The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West
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her how deadly he was, how skilled. How he’d been the only man she’d ever met, before or since, who had known exactly what buttons to push to turn her to jelly, and had. Again and again. He’d simply looked at her, everything else had disappeared and he’d known.
He still knew. She could see it in that heat that made his dark eyes gleam. She could feel it the way her body prickled with that same lick of fire, the way the worst of the flames tangled together deep in her belly.
She felt her breath desert her, and she thought she saw the man she remembered in his dark gaze, the man as lost in this as she always had been, but it was gone almost at once as if it had never been. As if that had been nothing but wishful thinking on her part.
“Wear something I can get my hands under,” he told her, and there was a cruel cast to his desperately sensual mouth then that should have made her want to cry—but that wasn’t the sensation that tripped through her blood, making her feel dizzy with something she’d die before she’d call excitement.
And as if he knew that too, he smiled.
Then he left her there—trying to sort out all the conflicting sensations inside of her right there in the glare of another California summer morning, trying not to fall apart when she suspected that was what he wanted her to do—without a backward glance.
* * *
“I think he must be a terribly lonely man,” Violet said.
They were sitting in one of the great legend’s favorite rooms in this vast house, the sunny, book-lined and French-doored affair she called her office, located steps from her personal garden and festooned with her many awards.
Violet lounged back on the chaise she liked to sit on while tending to her empire—“because what, pray, is the point of being an international movie star if I can’t conduct business on a chaise?” Violet had retorted when asked why by some interviewer or another during awards season some time back—with her eyes on the city that preened before her beneath the ever-blue California sky and sighed. She was no doubt perfectly aware of the way the gentle light caught the face she’d allowed age to encroach upon, if only slightly. She looked wise and gorgeous at once, her fine blond hair brushed back from her face and only hinting at her sixty-plus years, dressed in her preferred “at home” outfit of butter-soft jeans that had cost her a small fortune and a bespoke emerald-green blouse that played up the remarkable eyes only a keen observer would note were enhanced by cosmetics.
This was the star in her natural habitat.
Sitting in her usual place at the elegant French secretary on the far side of the room, her laptop open before her and all of Violet’s cell phones in a row on the glossy wood surface in case any of them should ring, Paige frowned and named the very famous director they’d just been discussing.
“You think he’s lonely?” she asked, startled.
Violet let out that trademark throaty laugh of hers that had been wowing audiences and bringing whole rooms to a standstill since she’d appeared in her first film in the seventies.
“No doubt he is,” she said after a moment, “despite the parade of ever-younger starlets who he clearly doesn’t realize make him look that much older and more decrepit, but I meant Giancarlo.”
Of course she did.
“Is he?” Paige affected a vague tone. The sort of tone any employee would use when discussing the boss’s son.
“He was a very lonely child,” Violet said, in the same sort of curious, faraway voice she used when she was puzzling out a new character. “It is my single regret. His father and I loved each other wildly and often quite badly, and there was little room for anyone else.”
Everyone knew the story, of course. The doomed love affair with its separations and heartbreaks. The tempestuous, often short-lived reunions. The fact they’d lived separately for years at a time with many rumored affairs, but had never divorced. Violet’s bent head and flowing tears at the old count’s funeral, her refusal to speak of him publicly afterward.
Possibly, Paige thought ruefully as she turned every last part of the story over in her head, she had studied that Hollywood fairy tale with a little more focus and attention than most.
“He doesn’t seem particularly lonely,” Paige said when she felt Violet’s expectant gaze on her. She sat very still in her chair, aware that while a great movie star might seem to be too narcissistic to notice anyone but herself, the truth was that Violet was an excellent judge of character. She had to be, to inhabit so many. She read people the way others read street signs. Fidgeting would tell her much, much more than Paige wanted her to know. “He seems as if he’s the sort of man who’s used to being in complete and possibly ruthless control. Of everything.”
The other woman’s smile then seemed sad. “I agree. And I can’t think of anything more lonely,” she said softly. “Can you?”
And perhaps that conversation was how Paige found herself touching up what she could only call defensive eyeliner in the mirror in the small foyer of her cozy little cottage when she heard a heavy hand at her door at precisely eight o’clock that night.
She didn’t bother to ask who it was. The cartwheels her stomach turned at the sound were identification enough.
Paige swung open the door and he was there, larger than life and infinitely more dangerous, looking aristocratic and lethal in one of the suits he favored that made him seem a far cry indeed from the more casual man she’d known before. This man looked as if he’d sooner spit nails than partake of the Californian pastime of surfing, much less lounge about like an affluent Malibu beach bum in torn jeans and no shirt. This man looked as forbidding and unreachable and haughtily blue-blooded as the Italian count he was.
Giancarlo stood on the path that led to her door and let his dark eyes sweep over her, from the high ponytail she’d fashioned to the heavy eye makeup she’d used because it was the only mask she thought he’d allow her to wear. His sensual mouth crooked slightly at that, as if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking when she’d lined her eyes so dramatically, and then moved lower. To the dress that hugged her breasts tight, with only delicate straps above, then cascaded all the way to the floor in a loose, flowing style that suggested the kind of casual elegance she’d imagined he’d require no matter where he planned to take her.
“Very good, cara,” he said, and that wasn’t quite approval she heard in his voice. It was much closer to satisfaction, and that distinction made her pulse short-circuit, then start to drum wildly. Erratically. “It appears you are capable of following simple instructions, when it suits you.”
“Everyone can follow instructions when it suits them,” she retorted despite the fact she’d spent hours cautioning herself not to engage with him, not to give him any further ammunition. Especially not when he called her that name—cara—he’d once told her he reserved for the many indistinguishable women who flung themselves at him. Better that than “Nicola,” she thought fiercely. “It’s called survival.”
“I can think of other things to call it,” he murmured in that dark, silken way of his that hurt more for its insinuations than any directness would have. “But why start the night off with name-calling?” That crook of his mouth became harder, deadlier. “You’ll need your strength, I suspect. Best to conserve it while you can.”
He’s only messing with you, she cautioned herself as she stepped through the door and delivered herself into his clutches, the way she’d promised him she would. He wants to see if you’ll really go through with this.
So did she, she could admit, as she made a show of locking the front door, mostly to hide her nerves from that coolly assessing dark gaze of his. But it was done too fast, and then Giancarlo was urging her into a walk with that hand of his at the small of her back, and their history seemed particularly alive then in the velvety night that was still edged with deep blues as the summer evening took hold around them.
Everything