At the Count's Bidding

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It was just as he remembered it.

All that fire, arcing in him and in her, too, from the shocked sound she made. All that misery. Shame and fury and ten years of that terrible longing. He’d never quite got past it, and this was why. This thrumming, pounding excitement that had only ever happened here, with her. This unmatched hunger. This beautiful lie that would not wreck him this time. Not this time.

He needed to work it all out on that delectable body she’d wielded like a weapon, enslaving him and destroying him before she’d finally got around to killing him, too. He needed to make her pay the price for her betrayal in the most intimate way possible. He needed to work out his goddamned issues in the very place they’d started, and then, only then, would he finally be free of her. It had only been two months back then. It would have burned out on its own—he was sure of it, but they hadn’t had time. He wanted time to glut himself, because only then would he get past this.

Giancarlo had to believe that.

“I know exactly who you are,” he told her then, and he didn’t pretend he wasn’t enjoying this. That now that the shock had passed, he wasn’t thrilled she’d proved herself as deceitful as he remembered. That he wasn’t looking forward to this in a way he hoped scared her straight down into her bones—because it should. “It’s long past time you paid for what you did to me, and believe me when I tell you I have a very, very detailed memory.”

“You’ll regret it.” Her voice was like gauze and had as much effect.

“I’ve already regretted you for a decade, cara,” he growled. “What does it matter to me if I add a little more?”

He leaned in closer, felt her quiver against him and thrilled to it. To her, because he knew her true face this time. He knew her. There would be no losing himself. There would be no fanciful dreaming of marriage and happy-ever-afters in the Tuscan countryside, deep in all the sweet golden fields that were his heritage. There would only be penance. Hers. Hard, hot, bone-melting penance, until he was satisfied.

Which he anticipated might take some time.

“This doesn’t make sense.” Did she sound desperate or did he want her to? Giancarlo didn’t care. “You hate me!”

“This isn’t hate,” he said, and his smile deepened. Darkened. “Let’s be clear, shall we? This is revenge.”

* * *

Paige thought he would leap on her the moment she agreed.

And of course she agreed, how could she do anything but agree when Violet Sutherlin had become the mother her own had been far too addicted and selfish and hateful to pretend to be? How could she walk away from that when Violet was therefore the only family she had left?

But Giancarlo had only smiled that hard, deeply disconcerting smile of his that had skittered over her skin like electricity.

Then he’d dropped his hand, stepped away from her and left her alone.

For days. Three days, in fact. Three long days and much longer nights.

Paige had to carry on as if everything was perfectly normal, doing her usual work for Violet and pretending to be as thrilled as the older woman was about the return of her prodigal son. She’d had to maintain her poise and professionalism, insofar as there was any professionalism in this particular sort of job that was as much about handling Violet’s personal whims as anything else. She’d had to try not to give herself away every time she was in the same room with Giancarlo, when all she wanted to do was scream at him to end this tension—a tension he did not appear to feel, as he lounged about, swam laps in the pool and laughed with his mother.

And every night she locked herself into the little cottage down near the edge of the canyon that was her home on Violet’s property and tortured herself until dawn.

It was as if her brain had recorded every single moment of every single encounter she’d ever had with Giancarlo and could play it all back in excruciating detail. Every touch. Every kiss. That slick, hard thrust of his possession. The sexy noise he’d made against her neck each time he’d come. The sobs echoing back from this or that wall that she knew were hers, while she writhed in mindless pleasure, his in every possible way.

By the morning of the fourth day she was a mess.

“Sleep well?” he asked in that taunting way of his, his dark brows rising high when he met her on the back steps on her way into the big house to start her day. Violet took her breakfast and the trades on a tray in her room each morning and she expected to see Paige there, too, before she was finished.

Giancarlo stood on the wide steps that led up to the terrace, not precisely blocking her way, but Paige didn’t rate her chances for slipping past him, either. Had she not been lost in her own scorching world of regret and too many vivid memories as she’d walked up the hill from her cottage, she’d have seen him here, lying in wait. She’d have avoided him.

Would you? that sly voice inside her asked.

A smart woman would have left Los Angeles ten years ago, never to return to the scene of so much pain and betrayal and heartache. A smart woman certainly wouldn’t have got herself tangled up with her ex-lover’s mother, and even if she had, she would have rejected Giancarlo’s devil’s bargain outright. So Paige supposed that ship had sailed a long time ago.

“I slept like a baby,” she replied, because her memories were her business.

