The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

“Darling, you know my feelings about Italy,” she murmured, and a stranger might have believed her wry, easy tone. “I love it with all my heart. But I’m afraid I buried that heart with your father.”

“Not that Italy,” he said. He smiled, though he understood he was speaking as much to the silent woman in the corner of his eye as to his mother. “My Italy.”

“Do you have your own?” Violet asked. She laughed again. “You have been busy indeed.”

“I’ve completely transformed the estate,” Giancarlo said quietly. “I know we’ve discussed all these changes over the years, but I’d like you to see them for yourself. I think Father would be proud.”

“I know he would,” Violet said with a glimmer of something raw in her gaze and the sound of it in her voice, and Giancarlo knew he had her. Paige knew it too, he could tell. He felt more than saw her stiffen at her desk, and it took everything he had to keep the triumph from his voice, the sheer victory from his face. “Of course, Giancarlo. I’d love to see Tuscany again.”

He only let himself look at Paige again when he was certain he had himself under complete control. Like iron, he thought fiercely. Like the old houses he’d rebuilt on the ancestral estate in Tuscany, stone by ancient stone, forcing his will and vision onto every acre.

He would take her away from Los Angeles, where history seemed to infuse every moment between them with meaning he didn’t want. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of this sooner.

In the far reaches of Tuscany, as remote as it was possible to get in one of the most famous and beloved regions of the world, she would be entirely dependent on him. Violet could relax in the hands of his world-class staff, her every need anticipated and met, and he would have all the time in the world to vanquish this demon from his past, for good. All the time he needed to truly make her pay.

Because that was what he wanted, he reminded himself. To make her pay. Everything else was memory and fantasy and better suited to a long night’s dream than reality.

“Wonderful.” Giancarlo tried not to gloat, and knew he failed when Paige frowned. And it was still a victory. It was still a plan. And it would work, he was sure of it. Because it had to. “We leave tonight.”

* * *

Paige had dreamed of Italy her whole life.

When she was a child, she’d sneaked library books into her mother’s bleak trailer in the blistering heat of the rocky Arizona desert. She’d waited for Arleen to pass out before she’d lost herself in them, and she’d dreamed. Fierce dreams of cypress trees in stern columns marching across a deep green undulation of ancient fields. Monuments to long lost gods and civilizations gone centuries before her birth, red-roofed towns clustered on gentle hills beneath a soft, Italian sun.

Then she’d met Giancarlo, who carried the lilt of Italy in every word he spoke, and her dreams had taken on a more specific shape. Even back then, when he’d wanted to play around in Hollywood more than he’d wanted to tend to his heritage, he’d spoken of the thousands of rural acres that his father had only just started to reclaim from the encroaching wilderness of a generation or two of neglect. They were his birthright and in those giddy days ten years ago she’d dared to imagine that she was, too.

And now she was finally here, and it turned out it was extraordinarily painful to visit a place that she’d once imagined might be her home and now knew never, ever would be. More than painful—but she told herself it was the jet lag that made her ache like that. Nothing a good night’s sleep on solid ground wouldn’t cure.

Even if it was this solid ground.

The vast estate sprawled across a part of Tuscany that had been in the Alessi family in one form or another since the Middle Ages. It was dotted with old farmhouses Giancarlo had spent the past decade painstakingly renovating for a very special class of clientele: people as wealthy as his mother and as allergic to invasions of their privacy as his father had been. As Paige supposed he must be himself now, after his too-public shaming at her own hands.

Here at Castello Alessi and all across its hilly lands, thick with olive groves and vineyards, lavender bushes and timeless forests of oak trees—according to the splashy website Paige had accessed a hundred times before and once again from the plane when she’d accepted she was really, truly coming here at last—such privacy-minded people could relax, secure in the knowledge that the “cottages” they’d paid dearly either to rent or to buy outright and fashion to their liking were as private and remote as it was possible to get while still enjoying world-class service akin to that of the finest hotels, thanks to Giancarlo’s private, around-the-clock staff.

