The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

“They won’t.”

“Because you tell them so?” She shook her head, her expression serious though her mysterious eyes laughed at him. “I think that tactic only works with me. And not very well.”

“Because,” he said, his hands moving to her bottom again, then higher along the tempting indentation in her lovely back to tug her down to him, “a man is only a playboy whore when he appears to be having too much of a certain kind of uncontrolled fun in public. I can do all the same things in private and it doesn’t count. Didn’t you know?”

Her attention dropped to his mouth and he wanted it there. He was already hardening within her again and she shifted restlessly against him as if she encouraged it, making the fire inside him leap to new life that easily.

“It all counts,” she breathed. “Or none of it does.”

“Then I suppose that makes us all whores, doesn’t it?” he asked. He indulged himself and sank his hands deep into her hair, holding her head fast, as he tested the depth of her again and found her hotter around him. Wetter. Better, somehow, than before. That quickly, he was like steel. “But let’s be clear. How many lovers have you taken in the last ten years?”

“Less than your thousand,” she said, her voice a thin little thing, as her hips met his greedily. Deliciously. He grunted, and then pulled out to flip them around, coming down over her again and drawing her legs around his waist. He teased her heat with the tip of his hardness, and he didn’t know what it was that drove him then, but he didn’t let her pull him into her.

“How many?” he asked. He had no idea why he cared. He didn’t care. He’d imagined it a thousand times and it scraped at him and it changed nothing either way. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Tell me.”

Her eyes moved to his, then away, and they looked blue in the shadows. “What does it matter? Whatever number I pick, you’ll think the worst of me.”

“I already think the worst of you,” he said, the way he might have crooned love words a lifetime ago, and he couldn’t have said what he wanted here. To hurt her? Or himself? To make this all worse? Or was this simply his way of reminding them both who they were? “Why don’t you try the truth?”

“None,” she said, and there was an odd expression on her face as she said it. He might have called it vulnerable, were she someone else. “I told you there were no new tricks.”

It took another beat for him to process that, and then something roared in him, a primal force that was like some kind of howl, and he thought he shook though he knew he held himself perfectly still.

“Is that a joke?” But he was whispering. He barely knew his own voice.

Her wide mouth twisted and her gaze was dark with something he didn’t want to understand. Something that couldn’t possibly be real.

“Yes,” she said, her voice broken and fierce at once. “Ha ha, what a joke. I meant ten. Twenty. How many lovers do you imagine I’ve taken, Giancarlo? What number proves I’m who you think I am?”

He heard her voice break slightly as she asked the question, and a kind of ripple went through her lush body. He felt it. This time when she urged him into her, he went, slick and hard and even better than before, making him mutter a curse and press his forehead to hers. And he didn’t have the slightest idea if this was his form of an apology, or hers.

“I don’t care one way or the other,” he lied, and he didn’t want to talk about this any longer. He didn’t want to revisit all those images he’d tortured himself with over the years. Because his sad little secret was that he’d never imagined her in prison, the way he’d told her he had. He’d imagined her wrapped around some other man exactly like this and he’d periodically searched the internet to see if he could find any evidence that she was out there somewhere, doing it with all that same joy and grace that had undone him.

And it had killed him, every time. It still killed him.

So he took it out on her instead, in the best way possible. He set a hard pace, throwing them headfirst into that raging thing that consumed them both, and he laughed against the side of her neck when she couldn’t do anything but moan out her surrender.

He held on, building that perfect wildness all over again, making her thrash and keen, and when he thought he couldn’t take it any longer he reached between them and pressed hard against the center of her need, making her shatter all around him.

And he rode her until he could throw himself into that shattering, too. Until he could forget the truth he’d heard in her voice when she’d told him there hadn’t been anyone since him, because he couldn’t handle that—or what he’d seen on her face that he refused to believe. He refused.

He rode her until he could forget everything but this. Everything but her. Everything they built between them in this marvelous fire.

Until he lost himself all over again.

* * *

“Violet is asking for you,” Giancarlo said.

Paige had heard him coming from a long way off. First the Jeep, the engine announcing itself high on the hill and only getting louder as it wound its way down toward her cottage. Then the slam of the driver’s door. The thud of the cottage’s front door, and then, some minutes later, the slide of the glass doors that led out to where she sat, curled up beneath a graceful old oak tree with her book in her lap.