“I take it you mean that in the literal sense,” he said drily. “Up every two hours wailing down the walls and making life a misery, then?”

Paige gritted her teeth. He, of course, glowed with health and that irritating masculine vigor of his. He wore an athletic T-shirt in a technical fabric and a pair of running shorts, and was clearly headed out to get himself into even better shape on the surrounding trails that scored the mountains, if that were even possible. No wonder he maintained that lean, rangy body of his that appeared to scoff at the very notion of fat. She wished she could hate him. She wished that pounding thing in her chest, and much lower, was hate.

“I’ve never slept better in my life,” she said staunchly.

Her mistake was that she’d drifted too close to him as she said it, as if he was a magnet and she was powerless to resist the pull. She remembered that, too. It had been like a tractor beam, that terrible compulsion. As if they were drawn together no matter what. Across the cavernous warehouse where she’d met him on that shoot. Across rooms, beds, showers. Wherever, whenever.

Ten years ago she’d thought that meant they were made for each other. She knew better now. Yet she still felt that draw.

Paige only flinched a little bit when he reached over and ran one of his elegant fingers in a soft crescent shape beneath her eye. It was such a gentle touch it made her head spin, especially when it was at such odds with that harsh look on his face, that ever-present gleam of furious gold in his gaze.

It took her one shaky breath, then another, to realize he’d traced the dark circle beneath her eye. That it wasn’t a caress at all.

It was an accusation.

“Liar,” he murmured, as if he was reciting an old poem, and there was no reason it should feel like a sharp blade stuck hard beneath her ribs. “But I expect nothing else from you.”

Bite your tongue, she ordered herself when she started to reply. Because she might have got herself into this mess, twice, but that didn’t mean she had to make it worse. She poured her feelings into the way she looked at him, and one corner of that hard, uncompromising mouth of his kicked up. Resignation, she thought. If they’d been different people she might have called it a kind of rueful admiration.

But this was Giancarlo, who despised her.

“Be ready at eight,” he told her gruffly.

“That could cover a multitude of sins.” So much for her vow of silence. Paige smiled thinly when his brows edged higher. “Be ready for what?”

Giancarlo moved slightly then on the wide marble step, making her acutely aware of him. Of the width of his muscled shoulders, the long sweep of his chiseled torso. Of his strength, his heat. Reminding her how deadly he was, how skilled. How he’d been the only man she’d ever met, before or since, who had known exactly what buttons to push to turn her to jelly, and had. Again and again. He’d simply looked at her, everything else had disappeared and he’d known.

He still knew. She could see it in that heat that made his dark eyes gleam. She could feel it the way her body prickled with that same lick of fire, the way the worst of the flames tangled together deep in her belly.

She felt her breath desert her, and she thought she saw the man she remembered in his dark gaze, the man as lost in this as she always had been, but it was gone almost at once as if it had never been. As if that had been nothing but wishful thinking on her part.

“Wear something I can get my hands under,” he told her, and there was a cruel cast to his desperately sensual mouth then that should have made her want to cry—but that wasn’t the sensation that tripped through her blood, making her feel dizzy with something she’d die before she’d call excitement.

And as if he knew that too, he smiled.

Then he left her there—trying to sort out all the conflicting sensations inside of her right there in the glare of another California summer morning, trying not to fall apart when she suspected that was what he wanted her to do—without a backward glance.

* * *

“I think he must be a terribly lonely man,” Violet said.

They were sitting in one of the great legend’s favorite rooms in this vast house, the sunny, book-lined and French-doored affair she called her office, located steps from her personal garden and festooned with her many awards.

Violet lounged back on the chaise she liked to sit on while tending to her empire—“because what, pray, is the point of being an international movie star if I can’t conduct business on a chaise?” Violet had retorted when asked why by some interviewer or another during awards season some time back—with her eyes on the city that preened before her beneath the ever-blue California sky and sighed. She was no doubt perfectly aware of the way the gentle light caught the face she’d allowed age to encroach upon, if only slightly. She looked wise and gorgeous at once, her fine blond hair brushed back from her face and only hinting at her sixty-plus years, dressed in her preferred “at home” outfit of butter-soft jeans that had cost her a small fortune and a bespoke emerald-green blouse that played up the remarkable eyes only a keen observer would note were enhanced by cosmetics.

This was the star in her natural habitat.