But none of that applied to Paige, she was well aware.

They’d landed on a private airstrip in a nearby valley after flying all night. It had been a bright, somehow distinctly Italian summer morning, filled with yellow flowers and too-blue skies, and a waiting driver had whisked them off to the estate some forty minutes away. It was a long, gorgeous drive, winding in and around the hills of Tuscany that looked exactly as Paige had imagined them while also being somehow so much more than she’d anticipated. Violet had been installed in the lavishly remodeled castello itself, arrayed around a welcoming stone courtyard with heart-stopping views and her own private spa with waiting staff to pamper her at once, as if she was truly the High Queen of Italy.

Paige, on the other hand, Giancarlo ushered into a Jeep and then personally drove far out into the heart of the property, until all she could see in all directions was the gently rolling countryside and one lone house at the top of the nearest hill. All of it so gorgeous and yet so familiar, as if she’d been here before and recognized it like a homecoming, and yet, she was forced to keep telling herself, none of this was hers. Not the perfect sky, the charming lane, the pretty little houses on this or that ridge. Not hers. The man beside her least of all.

“Are you deliberately stranding me out here as some kind of punishment?” she asked him, when it became clear that a smaller cottage down in the valley beneath that lone house was where he was headed. She was doing her best not to look at him, braced beside her in the smaller-by-the-moment front of his Jeep as they bumped along the lazy dirt road that meandered toward the little stone house, because she was afraid it might make all these raw emotions inside of her spill over into tears. Or worse. “Don’t you think that looks a little bit strange?”

“My mother will be waited on hand and foot in the castello,” he said, his gruff voice either impatient or triumphant, and Paige couldn’t tell which. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “And if by some chance she needs you while undergoing a battalion of spa treatments, never fear, the Wi-Fi is excellent. I trust she can manage to send out an email should she require your presence.”

“So the answer is yes,” Paige said stiffly as he pulled up in front of the cottage. He turned the key in the ignition and the sudden quiet seemed to pour in through the open windows, as terrifying as it was sweet. “This is a punishment.”

“Yes,” he said in that low way of his that wrapped around her and made her yearn, then made her question her own sanity. “I am punishing you with Tuscany. It is a fate worse than death, obviously. Just look around.”

She didn’t want to look around, for a thousand complicated reasons and none she’d dare admit. It made her feel scraped to the bone and weak. So very weak. So she looked at him instead, which wasn’t really any better.

“You think I don’t know why you brought me here, but of course I do.” She laughed, though it was a hollow little sound and seemed to make that scraped sensation expand inside of her. “You’re making sure I have nowhere to run. I think that counts as the most basic of torture methods, doesn’t it?”

“Correction.” He aimed a smile at her that didn’t quite reach the storm in his eyes, but made her feel edgy all the same. “I don’t care if you know. It isn’t the same thing.”

Paige pushed her way out of the Jeep, not surprised when he climbed out himself. Was this all a prologue to another one of these scenes with him—as damaging as it was irresistible? She tucked her hands into the pockets of the jeans she’d worn on the long flight and wished she felt like herself. It’s only jet lag, she assured herself. Or so she hoped. You’ve read about jet lag. Everyone says it passes or no one would ever go anywhere, would they? But she didn’t feel particularly tired. She felt stripped to the bone instead. Flayed wide-open.

And the way he looked at her didn’t help.

“How long?” she asked, her voice not quite sounding like her own. “How long do you think you can keep me here?”

Giancarlo pulled her bags from the back and carried them to the door of the cottage, shouldering it open and disappearing inside. But Paige stayed where she was, next to the Jeep with her eyes on the rolling green horizon. The sweet blue of the summer sky was packed with fluffy white clouds that looked as if they were made of meringue and were far more beautiful than all of her dreams put together, and she tried her best not to cry, because this was a prison—she knew it was—and yet she couldn’t escape the notion that it was home.