“That sounds like an accusation,” she said mildly, putting her book aside. He stood on the terrace with his hands on his lean hips, frowning at her. “Of course she’s asking for me. I’m her assistant. She might be on vacation here, but I’m not.”

“She needs to learn how to relax and handle her own affairs,” he replied, somewhat darkly. Paige climbed to her feet, brushing at the skirt she wore, and started toward him. It was impossible not feel that hunger at the sight of him, deep inside her, making her too warm, too soft.

“Possibly,” she said, trying to concentrate on something, anything but the sensual spell he seemed to weave simply by existing. “But I’m not her therapist, I’m her personal assistant. When she learns how to relax and handle her own affairs, I’m out of a job.”

Her heart set up its usual clatter at his proximity, worse the closer she got to him, and she didn’t understand how that could still happen. They’d been here almost a week. It should have settled down by now. She should have started to grow immune to him, surely. After all, she already knew how this would end. Badly. Unlike the last time, when she’d been so blissfully certain it would be the one thing in her life that ended well, this time she knew better. Their history was like a crystal ball, allowing her to see the future clearly.

Maybe too clearly. Not that it seemed to matter.

She stopped when she was near him but not too near him, and felt that warm thing in the vicinity of her heart when he scowled. He reached over and tugged her closer, so he could land a hard kiss on her mouth. Like a mark of possession, she thought, more than an indication of desire—but she didn’t care.

It deepened, the way it always deepened. Giancarlo muttered something and angled his head, and when he finally pulled back she was wound all around him and flushed and there was that deep male satisfaction stamped all over his face.

“Later,” he told her, like a promise, as if she’d been the one to start this.

And in this past week, Paige had learned that she’d take this man any way she could have him. She imagined that said any number of unflattering things about her, but she didn’t care.

“I might be busy later,” she told him loftily.

He smiled that hard smile of his that made her ache, and he didn’t look particularly concerned. “I will take that chance.”

And she would let him, she knew. Not because he told her to. Not because he was holding anything over her head. But because she was helpless before her own need, even though she knew perfectly well it would ruin her all over again....

Later, she told herself. I’ll worry about it later.

Because later was going to be all the years she got to live through on the other side of this little interlude, when he was nothing but a memory all over again. And she wasn’t delusional enough to imagine that there was any possibility that when this thing with Giancarlo ended he might permit her to remain with Violet, in any capacity. He was as likely to fall to his knees and propose marriage.

She moved around him and into the house then, not wanting him to read that epic bit of silliness on her face, when that notion failed to make her laugh at herself the way it should have. When it made everything inside of her clutch hopefully instead. You are such a fool, she chided herself.

But then again, that wasn’t news.

Paige swept up her bag and hung it over her shoulder, then followed Giancarlo out to his Jeep. He climbed in and turned the key, and she clung to the handle on her side of the vehicle as he bumped his way up the old lane and then headed toward the castello in the distance.

It was another beautiful summer’s day, bright and perfect with the olive trees a silvery presence on either side of the lane that wound through the hills toward Violet, and Paige told herself it was enough. This was enough. It was more than she’d ever imagined could happen with Giancarlo after what she’d done, and why did she want to ruin it with thoughts of more?

But the sad truth was, she didn’t know how to be anything but greedy when it came to this man. She wanted all of him, not the parts of himself he doled out so carefully, so sparingly. Not when she could feel he kept so much of himself apart.

She’d woken the morning after that first night to find herself in his bed. Alone. He’d left her there without so much as a note, and she’d lectured herself about the foolishness of her hurt feelings. She’d told herself she should count herself lucky he hadn’t tossed her out his front door at dawn, naked.

What she told herself and what she actually went right on feeling, of course, were not quite the same thing.

Modify your expectations, girl, she’d snapped at herself on the walk down the hill to her cottage. The birds had been singing joyfully, the sun had been cheerful against her face, she was in Italy of all places, and Giancarlo had made love to her again and again throughout the night. He could call it whatever he wanted. She would hold it in her battered little heart and call it what it had meant to her.

Because she hadn’t lied to him. She hadn’t touched another man since him, and she’d grown to accept the fact she never would. At first it had hurt too much. She’d seen nothing but Giancarlo—and more important, his back, on that last morning when he’d walked away from her rather than talk about what had happened, what she’d done. Then she’d started working for Violet and it had seemed as if Giancarlo was everywhere, in pictures, in emails, in conversation. Paige had had the very acute sense that so much as going out to dinner with another man was some kind of treason—which she’d known was absurd. Beyond absurd, given the way in which she’d betrayed him. She’d made certain he hated her. He’d walked away from her without a single backward glance. Why should he care what she did?