Sitting in her usual place at the elegant French secretary on the far side of the room, her laptop open before her and all of Violet’s cell phones in a row on the glossy wood surface in case any of them should ring, Paige frowned and named the very famous director they’d just been discussing.

“You think he’s lonely?” she asked, startled.

Violet let out that trademark throaty laugh of hers that had been wowing audiences and bringing whole rooms to a standstill since she’d appeared in her first film in the seventies.

“No doubt he is,” she said after a moment, “despite the parade of ever-younger starlets who he clearly doesn’t realize make him look that much older and more decrepit, but I meant Giancarlo.”

Of course she did.

“Is he?” Paige affected a vague tone. The sort of tone any employee would use when discussing the boss’s son.

“He was a very lonely child,” Violet said, in the same sort of curious, faraway voice she used when she was puzzling out a new character. “It is my single regret. His father and I loved each other wildly and often quite badly, and there was little room for anyone else.”

Everyone knew the story, of course. The doomed love affair with its separations and heartbreaks. The tempestuous, often short-lived reunions. The fact they’d lived separately for years at a time with many rumored affairs, but had never divorced. Violet’s bent head and flowing tears at the old count’s funeral, her refusal to speak of him publicly afterward.

Possibly, Paige thought ruefully as she turned every last part of the story over in her head, she had studied that Hollywood fairy tale with a little more focus and attention than most.

“He doesn’t seem particularly lonely,” Paige said when she felt Violet’s expectant gaze on her. She sat very still in her chair, aware that while a great movie star might seem to be too narcissistic to notice anyone but herself, the truth was that Violet was an excellent judge of character. She had to be, to inhabit so many. She read people the way others read street signs. Fidgeting would tell her much, much more than Paige wanted her to know. “He seems as if he’s the sort of man who’s used to being in complete and possibly ruthless control. Of everything.”

The other woman’s smile then seemed sad. “I agree. And I can’t think of anything more lonely,” she said softly. “Can you?”

And perhaps that conversation was how Paige found herself touching up what she could only call defensive eyeliner in the mirror in the small foyer of her cozy little cottage when she heard a heavy hand at her door at precisely eight o’clock that night.

She didn’t bother to ask who it was. The cartwheels her stomach turned at the sound were identification enough.

Paige swung open the door and he was there, larger than life and infinitely more dangerous, looking aristocratic and lethal in one of the suits he favored that made him seem a far cry indeed from the more casual man she’d known before. This man looked as if he’d sooner spit nails than partake of the Californian pastime of surfing, much less lounge about like an affluent Malibu beach bum in torn jeans and no shirt. This man looked as forbidding and unreachable and haughtily blue-blooded as the Italian count he was.

Giancarlo stood on the path that led to her door and let his dark eyes sweep over her, from the high ponytail she’d fashioned to the heavy eye makeup she’d used because it was the only mask she thought he’d allow her to wear. His sensual mouth crooked slightly at that, as if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking when she’d lined her eyes so dramatically, and then moved lower. To the dress that hugged her breasts tight, with only delicate straps above, then cascaded all the way to the floor in a loose, flowing style that suggested the kind of casual elegance she’d imagined he’d require no matter where he planned to take her.

“Very good, cara,” he said, and that wasn’t quite approval she heard in his voice. It was much closer to satisfaction, and that distinction made her pulse short-circuit, then start to drum wildly. Erratically. “It appears you are capable of following simple instructions, when it suits you.”

“Everyone can follow instructions when it suits them,” she retorted despite the fact she’d spent hours cautioning herself not to engage with him, not to give him any further ammunition. Especially not when he called her that name—cara—he’d once told her he reserved for the many indistinguishable women who flung themselves at him. Better that than “Nicola,” she thought fiercely. “It’s called survival.”

“I can think of other things to call it,” he murmured in that dark, silken way of his that hurt more for its insinuations than any directness would have. “But why start the night off with name-calling?” That crook of his mouth became harder, deadlier. “You’ll need your strength, I suspect. Best to conserve it while you can.”

He’s only messing with you, she cautioned herself as she stepped through the door and delivered herself into his clutches, the way she’d promised him she would. He wants to see if you’ll really go through with this.

So did she, she could admit, as she made a show of locking the front door, mostly to hide her nerves from that coolly assessing dark gaze of his. But it was done too fast, and then Giancarlo was urging her into a walk with that hand of his at the small of her back, and their history seemed particularly alive then in the velvety night that was still edged with deep blues as the summer evening took hold around them.

Everything felt perilous. Even her own breath.

