At the Count's Bidding

by Caitlin Crews

  There were other words for what she was with this man, she knew, words she hadn’t heard in a long time but still remembered all too well. Words she’d dismissed as the unhealthy rantings of the worst person she’d ever known, the person who had taken everything she’d wanted from her—but it turned out dismissing them wasn’t the same thing as erasing them.

  Even so, the hollow, gnawing thing that had sat inside her all day and made her feel so panicked was gone, because he was here. She filled it with his scent, his touch, his bold possession.

  Him. Giancarlo.

  The only man she’d ever touched. The only man she’d ever loved.

  And this was the only way she could tell him any of that. With her body. Paige shifted so he was flush against her entrance and hooked her legs over his hips, letting him in. Loving him in the only way she knew. In the only way he’d let her.

  “Maybe that didn’t always work out when you were a child,” she whispered, hoping he couldn’t read too much emotion in her eyes, across her face. “But my relationship with Violet is much easier. She pays, I agree, the end.”

  Giancarlo bent his head to press hot, open kisses along the ridge of her collarbone. Paige moved restlessly, hungrily against him, tilting her head back to give him greater access. To give him anything—everything—he wanted.

  Because this won’t last forever, that harsh voice that was too much an echo of her mother’s reminded her. That was what today had taught her. There were no fairy tales. This situation had an expiration date, and every moment she had with him was one moment closer to the end.

  “In a way,” Giancarlo said, still too dark, still too rough, his mouth against her skin so Paige could feel the rumble of his words inside of her as he spoke, “that is every relationship that Violet has.”

  She heard that same tense grief that had been in him in the castello that morning and this time, no one was watching. She could soothe him, or try. She ran her fingers through his thick hair and smiled when he pressed into her touch, like a very large cat.

  “I don’t think it can be easy to be a great figure,” Paige said after a moment, concentrating on the feel of his scalp beneath her fingertips, the drag of his thick hair as she moved her hands through it, the exquisite sensation of stroking him. “Too many expectations. Too much responsibility to something far bigger than oneself. The constant worry that it will be taken away. But it must be harder still to be that person’s child.”

  He shifted away from her, propping himself up on his elbows, though he kept himself cradled there between her thighs, his arousal a delicious weight against her softness. A promise. The silence stretched out and his face was in shadow, so all she could see was the glitter of his dark gold eyes, and the echo of it deep inside her.

  “It’s not hard,” he said, and she’d never heard that tone before, had she? Clipped and resigned at once. And yet somehow, that pit in her belly yawned open again as he spoke. “As long as you remember that she is always playing a role. The grande dame as benevolent mother. The living legend as compassionate parent. The great star whose favorite role of all is mom. When she was younger there were different roles threaded into the mix, but the same principle applied. You learn this as a child in a thousand painful ways and you vow, if you are at all wise, never to inflict it on another. To let it end with you.”

  Paige tried to imagine Giancarlo as a small boy, all stubborn chin and fathomless eyes, and ached for him, though that didn’t explain her nervousness. It was something in the way he held himself apart from her, a certain danger rippling down the length of his body, as hard and as steel-hewn as he was. It was the way he watched her, too still, too focused.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wanted to say so much more. She didn’t dare. Just like before, when she’d stood outside and wanted him and had known better than to go and find him, she was too uncertain. “That can’t have been easy.”

  “Is that sympathy for me, cara? Don’t bother.”

  He wasn’t quite scoffing at her. Not quite, though his face went fierce in the darkness, edging toward cruel the way he’d been in the beginning, and she found she was bracing herself—unable to open her mouth and stop him. Unable to defend herself at all. Whatever he’s about to say, that hard voice reminded her, like another slap, you deserve.

  “Here is what I learned from my mother, the great actress,” Giancarlo said. “That she is a mystery, unknowable even to herself. That she prefers it that way. That intimacy is anathema to her because it cannot be controlled, it cannot be directed, it cannot cut to print when she is satisfied with her performance. It is one long take with no rehearsal and no do-overs, and she goes to great lengths indeed to avoid it.”

  Paige wasn’t sure why she felt so stricken then, so stripped raw when he wasn’t talking about her—but then he moved again, dropping his weight against her to whisper in her ear, hot and close and dark. So very dark.

  You deserve this, she told herself. Whatever it is.

  “I want a woman I can trust, Paige,” he said with a ruthless inevitability. And it didn’t even hurt. It was like a deep slice of a sharp blade. She knew he’d cut her and now there was only the wait for blood. For the pain that would surely follow. And he wasn’t finished. “A woman I can know inside and out. A woman who carries no secrets, who does not hide herself away from me or from the world, who never plays a role. A woman who wants a partner, not an audience.”

  “Giancarlo.” She felt torn apart even though he was holding her close. Wrecked as surely as if he’d thrown her from the roof of the towering castello. “Please.”

  But the worst part was, he knew what he was doing. She’d seen it in the cast of his sensual mouth. She’d felt it in the way he’d very nearly trembled as he’d held himself above her.

  He knew he was hurting her. And he kept going.

