The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
Читать онлайн книгу.
big hands and then pull them behind her, securing them in one of his at the small of her back. Her skirt fell back into place against the sensitized skin of her thighs, her back arched almost of its own accord, and Giancarlo stared down at her, a hard wildness blazing from his eyes.
Paige remembered that, too.
She didn’t know what he looked for, much less what he saw. He stared at her for a moment that dragged out to forever and she felt it like panic beneath the surface of her skin. Like an itch.
And then he jerked her close, her hands still held immobile behind her back, and slammed his mouth to hers.
It wasn’t a brush of his mouth, a tease, like before. It wasn’t an introduction.
He took her mouth as if he was already deep inside of her. As if he was thrusting hard and driving them both toward that glimmering edge. It was more than wild, more than carnal. He bent her back over her own arms, pressing her breasts into the flat planes of his chest, and he simply possessed her with a ruthless sort of fury that set every part of her aflame.
She thrilled to his boldness, his shocking mastery. The glorious taste of him she’d pined for all these years. The sheer rightness.
Paige kissed him back desperately, deeply, forgetting about the games they played. Forgetting about penance, about trust. Forgetting her betrayal and his fury. She didn’t care what he wanted from her, or how he planned to hurt her, or anything at all but this.
This.
There was too much noise in her head and too much heat inside of her and she actually moaned in disappointment when he pulled back, holding her away from him with that iron strength of his that reminded her how gentle he was with it. How truly demanding, because he knew—as he’d always known—exactly what she wanted. How far away from force all of this really was.
“You kiss like a whore,” he said, and she could see it was meant to be an insult, but it came out sounding somehow reverent, instead.
She laughed. “Have you kissed many whores, then? You, the exalted Count Alessi, who could surely have any proper woman he wished?”
“Just the one.”
She should be wounded by that, Paige thought as she studied him. She should feel slapped down, put in her place, but she didn’t. She cocked her head to one side and saw the fever in his dark gaze, and she knew that whatever power he had over her, she had it over him, too. And more, he was as aware of that as she was.
“Then how would you know?” she asked him, her voice like a stranger’s, breathy and inviting. Nothing like hurt at all. “Maybe the whore is you.”
“Watch your mouth.” But he’d moved closer again, his shoulders filling her vision, her need expanding to swallow the whole world. Or maybe it was his need. Both of theirs, twined together and too big to fit beneath the sky.
“Make me,” she dared him, and he muttered something in Italian.
And then he did.
He let go of her hands to take her face between his hard palms, holding her where he wanted her as he plundered her mouth. As he took and took and then took even more, as if there was no end and no beginning and only the madness of their mouths, slick and hot and perfect. The fire between them danced high and roared louder, and he didn’t stop her when Paige melted against him. When she wound her arms around his neck and clung to him, kissing him back as if this was the reunion she’d always dreamed of. As if this was a solution, not another one of his clever little power games.
And she didn’t know when it changed. When it stopped being about fury and started to taste like heat. When it started to feel like the people they’d been long ago, before everything had gone so wrong.
He felt it, too. She felt him stiffen, and then he thrust her aside.
And for a long moment they only stared at each other, both of them breathing too fast, too hard. Paige tried to step back and her legs wobbled, and Giancarlo scowled at her even as his hand shot out to steady her.
“Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself. Her mouth felt marked, soft and plundered, and Giancarlo was looking at her as if she was a ghost. “That certainly taught me my place. All that punitive kissing.”
She didn’t know what moved across his face then, but it scraped at her. It hurt far worse than any of his words had. She had to bite her own tongue to keep from making the small sound of pain that welled up in her at the sight of it.
“It will,” he promised her, a bleakness in his voice that settled in her bones like a winter chill. Like the fate she’d been running from since the day she’d met him, loath as she was to admit it. “I can promise you that. Sooner or later, it will.”
* * *
Kissing her had been a terrible mistake.
Giancarlo ran until he thought his lungs might burst and his legs might collapse beneath him, and it was useless. The Southern California sun was unforgiving, the blue sky harsh and high and cloudless, and he couldn’t get her taste out of his mouth. He couldn’t get the feel of her out of his skin.
It was exactly as it had been a decade ago, all over again, except this time he couldn’t pretend he’d been blindsided. This time, he’d walked right into it. He’d been the one to kiss her.
He cursed himself in two languages and at last he stopped running, bending over to prop his hands on his knees and stare down the side of the mountain toward his mother’s estate and the sprawl of the city below it in the shimmering heat of high summer. It was too hot here. It was too familiar.
Too dangerous.
It was much too tempting to simply forget himself, to pick up where he’d left off with her. With the woman who was no longer Nicola. As if she hadn’t engineered his ruin, deliberately, ten years ago. As if she hadn’t then tricked her way to her place at his mother’s side with a new name and God only knew what agenda.
As if, were he to bury himself in her body the way he wanted to do more than was wise and more than he cared to admit to himself, she might transform into the woman she’d already proved she wasn’t in the most spectacular way imaginable.
He was already slipping back into those old habits he’d thought he’d eradicated. The work he’d left in Italy was piling up high, and yet here he was, running off steam in the Bel Air hills the way he’d done when he was a sixteen-year-old. She was the first thing he thought of when he woke. She was what he dreamed about. She was taking over his life as surely as she ever had, very much as if this was her revenge, not his.
He was an addict. There was no other explanation for the state he was in, hard and ready and yearning, and he didn’t want that. He wanted her humbled, brought low, destroyed. He wanted her to feel how he’d felt when he’d woken that terrible morning to find his naked body splashed everywhere for the entire world to pick over, parse, comment upon, like every other time his private life been exploited for Violet’s gain—but much worse, because he hadn’t seen the betrayal coming. He hadn’t thought to brace himself for impact.
He wanted this to hurt.
Giancarlo straightened and shoved his hair back from his forehead, the past seeming to press against him too tightly. He remembered it all too well. Not just the affair with Nicola—Paige, he reminded himself darkly—in all its blistering, sensual perfection, as if their bodies had been created purely to drive each other wild. But the parts of that affair he’d preferred to pretend he didn’t remember, all these years later. Like the way he’d always found himself smiling when they’d spoken on the phone, wide and hopeful and giddy, as if she was sunshine in a bottle and only his. Or the way his heart had always thudded hard when she’d entered a room, in the moment before she’d seen him and had treated him to that dazzling smile of hers that had blotted out the rest of the world. The way she’d held his hand as if that connection alone would save them both from darkness, or dragons, or something far worse.
Oh