The Revenge Collection 2018. Кейт Хьюит
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from the start. It had been the only way to survive the chaos that had been her mother. There had only been one two-month stretch of laughter in her life, gleaming and overflowing and dizzy with joy, and she’d ruined it ten years ago.
“My goodness,” Violet said in her grand way when she picked up her private line, after Paige apologized for disappearing and then sleeping for hours, “this is Italia, Paige. One must soak in la dolce vita, especially when jet-lagged. I plan to spend the night in my lovely little castle, getting fat on all the marvelous local cuisine! I suggest you do the same.”
And Paige would have loved to do the same, she thought when she finally stepped out of her cottage into the cool evening, the Tuscan sky turning to gold above her. But she had a date with her sins instead.
Sins that felt like wishes granted, and what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to tell the difference between the two?
She took her time and yet the walk was still too short. Much too short.
And Giancarlo waited there at the crest of the hill, his eyes as hard as his body appeared loose and relaxed, in linen trousers and the sort of camel-colored sport coat that made her think of his aristocratic roots and her lack of them. And Paige was suddenly as wide-awake as if she’d drowned herself in a vat of espresso.
He looked like something more than a man as he waited there, at first a shadow next to the bold upright thrust of a thick cypress tree, then, as she drew closer, very distinctly himself. He’d clearly watched her come all the way up the side of his hill, and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen him from afar without realizing it or if it was that odd magnetic pull inside of her that had done it, pointing her toward him as unerringly as if she’d been headed straight to him all along.
Home, that thing in her whispered, and she didn’t have the strength to pretend she didn’t feel it when she did. Not tonight.
She stopped when she was still some distance away and looked back the way she’d come, unable to keep the small sigh of pleasure from escaping her lips. There was the hint of mist in the valley the lower the sun inched toward the hills, adding an elegant sort of haunting to the shadows that danced between them, and far off in the distance the castello stood tall and proud, lights blazing against the coming night. It was so quiet and perfect and deeply satisfying in a way Paige hadn’t known anything could be. Gooseflesh prickled up and down her arms and she felt it all like a heavy sob in her chest, rolling through her, threatening her very foundations.
Or maybe that was him. Maybe it had always been him.
“It’s gorgeous here,” she said, which felt deeply inadequate. “It doesn’t seem real.”
“My father believed that the land is our bones,” Giancarlo said. “Protect it, and we strengthen ourselves. Conserve it and care for it, and we become greater in its glory. Sometimes I think he was a madman, a farmer hiding in an aristocrat’s body.” His gaze moved over her face, then beyond her, toward the setting sun. “And then another sunset reminds me that he was right. Beauty is always worth it. It feeds the soul.”
“He sounds like some kind of poet.”
“Not my father. Poets and artists were to be championed, as one must always support art and culture for the same reason one tends the land, but Alessis had a higher calling.” He shook his head. “Endless debt and responsibility, apparently. I might have been better off as an artist, come to that.”
“If I had a home like this, I don’t think I’d mind doing whatever it took to keep it,” Paige said then. She remembered herself. “I don’t think anyone would.”
She thought Giancarlo smiled, though his face was obscured in the falling dark and then she knew she must have imagined it, because this wasn’t that kind of evening no matter how lovely it was. He wasn’t that kind of man. Not anymore. Not for her.
“Come,” he said. He reached out his hand and held it there in the last gasp of golden light, and Paige knew, somehow, that everything would be divided into before and after she took it. The world. Her life. This thing that was still between them. And that precarious, wildly beating creature inside her chest that was the battered ruins of her heart.
His mouth crooked slightly as the moment stretched out. She made no move; she was frozen into place and wasn’t sure she could do anything about it, but he didn’t drop his hand.
“Did you make me dinner?” she asked, her voice shockingly light when there was nothing but heaviness and their history and her treacherous heart inside of her, and she thought neither one of them was fooled. “Because food poisoning really would be a punishment, all joking aside.”
“I am Italian,” he said, with a note of amused outrage in his voice, which reminded her too strongly of all that laughter they’d shared a lifetime ago. As if the only things that had mattered in the whole world had been there in his smile. She’d thought so then. She thought maybe she still did, for all the good that would do her here. “Of course I can cook.” He paused, as if noticing how friendly he sounded and remembering how inappropriate that was tonight. As if he, too, was finding it hard to recall the battle lines he’d drawn. “But even if I couldn’t, the estate has a fleet of chefs on call. Meals are always gourmet here, no matter who prepares them.”
“Careful,” she said softly, more to her memories and her silly heart than the man who stood there before her, still reaching out to her, still her greatest temptation made flesh. Still the perfect embodiment of all the things she’d always wanted and couldn’t have. “I might forget to be suitably intimidated and start enjoying myself. And then what would happen?”
He definitely smiled that time, and Paige felt it like a deep, golden fire, lighting her up from the inside out. Making her shiver.
“Surrender takes many forms,” he replied into the indigo twilight that cloaked them both, now that the sun had finally sunk beneath the furthest hill. “I want yours every way I can get it.”
“I can surrender to la dolce vita,” she said, as airily as possible, as if her tone of voice might make it so. “I understand that’s the point of Italy.”
He still stood there, his hand out, as if he could stand like that forever. “That’s as good a place to start as any.”
And there was no real decision, in the end. There had been so many choices along the way, hadn’t there? Paige could have got a different job three years ago. She could have left Violet’s house and employ the moment Giancarlo had appeared, or anytime since. She could have declined the offer of that “date” that night, she could have stayed standing up instead of sinking to her knees by the side of that road, she could have shown him nothing in Violet’s closet that day but her back as she walked away from him. She could have refused to board his plane, refused to leave her cottage tonight, locked herself inside rather than climb this hill to stand before him like this.
He hadn’t happened to her, like the weather. She’d chosen this, every step of the way, and even here, even stranded in the countryside with this man who thought so ill of her, she felt more at home than she had in years. Maybe ever. She supposed that meant she’d made her decision a long time ago.
So Paige reached out her hand and slid it into his. She let the heat of him wash through her at that faintly rough touch, his palm warm and strong and perfect, and told herself it didn’t matter what happened next.
That she’d surrendered herself to Giancarlo a long time ago, whether he understood that or not.
“IF THIS IS your revenge,” Paige said, a current of laughter in her voice though her expression was mild, “I think I should confess to you that it tastes a whole lot like red wine.”
He should do something about that, Giancarlo thought, watching her move through the refurbished ground floor of his renovated house. She was still so graceful,