The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
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Paige said evenly. “I’m sure he knows that by now. Just as he likely knows that therefore, his own needs are different from yours.”
“One would think,” Violet agreed in her serene, untroubled way, which shouldn’t have sent a little shiver of warning down Paige’s back. “But then, the most interesting men are not always in touch with what they need, are they?”
Violet didn’t speak much after that, yet Paige didn’t feel as if she could breathe normally until the car pulled off the country road and started along the winding drive into the estate. And she was impatient—the most impatient she’d ever been in Violet’s presence, though she tried valiantly to disguise it—as she helped the older woman into the castello and oversaw the staff as they sorted out her purchases.
And only when she was finally in the car again and headed toward her cottage did Paige understand what had been beating at her all day, clutching at her chest and her throat and making her want to scream in the middle of ancient Italian piazzas. Guilt, yes, but that was a heavy thing, a spiked weight that hung on her. The rest of it was panic.
Because any opportunity Giancarlo had to reflect on what was happening between them—not revenge, not the comeuppance he’d obviously planned—was the beginning of the end. She knew it, deep inside. She’d seen it in his eyes this morning.
And when she got to her cottage and found not only it but the house above it dark, it confirmed her fears.
Paige stood there in the dark outside her cottage long after the driver’s car disappeared into the night, staring up the hill, willing this shadow or that to separate from the rest and become Giancarlo. She was too afraid to think about what might happen if this was it. If that kiss he’d delivered in the garden was their last.
Too soon, she thought desperately, or perhaps that was the first prayer she’d dared make in years. It’s too soon.
She stared up the side of the hill as if that would call him to her, somehow. But the only thing around her was the soft summer night, pretty and quiet. Still and empty, for miles around.
When she grew too cold and he still didn’t appear, she made her way inside, feeling more punished by his absence than by anything else that had happened between them. Paige entertained visions of marching up the hill and taking what she wanted, or at least finding him and seeing for herself what had happened in her absence today, but the truth was, she didn’t dare. She was still so uncertain of her welcome.
Would he throw back the covers and yank her into his arms if she appeared at his bedside? Or would he send her right back out into the night again, with a cruel word or two as her reward? Paige found she was too unsure of the answer to test it.
There were red flags everywhere, she acknowledged as she got ready for bed and crawled beneath her sheets. Red flags and dark corners, and nothing safe. But maybe what mattered was that she knew that, this time. She’d known the moment she’d decided to apply for that job with Violet. She’d always known.
She would have to learn to live with that, too.
* * *
Later that night, Paige woke with a sudden start when a lean male form crawled into her bed, hauling her into his arms.
Giancarlo. Of course.
But her heart was already crashing against her ribs as he rolled so she was beneath him. Excitement. Relief. The usual searing hunger, sharper than usual this time.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” he gritted at her, temper and need and too many other dark and hungry things in his voice. Then the scrape of his teeth against the tender flesh of her neck, making her shudder.
Paige didn’t want to think about the contours of her fears now, her certainty he’d finished with this. With her. Not now, while he was braced above her, his body so familiar and hot against hers, making the night blaze with the wild need that was never far beneath the surface. Never far at all.
Not even when she thought she’d lost him again.
“I thought you’d gone to bed already.” I didn’t know if you’d want me to come find you, she thought, but wisely kept to herself. “All of your lights were out.”
She thought she saw a certain self-knowledge move over his face then, but it was gone so quickly she was sure she must have imagined it.
“Did you have a lovely day out with my mother?” he asked in a tone she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine was friendly, his dark eyes glittering in the faint light from the rising moon outside her windows. “Filled with her admirers, exactly as she wished?”
“Of course.” Paige ran her hands from his hard jaw to the steel column of his neck, as if trying to imprint the shape of him on her palms. Trying to make certain that if this was the last time, she’d remember it. That it couldn’t be snatched from her, not entirely. “When Violet decrees we are to have fun, that is precisely what we have. No mere crowd would dare defy the crown jewel of the Hollywood establishment.”
Giancarlo didn’t laugh. He shifted his body so he was hard against her and she melted the way she always did, ready to welcome him no matter his mood or hers, no matter the strange energy that crackled from him tonight, no matter the darkness that seemed wrapped around him even as he wound himself around her.
There were other words for what she was with this man, she knew, words she hadn’t heard in a long time but still remembered all too well. Words she’d dismissed as the unhealthy rantings of the worst person she’d ever known, the person who had taken everything she’d wanted from her—but it turned out dismissing them wasn’t the same thing as erasing them.
Even so, the hollow, gnawing thing that had sat inside her all day and made her feel so panicked was gone, because he was here. She filled it with his scent, his touch, his bold possession.
Him. Giancarlo.
The only man she’d ever touched. The only man she’d ever loved.
And this was the only way she could tell him any of that. With her body. Paige shifted so he was flush against her entrance and hooked her legs over his hips, letting him in. Loving him in the only way she knew. In the only way he’d let her.
“Maybe that didn’t always work out when you were a child,” she whispered, hoping he couldn’t read too much emotion in her eyes, across her face. “But my relationship with Violet is much easier. She pays, I agree, the end.”
Giancarlo bent his head to press hot, open kisses along the ridge of her collarbone. Paige moved restlessly, hungrily against him, tilting her head back to give him greater access. To give him anything—everything—he wanted.
Because this won’t last forever, that harsh voice that was too much an echo of her mother’s reminded her. That was what today had taught her. There were no fairy tales. This situation had an expiration date, and every moment she had with him was one moment closer to the end.
“In a way,” Giancarlo said, still too dark, still too rough, his mouth against her skin so Paige could feel the rumble of his words inside of her as he spoke, “that is every relationship that Violet has.”
She heard that same tense grief that had been in him in the castello that morning and this time, no one was watching. She could soothe him, or try. She ran her fingers through his thick hair and smiled when he pressed into her touch, like a very large cat.
“I don’t think it can be easy to be a great figure,” Paige said after a moment, concentrating on the feel of his scalp beneath her fingertips, the drag of his thick hair as she moved her hands through it, the exquisite sensation of stroking him. “Too many expectations. Too much responsibility to something far bigger than oneself. The constant worry that it will be taken away. But it must be harder still to be that person’s child.”
He shifted away from her, propping himself up on his elbows, though he kept himself cradled there between her thighs, his arousal a delicious weight against her softness. A promise. The