The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
Читать онлайн книгу.
him that this was a bad idea.
He didn’t know what had woken him, only that he’d come alert in a rush and had turned to make sure she was still there beside him—the way he’d done for years after the photographs hit. He’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d dreamed it all away, dreamed she’d never betrayed him, dreamed that things had been different. He’d grown uncomfortably well used to lying there in his empty bed, glaring at the ceiling and wishing her ill even as he’d wanted her back, wherever she was.
But this time, she was right here. She was curled up beside him and sound asleep, so that she didn’t even murmur when he stretched out on his side, his front to her back, and held her there. The way he knew he wouldn’t do if she was awake, lest it give her too many ideas...
So much for your revenge plot, he chided himself, but it all seemed so absurd when she was lying beside him, her features taking on an angelic cast in the faint light that poured in from the skylight above them, the stars themselves lighting her with that special glow.
He found himself tracing the line of her cheek with his finger, the memories of ten years ago so strong he could almost have sworn that no time had passed. That the pictures and the separation had been the bad dream. Because he might be wary of her, but every day it seemed that was only because he thought he should be, not because he truly was. And every day it seemed to make less and less sense.
She had been so young.
He didn’t know how he’d forgotten that. How he’d failed to factor it in. When he’d been twenty he’d been a bona fide idiot, making an ass of himself at Stanford and enjoying every minute of it. He certainly hadn’t been performing for a living, running from this audition to that gig with no guarantee he’d ever make his rent or make some money or even get cast. When Violet had been twenty years old she’d been famously divorcing the much, much older producer who had married her and made her when she’d been only seventeen. No one had called her a mercenary bitch, at least, not to her face. She’d been lauded for her powerful choices and the control she’d taken over her career.
Maybe that was why he’d spent a decade this furious with Paige. Because he loved his mother, he truly did, but he’d wanted something else for himself. He’d wanted a girl who wouldn’t think of herself first, second, last and always. He’d wanted a girl who would put him first. Had he known Paige wouldn’t stick with dancing? Had he assumed she would gravitate toward the life she had here in Tuscany, which was more or less arranged around pleasing him?
He’d told her he wanted a partner, but nothing he’d done supported that. Back in Malibu, he’d been jealous of the time she spent practicing and really anything else that took her away from him. This time around he was jealous of her devotion to his own mother. Did he want a partner? Or did he want her to treat him like a partner while he did whatever he liked?
Giancarlo didn’t much care for the answers that came to him then, in the quiet night, the woman he couldn’t seem to get over lying so sweetly beside him. All he knew was that he was tired of fighting this, of holding her at arm’s length when he wanted her close. He was tired of the walls he put up. He hated himself more every time he hurt her—
We all must practice what we preach if we are to achieve anything in this life, his father had told him a long time ago as they’d walked the land together, plotting out the placement of vineyards the older man hadn’t lived to see to completion. The trouble is we’re all much better at the preaching and not so good at the listening, even to ourselves.
It had to stop. He had to stop. There was no point demanding her trust if he refused to give his own.
He shifted beside her, pulling her close and burying his face in the sweet heat of her neck.
It was time to admit what he’d known for years. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, no matter what she called herself. No matter what she’d done when she was little more than a kid. And he’d never stopped loving her.
“Come sei bella,” he whispered into the dark. How beautiful you are. And, “Mi manchi.” I miss you. And then, “I love you,” in English, though he knew she couldn’t hear him.
Giancarlo understood then, in the soft darkness, Paige snuggled close in his arms as if she’d been there all along, that he always had. He always would.
He just needed to tell her when she could hear him.
* * *
Paige woke up the next morning in her usual rush when the morning light danced over her face from the skylights above. Giancarlo was next to her, his big body wrapped around her, and she thought, this is my favorite day.
She thought that every day, lately. No matter what that voice in her head had to say about it.
And she continued to think it until her stomach went funny in a sudden, hideous lurch, and she had to pull away from him and race for the toilet.
“I must have eaten something strange,” she said when she came out of the bathroom to find him frowning with concern, sitting on the side of his bed. She grimaced. “Your mother insisted we eat those weird sausages in Cinque Terre yesterday. One must not have agreed with me.”
But Violet wasn’t affected. “I have a stomach of steel, my dear girl,” she proclaimed when Paige called her to check in, “which is handy when one is living off craft service carts for weeks at a time in all the corners of the earth.” And it happened again the next morning. And then the morning after that.
And on the fourth morning, when Paige ran for the bathroom, Giancarlo came in after her and placed a package on the floor beside her as she knelt there, pale and sick and wishing for death. It took her a long moment to calm the wild, lurching beat of her heart. To force back the dizziness as that awful feeling in her stomach retreated again. To feel well enough to focus on what he’d put there in front of her.
Only to feel even more light-headed when she did.
It was a pregnancy test.
“Use it,” Giancarlo said, his voice so clipped and stern she didn’t dare look up at him to see if his expression matched. She didn’t think her stomach could take it. She knew her heart couldn’t. “Bring me the result. Then we’ll talk.”
PAIGE CLIMBED SHAKILY to her feet after his footsteps retreated. She rinsed her mouth out with a scoop of water from the sink and then she followed the directions on the package. She waited the requisite amount of time—she timed it on her phone, to the second—and when the alarm chirped at her she let herself look.
And just like that, everything was forever altered. But all she could do was stare at the little stick with its unmistakable plus sign and wish she wasn’t naked.
That didn’t merely say things about her character, she thought dimly. It said far more dire things about the kind of mother she’d be to the tiny little life that was somehow there inside her—
That was when it hit her. It was a tidal wave of raw feeling, impossible to categorize or separate or do anything but survive as it all tore through her. Terror. Joy. Panic. How could she be someone’s mother when all she’d ever known of mothering was Arleen? How could she be someone’s mother?
She was holding on to the sink in a death grip when it passed, tears in her eyes and her knees weak beneath her. It was hard to breathe, but Paige made herself do it. In, then out. Deep. Measured.
Then she remembered Giancarlo was waiting for her, and worse, what he’d said before he’d gone downstairs. And Paige understood then. That this was her worst fear come to life, literally.
That this was the other shoe she’d spent all this time knowing would drop.
She dressed before she went downstairs, glad she’d worn something