“I’ll keep you as long as I like,” he said from the doorway, his voice another rolling thing through the morning’s stillness, like a dark shadow beneath all that shine. “This is about my satisfaction, cara. Not your feelings. Or it wouldn’t be torture, would it? It would be a holiday.”

“By your account, I imagine I don’t have any feelings anyway, isn’t that right?” She hadn’t meant to say that, and certainly not in that challenging tone. She scowled at the stunning view, and reminded herself that she’d never really had a home and never would. Longing for a place like this was nothing more than masochistic, no matter how familiar it felt. “I’m nothing but a mercenary bitch who set out to destroy you once and is now, what? A delusional stalker who has insinuated herself into the middle of your family? For my own nefarious purposes, none of which have been in evidence at all over the past three years?”

“I find parasite covers all the bases.” Giancarlo drawled that out, and it was worse, somehow, here in the midst of so much prettiness. Like a creeping black thing in the center of all that green, worse than a mere shadow. “No need to succumb to theatrics when you can merely call it what it is.”

She shook her head, that same old anguish moving inside of her, making her shake deep in her gut, making her wish for things she knew better than to want. A home, at last. Love to fill it. A place to belong and a person to share it with—

Paige had always known better. Dreams were one thing. They were harmless. No one could have survived the hard, barren place where she’d grown up, first her embittered mother’s teenage mistake and then her meal ticket, without a few dreams to keep them going. Much less what had happened ten years ago. What her mother had become. What Paige had nearly had to do in a vain attempt to save her.

But wishes were nothing but borrowed trouble. And she supposed, looking back, that had been the issue from the start—being with Giancarlo had made her imagine she could dare to want things she knew, she knew, could never be hers. Never.

You won’t make that mistake again in a hurry, her mother’s caustic voice jeered at her.

Paige risked a look at Giancarlo then, despairing at the way her heart squeezed tight at the sight of him the way it always had, at that dark look on his face that was half hunger and half dislike, at the way she had always loved him and understood she always would, and to what end? He would have his revenge and she would endure it and somehow, somehow, she would survive him, too.

It hurts a little bit more today than it usually does because you’re here and you’re tired, she tried to tell herself. But you’re fine. You’re always fine. Or you will be.

“I know you don’t want to believe me,” she said, because she had always been such an idiot where this man was concerned. She had never had the slightest idea how to protect herself. Giancarlo had been the kind of man who had blistering affairs the way other people had dinner plans, but she had fallen head over heels in love with him at first glance and destroyed them both in the process. And now she wanted, so desperately, for him to see her, just for a moment. The real her. “But I would do anything for your mother. For a hundred different reasons. Chief among them that she’s been better to me than my own mother ever was.”

“And here I thought you emerged fully grown from a bed of lies,” he said silkily. He paused, his dark eyes on her, as if recognizing how rare it was that Paige mentioned her own mother—but she watched him shrug it off instead of pursuing it and told herself it was for the best. “I was avoiding the city my mother lived in all these years and the kind of people who lived in it, not my mother. A crucial distinction, because believe me, Paige, I would also do anything for my mother. And I will.”

There was a threat in the last three words. A promise. And there was no particular reason it should thud into her so hard, as if it might have taken her from her feet if she hadn’t already been braced against all of this. The pretty place, the sense of homecoming, the knowledge he was even more lost to her when he stood in front of her than he had been in all their years apart.

“I loved my mother, too, Giancarlo,” Paige said, and she understood it was that scraped raw feeling that made her say such a thing. Giancarlo would never understand the kind of broken, terrible excuse for love that was the only kind Paige had ever known, before him. The sharp, scarring toll it exacted. How it festered inside and taught a person how to see the world only through the lens of it, no matter how blurred or cracked or deeply twisted. “And that never got me anything but bruises and a broken heart.” And then had taken the only things that had ever mattered to her. She swallowed. “I know the difference.”

He moved out of the doorway of the cottage then, closing the distance between them with a few sure steps, and Paige couldn’t tell if that was worse or better. Everything seemed too mixed up and impossible and somehow right, too; the gentle green trees and the soft, lavender-scented breeze, and his dark gold eyes in the center of the world, making her heart beat loud and slow inside her chest.

