At the Count's Bidding

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At the Count's Bidding Page 7

by Caitlin Crews


  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.

  “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. Pai
ge 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 wher
e 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—

 

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