The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

And Paige would have loved to do the same, she thought when she finally stepped out of her cottage into the cool evening, the Tuscan sky turning to gold above her. But she had a date with her sins instead.

Sins that felt like wishes granted, and what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to tell the difference between the two?

She took her time and yet the walk was still too short. Much too short.

And Giancarlo waited there at the crest of the hill, his eyes as hard as his body appeared loose and relaxed, in linen trousers and the sort of camel-colored sport coat that made her think of his aristocratic roots and her lack of them. And Paige was suddenly as wide-awake as if she’d drowned herself in a vat of espresso.

He looked like something more than a man as he waited there, at first a shadow next to the bold upright thrust of a thick cypress tree, then, as she drew closer, very distinctly himself. He’d clearly watched her come all the way up the side of his hill, and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen him from afar without realizing it or if it was that odd magnetic pull inside of her that had done it, pointing her toward him as unerringly as if she’d been headed straight to him all along.

Home, that thing in her whispered, and she didn’t have the strength to pretend she didn’t feel it when she did. Not tonight.

She stopped when she was still some distance away and looked back the way she’d come, unable to keep the small sigh of pleasure from escaping her lips. There was the hint of mist in the valley the lower the sun inched toward the hills, adding an elegant sort of haunting to the shadows that danced between them, and far off in the distance the castello stood tall and proud, lights blazing against the coming night. It was so quiet and perfect and deeply satisfying in a way Paige hadn’t known anything could be. Gooseflesh prickled up and down her arms and she felt it all like a heavy sob in her chest, rolling through her, threatening her very foundations.

Or maybe that was him. Maybe it had always been him.

“It’s gorgeous here,” she said, which felt deeply inadequate. “It doesn’t seem real.”

“My father believed that the land is our bones,” Giancarlo said. “Protect it, and we strengthen ourselves. Conserve it and care for it, and we become greater in its glory. Sometimes I think he was a madman, a farmer hiding in an aristocrat’s body.” His gaze moved over her face, then beyond her, toward the setting sun. “And then another sunset reminds me that he was right. Beauty is always worth it. It feeds the soul.”

“He sounds like some kind of poet.”

“Not my father. Poets and artists were to be championed, as one must always support art and culture for the same reason one tends the land, but Alessis had a higher calling.” He shook his head. “Endless debt and responsibility, apparently. I might have been better off as an artist, come to that.”

“If I had a home like this, I don’t think I’d mind doing whatever it took to keep it,” Paige said then. She remembered herself. “I don’t think anyone would.”

She thought Giancarlo smiled, though his face was obscured in the falling dark and then she knew she must have imagined it, because this wasn’t that kind of evening no matter how lovely it was. He wasn’t that kind of man. Not anymore. Not for her.

“Come,” he said. He reached out his hand and held it there in the last gasp of golden light, and Paige knew, somehow, that everything would be divided into before and after she took it. The world. Her life. This thing that was still between them. And that precarious, wildly beating creature inside her chest that was the battered ruins of her heart.

His mouth crooked slightly as the moment stretched out. She made no move; she was frozen into place and wasn’t sure she could do anything about it, but he didn’t drop his hand.

“Did you make me dinner?” she asked, her voice shockingly light when there was nothing but heaviness and their history and her treacherous heart inside of her, and she thought neither one of them was fooled. “Because food poisoning really would be a punishment, all joking aside.”

“I am Italian,” he said, with a note of amused outrage in his voice, which reminded her too strongly of all that laughter they’d shared a lifetime ago. As if the only things that had mattered in the whole world had been there in his smile. She’d thought so then. She thought maybe she still did, for all the good that would do her here. “Of course I can cook.” He paused, as if noticing how friendly he sounded and remembering how inappropriate that was tonight. As if he, too, was finding it hard to recall the battle lines he’d drawn. “But even if I couldn’t, the estate has a fleet of chefs on call. Meals are always gourmet here, no matter who prepares them.”