  “I want a woman I can believe when she tells me she loves me,” he said, raw and fierce and she knew she deserved that, she knew she did, even though it felt a little bit like dying. And then he lifted his head to look her straight in the eyes, making it that much worse. “And that can never be you, can it? It never was. It never will be.”

  Later, she thought she might take that apart and live awhile in the misery he’d packed into those last two sentences. Later, she thought she might cry for days and check herself for scars, the way she’d done ten years ago. But that was later.

  Tonight Paige thought the pain in him was far greater than the hurt he’d caused—that she deserved, that voice kept telling her, and she agreed no matter how it cut her up—and she couldn’t bear it.

  She didn’t care if he still hated her, even now, after another week in his bed when he’d tasted every part of her and had to have recognized the sheer honesty in her response to him. She told herself she didn’t care about that at all and some part of her believed it.

  Or wanted to believe it.

  But worrying about that was for later, too. Later, when she could put herself together again. Later, when she could think about something other than the man who stretched over her and broke her heart, again and again and again. Because he could.

  “Giancarlo,” she said again, with more force this time. “Stop talking.”

  And he surrendered with a groan, thrusting deep and hard inside of her where there was nothing but the two of them—that shimmering truth that was only theirs, wild and dizzying and hotter every time—and that perfect, wondrous fire that swept them both away in its glory.

  And Paige did her best to make them both forget.

  * * *

  Two more weeks passed, slow and sweet. The Tuscan summer started to edge toward the coming fall. The air began to feel crisp in the mornings, and the sky seemed bluer. And if she’d allowed herself to think about such things, Paige might have believed that the tension between her and Giancarlo was easing, too—all that h
eavy grief mellowing, turning blue like the sky, gold like the fields, lighter and softer with age.

  Or perhaps she’d taught them both how to forget.

  Whatever it was, it worked. No more did she spend her days trapped in her isolated cottage, available only to him and only when he wanted—and she told herself she didn’t miss it, all that forced proximity and breathlessness. Of course she didn’t miss it.

  Paige’s days looked a great deal as they had back home. She met with Violet most mornings, and helped her plan out her leisure time. Violet was particularly fond of day trips to various Italian cities to soak in all the art and culture and fashion with a side helping of adulation from the locals, which she often expedited by taking Giancarlo’s helicopter that left from the roof of the castello and kicked up such a ruckus when it returned it could be heard for miles around.

  “I’ve always preferred a big entrance,” Violet had murmured the first time, that famous smile of hers on her lips as the helicopter touched down.

  But when Violet was in between her trips—which meant days of spa treatments and dedicated lounging beneath artfully placed umbrellas at the side of the castello’s private pool instead—Paige was left to her own devices, which usually meant she was left to Giancarlo’s.

  One day he stopped the Jeep the moment it was out of sight of the castello’s stout tower and knelt down beside the passenger door, pulling her hips to his mouth and licking his way into Paige right there—making her sob out his name into the quiet morning, so loud it startled the birds from the nearby trees. Another time he drove them out to one of the private lakes that dotted the property and they swam beneath the hot sun, then brought each other to a shuddering release in the shallow end, Giancarlo holding her to him as she took advantage of the water’s buoyancy to make him groan.

  Other times, they talked. He told her of his father’s dreams for this land, its long history and his own plans to monetize it while conserving it, that it might last for many more generations. He showed her around the Etruscan ruins that cropped up in the oddest spots and demonstrated, as much as possible, that a man who knew the ins and outs of three thousand acres in such extraordinary detail seemed something like magical when the landscape in question was a woman’s body. Her body.

  Paige didn’t know which she treasured more. His words or his body. But she held them to her like gifts, and she tried not to think about what she deserved, what she knew she had coming to her. She tried to focus on what she had in her hands, instead.

  One lazy afternoon they lay together in the warm sun, the sweet breeze playing over their heated skin. Paige propped her chin against his chest and looked into his eyes and it was dizzying, the way it was always dizzying. And then he smiled at her without a single stray shadow in his gorgeous eyes, and it was as if the world slammed to a stop and then started in the other direction.

  “I saw you dancing in the garden the other night,” he said.

  There was no reason to blush. She told herself the heat she felt move over her was the sun, the leftover fire of the way he’d torn her to pieces only moments before, and nothing more.

  “I haven’t danced in a long while,” she said, and she wanted to tear her gaze away from his, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. He ran his hand through her hair, slow and sweet, and she was afraid of the things he could see in her. And so afraid of the things she wanted.

  “Why not?”

  And Paige didn’t know how to answer that. How to tell him the why of it without blundering straight into all the land mines they’d spent these weeks avoiding. That they’d managed to avoid entirely after that night she’d come back late from Lucca.

  I want a woman I can trust, he’d said, and she wanted him to trust her. She might not deserve his trust, but she wanted it.

  “I was good,” she said after a moment, because that was true enough, “but I wasn’t amazing. And there were so many other dancers who were as good as I was, but wanted it way more than I did.”

