The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
Читать онлайн книгу.
matter what you understand, he snapped at himself. Only what you do to make this thing for her go away—
But something had happened out there as the sun set. Something had shifted inside him, though he couldn’t quite identify it. He wasn’t certain he’d want to name it if he could.
“It may prove to be a long night, cara,” he told her darkly, pouring himself a glass of the wine they made here from Alessi grapes. “This is merely the beginning.”
“The civilized version of revenge, then,” she murmured, almost as if to herself, running her fingers along the length of the reclaimed wood table that marked his dining area in the great, open space he’d done himself. In soothing yet bright colors and historically contextual pieces, all of which dimmed next to that effortless, offhanded beauty of hers. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
This didn’t feel like revenge. This felt like a memory. Giancarlo didn’t want to think too closely about that, but the truth of it slapped at him all the same. It could have been any one of the long, lush evenings they’d shared in Malibu a decade back that still shimmered in his recollection, as if the two of them had been lit from within. It shimmered in him now, too. Again. As if this was the culmination of all the dreams he’d lied and told himself he’d never had, in all those years since he’d left Los Angeles and started bringing the estate back to life.
There was too much history between them, too much that had gone wrong to ever fix, and yet he still caught himself watching her as if this was a new beginning. But then, he had always been such a damned fool where this woman was concerned, hadn’t he?
Earlier he’d stood in the courtyard of the castello with Violet, toasting her first night back in Italy since his father’s funeral eight years ago, and he’d felt a sense of deep rightness. Of homecoming, long overdue. These hills held his happiest childhood memories, after all. When his parents had both been alive, and in those early years, so much in love it had colored the air around them.
“You’ve done a marvelous thing here, darling,” Violet had said, smiling as much at him as at the achingly perfect view.
“I remember the days when we couldn’t drive out the gates in Bel Air without having to fight our way through packs of photographers,” he’d said, gazing out at the slumbering hills, all of them his now, his birthright and his future. His responsibility. And not a single paparazzo in a thousand miles or more. No lies. No stories. Only the enduring beauty of the earth. “Just to get to school in the morning.”
“The tabloids giveth and the tabloids taketh away,” Violet had said drily, looking as chic and elegant as ever though she wore her version of lounge wear and what was, for her, a practically cosmetic-free face. “It’s never been particularly easy to navigate, I grant you, but there did used to be a line. Or perhaps I’m kidding myself.”
“I want this place to be a refuge,” he’d told her then. “It’s nearly fifteen miles to the nearest main road. Everything is private. It’s the perfect retreat for people who can’t hide anywhere else.”
Violet had tasted her wine and she’d taken her time looking at him again, and he’d still been unsure if she was pausing for dramatic effect or if that was simply how she processed emotion. She was still a mystery to him and he’d long since accepted she always would be. Or anyway, he’d been telling himself he’d accepted it. It might even have been true.
“Yes,” she’d said, “and it’s very beautiful. It’s always been beautiful. I imagine I could live here quite happily and transform myself into one of those portly, Italy-maddened expatriates who are forever writing those merry little Tuscan memoirs and waxing rhapsodic about the light.” Her brows had lifted. “But which one of us is it that feels they need a hiding place, Giancarlo? Is that meant to be you or me?”
“Never fear, Mother,” he’d replied evenly. “I have no intention of having children of my own. I won’t have any cause to hide away, the better to protect them from prying eyes and a judgmental world. Perhaps I, too, will flourish in the heat of so many spotlights.”
She’d only smiled, enigmatic as ever, seemingly not in the least bit chastised by what he’d said. Had he expected otherwise? “Privacy can be overrated, my darling boy. Particularly when it better resembles a jail.”
And now he stood in the cheerful lounge of the house he’d taken apart and put back together with his own two hands, and watched the woman he’d once loved more than any other walk through the monument—he wouldn’t call it a jail—he’d built to his own unhappiness, his lonely, broken, betrayed heart.
How had he failed to realize, until this moment, that he’d built it for her? That he’d been hiding here these past ten years—deliberately keeping himself some kind of hermit, tucked away on this property and in this very cottage? That it was as much his refuge for her as it was from her?
That notion made something like a storm howl in him, deep and long. And as if she could read his mind, Paige turned, a small smile on that distracting mouth of hers.
“I always liked your films,” she said, her voice the perfect complement to the carefully decorated great room, the furnishings a mix of masculine ease and his Italian heritage, as if he’d planned for her to stand there in its center and make it all work. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that that kind of attention to detail should spill over into all the things you do.”
“My films were laughable vanity projects at best,” he told her, that storm in his voice and clawing at the walls of his chest. “I should never have taken myself seriously, much less allowed anyone else to do the same. It’s an embarrassment.”
Paige wrinkled her nose and he thought that might kill him, because finding her adorable was far more dangerous than simply wanting her. One was about sex, which was simple. The other had consequences. Terrible consequences he refused to pay.
“I liked them.”
“Shall we talk about the things you like?” Giancarlo asked, and he sounded overbearingly brooding to his own ears. As if he was performing a role because he thought the moment needed a villain, not because he truly wanted to put her back in her place. “Your interest in photography and amateur porn, for instance?”
Some revenge, he thought darkly. Next you’ll try to cuddle her to death with your words.
But she only smiled in that enigmatic way of hers, and moved closer to one of the paintings on the wall, her hands cupped around her glass of wine and that inky black hair of hers falling in abandon down her back, and it wasn’t cuddling he thought about as he watched her move. Then bite her lower lip as she peered up at the painting. It wasn’t cuddling that made his blood heat and his mouth dry.
“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Paige said, so softly that it took him a moment to realize she’d spoken. She swiveled back to look at him, framed there like a snapshot, the woman who had destroyed him before the great, bright canvas that stretched high behind her, all shapes and emotion and a swirl of color, that he hadn’t understood until tonight had reminded him of her.
Giancarlo told himself it was a sour realization, but his sex felt heavy and the air between them tasted thick. Like desire. Like need.
Like fate.
“It seems as if you’ve achieved what you set out to do,” she continued as if she couldn’t feel the thickness, though he knew, somehow, that she could. “You’ve separated me from Violet without seeming to do so deliberately, which I’m assuming was your purpose from the start. But why bring me all the way here? Why not leave me in California and spirit Violet away? And having made me come all the way here,” Paige continued, something he couldn’t identify making her eyes gleam green in the mellow light, “why not simply leave me to rot in my little cottage? It’s pretty as prison cells go, I grant you. Very pretty. It might take me weeks to realize I’m well and truly trapped there.”
He let his gaze roam over her the way his hands itched to do. “You’ve