“The how is simple. I remembered you said you wanted to see the fall leaves change color in Vermont.”
“I did?”
“When we first met. It was autumn in Los Angeles, hot and bright, and you told me you wanted to see real seasons. You also said you wanted to live near the sea and see the snow.” He shrugged. “I decided that all those things pointed to New England. After that, I utilized the fact that I am a very wealthy, very motivated, very determined man to hunt you down.”
“Giancarlo—”
“And the why is this.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box, and smiled slightly when she jerked back.
“No.” It was automatic. And loud.
Giancarlo didn’t seem at all fazed.
“This was my grandmother’s diamond,” he said. He cracked open the box and held it out, and she remembered, then, that first night with him in Italy, when he’d stood with his hand out and she’d thought he could stand like that forever, if he had to. His dark gaze met hers, and held. “I had the ring made for you ten years ago.”
Paige felt her eyes flood then, and she let them, covering her mouth with her hands, unable to speak. So he did.
“Everything you said about me is true,” he told her. “I can’t deny any of it. But I want to understand you, Paige. I want to dedicate the next ten years to learning every single thing that makes you you. I don’t simply want a partner, I want to be one. I want to be yours. I want you to yell at me and put me in my place and I want to help you teach our daughter never to surrender herself to terrible men like her father.” His voice was scratchy then. “Not ever.”
“Stop,” she said, and she didn’t mean to reach over to him. She didn’t mean to slide her hand along his perfect, lean cheek. “I never gave you anything I didn’t want to give. You must know that. It was only that I knew it would end.”
“This won’t,” he whispered. “It hasn’t in ten years. It won’t in ten more, or ten after that, or ever.” He leaned forward, sliding his hand over her belly to cup that small, unmistakable swell, and the smile that moved over that mouth of his broke her heart and made it leap at once. Then he made it far worse, leaning in to press a reverent kiss there. “I love you, Paige. Please. Let me show you.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered, because what was the point in pretending otherwise? They’d already lost so much time. “But trust is a whole lot more than a pretty ring. I’ll always be the woman who sold you out.”
“And I’ll always be the man who greeted the news of his daughter’s impending arrival like a pig,” he retorted. “Based on the wild fears of the four-year-old boy I haven’t been in decades.”
“That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
“I know.” He shifted then, pulling the ring from its box and slipping it onto her finger. It fit perfectly, and Paige couldn’t seem to breathe. And his eyes were so bright, and she felt three times the size of her skin, and she didn’t want to let him go this time. She didn’t want to sacrifice him, ever again. “Believe me, I know, but it’s not. It only means we’ve tested each other and we’re still here.”
He picked up her hand with its sparkling diamond and carried it to his lips. “Wear this and we’ll work on it,” he murmured, his eyes on her and the words seeming to thud straight into her heart, her flesh, her bones. “Every day. I promise I won’t rest until you’re happy enough to burst.”
“Until we both are,” she corrected him.
And then he leaned in close, and he wrapped himself around her and he kissed her. Again and again. Until she was dizzy with longing and love. Until neither one of them could breathe.
And Giancarlo gave her a detailed demonstration of his commitment to the cause, right there on one of the sofas in that bright, big room.
CHAPTER TEN
SHE MADE HIM work for it. And she made him wait.
And Giancarlo had no one to blame but himself for either.
“How do I know that you want to marry me and not simply to claim the baby in some appalling display of machismo?” she had asked him that first night, naked and astride him, when his intentions toward her, personally, could not have been more obvious.
“Set me any test,” he’d told her then. “I’ll pass it.”
She’d considered him for a long moment, her inky hair in that tangle he loved and her eyes that brilliant green. And the way she fit him. God, the fit.
“Don’t ask me again,” she said, her tone very serious, her green gaze alight. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
“Take your time,” he’d told her with all the patience of a desperate man. “I want you to trust me.”
“I want to trust you, too,” she’d whispered in return.
But the truth was they learned to trust each other.
He flew back and forth from Italy as needed, and didn’t argue when sometimes, she refused to go with him. He shared her tiny studio apartment with her in her snowy New England town, a hundred miles or more from anywhere, and he didn’t complain. He shoveled snow. He salted paths. He made certain her car was well-maintained and he never pressured her to move.
She told him more about her childhood with that terrible woman. He told her about his childhood with a woman less terrible perhaps, but deeply complicated all the same. And they held each other. They soothed each other.
They came to know each other in all the ways they hadn’t had time to get to know each other ten years ago. Layer on top of layer.
Until he came back from another trip to Italy one snowy March weekend and Paige said that maybe, if he had a better place in mind for them to live, she’d consider it.
“I don’t know anything about homes,” she told him, her attention perhaps too focused on the book she held in her lap. “But you seem to have quite a few.”
