The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

And that was only at the sound of his voice. What would happen if he touched her this time?

“Is this your strategy, cara? To feign ignorance every time I speak to you?” He loomed in the doorway, looking untamed and edgy, furious and male. He’d forgone the exquisite suits and running apparel today and looked more like the Giancarlo she remembered in casual trousers and a top that was more like a devotional poem extolling the perfection of his torso than anything so prosaic as a T-shirt. “It’s already tiresome.”

She was standing too straight, too still, on the other side of the central island that housed Violet’s extensive jewelry collection, entirely too aware that she resembled a deer stuck fast in the glare of oncoming headlights. But she couldn’t seem to move.

Anything besides her mouth, that was. “I did try to warn you that this would get boring.”

Giancarlo’s mouth crooked slightly and made hers water. His eyes were so dark the gold in them felt as much like a caress as a warning, and she was terribly afraid she could no longer tell the difference.

“Show me that you know how to follow directions.” He folded his arms over that chest of his and propped a shoulder against the doorjamb, but Paige wasn’t the least bit fooled. He looked about as casual and relaxed as a predator three seconds before launching an attack. “And I’d think twice before making me wait, if I were you.”

“It’s all the threats,” she grated at him. “They make me dizzy with fear. It’s hard to hear the instructions over all the heart palpitations.”

“I’m certain that’s true.” That crook in his mouth deepened. She was fascinated. “But I think we both know it isn’t fear.”

Paige couldn’t really argue with that, and she certainly didn’t want him to wander any closer and prove his point—did she? She glanced down at her outfit, the short, flirty little skirt with nothing on beneath it, and realized that she’d obeyed him without thinking about it when she’d dressed this morning. Make sure that I have access to you, should I desire it, he’d told her two nights ago, a harsh whisper in the hallway outside Violet’s office. She’d obeyed him and in so doing, she’d revealed herself completely.

When she raised her gaze to his again, he was smiling, a fierce satisfaction in his dark gold eyes and stamped across that impossibly elegant face of his. He jerked his chin at her, wordlessly ordering her to show him, and her hands moved convulsively, as if her body wanted nothing more than to prove itself to him. To prove herself trustworthy again, to jump through any hoop he set before her—

But that wasn’t where this was headed. This wasn’t a love story. No matter how many memories she used to torture herself into imagining otherwise.

“Come over here and find out for yourself, if you want to know,” she heard herself say. Suicidally.

Giancarlo only shook his head at her, as if saddened. “You seem to miss the point. Again. This is not a game that lovers play, cara. This is not some delightful entertainment en route to a blissful afternoon in bed. This is—”

“Penance,” she finished for him, with far more bitterness than she should have allowed him to hear. “Punishment. I know.”

“Then stop stalling. Show me.”

Paige could see he meant it.

She told herself it didn’t matter. That he’d seen all of her before, and in a far more intimate setting than this. That more than that, he’d had his mouth and his hands on every single inch of her skin, in ways so devastating and intense that she could still feel it ten years later. So what did it matter now? He was all the way across the room and he wanted her to balk. To hate him. That was why he was doing this, she was sure.

So instead, she laughed, like the carefree girl she’d never been. Paige stepped out from behind the center island so there could be no accusations of hiding. She watched his hard, hard face and then, slowly, she reached down and pulled her skirt up to her hips.

“Satisfied?” she asked when she was fully bared to his view—because she was.

She’d been so lost in her guilt, her shame, her own anger at everything that had happened and Giancarlo too, that she’d forgotten one very important fact about this thing between them that Giancarlo had been using to such great effect.

It ran both ways.

He stared at her—too hard and too long—and she saw the faintest hint of color high on those gorgeous cheeks of his. And that hectic glitter in his dark eyes that she recognized. Oh yes, she recognized it. She remembered it.

She knew as much about him as he did about her, after all. She knew every inch of his body. She knew his arousal when she saw it. She knew he’d be so hard he ached and that his control would be stretched to the breaking point. The chemistry between them wasn’t only his to exploit.

