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.”
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 i
n 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.
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