She actually sighed, as if he tried her patience, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or throttle her. He remembered that, too. From before. When she’d broken over his life like a hurricane and hadn’t stopped tearing up the trees and rearranging the earth until she was gone the same way she’d come, leaving nothing but scandal and the debris of her lies in her wake.
And yet she was still so pretty. He found that made him angrier than the rest of it.
“Glaring ferociously at me isn’t going to make me cry,” she said, and he wanted to see things in those chameleon eyes of hers. He wanted something, anything, to get to her—but he knew better, didn’t he? She hadn’t simply destroyed him, this time. She’d targeted his mother and she’d done it right under his nose. How could he imagine she was anything but evil? “It only makes the moment that much more uncomfortable.” She inclined her head slightly. “But if it makes you feel better, Giancarlo, you should go right ahead and try.”
He did laugh then. A short, humorless little sound.
“I am marveling at the sight of you,” he said, sounding cruel to his own ears, but she didn’t so much as blink. “You deserve to look like the person you really are, not the person you pretended you were.” He felt his mouth thin. “But I suppose this is Hollywood magic in action, no? The nastiest, most narcissistic things wrapped up tight in the prettiest packages. Of course you look as good as you did then.” He laughed softly, wanting it to hurt. Wanting something he said or did to have some effect on her—which told him a bit more than he wanted to know about his unresolved feelings about this woman. “That’s all you really have, is it not?”
CHAPTER TWO
GIANCARLO HAD FANCIED himself madly in love with her.
That was the thing he couldn’t forgive, much less permit himself to forget, especially when she was right here before him once again. The scandal that had ruined his budding film career, that had cast that deep, dark shadow over what had been left of his intensely private, deeply proper father’s life, that had made him question everything he’d thought he’d known about himself, that had made him finally leave this damned city and all its demons behind him within a day of the photos going live—that had been something a few shades worse than terrible and it remained a deep, indelible mark on Giancarlo’s soul. But however he might have deplored it, he supposed he could have eventually understood a pampered, thoughtless young man’s typical recklessness over a pretty girl. It was one of the oldest stories in the world.
It was his own parents’ story, come to that.
It was the fact that he’d been so deceived that he’d wanted to marry this creature despite his lifelong aversion to the institution, make her his countess, bring her to his ancestral home in Italy—he, who had vowed he’d never marry after witnessing the fallout from his parents’ tempestuous union—that made his blood boil even all these years later. He’d been plotting out weddings in his head while she’d been negotiating the price of his disgrace. The fury of it still made him feel much too close to wild.
She only inclined her head again, as if she was perfectly happy to accept any and all blame he heaped on her, and Giancarlo didn’t understand why that made him even more enraged.
“Have you nothing to say?” he taunted her. “I don’t believe it. You must have lost your touch in all these years, Nicola.” He saw her jerk, as if she really did hate that name, and filed that away as ammunition. “I beg your pardon. Paige. You can call yourself whatever you want. You’ve obviously spent too much time with a lonely old woman if this is the best you can do.”
“She is lonely,” Paige agreed, and he thought that was temper that lit up her cheeks, staining them, though her voice was calm. “This was never meant to be a long-term situation, Giancarlo. I assumed you’d come home and recognize me within the month. Of course, that was three years ago.”
It took him a moment to understand what it was he was feeling then, and he didn’t like it when he did. Shame. Hot and new and unacceptable.
“The world will collide with the sun before I explain myself to you,” he bit out. Like how he’d managed to let so much time slip by—always so busy, always a crisis on the estate in Italy, always something. How he’d avoided coming here and hurt his mother in the process. Those things might have been true—they were why he’d finally forced himself to come after an entire eighteen months without seeing Violet on one of her usual press junkets around the globe—but they certainly weren’t this woman’s business.
“I didn’t ask you to explain anything.” She lifted one shoulder, still both delicate and toned, he was annoyed to notice, and then dropped it. “It’s simply the truth.”
“Please,” he scoffed, and rubbed his hand over his face to keep from reacting like the animal he seemed to become in her presence. Ten years ago he’d thought that compulsion—that need—was passion. Fate. He knew better now. It was sheer, unadulterated madness. “Do not use words you cannot possibly know the meaning of. It only makes you look even more grasping and base than we both know you are already.”
She blinked, then squared her shoulders, her chin rising as she held his gaze. “Do I have time to get a list of approved vocabulary words in what remains of my five minutes? Before you have me thrown over Violet’s walls and onto the street?”
Giancarlo looked at her, the breeze playing in her inky dark hair with its auburn accents, the sun shifting through the vines that stretched lazily above them in a fragrant canopy, and understood with a painful surge of clarity that this was an opportunity. This woman had been like a dark, grim shadow stretching over his life, but that was over now. And he was so different from the man he’d been when she’d sunk her claws in him that he might as well have been a stranger.
She had never been the woman she’d convinced him she was. Because that woman, he had loved. That woman had been like a missing piece to his own soul that he’d never known he lacked and yet had recognized instantly the moment he’d seen her.
