At the Count's Bidding

by Caitlin Crews

  “Is that a threat?” She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and he thought she looked tired again, but not threatened. “This isn’t your land in Italy. I’m not a prisoner here.”

  “I don’t want to keep you prisoner,” he said, which was not entirely true. He reminded himself he was a civilized man. Or the son of one anyway, little as he might have lived up to his father’s standards lately. “I want to have dinner with you.”

  She eyed him, and he could see the uncertainty on her pretty face. “That’s all?”

  “Do you want me to lie to you?” he asked quietly. “It’s a start. Just give me a start.”

  She shook her head, but her eyes seemed less gray now and more that changeable blue-green he recognized, and Giancarlo couldn’t help but consider that progress.

  “What if I don’t want a start?” she asked after a moment. “Any start? We’ve had two separate starts marked by ten years of agony and now this. It’s not fun.”

  He smiled. “Then it’s dinner. Everyone needs to eat dinner. Especially pregnant women, I understand.”

  “But not with you,” Paige said, and there was something different in her voice then. Some kind of resolve. “Not again. It’s not worth it.”

  She turned away again and headed toward the door he could see in the back, and this time, he could tell, she was really going to leave.

  And Giancarlo knew he should let her go. He knew he’d done more than enough already. The practical side of him pointed out that six months was a reasonable amount of time to win a person over, to say nothing of the following lifetime of the child they’d made. Their daughter. He had all the time in the world.

  He’d spent three months trying to find her—what was another night? He knew he should forfeit this battle, the better to win the war. But he couldn’t do it.

  Giancarlo couldn’t watch her walk away again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LATER, PAIGE THOUGHT, she would hate herself for how difficult it was to march across the studio floor toward the door, her car beyond, and the brand-new life she was in the middle of crafting.

  Later, she would despair of the kind of person she must be, that her heart had somersaulted nearly out of her chest when Giancarlo had stormed in, startling her so profoundly it had taken her a long moment to remember why that instant sense of relief she’d felt was more than a little sick. Later, she would beat herself up about how little she wanted to walk away from him, even now.

  But first she had to really do it. Walk away. Mean what she said. Leave him standing—

  Her first clue that he’d moved at all was a rush of air over her shoulder and then his hands were on her, gentle and implacable at once. He turned her, lifted her, and in a single smooth shift she was in his arms. Held high against his chest, so she was surrounded. By his scent. By his strength.

  A scant breath away from that cruel mouth, that sensual mouth.

  Much too close to everything she wanted, so desperately, to forget.

  “Put me down.”

  Her voice was so quiet it was hardly a breath of sound—but she knew, somehow, what that dark gold fury in his gaze was now. It was a warning that this situation could get out of control quickly, with a single kiss, and Paige rather doubted she’d be able to maintain any kind of moral high ground if she let him deep inside her again.

  Especially because she wanted him there. Even now.

  “First of all,” Giancarlo said, in that low and lethal way that still moved over her like a seduction, making her very bones feel weak, “I do not hate you. I have never hated you. I have spent years trying to convince myself that I hated you only to fail miserably at it, again and again.”

  “Then you only act as if you hate me,” she grated at him, refusing to put her arm over his shoulders, holding herself tight and unyielding against him as if that might save her. From herself. “That’s much better.”

  He stopped next to the line of old armchairs and love seats that sat against the wall and set her down in the biggest one, then shocked her to the core by kneeling down in front of her. She froze, which was why it took her a moment to notice that he’d caged her in, his hands gripping the back of the chair behind her, putting his face about as close as it could get to hers without actually touching her.

  “Why did you sell those photographs?” he asked. Quietly, his dark gaze trained on her face. So there was no chance at all he didn’t see the heat that flashed over her, making her cheeks warm.

  “What can that possibly matter now?”

  “I think you’re right about a lot of things,” he said, sounding somewhere between grim and determined. And something else she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard before. “But especially this. I should have asked. I’m asking now.”

  And the trouble was, she loved him. She’d always loved him. And she’d waited a decade for him to ask. If he’d asked in Italy, she might have sugarcoated it, but things were different now. She was different now.

  She owed it to the life inside of her to be the kind of woman she wanted her daughter to become. That strong. That unafraid. That unflinching when necessary.

  “My mother was a drunk,” Paige said flatly. “Her dreams of riches and fame and escape from our awful little hometown came to a screeching halt when she got pregnant with me in high school, so it worked out well that I could dance. The minute I was done with high school she took me to Los Angeles. She made me use my middle name as a stage name because she thought it was fancy, and everyone knew you had to be fancy to be famous. She decided she made an excellent stage mother, if your definition of a stage mother is that she took all the money and then yelled at me to get out there and make more.”

  “That is the common Hollywood definition, yes,” Giancarlo said drily, but she couldn’t stop now. Not even to laugh.