“Careful,” she said softly, more to her memories and her silly heart than the man who stood there before her, still reaching out to her, still her greatest temptation made flesh. Still the perfect embodiment of all the things she’d always wanted and couldn’t have. “I might forget to be suitably intimidated and start enjoying myself. And then what would happen?”

He definitely smiled that time, and Paige felt it like a deep, golden fire, lighting her up from the inside out. Making her shiver.

“Surrender takes many forms,” he replied into the indigo twilight that cloaked them both, now that the sun had finally sunk beneath the furthest hill. “I want yours every way I can get it.”

“I can surrender to la dolce vita,” she said, as airily as possible, as if her tone of voice might make it so. “I understand that’s the point of Italy.”

He still stood there, his hand out, as if he could stand like that forever. “That’s as good a place to start as any.”

And there was no real decision, in the end. There had been so many choices along the way, hadn’t there? Paige could have got a different job three years ago. She could have left Violet’s house and employ the moment Giancarlo had appeared, or anytime since. She could have declined the offer of that “date” that night, she could have stayed standing up instead of sinking to her knees by the side of that road, she could have shown him nothing in Violet’s closet that day but her back as she walked away from him. She could have refused to board his plane, refused to leave her cottage tonight, locked herself inside rather than climb this hill to stand before him like this.

He hadn’t happened to her, like the weather. She’d chosen this, every step of the way, and even here, even stranded in the countryside with this man who thought so ill of her, she felt more at home than she had in years. Maybe ever. She supposed that meant she’d made her decision a long time ago.

So Paige reached out her hand and slid it into his. She let the heat of him wash through her at that faintly rough touch, his palm warm and strong and perfect, and told herself it didn’t matter what happened next.

That she’d surrendered herself to Giancarlo a long time ago, whether he understood that or not.

CHAPTER FIVE

“IF THIS IS your revenge,” Paige said, a current of laughter in her voice though her expression was mild, “I think I should confess to you that it tastes a whole lot like red wine.”

He should do something about that, Giancarlo thought, watching her move through the refurbished ground floor of his renovated house. She was still so graceful, so light on her feet. Like poetry in motion, and he’d never been able to reconcile how she could flow like that and have turned out so rotten within. He’d never understood it.

It doesn’t matter what you understand, he snapped at himself. Only what you do to make this thing for her go away—

But something had happened out there as the sun set. Something had shifted inside him, though he couldn’t quite identify it. He wasn’t certain he’d want to name it if he could.

“It may prove to be a long night, cara,” he told her darkly, pouring himself a glass of the wine they made here from Alessi grapes. “This is merely the beginning.”

“The civilized version of revenge, then,” she murmured, almost as if to herself, running her fingers along the length of the reclaimed wood table that marked his dining area in the great, open space he’d done himself. In soothing yet bright colors and historically contextual pieces, all of which dimmed next to that effortless, offhanded beauty of hers. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

This didn’t feel like revenge. This felt like a memory. Giancarlo didn’t want to think too closely about that, but the truth of it slapped at him all the same. It could have been any one of the long, lush evenings they’d shared in Malibu a decade back that still shimmered in his recollection, as if the two of them had been lit from within. It shimmered in him now, too. Again. As if this was the culmination of all the dreams he’d lied and told himself he’d never had, in all those years since he’d left Los Angeles and started bringing the estate back to life.

There was too much history between them, too much that had gone wrong to ever fix, and yet he still caught himself watching her as if this was a new beginning. But then, he had always been such a damned fool where this woman was concerned, hadn’t he?

Earlier he’d stood in the courtyard of the castello with Violet, toasting her first night back in Italy since his father’s funeral eight years ago, and he’d felt a sense of deep rightness. Of homecoming, long overdue. These hills held his happiest childhood memories, after all. When his parents had both been alive, and in those early years, so much in love it had colored the air around them.

“You’ve done a marvelous thing here, darling,” Violet had said, smiling as much at him as at the achingly perfect view.

