The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
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not hard,” he said, and she’d never heard that tone before, had she? Clipped and resigned at once. And yet somehow, that pit in her belly yawned open again as he spoke. “As long as you remember that she is always playing a role. The grande dame as benevolent mother. The living legend as compassionate parent. The great star whose favorite role of all is mom. When she was younger there were different roles threaded into the mix, but the same principle applied. You learn this as a child in a thousand painful ways and you vow, if you are at all wise, never to inflict it on another. To let it end with you.”
Paige tried to imagine Giancarlo as a small boy, all stubborn chin and fathomless eyes, and ached for him, though that didn’t explain her nervousness. It was something in the way he held himself apart from her, a certain danger rippling down the length of his body, as hard and as steel-hewn as he was. It was the way he watched her, too still, too focused.
“I’m sorry,” she said, though she wanted to say so much more. She didn’t dare. Just like before, when she’d stood outside and wanted him and had known better than to go and find him, she was too uncertain. “That can’t have been easy.”
“Is that sympathy for me, cara? Don’t bother.”
He wasn’t quite scoffing at her. Not quite, though his face went fierce in the darkness, edging toward cruel the way he’d been in the beginning, and she found she was bracing herself—unable to open her mouth and stop him. Unable to defend herself at all. Whatever he’s about to say, that hard voice reminded her, like another slap, you deserve.
“Here is what I learned from my mother, the great actress,” Giancarlo said. “That she is a mystery, unknowable even to herself. That she prefers it that way. That intimacy is anathema to her because it cannot be controlled, it cannot be directed, it cannot cut to print when she is satisfied with her performance. It is one long take with no rehearsal and no do-overs, and she goes to great lengths indeed to avoid it.”
Paige wasn’t sure why she felt so stricken then, so stripped raw when he wasn’t talking about her—but then he moved again, dropping his weight against her to whisper in her ear, hot and close and dark. So very dark.
You deserve this, she told herself. Whatever it is.
“I want a woman I can trust, Paige,” he said with a ruthless inevitability. And it didn’t even hurt. It was like a deep slice of a sharp blade. She knew he’d cut her and now there was only the wait for blood. For the pain that would surely follow. And he wasn’t finished. “A woman I can know inside and out. A woman who carries no secrets, who does not hide herself away from me or from the world, who never plays a role. A woman who wants a partner, not an audience.”
“Giancarlo.” She felt torn apart even though he was holding her close. Wrecked as surely as if he’d thrown her from the roof of the towering castello. “Please.”
But the worst part was, he knew what he was doing. She’d seen it in the cast of his sensual mouth. She’d felt it in the way he’d very nearly trembled as he’d held himself above her.
He knew he was hurting her. And he kept going.
“I want a woman I can believe when she tells me she loves me,” he said, raw and fierce and she knew she deserved that, she knew she did, even though it felt a little bit like dying. And then he lifted his head to look her straight in the eyes, making it that much worse. “And that can never be you, can it? It never was. It never will be.”
Later, she thought she might take that apart and live awhile in the misery he’d packed into those last two sentences. Later, she thought she might cry for days and check herself for scars, the way she’d done ten years ago. But that was later.
Tonight Paige thought the pain in him was far greater than the hurt he’d caused—that she deserved, that voice kept telling her, and she agreed no matter how it cut her up—and she couldn’t bear it.
She didn’t care if he still hated her, even now, after another week in his bed when he’d tasted every part of her and had to have recognized the sheer honesty in her response to him. She told herself she didn’t care about that at all and some part of her believed it.
Or wanted to believe it.
But worrying about that was for later, too. Later, when she could put herself together again. Later, when she could think about something other than the man who stretched over her and broke her heart, again and again and again. Because he could.
“Giancarlo,” she said again, with more force this time. “Stop talking.”
And he surrendered with a groan, thrusting deep and hard inside of her where there was nothing but the two of them—that shimmering truth that was only theirs, wild and dizzying and hotter every time—and that perfect, wondrous fire that swept them both away in its glory.
And Paige did her best to make them both forget.
* * *
Two more weeks passed, slow and sweet. The Tuscan summer started to edge toward the coming fall. The air began to feel crisp in the mornings, and the sky seemed bluer. And if she’d allowed herself to think about such things, Paige might have believed that the tension between her and Giancarlo was easing, too—all that heavy grief mellowing, turning blue like the sky, gold like the fields, lighter and softer with age.
Or perhaps she’d taught them both how to forget.
Whatever it was, it worked. No more did she spend her days trapped in her isolated cottage, available only to him and only when he wanted—and she told herself she didn’t miss it, all that forced proximity and breathlessness. Of course she didn’t miss it.
Paige’s days looked a great deal as they had back home. She met with Violet most mornings, and helped her plan out her leisure time. Violet was particularly fond of day trips to various Italian cities to soak in all the art and culture and fashion with a side helping of adulation from the locals, which she often expedited by taking Giancarlo’s helicopter that left from the roof of the castello and kicked up such a ruckus when it returned it could be heard for miles around.
“I’ve always preferred a big entrance,” Violet had murmured the first time, that famous smile of hers on her lips as the helicopter touched down.
But when Violet was in between her trips—which meant days of spa treatments and dedicated lounging beneath artfully placed umbrellas at the side of the castello’s private pool instead—Paige was left to her own devices, which usually meant she was left to Giancarlo’s.
One day he stopped the Jeep the moment it was out of sight of the castello’s stout tower and knelt down beside the passenger door, pulling her hips to his mouth and licking his way into Paige right there—making her sob out his name into the quiet morning, so loud it startled the birds from the nearby trees. Another time he drove them out to one of the private lakes that dotted the property and they swam beneath the hot sun, then brought each other to a shuddering release in the shallow end, Giancarlo holding her to him as she took advantage of the water’s buoyancy to make him groan.
Other times, they talked. He told her of his father’s dreams for this land, its long history and his own plans to monetize it while conserving it, that it might last for many more generations. He showed her around the Etruscan ruins that cropped up in the oddest spots and demonstrated, as much as possible, that a man who knew the ins and outs of three thousand acres in such extraordinary detail seemed something like magical when the landscape in question was a woman’s body. Her body.
Paige didn’t know which she treasured more. His words or his body. But she held them to her like gifts, and she tried not to think about what she deserved, what she knew she had coming to her. She tried to focus on what she had in her hands, instead.
One lazy afternoon they lay together in the warm sun, the sweet breeze playing over their heated skin. Paige propped her chin against his chest and looked into his eyes and it was dizzying, the way it was always dizzying. And then he smiled at her without a single stray shadow