  “A drunk Arleen was one thing,” Paige told him. “But a little while before I met you, my mother met a meth dealer. His name was Denny, and let me tell you, he was so nice to us. A new best friend.” Her mouth twisted. “A month later, she was thousands of dollars in the hole and he was a little less friendly. Two months later, she was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to him, there was no possible way she could get out of it and he stopped pretending. He laid it out for me.” She met Giancarlo’s gaze and held it. Unflinching, she told herself. No matter that she’d never wanted him to know the kind of dirt that clung to her. Not when his whole life was so clean, so pretty, so bathed in light. “I could work it off on my back, or I could watch him kill her. Or—and this was an afterthought—I could make some money off my rich new boyfriend instead.”

  “Paige.” He breathed her name as if it was one of his Italian curses, or perhaps a prayer, and she didn’t know when he’d dropped his hands down to take hers, only that his hands were so warm, so strong, and she was far weaker than she wanted to be if he was what made her feel strong. Wasn’t she? “Why didn’t you tell me this? Why didn’t you let me help you?”

  “Because I was ashamed,” she said, and her voice cracked, but she didn’t look away from him. “Your mother was Violet Sutherlin. My mother was a drug addict who sold herself when she ran out of money, and it still wasn’t enough. Who wanted to sell me because until I met you, I was a virgin.”

  He paled slightly, and she felt his hands tighten around hers, and she pushed on.

  “The first night I spent with you, she realized I’d slept with you,” Paige said, aware that she sounded hollow, when still, she couldn’t regret it. Not a moment of that long, perfect night. Not even knowing what came after. “And when I got home that next day, she slapped me so hard it actually made my ears ring. But not enough to block her out. I’d already ruined her life by being born, you see. The least I could have done was let her sell the one commodity she had—I mean my virginity—to the highest bidder. She’d had the whole thing planned out
with some friends of Denny’s.”

  “How did I miss this?” Giancarlo asked, his voice a hoarse scrape in the empty studio.

  “Because I wanted you to miss it.” Her voice was fierce. “Because you were my single rebellion. My escape. The only thing I’d ever had that was good. And all mine. And you came without any strings.” She dropped her gaze then, to where their hands were clasped tight. “But she was my mother.”

  He muttered something in Italian.

  “I think,” Paige said, because she had to finish now, “that if I hadn’t met you, even if I’d had a different boyfriend, I would have just slept with whoever Denny told me to sleep with. It would have been easier.”

  “It would have been prostitution,” Giancarlo said, viciously, but she knew that this time, it wasn’t directed at her.

  “What difference would it have made?” she asked, and she meant that. She shrugged. “I didn’t know anything else. A lot of the dancers slept around and let the men help with their rent. They didn’t call it prostitution—they called it dating. With benefits. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded it, if I’d started there. But I’d met you.” She blew out a breath and met his dark gold gaze. “And I was twenty years old. My mother told me a thousand times a day that men like you had a million girls like me. That I’d thrown myself away on you, that you would get sick of me sooner rather than later and we’d have nothing to show for it. And she, by God, wanted something to show for all her suffering.”

  “How, pray, had she suffered?” His tone was icy, and it warmed something inside of her. As if maybe all those foundations she’d thought he’d shattered in Italy had only frozen and were coming back now as they warmed. As she did.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Paige said quietly, because this was the important part. “Denny insisted that sex sold. That you were worth an outrageous amount of money. And I thought—I really thought—that I owed her something. That it was just what love looked like. Because I might have ruined her life, but she was my mother. I loved her. I owed her.”

  “You don’t have to tell me any more,” Giancarlo said, his voice a deep rumble. “I understand.”

  “I loved you, too,” Paige whispered. “But I’d had twenty years of Arleen and only a couple months of you. I thought she was the real thing and you were just a dream. I thought if it was really a true thing between you and me, you’d try to understand why I did it. But I wasn’t surprised when you didn’t.”

  He let out a breath, as if he’d suffered a blow.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. So quietly she almost didn’t notice the way it sneaked into her, adding fuel to that small fire that still burned for him, for them. That always would. “I wish you’d come to me. I wish I’d seen what was happening beneath my nose. I wish I’d had any idea what you were going through.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.” And she found she meant that. She kept going, because she needed to finish. To see it through. “I did it. I got half a million dollars for those pictures and I lost you. I gave the money to my mother. It was enough to pay Denny and then some. I was such an idiot—I thought that meant we’d be fine.”

  “How long?” he asked, and she knew what he meant.

  “Another month or so and the money was gone. Then she was in debt again. And it turned out Denny was even less understanding than he’d been before, because there was no rich boyfriend any longer. There was only me. And he was pretty clear about the one thing I was good at. How could I argue? The entire world had seen me in action. I was a commodity again.”

  “My God.”

  “I don’t know about God,” Paige said. “It was the LAPD who busted Denny on something serious enough to put him away for fifteen years. My mother lost her supplier, which meant she lost her mind. The last time I saw her, she was on the streets and she might be there still. She might not have made it this long. I don’t know.” She lifted her chin to look him in the eye. “And that’s what happened ten years ago.”

