.

Determined to be gentle and not screw this up, Sandro reached out, touched his brother’s thin shoulder and squeezed. There was no give in the tight muscles; he might as well have been touching reinforced steel. And despite the sub-zero temperature in here, Tony’s flesh burned through the thin cotton of his T-shirt, generating enough heat to scorch Sandro’s fingers.

Tony turned his head to the side, but didn’t wake up.

Sandro hovered, just in case. Maybe Tony had settled down for now, but who knew? And how could he breathe with his face smothered in the blankets like that? What if Sandro didn’t hear him the next time? What would happen—

Without warning, Tony doubled up, curling in on himself and heading for the fetal position, except that there wasn’t room for it against the wall. His face twisted; his mouth opened in a silent scream.

“Talia,” he cried. “Talia!”

Screw it. Throwing caution to the wind, Sandro grabbed both his shoulders and gave him a hard shake. “Tony. Wake up.”

That seemed to do the trick. Tony surged upright into a sitting position, his back to the wall and his long legs bent against his chest. Wild-eyed, he looked around and tried to get his bearings, and then his expression coalesced into another one that Sandro had seen too many times before.

Ah, shit.

Tony lashed an arm out, reaching under the blankets. So did Sandro. A brief, grunting struggle followed, and Sandro clamped a hand down on Tony’s wrist and held on for dear life. Tony, meanwhile, was brandishing a hunting knife.

They fought, the blade glinting at face level between them. Since Sandro didn’t plan to kill or be killed in a crazy domestic accident after they’d both survived the war and come home in one piece, Sandro squeezed Tony’s wrist even harder.

“Tony! Wake up! It’s me, Sandro!”

Tony blinked, some of the snarl leaving his face. “Sandro?”

“Yeah, idiot. It’s your brother. So don’t kill me, okay?”

Tony’s expression cleared and his eyes came into focus.
“Sandro.”

“You okay?” Sandro asked warily.

Tony ran his free hand over the top of his head. “Yeah.”

“Maybe you could drop the blade.”

Tony, to his great relief, dropped it.

Feeling much better, Sandro surged to his feet and extended a hand. Tony took it in a hard grip. Sandro gave him a tug, and the next thing he knew, Tony was on his feet but still in motion.

They came together in one of those punishing, backslapping hugs that was more a test of a person’s pain threshold than a display of affection. Swaying and too choked on their mutual emotional torment to manage any words, they held each other upright.

It wasn’t until this precise moment of reunion that Sandro realized how much he’d missed this other half of himself, and how sick he’d been without him.

“I’m sorry, man,” he said gruffly, his face wet with the kind of tears that a soldier hated to cry. He squeezed the back of Tony’s neck, anchoring him here, to his house and his family, where he belonged. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry—”

The only consolation was that Tony was also having problems with eye leakage. “I missed you, you punk,” Tony told him, giving his cheek a hard kiss. “I missed you.”

Overcome, Sandro did the only manly thing left, which was to make a joke and hope they could pretend this interlude never happened. “Yeah, okay, don’t get crazy,” he said, breaking free and turning away.

“I didn’t dismiss you, soldier.”

Lashing out, Tony hooked him around the neck and bent him up in the same headlock he’d been using on him since they were three. Sandro struggled, but the truth was, it felt good.

Really, really good.

“Okay.” Tony turned him loose with a rough shove that tumbled Sandro onto the sofa. “Now you’re dismissed.”

He collapsed beside him and they sat there together, breathless and a little stunned by this turn of events.

“Night terrors, eh?” Sandro asked after a while.

Tony shrugged. “It’s the war that keeps on giving.”