But that was nothing but a performance, a stern voice whispered in his head.
And this was the second act.
“Does my mother know that you are the woman who starred in all those photos a decade ago?” he asked, sounding almost idle, though he felt anything but. He slid his hands into his pockets and regarded her closely, noting how pale she went, and how her lips pressed hard together.
“Of course not,” she whispered, and there was a part of him that wondered why she wanted so badly to maintain his mother’s good opinion. Why should that matter? But he reminded himself this was the way she played her games. She was good—so good—at pretending to care. It was just another lie and this time, he’d be damned if he believed any part of it.
“Then this is what will happen.” He said it calmly. Quietly. Because the shock of seeing her had finally faded and now there was only this. His revenge, served nice and cold all these years later. “I wouldn’t want to trouble my mother with the truth about her favorite assistant yet. I don’t think she’d like it.”
“She would hate it, and me,” Nicola—Paige threw at him. “But it would also break her heart. If that’s your goal here, it’s certainly an easy way to achieve it.”
“Am I the villain in this scenario?” He laughed again, but this time, he really was amused, and he saw a complex wash of emotion move over her face. He didn’t want to know why. He knew exactly what he did want, he reminded himself. His own back, in a way best suited to please him, for a change. This was merely the dance necessary to get it. “You must have become even more delusional than your presence here already suggests.”
“Giancarlo—”
“You will resign and leave of your own volition. Today. Now.”
She lifted her hands, which he saw were in tight fists, then dropped them back to her sides, and he admired the act. It almost looked real. “I can’t do that.”
&nb
sp; “You will.” He decided he was enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. “This isn’t a debate, Paige.”
Her pretty face twisted into a convincing rendition of misery. “I can’t.”
“Because you haven’t managed to rewrite her will to leave it all to you yet?” he asked drily. “Or are you swapping out all the art on the walls for fakes? I thought the Rembrandt looked a bit odd in the front hall, but I imagined it was the light.”
“Because whatever you might think about me, and I’m not saying I don’t understand why you think it,” she rasped, “I care about her. And I don’t mean this to be insulting, Giancarlo, but I’m all she has.” Her eyes widened at the dark look he leveled at her, and she hurried on. “You haven’t visited her in years. She’s surrounded by acolytes and users the moment she steps off this property. I’m the only person she trusts.”
“Again, the irony is nearly edible.” He shrugged. “And you are wasting your breath. You should thank me for my mercy in letting you call this a resignation. If I were less benevolent, I’d have you arrested.”
She held his gaze for a moment too long. “Don’t make me call your bluff,” she said quietly. “I doubt very much you want the scandal.”
“Don’t make me call your bluff,” he hurled back at her. “Do you think I haven’t looked for the woman who ruined my life over the years? Hoping against hope she’d be locked up in prison where she belongs?” He smiled thinly when she stiffened. “Nicola Fielding fell off the face of the planet after those pictures went viral. That suggests to me that you aren’t any more keen to have history reveal itself in the tabloids than I am.” He lifted his brows. “Stalemate, cara. If I were you, I’d start packing.”
She took a deep breath and then let it out, long and slow, and there was no reason that should have bothered him the way it did, sneaking under his skin and making him feel edgy and annoyed, as if it was tangling up his intentions or bending the present into the past.
“I genuinely love Violet,” she said, her eyes big and pleading on his, and he ignored the tangling because he knew he had her. He could all but taste it. “This might have started as a misguided attempt to reach you after you disappeared, I’ll admit, but it stopped being that a long time ago. I don’t want to hurt her. Please. There must be a way we can work this out.”
He let himself enjoy the moment. Savor it.
This wasn’t temper, hot and wild, making him act out his passions in different ways, the line between it and grief too finely drawn to tell the difference. Too much time had passed. There was too much water under that particular bridge.
And she should never have come here. She should never have involved his mother. She should never have risked this.
“Giancarlo,” she said, the way she’d said it that bright and terrible morning a decade ago when he’d finally understood the truth about her—and had seen it in full color pictures splashed across the entirety of the goddamned planet. When he’d showed up at the apartment she’d never let him enter and had that short, awful, final conversation on her doorstep. Before he’d walked away from her and Los Angeles and all the rest of these Hollywood machinations he hated so deeply. Five painful minutes to end an entire phase of his life and so many of his dreams. “Please.”
He closed the distance between them with a single step, then reached over to pull on the end of that dark, glossy hair of hers, watching the auburn sheen in it glow and shift in the light. He felt more than heard her quick intake of breath and he wanted her in a thousand ways. That hadn’t dimmed.
It was time to indulge himself. He was certain that whatever her angle was, her self-interest would win out over self-preservation. Which meant he could work out what remained of his issues in the best way imaginable. Whatever else she was, she was supple. He had her.
“Oh, we can work it out,” he murmured, shifting so he could smell the lotion she used on her soft skin, a hint of eucalyptus and something far darker. Victory, he thought. His, this time. “It requires only that you get beneath me. And stay there until I’m done with you.”