  “You can’t possibly feel guilty about that.” He sounded incredulous. He frowned at her. “Paige. Please. You did everything you possibly could for that woman. Literally. You can’t stop people when they want to destroy themselves—you can only stop them from taking you along with them.”

  She shrugged again, as if that might shift the constriction in her throat. “She’s still my mother. I still love...if not her, then who she was supposed to be.”

  Giancarlo looked at her for a long time. So long she forgot she’d been too ashamed to tell him this. So long she lost herself again, the way she always did, in that face of his, those dark eyes, that mouth.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice so low it seemed to move inside of her, like heat. “I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me. I don’t think I understand why you don’t.”

  “Because my whole life, Giancarlo,” she whispered, unable to hide anything from him, not after all this time and all the ways they’d hurt each other, not any longer, “you’re the only person I’ve ever loved. The only one who loved me back.”

  He shifted back and then he reached over to brush moisture from beneath her eyes, and Paige reminded herself that she was supposed to be resisting him. Fighting him off. Standing up for herself. She couldn’t understand how she could feel as if she was doing that when, clearly, she was doing the opposite.

  “Violet adores you,” he said then. “And despite her excursions around the Tuscan countryside purely to be recognized and adored, she does not, in fact, like more than a handful of people. She trusts far fewer.”

  Paige made a face. “She has no idea who I really am.”

  He smiled then. “Of course she does. She tells me she’s known exactly who you are from the moment she met you. Why else would she let you so deep into the family?”

  But Paige shook her head at that, confused. And something more than simply confused.

  “Why would she do that?” she whispered.

  “Because my father was a good man,” Giancarlo said, his hands hard and warm and tight on hers again, “and a kind man, but a cold one. And shortly after I told her you’d left she informed me that the only time in my life when I didn’t act just like him, inaccessible and aloof and insufferable—her words—” and his mouth crooked then “—was when I was with you. Ten years and three months ago.”

  “She knew,” Paige whispered, trying to take it in. “Is that why she was so kind to me?”

  “That,” Giancarlo said, a certain urgency in his voice that made her shift against the chair and tell herself it was only nerves, “and the fact that no matter what you might have been taught, it is not that difficult to be kind to you.”

  “You’ve found it incredibly difficult,” she pointed out, and it was getting harder by the moment to control the things shaking inside her, the things shaking loose. “Impossible, even.”

  “I am a selfish, arrogant ass,” he said, so seriously that she laughed out loud.

  “Well,” she said when the laughter faded. “That’s not the word I would have used. But if the shoe fits...”

  “I am my mother’s son,” he said simply. “I was born wealthy and aristocratic and, apparently, deeply sorry for myself. It took me all of an hour to realize I’d been completely out of line that day in Italy, Paige. It wasn’t about you. It was about my own childhood, about the vows I’d made that only you have ever tempted me to break—but I have no excuse.” He shook his head, his mouth thinning. “I know you didn’t try to trick me. I considered chasing you down at the airfield and dragging you back with me, but I thought you needed space from the madman who’d said those things to you. I took the earliest flight I could the following day, but when I got to Los Angeles, you weren’t there. Your things were packed up and shipped out to storage, but you never went there in person.”

  “That storage facility is in Bakersfield,” she said, blinking.
“Did you go there?”

  “I haunted it,” he said, his gaze dark and steady on hers. “For weeks.”

  There was no denying the heat that swirled in her then, too much like hope, like light, when she knew better than to—

  But he was here. He was kneeling down in front of her even after she’d told him the kind of person she’d been at twenty. The kind of life she’d have led, if not for him. The kind of world she’d been raised in. He was trying, clearly.

  And Paige didn’t want to be right. She wanted to be happy. Just once, she wanted to be happy.

  “I was going to ship it wherever I settled,” she told him, letting that revolutionary thought settle into her bones. “There was no point carting it all around with me when I didn’t know where I was going.”

  “What ‘all’ are you talking about?” he asked, his tone dry. “It is perhaps three boxes, I am informed, after bribing the unscrupulous owner of that facility a shockingly small amount of money to see for myself.“ His expression dared her to protest that, but she didn’t. If anything, she had to bite back a smile. “My mother requires more baggage for a long afternoon in Santa Monica.”

  Paige shook her head, realizing she was drinking in his nearness instead of standing up for herself and the little life inside of her. That she owed both of them more than that. That the fact she felt lighter than she had in years was nice, but it didn’t change anything. That wasn’t happiness, that was chemistry, and she’d already seen where that led, hadn’t she? She needed more.

  Paige might not be certain what she deserved, but her daughter deserved everything. Everything. She would use Arleen as her base and do the exact opposite. That meant many things, among them, not settling for a man—even if it was Giancarlo Alessi—simply because he was in front of her. Paige had watched that dynamic in action again and again and again. Her baby would not.

  “How did you find me?” she asked, keeping all of her brand-new hopes, all of her wishes and all of her realizations out of her voice. Or she tried. “And more importantly, why?”