At the Count's Bidding

by Caitlin Crews

  “Do not attempt to contact my mother again.” His voice got dangerous then. Flint and fury, and still, he was a stranger. “I will have you arrested and thrown in jail and no judge in any country would ever grant a woman with mental problems and a prison record custody of a child over me. I want you to remember that. You so much as text Violet and you’ll never see that child again.”

  “Stop,” she threw at him, in a terrible whisper. “You can’t think—”

  “A driver will pick you up in an hour,” he told her, and he was merciless. Pitiless. As if he was made of marble and was that soft, that bendable. “I want you gone. And I never, ever want to see you again. Not in ten minutes. Not in another ten years. Is that clear?”

  Paige couldn’t reply. She was shaking so hard she was afraid she’d fall over, the tears were hot and endless, and he looked at her as if she was a stranger. As if he was. Crafted of marble, but far crueler. Marble might crush her. But he’d torn her into pieces first.

  “Do you understand?” he asked, even harsher than before.

  “Yes,” Paige managed to say. “I understand.” She scrubbed her hands over her face and sucked in a breath and tried one last time. “Giancarlo—”

  But he was already gone.

  It was over.

  * * *

  The slippery December roads were treacherous but the wind outside was even worse, rattling his SUV and shaking the skeletons of the trees on either side of the New England country roads.

  And inside him, Giancarlo knew, it was colder and darker still.

  He had not been in a good mood to begin with when he’d left Logan International Airport in Boston more than two hours earlier on this latest quest to find Paige. It was fair to say he’d been in a black mood for the past three months.

  The tiny, lonely little Maine town a hundred miles from anywhere sat under a fresh coat of snow, lights twinkling as the December evening fell sudden and fast in the middle of what other places might still consider the afternoon, and he felt the stirrings of adrenaline as he navigated through the very few streets that comprised the village to the small, white clapboard house that was his destination.

  He’d hired detectives. He’d scoured half of the West Coast and a good part of the East Coast himself. This was the last place on earth he’d have thought to look for her—which was, he could admit, why it had no doubt made such a perfect hiding place.

  This time, he knew she was here. He’d seen the photo on his mobile when he’d landed in Boston from Italy, taken this very morning. But he wouldn’t believe it until he saw her with his own eyes.

  He could admit the place held a certain desolate charm, Giancarlo thought grimly as he climbed from the car, the boots he only ever wore at ski resorts in places like Vail or St. Moritz crunching into the snow beneath him. The drive from Boston into the remote state of Maine had reminded him of the books he’d had to read while in his American high school. Lonely barns in barren fields and the low winter sky pressing down, gray and sullen. Here and there a hint of the wild, rocky Atlantic coast, lighthouses the only bit of faint cheer against the coming dark.

  It felt like living inside his own bleak soul, in the great mess he’d made.

  Giancarlo navigated his way over the salted sidewalk and up the old front steps to the clapboard house’s front door, able to hear the faint sound of piano music from inside. DANCE LESSONS, read the sign on the door, making his chest feel tight.

  He stopped there, frozen on the porch with his hand on the doorknob, because he heard her voice. For the first time since that last, ugly morning in his Tuscan cottage. Counting off the beat.

  Wedging its way into his heart like one of the vicious icicles that hung from the roof above him.

  He wrenched the door open and walked inside, and then she was right there in front of him after all this time. Right there.

  She took his breath away.

  Giancarlo’s heart thundered in his chest and he forced himself to take stock of his surroundings. The ground floor of this house was its dance studio, an open space with only a few pillars and a class in session. And the woman he’d accused of a thousand different scams was not lounging about being fed bonbons she’d bought with his mother’s money or her own infamy, she was teaching the class. To what looked like a pack of very pink-faced, very uncoordinated young girls.

  He was standing in what passed for the small studio’s lobby and if the glares from the women sitting in the couches and chairs along the wall were anything to go by, he’d disrupted the class with his loud entrance.

  Not that Giancarlo cared about them in the slightest.

  Paige, he noted as he forced himself to breathe again and not do anything rash, did not look at him at all, which was a feat indeed, given the mirrors on every available wall. She merely carried on teaching as if he was nothing to her.

  But he refused to accept that. Particularly if it were true.

  The class continued. And Giancarlo studied her as she moved in front of the small collection of preadolescents, calling out instructions and corrections and encouragement in equal measure. She looked as if she hadn’t slept much, but only when he studied her closely. Her hair was still that inky black, darker now than he remembered, and he wondered if it was the sun that brought out its auburn hints. She moved the way she did in all his dreams, all of that grace and ease, as if she flowed rather than walked.

  And she was still slim, with only the faintest thickening at her belly to tell him what he hadn’t known until now, what he’d been afraid to wonder about until he’d finally tracked her down in what had to be, literally, one of the farthest places she could go in the opposite direction of Bel Air. And him.

  That she was keeping the baby. His baby.

  Giancarlo didn’t know what that was inside of him then. Relief. Fury. A new surge of determination. All the rest of the dark things he’d always felt for this woman, turned inside out. All mixed together until it felt new. Until he did.