“You make every house I have a home, il mio amore,” he told her. “Without you, they are but adventures in architecture.”
And he had them back in his house in Malibu by the following afternoon, as if they’d never left it ten years ago. The sea in front of him, the mountains behind him and his woman at his side.
Giancarlo had never been happier. Except for one small thing.
“Why haven’t you married her yet?” Violet demanded every time she saw him, particularly when Paige was with him. He could only raise his brows at this woman he loved more than he’d imagined it was possible to love anyone, and wait for her to answer.
Which she was happy to do.
“I’m not sure I’ll have him, Violet,” Paige would reply airily. She would pat her ever-larger belly and smile blandly, and Giancarlo thought that they’d both transitioned from a working relationship to family rather easily. Almost as if Violet had planned it. “I’m considering all my options.”
“I don’t blame you,” Violet would say with a sniff. “He was horrible. I’d tell you he gets that sort of inexcusable behavior from his father but, alas, Count Alessi was the most polite and well-mannered man I ever met. It’s all me.”
“I don’t think anyone thought otherwise,” Giancarlo would say then, and everyone would laugh.
But he never asked Paige again. He kept his promise.
“And if a single photograph or unauthorized mention of my daughter appears anywhere, for any reason, in a manner which benefits you without my express, written consent,” he told the great screen legend Violet Sutherlin one pretty afternoon, in her office in front of her new assistant so there could be no mistake that he meant business, “you will never see her again. Until she is at least thirty. Do you understand me, Mother? I am no longer that four-year-old. My daughter never will be.”
Violet had gazed at him for a long time. She hadn’t showed him that smile of hers. She hadn’t said anything witty. In the end, she’d only nodded, once. Sharp and jerky.
>
But he knew she understood that he’d meant it.
Five months and three weeks after the night he’d turned up in Maine, when Paige was big and round and had to walk in a kind of waddle to get down the makeshift aisle, she married him at last in a tiny ceremony on Violet’s terrace. Violet presided. The bride and the officiant wept.
Giancarlo smiled with the greatest satisfaction he’d known in his life. And kissed his bride. His wife.
“Don’t ever torture me like that again,” he growled against her lips when they were in the car and headed home, finally married, the way they should have been more than ten years before.
“Surely you knew I’d marry you,” Paige said, laughing. “I’ve been pretty open about how much I love you.”
“I’m not at all certain I deserve you,” he said, and was startled when that made great tears well up in her lovely changeable eyes, then roll down her cheeks. “But I’ve taken that on as a lifelong project.”
She smiled at him, the whole world in that smile, the way it had been that long ago day on that set when they’d locked eyes for the first time. And Giancarlo knew without the slightest shred of doubt that this was merely a particularly good day on the long road toward forever. And that they’d walk the whole of it together, just like this.
And then her expression altered, and she grabbed his arm.
“We’re going to have a lot of lifelong projects,” Paige said, sounding fierce and awed at once. His beautiful wife. “I think my water just broke.”
* * *
They named their daughter Violetta Grace, after her famous grandmother, who’d insisted, and the less famous one, who’d died before Paige was born and Arleen had gone completely off the rails, and she was perfect.
Extraordinary.
Theirs.
And they spent the rest of their lives teaching her, in a thousand little ways and few great big ones, what it meant to be as happy as they were the moment they met her.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE TAMING OF XANDER STERNE by Carole Mortimer.
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CHAPTER ONE
‘I APPRECIATE THAT you leave for your honeymoon at the end of the week, Darius, but I seriously do not need you to arrange for a live-in babysitter for me for the two weeks you’re away!’ Xander scowled at his twin brother across the sitting room of his London penthouse apartment.
‘It’s not a babysitter, just someone to help you with things you can’t do yet, like getting in and out of the shower, drying off and dressing, driving.’
‘We have a company driver who can do that.’
‘But there’s no one to help you with the rest of those things,’ his brother reasoned. ‘Or to cook for you.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Darius, it’s been six weeks since I broke my leg.’
‘In three places, requiring two operations to fix. You can’t even stand for longer than ten minutes at a time yet.’ Darius was obviously refusing to back down on this.
Xander eyed him moodily, knowing that everything his brother said was true. ‘This isn’t really about what I can or can’t do, is it?’ He finally sighed resignedly.
Darius stilled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is that I don’t have a death wish. Yes, I drove my car when I shouldn’t have, and yes, I ended up crashing into a lamppost and wrecking my car, but thankfully no one else was injured. But I didn’t do it deliberately, Darius. I told you at the time I was just so angry I couldn’t see straight. I was angry, Darius,’ he repeated harshly.