Stop it, she ordered herself. This is not your home. Neither is he.

“Is this an appeal to my better nature?” Giancarlo asked softly. Dangerously. “I keep telling you, that man is dead. Killed by your own hand. Surely you must realize this by now.”

“I know.” She tilted up her chin and hoped he couldn’t see how lost she felt. How utterly out of place. How hideously dislocated if it seemed that he was the only steady thing here, this man who detested her. “And here I am. Isolated and at your beck and call. Just think of all the ways you can make me pay for your untimely death.”

She couldn’t read the shadow that moved over his face then. His hand moved as if it was outside his control and he ran the backs of his fingers over the line of her jaw, softly, so softly, and yet she knew better than to mistake his gentleness for kindness. She knew better than to trust her body’s interpretations of things when it came to this man and the things he could do to it with so seemingly careless a touch.

The truth was in that fierce look in his eyes, that flat line of his delectable mouth. The painful truth that nothing she said could change, or would.

He wanted to hurt her. He wanted all of this to hurt.

“Believe me,” he said quietly. Thickly, as if that scraped raw thing was in him, too. “I have thought of little else.”

Paige thought he might kiss her then, and that masochist in her yearned for it, no matter what came after. No matter how he made her pay for wanting him, which she knew he would. She swayed forward and lifted her mouth toward his and for a moment his attention seemed to drift toward her lips—

But then he muttered one of those curses that sounded almost pretty because it was in Italian. And he stepped back, staring at her as if she was a ghost. A demon, more like. Sent to destroy him when it was clear to her that if there was going to be any destruction here, it would be at his hands.

It was going to be her in pieces, not him. And Paige didn’t understand why she didn’t care about that the way she should. When he looked at her, she didn’t care about anything but him and all these terrible, pointless wishes that had wrecked her once already. She should have learned her lesson a long time ago. She’d thought she had.

“I suggest you rest,” he said in a clipped tone, stalking back toward the driver’s side of the Jeep. “Dinner will be served at sunset and you’ll wake up starving sometime before then. That’s always the way with international flights.”

As if he knew she’d never left the country before, when she’d thought she’d hidden it well today. His knowing anyway seemed too intimate, somehow. The sort of detail a lover might know, or perhaps a friend, and he was neither. She told herself she was being ridiculous, but it was hard to keep looking at him when she felt there had to be far too much written across her face then. Too much of that Arizona white trash dust, showing him all the things about her she’d gone to such lengths to keep him from ever knowing.

“At the castello?” she asked, after the moment stretched on too long and his expression had begun to edge into impatience as he stood there, the Jeep in between them and his hand on the driver’s door. “That seems like a bit of a walk. It was a twenty-minute drive, at least.”

“At the house on the hill,” he said, and jerked his head toward the farmhouse that squatted at the top of the nearest swell of pretty green, looking sturdy and complacent in the sunlight, all light stones and an impressive loggia. “Right there. Unless that’s too much of a hike for you these days, now that you live on a Bel Air estate and are neck deep in opulence day and night. None of it earned. Or yours.”

Paige ignored the slap. “That really all depends on who lives there,” she replied, and it was remarkably hard to make her voice sound anything approximating light. “A troll? The Italian bogeyman? The big, bad wolf with his terrible fangs?”

His mouth moved into that crooked thing that made her stomach flip over and her heart ache. More. Again. Always.

“That would be me,” he said softly, and she thought he took a certain pleasure in it. “So that’s all of the above, I’d think. For your sins.”

* * *

A long nap and a very hot shower after she woke made Paige feel like a new person. Or herself again, at last. She had been too weary and inexplicably sad to explore the cottage when Giancarlo had driven away, so she did it now, with the whisper-soft robe she’d found in the master bathroom wrapped around her and her feet bare against the reclaimed stone floors, her wet hair feeling indulgent against her shoulders as she moved through the charming space.