  She was keeping their baby.

  He would have loved her anyway. He did. But he couldn’t help but view her continuing pregnancy as a sign. As hope.

  As far more than he deserved.

  It seemed like twenty lifetimes before the class ended, and the women in the chairs collected their young. He paid them no attention as they herded their charges past him out into the already-pitch-black night; he simply waited, arms crossed and his brooding gaze on Paige.

  And eventually, the last stranger left and slammed the door shut behind her small town curiosity, and it was only the two of them in the glossy, bright room. Paige and him and all their history, and she still didn’t look at him.

  “You decided to keep it.” He didn’t know why he said it like that, fierce and low, and he watched her stiffen, but it was too late to call it back.

  “If you came here for an apology,” she said in a low voice he hardly recognized, and then she turned to face him fully and he blinked because she hardly looked like herself, “you can shove it right up your—”

  “I don’t want an apology.” It was temper, he realized belatedly. Pure fury that transformed her lovely face and turned her eyes nearly gray. As if she would kill him with her own hands if she crossed the wide, battered floor and got too close to him, and there was no reason that should shock him and intrigue him in equal measure. “I spent three months tracking you down, Paige.”

  Her eyes narrowed and if anything, grew darker.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want to call me?” she threw at him. “I know that historically you’ve had some trouble keeping my name straight.”

  Giancarlo felt a muscle move in his cheek and realized he was clenching his jaw.

  “I know your name.”

  “I can’t tell you how that delights me.” Her temper was like a fog in the air between them, thick and
impenetrable, and he thought she might even have growled at him. “The only thing that would delight me more would be if you’d turn around and go away and pretend we never met. That’s what I’ve been doing and so far? It’s been the best three months of my life.”

  He had that coming. He knew that. He told himself it didn’t even sting.

  “I understand,” he began as carefully as he could, “that—”

  “Don’t bother,” she snapped, cutting him off. He couldn’t recall she’d ever done that before. In fact, there was only one person in the world who interrupted him with impunity and she’d given birth to him—and wasn’t terribly thrilled with him at the moment, either. “I don’t want your explanations. I don’t care.”

  She turned away from him, but the mirrors betrayed her, showing him a hint of the Paige he knew in the way her face twisted before she wrestled it back under control. Another sliver of hope, if he was a desperate man. He was.

  Giancarlo walked farther into the studio, still studying her. She was in bare feet and a pair of leggings, with a loose tunic over them that drooped down over one shoulder. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He wanted to press his mouth to the bare skin of her shoulder, then explore that brand-new belly of hers. Then, perhaps, that molten heat of hers that he knew had only ever been his. He was primitive enough to relish that.

  He’d believed her. It had taken him longer than it should have to admit that to himself. He’d believed her then, and he believed her now—but the fact she’d only ever given herself to him had meanings he’d been afraid to explore. He wasn’t afraid anymore.

  Giancarlo had lost her once. What was there to fear now? He’d already lived through the worst thing that could happen to him. Twice.

  “How did you find this place?” he asked as he walked toward her. He meant, how did you settle on this small, faraway, practically hidden town it took me three months to find? “Why did you come here in the first place?”

  “I can’t imagine why you care.” Paige shoved her things into a bag and then straightened. “I doubt that you do.” She scowled at him when he kept coming, when he only stopped when he was within touching distance. “What do you want, Giancarlo?”

  “I don’t know.” That wasn’t true, but he didn’t know how to express the rest of it, and not when she kept throwing him like this. He realized he’d never seen her angry before. Or anything but wild—wildly in love, wildly apologetic, wild beneath his hands. Never cold like this. Never furious. He supposed he deserved that, too. “You’re so angry.”

  Paige actually laughed then, and it wasn’t her real laugh. It was a bitter little thing that made his chest hurt. More than it already did, than it had since that morning in Tuscany.

  “You’re unbelievable,” she whispered. Then she shook her head. “I could be angry about any number of things, Giancarlo, but let’s pick one at random, shall we? You told me you never wanted to see me again, and I happen to think that’s the best plan you’ve had yet. So please, go back to wherever you came from. Go back to Italy and ruin someone else’s life. Leave me—leave us—alone.”

  He wanted to pull her close to him. He wanted to taste her. He wanted. But he settled for shaking his head slightly and watching her face, instead, as if she might disappear again if he took his eyes off her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said into the tense quiet. “It’s not that I’m not listening to you. But I’ve never seen you angry, ever. I didn’t think it was something you knew how to do.”

  Paige blinked, and pulled the bag higher on her shoulder, gripping the strap with both of her hands.

  “It wasn’t,” she said simply. “Especially around you. But it turns out, that’s not a very healthy way to live a life. It ends up putting you at the mercy of terrible people because you never say no. You never tell them to stop. You never stand up for yourself until it’s too late.”