‘Everyone gets angry, Xander,’ Darius said softly.
‘My anger had been building for months.’
‘I know.’
Xander blinked. ‘You do?’
His twin nodded. ‘You were working and playing way too hard. It was as if you were trying to avoid something or someone.’
‘Lot of good that did me.’ If Xander had been capable of pacing the room at that moment, then he would have.
Six weeks ago, for the first time in his life, Xander had realised that he had a temper. Not the slow-burning temper of his brother, but a fiery hot volcano that had exploded out of control, resulting in Xander wanting to beat another man to within an inch of his life.
Admittedly that man had been loudly verbally abusing the woman who had arrived with him that night at the exclusive London nightclub owned by the Sterne brothers. It was a situation reminiscent of Xander’s childhood memories of the way in which his father had treated his mother.
But the desire to hit someone had shaken Xander to his core, to the point that he no longer trusted himself or his responses to situations; he had never wanted to hit anyone in his life before that night. Not even the father who had beaten him when he was a child.
Lomax Sterne had been dead for over twenty years now, after a fall down the stairs of the family’s London home whilst in a drunken stupor. A death that neither his wife nor his twin sons had mourned.
Lomax Sterne had been a brute of a man and a bully, with a temper to match.
And six weeks ago Xander had terrified the life out of himself by discovering that, at the age of thirty-three, he had the same temper.
‘What made you so tense in the first place, do you think?’ Darius looked at him curiously.
Xander grimaced. ‘I don’t know. Yes, I do.’ His brow cleared. ‘Do you remember when we were in Toronto four months ago? Remember the chairman of Bank’s Corporation? We went out to dinner with him and his wife.’
‘And he talked down to her all evening,’ Darius realised ruefully. ‘Which was the reason we both decided we didn’t want to do business with him. And the reason for your pent-up anger these past few months, I’m guessing?’
‘I think it is, yes,’ Xander agreed.
‘You controlled it then, Xander, and you controlled it six weeks ago,’ Darius insisted impatiently. ‘Just let it go. It’s over.’
Xander wished he could dismiss it as easily.
‘I really do appreciate your moving in here the past four weeks, Darius, but I just don’t think I’m up to having someone else, a stranger, living with me right now.’ In truth, Xander had been looking forward to having his apartment all to himself again.
He grimaced. ‘It’s not that I’m ungrateful, Darius. I just didn’t envisage the next two weeks of having to sit across the breakfast table every morning from the no doubt muscle-bound man, Sam Smith, who you’ve employed to act as both my nursemaid and watchdog while you’re away.’
Darius gave a chuckle. ‘It would certainly make the neighbours sit up and take notice, if they thought you were living with a man who isn’t your brother.’
As one of the billionaire Sterne twins, Xander had a playboy reputation with women that had long been catalogued, and speculated about, by the media. So yes, they would no doubt have a field day with the fact that he was sharing his apartment with a man.
‘Fortunately, for you, none of that is going to happen. Samantha Smith is a woman,’ Darius assured him dryly.
Xander sat forward. ‘Sam Smith is a w
oman!’
‘Nice to know that your hearing wasn’t affected in the accident,’ his twin taunted.
Darius had taken his own sweet time sharing that little nugget of information with him!
Xander scowled. ‘You don’t have to look so happy about leaving me completely at this woman’s mercy for the next two weeks!’
‘I’ll ask her to be gentle with you,’ Darius teased.
‘Very funny,’ Xander muttered distractedly; just the thought of having some strange woman staying here with him filled Xander with a sense of unease. ‘So how is it that you know this woman?’
Darius smiled. ‘She’s a friend of Miranda’s. She really likes her, so much so that she’s asked Sam to work at the dance studio with her part-time once we’re back from our honeymoon. Oh, and her little girl attends one of Miranda’s dance classes.’
‘Stop right there!’ Xander held up a silencing hand, breathing hard in his agitation. ‘You didn’t mention she had a child. What does she plan to do with her daughter while she’s staying here with me?’
‘She’s going to bring her with her, of course,’ his brother dismissed as if there had never been the possibility of anything else.
‘Are you completely insane?’ Xander exploded as he finally struggled up onto his feet with the help of his crutches. ‘Darius, I told you what happened to me at the nightclub six weeks ago. I told you how I lost control of myself, and now you want to bring some child to live with me? How old is Ms Smith’s daughter?’ He knew that Miranda’s ballet school was for pupils from five to sixteen years old.
‘Five, I think.’
‘You plan on allowing this woman to bring a five-year-old child to stay in my apartment with me?’ Xander breathed in deeply in an effort to calm himself. ‘This was Andy’s idea, wasn’t it?’ It was a statement, rather than a question. ‘You told her what happened to me and—’
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