“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?”