And yet somehow, each of these ten years had crept by and he was still the only man she’d ever slept with. She’d been unable to contain the small, humming thing inside her then as that thought had kept her company on her walk. It had felt a little bit too much like a kind of silly joy she ought to have known better than to indulge.

But he’d turned up that night, his face drawn as if he’d fought a great battle with himself, and he hadn’t seemed interested in talking about whether he’d lost or won. He’d led her up her stairs, thrown her on her bed, and kept them up for another night—this time, she’d noted, with the condoms they’d failed to use before.

They hadn’t talked about that first night and its lack of birth control. Just like ten years ago, they hadn’t talked about a thing.

And that was how it had been since her arrival, Paige thought now, as they drew closer to the castello. She’d never spent much time wondering what it felt like to be a rich man’s kept woman before now. What she thought people in this part of the world might call a mistress. But she imagined it must be something like this past week.

Nothing but the pleasures of their flesh. No unpleasant topics, save the odd bout of teasing that never quite landed a hard punch. Nothing but sex and food and sex again, until she felt glutted on it. Replete. Able to know him at a touch, taste him when he wasn’t there, scent him on any breeze.

The last time she’d felt so deeply a part of her own body, her own physical space, she’d been dancing more hours of the day than she’d slept.

She didn’t tell him that, either. That she filled these golden, blue-skied days with dancing, as if the first dancing she’d done on that initial night with him had freed her. Paige hadn’t understood how lost she’d been until she found herself out in the field near her cottage, dancing in great, wide circles beneath the glorious Tuscan sky with tears running down her face and her arms stretched toward the sun. She wanted nothing more than to share that with him.

But Giancarlo drove the Jeep with the same ferocity he did everything else—except in bed, where he indulged every sense and took his sweet time—and with that same hard edge of his old dark fury beneath it.

Almost as if he, too, preferred the little fairy tale they’d been living this past week, where she existed purely to please him, and did, again and again.

Paige knew better than to ask him about it. Or to tell him the things that moved in her, sharp and sweet, in this place that felt more like home every day. This was a no-talking zone. This was a place of sun and sex and silence. It was the only possible way it could work.

Like all temporary things, all stolen moments, it could only be a secret, or it would implode.

“What have you been up to all this time?” Violet asked, peering at Paige from her position on one of the castello’s lovely couches, her iPad in her lap and her voice no more than mildly reproving. “I thought perhaps you’d been sucked into one of the olive groves, never to be seen again.”

“You should have told me you needed me!” Paige exclaimed instead of answering the question. Because she didn’t want to know what Violet would think about the help touching her son. She didn’t want to risk her relationship with either one of them. “I thought I was giving you some much-needed time and space to yourself!”

“My dear girl,” Violet said, sounding amused, “if I wanted time and space to myself, I would have chosen a different life altogether.”

Paige was too aware of Giancarlo’s dark, brooding presence on the other side of the living room then, lounging there against the massive stone fireplace, supposedly scrolling through his phone’s display. She was certain he was hanging on every word. Or did she simply want to be that important to him?

There was no answer to that. Not one that came without a good dose of pain in its wake.

“I’m here now,” Paige said stoutly, trying to focus on the woman who had always been good to her, without all these complications and regrets. Not that she’d give you the time of day if she knew who you really were, that rough voice that was so much like her mother’s snarled at her.

“Then I have two questions for you,” Violet replied, snapping Paige back to the present. “Can you operate a manual transmission?”

That hadn’t been what Paige was expecting, but that was Violet. Paige rolled with it. “I can.”

It was, in fact, one of the few things she could say her mother had taught her. Even if it had been mostly so that Paige could drive the beat-up car she owned to pick her up, drunk and belligerent, from the rough bars down near the railroad tracks.

“And do you want to drive me to Lucca?” Violet smiled serenely when Giancarlo made an irritated sort of noise from the fireplace across the room and kept her eyes trained on Paige. “If memory serves, it has wonderful shopping. And I’m in the mood for an adventure.”

“An adventure with attention or without?” Paige asked without missing a beat, though she was well aware it had been a long time since Violet had gone out on one of her excursions into the public without expecting attention from the people who would see her out and about.