“I remember the days when we couldn’t drive out the gates in Bel Air without having to fight our way through packs of photographers,” he’d said, gazing out at the slumbering hills, all of them his now, his birthright and his future. His responsibility. And not a single paparazzo in a thousand miles or more. No lies. No stories. Only the enduring beauty of the earth. “Just to get to school in the morning.”

“The tabloids giveth and the tabloids taketh away,” Violet had said drily, looking as chic and elegant as ever though she wore her version of lounge wear and what was, for her, a practically cosmetic-free face. “It’s never been particularly easy to navigate, I grant you, but there did used to be a line. Or perhaps I’m kidding myself.”

“I want this place to be a refuge,” he’d told her then. “It’s nearly fifteen miles to the nearest main road. Everything is private. It’s the perfect retreat for people who can’t hide anywhere else.”

Violet had tasted her wine and she’d taken her time looking at him again, and he’d still been unsure if she was pausing for dramatic effect or if that was simply how she processed emotion. She was still a mystery to him and he’d long since accepted she always would be. Or anyway, he’d been telling himself he’d accepted it. It might even have been true.

“Yes,” she’d said, “and it’s very beautiful. It’s always been beautiful. I imagine I could live here quite happily and transform myself into one of those portly, Italy-maddened expatriates who are forever writing those merry little Tuscan memoirs and waxing rhapsodic about the light.” Her brows had lifted. “But which one of us is it that feels they need a hiding place, Giancarlo? Is that meant to be you or me?”

“Never fear, Mother,” he’d replied evenly. “I have no intention of having children of my own. I won’t have any cause to hide away, the better to protect them from prying eyes and a judgmental world. Perhaps I, too, will flourish in the heat of so many spotlights.”

She’d only smiled, enigmatic as ever, seemingly not in the least bit chastised by what he’d said. Had he expected otherwise? “Privacy can be overrated, my darling boy. Particularly when it better resembles a jail.”

And now he stood in the cheerful lounge of the house he’d taken apart and put back together with his own two hands, and watched the woman he’d once loved more than any other walk through the monument—he wouldn’t call it a jail—he’d built to his own unhappiness, his lonely, broken, betrayed heart.

How had he failed to realize, until this moment, that he’d built it for her? That he’d been hiding here these past ten years—deliberately keeping himself some kind of hermit, tucked away on this property and in this very cottage? That it was as much his refuge for her as it was from her?

That notion made something like a storm howl in him, deep and long. And as if she could read his mind, Paige turned, a small smile on that distracting mouth of hers.

“I always liked your films,” she said, her voice the perfect complement to the carefully decorated great room, the furnishings a mix of masculine ease and his Italian heritage, as if he’d planned for her to stand there in its center and make it all work. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that that kind of attention to detail should spill over into all the things you do.”

“My films were laughable vanity projects at best,” he told her, that storm in his voice and clawing at the walls of his chest. “I should never have taken myself seriously, much less allowed anyone else to do the same. It’s an embarrassment.”

Paige wrinkled her nose and he thought that might kill him, because finding her adorable was far more dangerous than simply wanting her. One was about sex, which was simple. The other had consequences. Terrible consequences he refused to pay.

“I liked them.”

“Shall we talk about the things you like?” Giancarlo asked, and he sounded overbearingly brooding to his own ears. As if he was performing a role because he thought the moment needed a villain, not because he truly wanted to put her back in her place. “Your interest in photography and amateur porn, for instance?”

Some revenge, he thought darkly. Next you’ll try to cuddle her to death with your words.

But she only smiled in that enigmatic way of hers, and moved closer to one of the paintings on the wall, her hands cupped around her glass of wine and that inky black hair of hers falling in abandon down her back, and it wasn’t cuddling he thought about as he watched her move. Then bite her lower lip as she peered up at the painting. It wasn’t cuddling that made his blood heat and his mouth dry.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Paige said, so softly that it took him a moment to realize she’d spoken. She swiveled back to look at him, framed there like a snapshot, the woman who had destroyed him before the great, bright canvas that stretched high behind her, all shapes and emotion and a swirl of color, that he hadn’t understood until tonight had reminded him of her.