It was a two-story affair in what had looked from the outside like a very old stone outbuilding. Inside, it was filled with the early-evening light thanks to the tall windows everywhere, the exposed beams high above, and the fact the interior was wholly open to best take advantage of what would otherwise have felt like a small space. Stairs led from the stone ground floor to the loft above, which featured a large, extraordinarily comfortable bed in the airy room nestled in the eaves, a small sitting area with a balcony beyond, and the luxurious master bath Paige had just enjoyed.

The main floor was divided into an efficient, cheerful kitchen with a happily stocked refrigerator, a cozy sitting area with deep sofas arranged around a wide stone fireplace, a small dining area that led out to a patio that spanned the length of the cottage and led into a small, well-tended garden. And everywhere she looked, behind everything and hovering near and far and more beautiful by the moment, the Tuscan view.

Home, she thought, despite herself.

Evening had crept in with long, deep shadows that settled in the valley and made art out of the soft green trees, the cypress sentries and the rounded hills on all sides. The road that had felt torturously remote when Giancarlo had driven her here looked like something from one of her beloved old books now, winding off into the distance or off into dreams. Paige stood there in the window until the air cooled around her, and realized only when she started back up the stairs that she hadn’t breathed like that—deeply and fully, all the way down to her feet, the way she had when she’d danced—in a very long time.

Almost as if she was comfortable here. As if she belonged. She’d felt that way in only one other place in her whole life, and had been as wrong. Giancarlo’s Malibu home, all wood and glass, angled to best let the sea in, had only been a pretty house. This was a pretty place.

And when you leave here, she told herself harshly, you will never come back. The same as that house in Malibu. Everyone feels at home in affluent places. That’s what they’re built to do.

Paige dressed slowly and carefully, her nerves prickling into a new awareness as she rifled through her suitcase. Should she wear the sort of thing she would wear if this was a vacation in Italy she happened to be taking by herself? Or should she wear something she suspected Giancarlo would prefer, so he could better enact his revenge? On the one hand, jeans and a slouchy sweatshirt, all comfort and very little style. On the other, a flirty little dress he could get his hands under, like before. She didn’t have the slightest idea which way to go.

“What do you want?” she asked her sleepy-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, her voice throaty from all that sleep.

But that was the trouble. She still wanted the same things she’d always wanted. She could admit that, here and now, with Giancarlo’s Italy pressing in on her from all sides. The difference was that this time, she knew better than to imagine she’d get it.

Paige dried her hair slowly, her mind oddly empty even as the rest of her felt tight with all the things she didn’t want to think about directly. Taut and on edge. She pulled on a pair of soft white trousers and a loose sort of tunic on top, a compromise between the jeans she’d have preferred and what she assumed Giancarlo would likely want to see her wear, given the circumstances.

“What he’d really like is me, as naked as the day I was born and crawling up that hillside on my hands and knees,” she muttered out loud and then laughed at the image, the sound creaky and strange in the quiet of the cottage. She kept laughing until a wet heat pricked at the back of her eyes and she had to pull in a ragged breath to keep the tears from pouring over. Then another.

Paige frowned as she slipped her feet into a pair of thonged flat sandals. When was the last time she’d laughed like that? About anything?

What a sad creature you’ve become, she scolded herself as she dug out her smartphone from her bag and scrolled through her messages. But the truth was, she had always been a fairly sad thing, when she looked back at the progression of her life. Sad and studious or determined and stubborn, from the start. It had been the only way to survive the chaos that had been her mother. There had only been one two-month stretch of laughter in her life, gleaming and overflowing and dizzy with joy, and she’d ruined it ten years ago.

“My goodness,” Violet said in her grand way when she picked up her private line, after Paige apologized for disappearing and then sleeping for hours, “this is Italia, Paige. One must soak in la dolce vita, especially when jet-lagged. I plan to spend the night in my lovely little castle, getting fat on all the marvelous local cuisine! I suggest you do the same.”