The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
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Angeles. Her tone was bland. Perhaps too bland. “On command.”
“I was going to say obedience,” he said, and he didn’t feel as if he was playing a game any longer. He was too busy letting his eyes trace over her curves, letting his hands relish the tactile memory of her face between them as if she’d burned her way into his flesh. He could still taste her, damn it. And he wanted more.
“Obedience,” she repeated, as if testing each syllable of the word as she said it. “Does that include feeding me a gourmet dinner in this perfect little mansion only a count would call a cottage? Are you entirely sure you know what obedience involves?”
Giancarlo smiled, or anyway, his mouth moved. “That’s the point. It involves whatever I say it involves.”
He took a sip of his wine as he walked over to the open glass doors that led out to the loggia, nodding for her to join him outside. Stiffly, carefully—as if she was more shaken by their encounter than she appeared, and God help him, he wanted that to be true—she did.
Because the truth was so pathetic, wasn’t it? He still so badly wanted her to be real. To have meant some part of the things that had happened between them. All these years later, he still wanted that. Giancarlo despaired of himself.
A table waited out in the soft night air, bright with candles and laden with local produce and delicacies prepared on-site, while a rolling cart sat next to it with even more tempting dishes beneath silver covers. It was achingly romantic, precisely as he’d ordered. The hills and valleys of the estate rolled out beneath the stars, with lights winking here and there in the distance, making their isolation high up on this terrace at a remove from all the world seem profound.
That, too, was the point.
He moved to pull her chair out for her like the parody of the perfect gentleman he had never quite been and waited as she settled in, taking a moment to inhale her scent. Tonight she smelled of the high-end bath products he had his staff stock in the cottages, vanilla and apricots, and that hint of pure woman beneath.
“This house was a ruin when I started working on it,” he told her, still standing behind her, because he didn’t know what his face might show and he didn’t want her to see it. To see him. He succumbed to a whim and ran his fingers through her hair, reveling in the heavy weight of the dark strands even as he remembered all the other times she’d wrapped him in the heat and sweetness of it. When she’d crawled over him in that wide bed in Malibu and let her hair slip and tumble all over his skin as she tortured him with that sweet mouth of hers, driving them both wild. Giancarlo hardened, remembering it, and her hair was thick silk in his hands. “It sits on its original foundation, but everything else is changed. Perhaps the walls still stand, but everything inside is new, reclaimed, or altered entirely. It might look the same from a distance, but it isn’t.”
“I appreciate the metaphor,” Paige said, with a certain grittiness to her voice that he suspected meant her teeth were clenched. He smiled.
“Then I hope you’ll appreciate this, too,” he said as he rounded the table and sat down across from her, stretching out his legs before him as he did. “This is the Italian countryside and everything you can see in every direction is mine. You could scream for days and no one would hear you. You could try to escape and, unless you’ve taken up marathon running in your spare time, you’d run out of energy long before you found the road. You claimed to be obedient in Los Angeles because it suited you. You wanted your job more than you minded the loss of your self-respect, such as it is. Here?” He shrugged as he topped up their wineglasses with a bottle crafted from grapes he’d grown himself and then sat back, watching her closely, as she visibly fought not to react to his cool tone, his calmly belligerent words. “You have no other choice.”
“That’s not at all creepy,” Paige said, though he could have sworn that gleam of green in her chameleon gaze was amusement, however beleaguered. “I’m definitely the terrifying stalker in this scenario, not you.”
Giancarlo laughed. “Not that I would care if it really was creepy, but I don’t think you really think so, do you? Shall we put it to the test?”
He wanted her to push him, he understood. He wanted to see for himself. He wanted to peel those crisp white trousers from her slim hips and lick his way into her wetness and heat and know it was all for him, the way he’d once believed it was. The way he’d once believed she was.
Soon, he assured himself as his body reacted to that image with predictable enthusiasm. Soon enough.
“Again,” Paige said tightly, taking a healthy gulp of her wine, “it seems to me that there are more effective forms of payback than a romantic dinner for two, served beneath the starry night sky on what might be the most intimate terrace on the entire planet.” She looked out at the view as the heavens sparkled back at her, as if they were performing for her pleasure. “I suspect you might be doing it wrong.”
“Ah, Paige,” Giancarlo said softly. “You lack imagination.” Her eyes swung back to his and he smiled again, wider, pleased when that seemed to alarm her. “The romantic setting will only make it more poignant, will it not, when I order you to strip and sit there naked as we eat. Or when I demand that you please me with your mouth while I soak in the view. Or when I bend you over the serving table and make you scream out my name until I’m done.” He let his smile deepen as her eyes went very green, and very round. “The more civilized the setting, the more debauched the act,” he said mildly. “I find there is very little more effective.”
She looked stunned, and then something like wistful, and he almost broke and hauled her into his arms—but somehow, somehow, he reined himself in. Just a little bit longer, he promised himself. She blinked, then coughed, and then she folded her hands together in her lap with such precision that Giancarlo knew she was torturing herself with all those images he’d put in her head.
Va bene.
“You say that as if this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.” Her voice was his own little victory, so raspy was it then, with that stunned heat in her gaze and that band of color high on her cheeks. “Do you spend a lot of time enacting complicated revenge fantasies, Giancarlo? Is that another one of your heretofore hidden talents—like architecture and interior design, apparently?”
“I went to architecture school after university,” he said, and something about the fact she didn’t know that bothered him. Had he never told her his own story? Had he been as guilty of wearing a false persona ten years ago as she had been? Had it simply been the rush, the need that had kept them in bed and focused on other things? Had it been by her design—or had it been his own selfishness at play? He shoved that disconcerting thought aside. “But when I was finished, I decided I wanted to leverage my position as Violet’s son, instead. That didn’t work out very well for either one of us, did it?” He reached over and removed the silver cover from the plate of antipasti in front of her, then from his own, and smiled at her when she looked confused. “The salsicce di cinghiale is particularly good,” he told her. “And you should be certain to eat well. We have a very long night ahead of us.”
He expected her to do as she was told. It took a moment or two for him to realize that she hadn’t moved. That she appeared to have frozen solid where she sat and was staring at him with a stricken sort of expression on her face.
Giancarlo lifted a brow. “Was I unclear?”
“I appreciate all the tension and drama,” Paige said after a moment. “I don’t think I realized how very much you take after your mother until now. That’s a compliment,” she added in a hurry when he frowned at her. “But I’ll pass.”
“That is not an option you have.” He shrugged. “You persist in thinking what you want comes into play here. It doesn’t.”
“What will you do?” she asked softly, so softly it took a moment for him to hear the challenge beneath the words, and then to see it there in her chameleon eyes. “Make me scream for people who won’t hear me? Make me walk for days