Giancarlo told himself it was a sour realization, but his sex felt heavy and the air between them tasted thick. Like desire. Like need.

Like fate.

“It seems as if you’ve achieved what you set out to do,” she continued as if she couldn’t feel the thickness, though he knew, somehow, that she could. “You’ve separated me from Violet without seeming to do so deliberately, which I’m assuming was your purpose from the start. But why bring me all the way here? Why not leave me in California and spirit Violet away? And having made me come all the way here,” Paige continued, something he couldn’t identify making her eyes gleam green in the mellow light, “why not simply leave me to rot in my little cottage? It’s pretty as prison cells go, I grant you. Very pretty. It might take me weeks to realize I’m well and truly trapped there.”

He let his gaze roam over her the way his hands itched to do. “You’ve forgotten the most important part.”

“The sex, yes,” Paige supplied, and she didn’t sound particularly cowed by the idea, or even as outraged as she’d been back in Los Angeles. Her tone was bland. Perhaps too bland. “On command.”

“I was going to say obedience,” he said, and he didn’t feel as if he was playing a game any longer. He was too busy letting his eyes trace over her curves, letting his hands relish the tactile memory of her face between them as if she’d burned her way into his flesh. He could still taste her, damn it. And he wanted more.

“Obedience,” she repeated, as if testing each syllable of the word as she said it. “Does that include feeding me a gourmet dinner in this perfect little mansion only a count would call a cottage? Are you entirely sure you know what obedience involves?”

Giancarlo smiled, or anyway, his mouth moved. “That’s the point. It involves whatever I say it involves.”

He took a sip of his wine as he walked over to the open glass doors that led out to the loggia, nodding for her to join him outside. Stiffly, carefully—as if she was more shaken by their encounter than she appeared, and God help him, he wanted that to be true—she did.

Because the truth was so pathetic, wasn’t it? He still so badly wanted her to be real. To have meant some part of the things that had happened between them. All these years later, he still wanted that. Giancarlo despaired of himself.

A table waited out in the soft night air, bright with candles and laden with local produce and delicacies prepared on-site, while a rolling cart sat next to it with even more tempting dishes beneath silver covers. It was achingly romantic, precisely as he’d ordered. The hills and valleys of the estate rolled out beneath the stars, with lights winking here and there in the distance, making their isolation high up on this terrace at a remove from all the world seem profound.

That, too, was the point.

He moved to pull her chair out for her like the parody of the perfect gentleman he had never quite been and waited as she settled in, taking a moment to inhale her scent. Tonight she smelled of the high-end bath products he had his staff stock in the cottages, vanilla and apricots, and that hint of pure woman beneath.

“This house was a ruin when I started working on it,” he told her, still standing behind her, because he didn’t know what his face might show and he didn’t want her to see it. To see him. He succumbed to a whim and ran his fingers through her hair, reveling in the heavy weight of the dark strands even as he remembered all the other times she’d wrapped him in the heat and sweetness of it. When she’d crawled over him in that wide bed in Malibu and let her hair slip and tumble all over his skin as she tortured him with that sweet mouth of hers, driving them both wild. Giancarlo hardened, remembering it, and her hair was thick silk in his hands. “It sits on its original foundation, but everything else is changed. Perhaps the walls still stand, but everything inside is new, reclaimed, or altered entirely. It might look the same from a distance, but it isn’t.”

“I appreciate the metaphor,” Paige said, with a certain grittiness to her voice that he suspected meant her teeth were clenched. He smiled.

“Then I hope you’ll appreciate this, too,” he said as he rounded the table and sat down across from her, stretching out his legs before him as he did. “This is the Italian countryside and everything you can see in every direction is mine. You could scream for days and no one would hear you. You could try to escape and, unless you’ve taken up marathon running in your spare time, you’d run out of energy long before you found the road. You claimed to be obedient in Los Angeles because it suited you. You wanted your job more than you minded the loss of your self-respect, such as it is. Here?” He shrugged as he topped up their wineglasses with a bottle crafted from grapes he’d grown himself and then sat back, watching her closely, as she visibly fought not to react to his cool tone, his calmly belligerent words. “You have no other choice.”

