The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
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some other city. Somewhere that held no trace of who they’d been together. But here, their history curled around everything, like a thick, encroaching smog, and made it impossible to inhale without confronting it every time.
With every goddamned breath.
“I must return to Italy,” he said shortly. Almost as if he wasn’t certain he’d say it at all if he didn’t say it quickly and that, of course, made him despise himself all the more.
“You can’t leave,” Violet said at once. Giancarlo noticed Paige seemed to type even more furiously and failed to raise her head at all. “You’ve only just arrived.”
“I came because it had been an unconscionably long time, Mother,” he said softly. “It was never my intention to stay away so long. But I have a solution.”
“You are moving back to Los Angeles,” Violet said, a curve to her mouth that suggested she didn’t believe it even as she said it. “I’m delighted. That Malibu house is far too nice to waste on all those renters.”
“Not at all.” He wanted to study Paige instead of his mother but he didn’t dare. Still, he was as aware of her as if she was triple her own size. As if she loomed there in his peripheral vision, a great dark cloud, consuming everything. “You must come to Italy. Bring your assistant. Stay for the rest of the summer.”
Violet looked startled for a moment, but then in the next her face smoothed out, and he recognized the mask she wore then. As impenetrable as it was graceful. A vision of loveliness that showed only what she wanted seen, and nothing else. Violet Sutherlin, the star. Giancarlo didn’t know what it said about him that he found this version of her easier to handle than the one who pretended motherhood was her primary concern.
“Darling, you know my feelings about Italy,” she murmured, and a stranger might have believed her wry, easy tone. “I love it with all my heart. But I’m afraid I buried that heart with your father.”
“Not that Italy,” he said. He smiled, though he understood he was speaking as much to the silent woman in the corner of his eye as to his mother. “My Italy.”
“Do you have your own?” Violet asked. She laughed again. “You have been busy indeed.”
“I’ve completely transformed the estate,” Giancarlo said quietly. “I know we’ve discussed all these changes over the years, but I’d like you to see them for yourself. I think Father would be proud.”
“I know he would,” Violet said with a glimmer of something raw in her gaze and the sound of it in her voice, and Giancarlo knew he had her. Paige knew it too, he could tell. He felt more than saw her stiffen at her desk, and it took everything he had to keep the triumph from his voice, the sheer victory from his face. “Of course, Giancarlo. I’d love to see Tuscany again.”
He only let himself look at Paige again when he was certain he had himself under complete control. Like iron, he thought fiercely. Like the old houses he’d rebuilt on the ancestral estate in Tuscany, stone by ancient stone, forcing his will and vision onto every acre.
He would take her away from Los Angeles, where history seemed to infuse every moment between them with meaning he didn’t want. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of this sooner.
In the far reaches of Tuscany, as remote as it was possible to get in one of the most famous and beloved regions of the world, she would be entirely dependent on him. Violet could relax in the hands of his world-class staff, her every need anticipated and met, and he would have all the time in the world to vanquish this demon from his past, for good. All the time he needed to truly make her pay.
Because that was what he wanted, he reminded himself. To make her pay. Everything else was memory and fantasy and better suited to a long night’s dream than reality.
“Wonderful.” Giancarlo tried not to gloat, and knew he failed when Paige frowned. And it was still a victory. It was still a plan. And it would work, he was sure of it. Because it had to. “We leave tonight.”
* * *
Paige had dreamed of Italy her whole life.
When she was a child, she’d sneaked library books into her mother’s bleak trailer in the blistering heat of the rocky Arizona desert. She’d waited for Arleen to pass out before she’d lost herself in them, and she’d dreamed. Fierce dreams of cypress trees in stern columns marching across a deep green undulation of ancient fields. Monuments to long lost gods and civilizations gone centuries before her birth, red-roofed towns clustered on gentle hills beneath a soft, Italian sun.
Then she’d met Giancarlo, who carried the lilt of Italy in every word he spoke, and her dreams had taken on a more specific shape. Even back then, when he’d wanted to play around in Hollywood more than he’d wanted to tend to his heritage, he’d spoken of the thousands of rural acres that his father had only just started to reclaim from the encroaching wilderness of a generation or two of neglect. They were his birthright and in those giddy days ten years ago she’d dared to imagine that she was, too.
And now she was finally here, and it turned out it was extraordinarily painful to visit a place that she’d once imagined might be her home and now knew never, ever would be. More than painful—but she told herself it was the jet lag that made her ache like that. Nothing a good night’s sleep on solid ground wouldn’t cure.
Even if it was this solid ground.
The vast estate sprawled across a part of Tuscany that had been in the Alessi family in one form or another since the Middle Ages. It was dotted with old farmhouses Giancarlo had spent the past decade painstakingly renovating for a very special class of clientele: people as wealthy as his mother and as allergic to invasions of their privacy as his father had been. As Paige supposed he must be himself now, after his too-public shaming at her own hands.
Here at Castello Alessi and all across its hilly lands, thick with olive groves and vineyards, lavender bushes and timeless forests of oak trees—according to the splashy website Paige had accessed a hundred times before and once again from the plane when she’d accepted she was really, truly coming here at last—such privacy-minded people could relax, secure in the knowledge that the “cottages” they’d paid dearly either to rent or to buy outright and fashion to their liking were as private and remote as it was possible to get while still enjoying world-class service akin to that of the finest hotels, thanks to Giancarlo’s private, around-the-clock staff.
But none of that applied to Paige, she was well aware.
They’d landed on a private airstrip in a nearby valley after flying all night. It had been a bright, somehow distinctly Italian summer morning, filled with yellow flowers and too-blue skies, and a waiting driver had whisked them off to the estate some forty minutes away. It was a long, gorgeous drive, winding in and around the hills of Tuscany that looked exactly as Paige had imagined them while also being somehow so much more than she’d anticipated. Violet had been installed in the lavishly remodeled castello itself, arrayed around a welcoming stone courtyard with heart-stopping views and her own private spa with waiting staff to pamper her at once, as if she was truly the High Queen of Italy.
Paige, on the other hand, Giancarlo ushered into a Jeep and then personally drove far out into the heart of the property, until all she could see in all directions was the gently rolling countryside and one lone house at the top of the nearest hill. All of it so gorgeous and yet so familiar, as if she’d been here before and recognized it like a homecoming, and yet, she was forced to keep telling herself, none of this was hers. Not the perfect sky, the charming lane, the pretty little houses on this or that ridge. Not hers. The man beside her least of all.
“Are you deliberately stranding me out here as some kind of punishment?” she asked him, when it became clear that a smaller cottage down in the valley beneath that lone house was where he was headed. She was doing her best not to look at him, braced beside her in the smaller-by-the-moment front of his Jeep as they bumped along the lazy dirt road that meandered toward the little stone house, because she was afraid it might make all these raw emotions inside