She stood there with her skirt at her waist, supposedly debasing herself before the only man she’d ever loved, and Paige felt better than she had in years. Powerful. Right, somehow.

“Looked your fill?” she asked sweetly when the silence stretched on, taut and nearly humming. He swallowed as if it hurt him, and she felt like a goddess as he dragged his gaze back to hers.

“Come here.” His voice was a rasp, thick and hot, and it moved in her like joy.

She obeyed him and this time, she was happy to do it. She walked toward him, reveling in the way her blood pounded through her and her skin seemed to shrink a size, too tight across her bones. Because he could call this revenge. He could talk about hatred and penance. But it was still the same thick madness that felt like a rope around her neck. It was still the same inexorable pull.

It was still them.

Paige stopped in front of him and let out a surprised breath when he moved, reaching down to gather her wrists in his big hands and then pull them behind her, securing them in one of his at the small of her back. Her skirt fell back into place against the sensitized skin of her thighs, her back arched almost of its own accord, and Giancarlo stared down at her, a hard wildness blazing from his eyes.

Paige remembered that, too.

She didn’t know what he looked for, much less what he saw. He stared at her for a moment that dragged out to forever and she felt it like panic beneath the surface of her skin. Like an itch.

And then he jerked her close, her hands still held immobile behind her back, and slammed his mouth to hers.

It wasn’t a brush of his mouth, a tease, like before. It wasn’t an introduction.

He took her mouth as if he was already deep inside of her. As if he was thrusting hard and driving them both toward that glimmering edge. It was more than wild, more than carnal. He bent her back over her own arms, pressing her breasts into the flat planes of his chest, and he simply possessed her with a ruthless sort of fury that set every part of her aflame.

She thrilled to his boldness, his shocking mastery. The glorious taste of him she’d pined for all these years. The sheer rightness.

Paige kissed him back desperately, deeply, forgetting about the games they played. Forgetting about penance, about trust. Forgetting her betrayal and his fury. She didn’t care what he wanted from her, or how he planned to hurt her, or anything at all but this.

This.

There was too much noise in her head and too much heat inside of her and she actually moaned in disappointment when he pulled back, holding her away from him with that iron strength of his that reminded her how gentle he was with it. How truly demanding, because he knew—as he’d always known—exactly what she wanted. How far away from force all of this really was.

“You kiss like a whore,” he said, and she could see it was meant to be an insult, but it came out sounding somehow reverent, instead.

She laughed. “Have you kissed many whores, then? You, the exalted Count Alessi, who could surely have any proper woman he wished?”

“Just the one.”

She should be wounded by that, Paige thought as she studied him. She should feel slapped down, put in her place, but she didn’t. She cocked her head to one side and saw the fever in his dark gaze, and she knew that whatever power he had over her, she had it over him, too. And more, he was as aware of that as she was.

“Then how would you know?” she asked him, her voice like a stranger’s, breathy and inviting. Nothing like hurt at all. “Maybe the whore is you.”

“Watch your mouth.” But he’d moved closer again, his shoulders filling her vision, her need expanding to swallow the whole world. Or maybe it was his need. Both of theirs, twined together and too big to fit beneath the sky.

“Make me,” she dared him, and he muttered something in Italian.

And then he did.

He let go of her hands to take her face between his hard palms, holding her where he wanted her as he plundered her mouth. As he took and took and then took even more, as if there was no end and no beginning and only the madness of their mouths, slick and hot and perfect. The fire between them danced high and roared louder, and he didn’t stop her when Paige melted against him. When she wound her arms around his neck and clung to him, kissing him back as if this was the reunion she’d always dreamed of. As if this was a solution, not another one of his clever little power games.

And she didn’t know when it changed. When it stopped being about fury and started to taste like heat. When it started to feel like the people they’d been long ago, before everything had gone so wrong.

He felt it, too. She felt him stiffen, and then he thrust her aside.