“That’s not at all creepy,” Paige said, though he could have sworn that gleam of green in her chameleon gaze was amusement, however beleaguered. “I’m definitely the terrifying stalker in this scenario, not you.”

Giancarlo laughed. “Not that I would care if it really was creepy, but I don’t think you really think so, do you? Shall we put it to the test?”

He wanted her to push him, he understood. He wanted to see for himself. He wanted to peel those crisp white trousers from her slim hips and lick his way into her wetness and heat and know it was all for him, the way he’d once believed it was. The way he’d once believed she was.

Soon, he assured himself as his body reacted to that image with predictable enthusiasm. Soon enough.

“Again,” Paige said tightly, taking a healthy gulp of her wine, “it seems to me that there are more effective forms of payback than a romantic dinner for two, served beneath the starry night sky on what might be the most intimate terrace on the entire planet.” She looked out at the view as the heavens sparkled back at her, as if they were performing for her pleasure. “I suspect you might be doing it wrong.”

“Ah, Paige,” Giancarlo said softly. “You lack imagination.” Her eyes swung back to his and he smiled again, wider, pleased when that seemed to alarm her. “The romantic setting will only make it more poignant, will it not, when I order you to strip and sit there naked as we eat. Or when I demand that you please me with your mouth while I soak in the view. Or when I bend you over the serving table and make you scream out my name until I’m done.” He let his smile deepen as her eyes went very green, and very round. “The more civilized the setting, the more debauched the act,” he said mildly. “I find there is very little more effective.”

She looked stunned, and then something like wistful, and he almost broke and hauled her into his arms—but somehow, somehow, he reined himself in. Just a little bit longer, he promised himself. She blinked, then coughed, and then she folded her hands together in her lap with such precision that Giancarlo knew she was torturing herself with all those images he’d put in her head.

Va bene.

“You say that as if this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.” Her voice was his own little victory, so raspy was it then, with that stunned heat in her gaze and that band of color high on her cheeks. “Do you spend a lot of time enacting complicated revenge fantasies, Giancarlo? Is that another one of your heretofore hidden talents—like architecture and interior design, apparently?”

“I went to architecture school after university,” he said, and something about the fact she didn’t know that bothered him. Had he never told her his own story? Had he been as guilty of wearing a false persona ten years ago as she had been? Had it simply been the rush, the need that had kept them in bed and focused on other things? Had it been by her design—or had it been his own selfishness at play? He shoved that disconcerting thought aside. “But when I was finished, I decided I wanted to leverage my position as Violet’s son, instead. That didn’t work out very well for either one of us, did it?” He reached over and removed the silver cover from the plate of antipasti in front of her, then from his own, and smiled at her when she looked confused. “The salsicce di cinghiale is particularly good,” he told her. “And you should be certain to eat well. We have a very long night ahead of us.”

He expected her to do as she was told. It took a moment or two for him to realize that she hadn’t moved. That she appeared to have frozen solid where she sat and was staring at him with a stricken sort of expression on her face.

Giancarlo lifted a brow. “Was I unclear?”

“I appreciate all the tension and drama,” Paige said after a moment. “I don’t think I realized how very much you take after your mother until now. That’s a compliment,” she added in a hurry when he frowned at her. “But I’ll pass.”

“That is not an option you have.” He shrugged. “You persist in thinking what you want comes into play here. It doesn’t.”

“What will you do?” she asked softly, so softly it took a moment for him to hear the challenge beneath the words, and then to see it there in her chameleon eyes. “Make me scream for people who won’t hear me? Make me walk for days in search of a road that’s still hours from anywhere? Force me to stay in that gorgeous little cottage down the hill like a bird in a cage?”