She went still for a hot, searing moment.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
Her changeable eyes were blue with distress then, and he might have loathed himself for that if he hadn’t known what a liar she was. And what an actress she could be when it suited her. So he only tugged on her plait again and watched her tipped-up face closely as comprehension moved across it, that same electric heat he felt inside him on its heels.
That, Giancarlo told himself, was why he would win this game this time. Because she couldn’t control the heat between them any more than he could. And he was no longer fool enough to imagine that meant a damned thing. He knew it was a game, this time.
“I want to make sure I’m understanding you.” She swallowed, hard, and he was certain she’d understood him just fine. “You want me to sleep with you to keep my job.”
He smiled, and watched goose bumps rise on her smooth skin. “I do. Often and enthusiastically. Wherever and however I choose.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I assure you, I am. But by all means, test me. See what happens.”
Her lips trembled slightly and he admired it. It looked so real. But he was close enough to see the hard, needy press of her nipples against the silk of her blouse, and he knew better. He knew she was as helpless before this thing between them as he was. Maybe she always had been. Maybe that was why it had all got so confused—she’d chosen him because he was Hollywood royalty by virtue of his parents and thus made a good mark, but then there’d been all of this to complicate things. But he didn’t want to sympathize with her. Not even at such a remove.
“Giancarlo...” He didn’t interrupt her but she didn’t finish anyway, and her words trailed off into the afternoon breeze. He saw her eyes fill with a wet heat and he had to hand it to her, she was still too good at this. She made it so believable.
But he would never believe her again, no matter the provocation. No matter how many tears she shed, or almost shed. No matter how convincingly she could make her lips tremble. This was Hollywood.
This time, he wouldn’t be taken by surprise. He knew it was all an act from the start.
“Your choices are diminishing by the minute,” he told her softly. It was a warning. And one of the last he’d give her. “Now you have but two. Leave now, knowing I will tell my mother exactly why you’ve left and how you’ve spent these past years deceiving her. It might break her heart, but that will be one more black mark on your soul, not mine. And I’d be very surprised if she didn’t find some way to make you pay for it herself. She didn’t become who she is by accident, you must realize. She’s a great deal tougher than she looks.”
“I know she is.” Her gaze still shimmered with that heat, but none of it spilled over—and he reminded himself that was acting talent, not force of will. “And what’s the second choice?”
He shrugged. “Stay. And do exactly as I tell you.”
“Sexually.” She threw that at him, her voice unsteady but her gaze direct. “You mean do as you tell me sexually.”
If she thought her directness would shame him into altering his course here, she was far stupider than he remembered. Giancarlo smiled.
“I mean do as I tell you, full stop.” He indulged himself then, and touched her. He traced the remarkable line of her jaw, letting the sharp delight of it charge through his bones, then held her chin there, right where he could stare her down with all the ruthlessness he carried within him. “You will work for me, Paige. On your back. On your knees. At your desk. Whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want.”
He could feel her shaking and he exulted in it.
“Why?” she whispered. “This is me, remember? Why would you want to...?”
Again, she couldn’t finish, and he took pleasure in these signs of her weakness. These cracks in her slick, pretty armor. Giancarlo leaned in close and brushed his mouth over hers, a little hint of what was to come. A little test.
It was just as he remembered it.
All that fire, arcing in him and in her, too, from the shocked sound she made. All that misery. Shame and fury and ten years of that terrible longing. He’d never quite got past it, and this was why. This thrumming, pounding excitement that had only ever happened here, with her. This unmatched hunger. This beautiful lie that would not wreck him this time. Not this time.
He needed to work it all out on that delectable body she’d wielded like a weapon, enslaving him and destroying him before she’d finally got around to killing him, too. He needed to make her pay the price for her betrayal in the most intimate way possible. He needed to work out his goddamned issues in the very place they’d started, and then, only then, would he finally be free of her. It had only been two months back then. It would have burned out on its own—he was sure of it, but they hadn’t had time. He wanted time to glut himself, because only then would he get past this.
Giancarlo had to believe that.
“I know exactly who you are,” he told her then, and he didn’t pretend he wasn’t enjoying this. That now that the shock had passed, he wasn’t thrilled she’d proved herself as deceitful as he remembered. That he wasn’t looking forward to this in a way he hoped scared her straight down into her bones—because it should. “It’s long past time you paid for what you did to me, and believe me when I tell you I have a very, very detailed memory.”
“You’ll regret it.” Her voice was like gauze and had as much effect.
“I’ve already regretted you for a decade, cara,” he growled. “What does it matter to me if I add a little more?”
He leaned in closer, felt her quiver against him and thrilled to it. To her, because he knew her true face this time. He knew her. There would be no losing himself. There would be no fanciful dreaming of marriage and happy-ever-afters in the Tuscan countryside, deep in all the sweet golden fields that were his heritage. There would only be penance. Hers. Hard, hot, bone-melting penance, until he was satisfied.
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