And for a long moment they only stared at each other, both of them breathing too fast, too hard. Paige tried to step back and her legs wobbled, and Giancarlo scowled at her even as his hand shot out to steady her.

“Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself. Her mouth felt marked, soft and plundered, and Giancarlo was looking at her as if she was a ghost. “That certainly taught me my place. All that punitive kissing.”

She didn’t know what moved across his face then, but it scraped at her. It hurt far worse than any of his words had. She had to bite her own tongue to keep from making the small sound of pain that welled up in her at the sight of it.

“It will,” he promised her, a bleakness in his voice that settled in her bones like a winter chill. Like the fate she’d been running from since the day she’d met him, loath as she was to admit it. “I can promise you that. Sooner or later, it will.”

* * *

Kissing her had been a terrible mistake.

Giancarlo ran until he thought his lungs might burst and his legs might collapse beneath him, and it was useless. The Southern California sun was unforgiving, the blue sky harsh and high and cloudless, and he couldn’t get her taste out of his mouth. He couldn’t get the feel of her out of his skin.

It was exactly as it had been a decade ago, all over again, except this time he couldn’t pretend he’d been blindsided. This time, he’d walked right into it. He’d been the one to kiss her.

He cursed himself in two languages and at last he stopped running, bending over to prop his hands on his knees and stare down the side of the mountain toward his mother’s estate and the sprawl of the city below it in the shimmering heat of high summer. It was too hot here. It was too familiar.

Too dangerous.

It was much too tempting to simply forget himself, to pick up where he’d left off with her. With the woman who was no longer Nicola. As if she hadn’t engineered his ruin, deliberately, ten years ago. As if she hadn’t then tricked her way to her place at his mother’s side with a new name and God only knew what agenda.

As if, were he to bury himself in her body the way he wanted to do more than was wise and more than he cared to admit to himself, she might transform into the woman she’d already proved she wasn’t in the most spectacular way imaginable.

He was already slipping back into those old habits he’d thought he’d eradicated. The work he’d left in Italy was piling up high, and yet here he was, running off steam in the Bel Air hills the way he’d done when he was a sixteen-year-old. She was the first thing he thought of when he woke. She was what he dreamed about. She was taking over his life as surely as she ever had, very much as if this was her revenge, not his.

He was an addict. There was no other explanation for the state he was in, hard and ready and yearning, and he didn’t want that. He wanted her humbled, brought low, destroyed. He wanted her to feel how he’d felt when he’d woken that terrible morning to find his naked body splashed everywhere for the entire world to pick over, parse, comment upon, like every other time his private life been exploited for Violet’s gain—but much worse, because he hadn’t seen the betrayal coming. He hadn’t thought to brace himself for impact.

He wanted this to hurt.

Giancarlo straightened and shoved his hair back from his forehead, the past seeming to press against him too tightly. He remembered it all too well. Not just the affair with Nicola—Paige, he reminded himself darkly—in all its blistering, sensual perfection, as if their bodies had been created purely to drive each other wild. But the parts of that affair he’d preferred to pretend he didn’t remember, all these years later. Like the way he’d always found himself smiling when they’d spoken on the phone, wide and hopeful and giddy, as if she was sunshine in a bottle and only his. Or the way his heart had always thudded hard when she’d entered a room, in the moment before she’d seen him and had treated him to that dazzling smile of hers that had blotted out the rest of the world. The way she’d held his hand as if that connection alone would save them both from darkness, or dragons, or something far worse.

Oh yes, he remembered.

And he remembered the aftermath, too. After the pictures ran in all those papers. After those final, horrible moments with this woman he had loved so deeply and known not at all. After he’d done the best he could to clear his head and then made his way back to Italy. To face, at last, his elderly father.

His father, who had felt denim was for commoners and had thought the only thing more tawdry than Europe’s aristocracy was the British royals, with their divorces and dirty laundry and jeans. His father, Count Alessi, who could have taught propriety and manners to whole nunneries and probably had, in his day. His father, who had been as gentle and nobly well-meaning as he was blue-blooded. Truly the last of his kind.