“Without,” Giancarlo snapped, from much closer by, and Paige had to control a little jump. She hadn’t heard him move.

“With, of course,” Violet said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “No one has fawned over me in a whole week, and I require attention the way plants require sunlight, you know. It’s how I maintain my youthful facade.”

She said it as if she was joking, but in that way of hers that didn’t actually allow for any argument. Not that it was Paige’s place to argue. Her son, however, was a different story.

“You’re one of the most famous women in the world,” Giancarlo pointed out, and the dark thing Paige heard in his voice was a different animal than the one he used when he spoke to her. More exasperated, perhaps. Or more formal. “It’s not safe for you to simply wander the streets alone.”

“I won’t be alone. I’ll have Paige,” Violet replied.

“And what, pray, will Paige do should you find yourself surrounded? Mobbed?” Giancarlo rolled his eyes. “Hold the crowd off with a smart remark or two?”

“I wouldn’t underestimate the power of a smart remark,” Paige retorted, glaring at him—but his gaze was on his mother.

“That was a long time ago,” Violet said softly. With a wealth of compassion that made Paige stiffen in surprise and Giancarlo jerk back as if she’d slapped him. “I was a very foolish young woman. I underestimated the kind of interest there would be—not only in me, but in you. Your father was livid.” She studied her son for a moment and then rose to her feet, smiling faintly at Paige. “We were in the south of France and I thought it would be a marvelous idea to go out and poke around the shops by myself. Giancarlo was four. And when the crowds surrounded us, he was terrified.”

“The police were called,” he said, furiously, Paige thought, though his voice was cold. “You had to be rescued by armed officials and you never went out without security again—and neither did I. I hope you haven’t spent your life telling this story as if I was an overimaginative child who caused a fuss. It wasn’t a monster in my closet. It was a pack of shouting cameramen and a mob of fans.”

“The point is, my darling, you were four,” Violet said quietly. “You are not four any longer. And while I flatter myself that I remain relevant, I am an old woman who has not commanded the attention of packs of paparazzi in a very long time. I’m perfectly capable of enjoying an afternoon with my assistant and, if you insist, one driver.”

“And you wonder why I refuse to have children,” he growled at her, and it took every shred of self-preservation Paige had to keep from reacting to that. To Giancarlo and the pain she could hear beneath the steel in his voice. “Why I would die before I’d subject another innocent to this absurd world of yours.”

“I didn’t wonder,” Violet replied. “I knew. But I hoped you’d outgrow it.”

“Mother—”

“I don’t like being locked away in Italian castles, Giancarlo,” she said, and there was steel in the way she said it, despite the smile she used. It was the famous star issuing a command, not a mother. “If you cast your memory back, you’ll remember that I never have.”

There was a strange tension in the room then. And though she knew better, though it would no doubt raise the suspicions of the woman who could read anyone, standing right there beside her, Paige found herself looking to Giancarlo as if she could soothe him somehow. As if he’d let her—

And she found that great darkness blazing in his eyes as he slowly, slowly turned his attention from Violet to her.

As if this was something she’d done, too.

Because, of course, she had. When he’d been far older than four. And what she’d done to him hadn’t been an accident.

The truth of that almost knocked her sideways, and she would never know how she remained standing. She wanted to tell him everything, and who cared what Violet thought? She wanted to explain about her mother’s downward spiral. The money owed, the threats from the horrible Denny, the fear and panic that she’d thought were just the way life was. Because that was how it had always been. Paige wanted him to understand—at last—that she never, ever would have sacrificed him if she hadn’t believed she had no other choice. If she hadn’t been trapped and terrified herself, with only hideous options on all sides.

But this wasn’t the place and she knew—she knew—he wouldn’t want to hear it anyway. He didn’t want to know why. He only wanted her to pay.

He didn’t realize that she had. That she still did. Every moment since.

And so she stood there, she said nothing the way she’d always said nothing and somehow she managed not to fall to her knees. Somehow Paige managed not to break into pieces. Somehow, she stared back at him as if she’d never broken his heart and she wished, hard and fierce and utterly pointless, that it were true.

“Don’t worry,” he said quietly, as if he was answering his mother. All of that darkness in his gaze. All of the betrayal, the loss. The terrible grief. It made Paige’s chest ache, so acutely that she forgot to worry that Violet would be able to sense it from a few feet away. So sharp and so deep she thought it might have been a mortal blow, and how could anyone hide that? “I remember everything.”

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