  And when her eyes met his, they slammed into him so hard it was like a punch, and Giancarlo understood she meant him. That he had done those things to her. That he was one more terrible person to her. It tasted sour in his mouth, that realization. And he hated it with almost as much force as he understood, at last, that it was true. That he’d treated her horribly. That he was precisely the kind of man he’d been raised to detest. That was why he’d come after her, was it not? To face these things.

  But that didn’t make hearing it any easier.

  “That is not the kind of life my baby is going to live, Giancarlo,” Paige told him fiercely. “Not if I have anything to say about it.” She tilted her chin up as if she expected him to argue. “This baby will have a home. This baby will be wanted. Loved. Celebrated. This baby is not a mistake. Or a problem. This baby will belong somewhere. With me.”

  As if she really had punched him, and hard, it took Giancarlo a moment to recover from all her fierceness, and more, what it told him. And when he did, it was to see her storming across the room.

  Away from him. Again.

  “Come have dinner with me,” he began.

  “No.”

  “Coffee then.” He eyed her, remembering that tiny bump. “Or whatever you can drink.”

  “And again, no.”

  “Paige.” He didn’t have any idea what he was doing and he thought he hated that almost as much as the distance between them, which seemed much, much worse now that they were standing in the same room. “It’s my baby, too.”

  She whirled back around, so fast he thought someone without her grace might have toppled over, and then she jabbed a finger in the air in a manner he imagined was meant to show him how very much she wished it was something sharp she could stick in a far more tender area.

  “She is my baby!” And her voice grew louder with each word. “Mine. I knew I was pregnant with the baby of a man who hated me for five whole minutes before you ripped me into shreds and walked away, but believe me, Giancarlo, I heard you. You want nothing to do with me. You want nothing to do with this baby. And that is fine—”

  “I never said I wanted nothing to do with the baby,” he protested. “Quite the opposite.”

  “We can debate that when there’s a baby, then,” she hurled at him, hardly stopping to take a breath. “Which by my calculations gives me six months and then some of freedom from having to talk to you.”

  “But I want to talk to you.” And he didn’t care that he sounded more demanding than apologetic, then. She might truly want nothing to do with him, ever again, and he understood he deserved that. But he had to be sure. “I want to see how you’re doing. I want to understand what happened between us in Italy.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  And her face twisted again, but her eyes were still that dark gray and they still burned, and he couldn’t tell what she wanted. Only that as ever, he was hurting her. The way he always did.

  “You don’t want to understand me,” Paige told him. “You want me to understand you. And believe me, I already do. I understood you when you were the very wealthy, semifamous director who took an unexpected interest in a backup dancer. I understood you when you were the noble son standing up for his mother against the potential lunatic who had infiltrated her home behind your back. I even understood you when you were the beleaguered, betrayed ex, drawn back into an intense sexual relationship against his better judgment by the deceitful little seductress he couldn’t put behind him. I understood myself sick.”

  She pulled in a breath, as if it hurt her, which was when Giancarlo realized he hadn’t breathed throughout this. That he couldn’t seem to draw a breath at all.

  “And then,” Paige continued, her voice strong and even, “once I left, I understood that you have never, ever pretended to be there for me in any way. Not ten years ago. Not now. It never crossed your mind to ask me why I did something like sell those pictures, just as it never occurred to you to ask me how I felt about
finding myself pregnant. The only thing you care about is you.”

  “Paige.”

  She ignored him. “You never asked me anything at all. You’ve never treated me liked anything but a storm you had to weather.” She shook her head. “You’re the damned hurricane, Giancarlo, but you blame me for the rain.” She shifted then, her hands moving to shelter that little bump, as if she needed to protect it from him, and he thought that might be the worst cut, the deepest wound. He was surprised to find he still stood. “All I want from you is what you’ve always given me. Your absence.”

  The room seemed dizzy with her words when she’d stopped speaking, as if the mirrors could hardly bear the weight of them. Or maybe that was him. Maybe he’d fallen down and he simply couldn’t tell the difference.

  “You said she.”

  “What?”

  Giancarlo didn’t know where that had come from. He hadn’t known he meant to speak at all. He was too busy seeing himself through her eyes—and not liking it at all. “Before. You called the baby a she.”

  “Yes.” She seemed worn-out then, in a sudden rush. As if she’d lanced a wound with a surge of adrenaline and the poison had all run out, leaving nothing behind it. “I’m having a little girl in May.”

  “A daughter.” His voice was gentle, yet filled with something it took him a moment to identify. Wonder. He heard it move through the room and he saw her shudder as she pulled in a breath, and he knew, somehow, that everything wasn’t lost. Not yet. Not quite yet. “We’re having a daughter.”

  “Go away, Giancarlo,” she said, but it was a whisper. Just a whisper with none of that fury behind it, and a hint of the kind of sadness he’d become all too familiar with these past few months. And he wanted nothing more than to protect her, even if it was from himself.

  Perhaps especially then.

  “I can do that,” he said gruffly. “Tonight. But I’ll keep coming back, Paige. Every day until you talk to me. I can be remarkably persuasive.”