“It is not your fault,” he’d told Giancarlo that first night in the wake of the scandal. He’d hugged his errant son and greeted him warmly, his body so frail it had moved in Giancarlo like a winter wind, a herald of the coming season he hadn’t wanted to face. Not then. Not yet. “When I married your mother I knew precisely who she was, Giancarlo. It was foolish to imagine she and I could raise a son untainted by that world. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

Perhaps his father’s disappointment in him had cut all the deeper because it had been so matter-of-fact. Untouched by any hint of anger or vanity or sadness. There was nothing to fight against, and Giancarlo had understood that there had been no one to blame but himself for his poor judgment. His father might have been antiquated, a relic of another time, but he’d instilled his values in his only son and heir.

Strive to do good no matter what, he’d told Giancarlo again and again. Never make a spectacle of oneself. And avoid the base and the dishonorable, lest one become the same by association.

Giancarlo had failed on all counts. It was why he knew that the vows he’d made when he was younger were solid. Right. No marriage, because how could he ever be certain that someone wanted him? And no heirs of his own, because he’d never, ever, subject a child to the things he’d survived. He might not be able to save himself from his own father’s disappointment, he might find his life trotted out into public every time his mother starred in something new and needed to remind the world of her once upon an Italian count fairy-tale marriage, but it would end with him.

Damn Nicola—Paige—for making him think otherwise, even if it had only been for two mostly naked months a lifetime ago.

It was that, he thought as he broke into a run again, his pace harder and faster than before as he hurtled down the hill, that he found the most difficult to get past. He hated that she had betrayed him, yes. But far worse was this thing in him, dark and brooding, that yearned only for her surrender no matter how painful, and that he very much feared made him no different than she was.

He thought he hated that most of all.

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER A LONG SHOWER and the application of his own hand to the part of him that least listened to reason, Giancarlo prowled through the house, his fury at a dull simmer. An improvement, he was aware.

La Bellissima was the same as it ever was, as it had been throughout his life, he thought as he moved quietly through its hushed halls, gleaming with Violet’s wealth and consequence in all its details. The glorious art she’d collected from all over the planet. The specially sourced artisan touches here and there that gave little hints of the true Violet Sutherlin, who had been born under another name and raised in bohemian Berkeley, California. Old Hollywood glamor mixed with contemporary charm, the house managed to feel light and airy rather than overfed, somehow, on its own affluence.

Much like Violet herself, all these years after her pouty, sex kitten beginnings in the mid-seventies. He should know, having been trotted out at key moments during her transition from kitten to lion of the industry, as a kind of proof, perhaps, that Violet could do more than wear a bikini.

There was the time she’d released a selection of cards he’d written her as a small child, filled with declarations of love that the other kids at school had teased him about all the way up until his high school graduation. There was the time she’d spent five minutes of her appearance in a famous actor’s studio interview telling a long, involved anecdote about catching him and his first girlfriend in bed that had humiliated fourteen-year-old Giancarlo and made his then-girlfriend’s parents remove her to a far-off boarding school. He knew every inch of this house and none of it had ever been his; none of it had ever been safe. He was as much a prop as any of the other things Violet surrounded herself with—only unlike the vases, he loved her despite knowing how easily and unrepentantly she’d use him.

He followed the bright hall toward Violet’s quarters, knowing how much she liked to spend her days in the office there with its views of the city she’d conquered. He had memories of catapulting himself down this same hallway as a child, careening off the walls and coming to a skidding halt in that room, only to climb up on the chaise and lie at his mother’s feet as she’d run her lines and practiced her voices, her various accents, the postures that made her body into someone else’s. He’d found her fascinating, back then. He supposed he still did, and Giancarlo couldn’t remember, then, at what age he’d realized that Violet was better admired than depended upon. That her love was a distantly beautiful thing, better experienced as a fan than a family member. The first time she’d released a photo of him he’d found embarrassing? Or the tenth, with as little remorse?