  Especially after he’d left and she hadn’t had the heart for it any longer, or anything else involving the body she’d used to betray the one man she’d ever given it to. She’d auditioned for one more gig and her agent had told her they’d said it was like watching a marionette. That had been her last audition. Her last dance, period.

  Because once she’d lost Giancarlo, she’d lost interest in the only other thing she’d had that’d ever had any meaning in her life. Her mother had descended even further into that abyss of hers and Paige had simply been lost. And when she’d run into a woman she’d met through Giancarlo on one of those Malibu weekends, who’d needed a personal assistant a few days a week and had kind of liked that Paige was a bit notorious, it had seemed like a good idea. And more, a way to escape, once and for all, the dark little world her mother lived in.

  A year later, she’d been working for a longtime television star who had no idea that competent Paige Fielding was related to that Nicola Fielding. A few years after that, she had enough experience to sign with a very exclusive agency that catered to huge stars like Violet, and when Violet’s previous assistant left her, to put herself forward as a replacement. All of those things had seemed so random back then, as they happened. But now, looking back, it seemed anything but. As if Paige’s subconscious had plotted out the only course that could bring her back to Giancarlo.

  But she didn’t want to think about that now. Or about what she’d do when she was without him again. How would she re-create herself this time? Where would she go? It occurred to her then that she’d never really planned beyond Violet. Beyond the road she’d known would bring her back to him.

  I want a partner, he’d said, and the problem was, she was a liar. A deliberate amnesiac, desperate to keep their past at bay. That wasn’t a partner. That was a problem.

  Giancarlo was still smiling, as if this was an easy conversation, and Paige wished it was. For once, just once, she wanted something to be as easy as it should have been.

  “I’m surprised,” he said, and there was something very much like affection in his gaze, transforming his face until he looked like that younger version of himself again. She told herself that it didn’t make her ache. That it didn’t make her heart twist tight. “I would have said dancing was who you were, not something you did.”

  “I was twenty years old,” she heard herself say, in a rueful sort of tone that suggested an amusement she didn’t quite feel. “I had no idea who I was.”

  You’re his toy, Nicola, her mother had screamed at her in those final, dark days, when Paige had believed she’d somehow navigate her way through it all unscathed—that she’d manage to keep Giancarlo, please her mother and her mother’s terrible friends, and pay off all of that debt besides. He’ll play with you until he’s done and then he’ll leave you broken and useless when he moves on to the next dumb whore. Don’t be so naive!

  Giancarlo’s face changed then, and his hand froze in her hair. “I think I always forget you were so young,” he said after a moment, as if remembering her age shocked him. “What the hell was I doing? You were a kid.”

  She laughed then. She couldn’t help it.

  “My life wasn’t exactly pampered and easy before I came to Hollywood,” she told him, knowing as she said it that she’d never talked about that part of her life. He had been so bright, so beautiful—why would she talk about dark, grim things? “And I did that about ten minutes after I graduated from high school. My mom had the car packed and waiting on the last day of classes.” She shook her head at him as her laughter faded. “I was never really much of a kid.”

  She hadn’t had the opportunity to be a kid, which wasn’t quite the same thing, but she didn’t tell him that. Even though she had the strangest idea that his childhood hadn’t been that different from hers, really. The trappings couldn’t have been more opposite, but she’d spent her whole life tiptoeing around, tr
ying to predict what mood her mother would be in, how much she might have drunk, and how bad she could expect it to get of an evening. She wasn’t sure that was all that different from trying to gauge one of Violet’s moods.

  It had never occurred to her that she’d traded one demanding mother for another, far classier one—and she wasn’t sure she liked the comparison. At least Violet cares for you in return, she told herself then. Which is more than Arleen ever did.

  “I’m not sure that excuses me,” Giancarlo was saying, but then he laughed, and everything else shot straight out of her head and disappeared into that happy sound. “But then, I never had any control where you were concerned.”

  “Neither did I,” she said, smiling at him, and they both stilled then. Perhaps aware in the same instant that they were straying too close to the very things they couldn’t let themselves talk about.

  Or the words they couldn’t say. Words he’d told her he wouldn’t believe if she did dare speak them out loud.

  But that didn’t keep her from feeling them. Nothing could.

  He studied her face for a long moment, until she began to feel the breeze too keenly on her exposed skin. Or maybe that was her vulnerability. Having sex was much easier, for all it stripped her bare and seemed to involve every last cell in her body. It required only feeling and action. Doing. It was this talking that was killing her, making her want too much, making her imagine too many happy endings when, God help her, she knew better.

  Paige pushed away from him, not willing to ruin this with a conversation that could only lead to more hurt. Or worse, something good that would be that much harder to leave behind when the time came. She sat up and gathered her clothes to her, pulling the flirty little sundress over her head as if the light material was armor. But she only wished it was.

  “Was it ever real?” he asked quietly.

  Paige didn’t ask him what he meant. She froze, her eyes on the rolling hills that spread out before her in the afternoon light, the glistening lake in the valley below. That stunning Tuscan sky studded with chubby white clouds, the vineyards and the flowers, and she didn’t think he understood that he was holding her heart between his palms and squeezing tight. Too tight.