He didn’t speak. He handed her into the kind of low-slung sports car she should have expected he’d drive, and as he rounded the hood to lower himself into the driver’s seat she could still feel his hand on that spot on her back, the heat of it pulsing into her skin like a brand, making the finest of tremors snake over her skin.

Paige didn’t know what she expected as he got in and started to drive, guiding them out of Violet’s high gates and higher into the hills. A restaurant so he could humiliate her in public? One of the dive motels that rented by the hour in the sketchier neighborhoods so he could treat her like the whore he believed she was? But it certainly wasn’t the sharp turn he eventually took off the winding road that traced the top of the Santa Monica Mountains bisecting Los Angeles, bringing the powerful car to a stop in a shower of dirt right at the edge of a cliff. There was an old wooden railing, she noted in a sudden panic. But still.

“Get out,” he said.

“I, uh, really don’t want to,” she said, and she heard the sheer terror in her own voice. He must have heard it too, because while his grim expression didn’t alter, she thought she saw amusement in the dark eyes he fixed on her.

“I’m not going to throw you off the side of the mountain, however appealing the notion,” he told her. “That would kill you almost instantly.”

“It’s the ‘almost’ part I’m worried about,” she pointed out, sounding as nervous as she felt suddenly. “It encompasses a lot of screaming and sharp rocks.”

“I want you to suffer, Paige,” he said softly, still with that emphasis on her name, as if it was another lie. “Remember that.”

It told her all manner of things about herself she’d have preferred not knowing that she found that some kind of comfort. She could have walked away, ten years ago or three days ago, and she hadn’t. He’d been the one to leave. He’d hurled his accusations at her, she’d told him she loved him and he’d walked away—from her and from his entire life here. This was the bed she’d made, wasn’t it?

So she climbed from the car when he did, and then followed him over to that rail, wary and worried. Giancarlo didn’t look at her. He stared out at the ferocious sparkle, the chaos of light that was this city. It was dark where they stood, no streetlamps to relieve the night sky and almost supernaturally quiet so high in the hills, but she could see the intent look on his face in the reflected sheen of the mad city below, and it made her shake down deep inside.

“Come here.”

She didn’t want to do that either, but she’d promised to obey him, so Paige trusted that this was about shaming her, not hurting her—at least not physically—and drifted closer. She shuddered when he looped an arm around her neck and pulled her hard against the rock-hard wall of his chest. The world seemed to spin and lights flashed, but that was only the beaming headlights of a passing car.

Giancarlo stroked his fingers down the side of her face, then traced the seam of her lips.

Everything was hot. Too hot. He was still as hard and male as she remembered, and his torso was like a brand beside her, the arm over her shoulders deliciously heavy, and she felt that same old fire explode inside of her again, as if this was new. As if this was the first time he’d touched her.

He didn’t order her to open her mouth but she did anyway at the insistent movement, and then he thrust his thumb inside. It was hotter than it should have been, sexy and strange at once, and his dark eyes glittered as they met hers with all of Los Angeles at their feet.

“Remind me how exactly it was I lost my head over you,” he told her, all that fury and vengeance in his voice, challenging her to defy him. “Use your tongue.”

Paige didn’t know what demon it was that rose in her then, some painful mixture of long lost hopes and current regrets, not to mention that anger she tried to hide because it was unlikely to help her here, but she did as she was told. She grabbed his invading hand with both of hers and she worshipped his thumb as if it were another part of his anatomy entirely, and she didn’t break away from him while she did it.

She didn’t know how long it went on.

His eyes were darker than the night around them, and the same hectic gold lit them, even as it burned within her. She felt molten and wild, reckless and lost, and none of that mattered, because she could taste him. He might hate her, he might want nothing more than to hurt her, but Paige had never thought she’d taste him again. She’d never dreamed this could happen.

She told herself it didn’t matter, those things she felt deep inside her that she didn’t want to acknowledge. Only that this was a gift. It didn’t matter what else it was.

He pulled his thumb out then and shifted her so they were facing each other, and the space between them seemed dense. Electric.

“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your touch,” he said, and though his tone was cruel his voice was rougher than it had been, and she told herself that meant something. It meant the same thing her breathlessness did, or that manic tightening deep in her belly, that restlessness she’d only ever felt with him and knew only he could cure.

He smiled, and it was so beautiful it made her throat feel tight, and she should have known better. Because he wasn’t finished.

“Get on your knees, Paige,” he ordered her. “And do it right.”