He only knew they’d both been far happier once he’d accepted it.

Giancarlo paused in the doorway, hearing his mother’s famous laugh before he saw her. She wasn’t in her usual place today, reclining on her chaise like the Empress of Hollywood. She was standing at the French doors instead, bathed in soft light from the summer day beyond with a mobile phone in her hand, and even though there was no denying her celebrated beauty, his gaze went straight to the other woman in the room as if Violet wasn’t there at all.

Paige sat at the fussy little desk in the corner, typing something as a male voice responded to whatever Violet had said from her mobile phone, obviously on speaker. Paige was frowning down at her laptop as her fingers flew over the keys, and when Violet turned toward her to roll her eyes at her assistant, Giancarlo could see the face Paige made in immediate response.

Sympathetic. Fully on Violet’s side. Staunch and true, he’d have said, if he didn’t know better.

He’d seen that expression before. That was the woman he’d loved in all the passionate fury of those two months of madness. Stalwart. Loyal. Not in any way the kind of woman who would sell a man out and print it all up in the tabloids. He’d have sworn on that. He’d have gambled everything.

Giancarlo still couldn’t believe how wrong he’d been.

His stomach twisted, and it took everything he had not to make a noise, not to bellow out his fury at all of this—but mostly at himself.

Because he wanted to believe, still. Despite everything. He wanted there to be an explanation for what had happened ten years ago. He wanted Paige—and when had he started thinking about her by that name, without stumbling over it at all?—to be who she appeared to be. Dedicated to his mother. Deeply sorry for what had gone before, and with some reason for what she’d done. And not the kind of self-serving reason Violet always had...

He wanted her back.

And that was when Giancarlo woke up with a jolt and recognized the danger he was in. History could not repeat itself. Not with her. Not ever.

“Darling,” Violet said when she ended her call, turning from the window and smiling at him. “Don’t lurk in the hallway. It was only my agent. A whinier, more demanding fool I have yet to meet, and yet I’m fairly certain he’s the best there is.”

But what Giancarlo noticed was the way Paige straightened in her chair, her eyes wide and blue when they flew to him, then quickly shuttered when she looked back to her keyboard.

He could think of a greater fool than his mother’s parasitical agent. It was something about finding himself back in Los Angeles, he thought as he fought back his own temper, as well as seeing Paige again. It would have been different if he’d encountered her in some other city. Somewhere that held no trace of who they’d been together. But here, their history curled around everything, like a thick, encroaching smog, and made it impossible to inhale without confronting it every time.

With every goddamned breath.

“I must return to Italy,” he said shortly. Almost as if he wasn’t certain he’d say it at all if he didn’t say it quickly and that, of course, made him despise himself all the more.

“You can’t leave,” Violet said at once. Giancarlo noticed Paige seemed to type even more furiously and failed to raise her head at all. “You’ve only just arrived.”

“I came because it had been an unconscionably long time, Mother,” he said softly. “It was never my intention to stay away so long. But I have a solution.”

“You are moving back to Los Angeles,” Violet said, a curve to her mouth that suggested she didn’t believe it even as she said it. “I’m delighted. That Malibu house is far too nice to waste on all those renters.”

“Not at all.” He wanted to study Paige instead of his mother but he didn’t dare. Still, he was as aware of her as if she was triple her own size. As if she loomed there in his peripheral vision, a great dark cloud, consuming everything. “You must come to Italy. Bring your assistant. Stay for the rest of the summer.”

Violet looked startled for a moment, but then in the next her face smoothed out, and he recognized the mask she wore then. As impenetrable as it was graceful. A vision of loveliness that showed only what she wanted seen, and nothing else. Violet Sutherlin, the star. Giancarlo didn’t know what it said about him that he found this version of her easier to handle than the one who pretended motherhood was her primary concern.