The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West
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himself into the driver’s seat she could still feel his hand on that spot on her back, the heat of it pulsing into her skin like a brand, making the finest of tremors snake over her skin.
Paige didn’t know what she expected as he got in and started to drive, guiding them out of Violet’s high gates and higher into the hills. A restaurant so he could humiliate her in public? One of the dive motels that rented by the hour in the sketchier neighborhoods so he could treat her like the whore he believed she was? But it certainly wasn’t the sharp turn he eventually took off the winding road that traced the top of the Santa Monica Mountains bisecting Los Angeles, bringing the powerful car to a stop in a shower of dirt right at the edge of a cliff. There was an old wooden railing, she noted in a sudden panic. But still.
“Get out,” he said.
“I, uh, really don’t want to,” she said, and she heard the sheer terror in her own voice. He must have heard it too, because while his grim expression didn’t alter, she thought she saw amusement in the dark eyes he fixed on her.
“I’m not going to throw you off the side of the mountain, however appealing the notion,” he told her. “That would kill you almost instantly.”
“It’s the ‘almost’ part I’m worried about,” she pointed out, sounding as nervous as she felt suddenly. “It encompasses a lot of screaming and sharp rocks.”
“I want you to suffer, Paige,” he said softly, still with that emphasis on her name, as if it was another lie. “Remember that.”
It told her all manner of things about herself she’d have preferred not knowing that she found that some kind of comfort. She could have walked away, ten years ago or three days ago, and she hadn’t. He’d been the one to leave. He’d hurled his accusations at her, she’d told him she loved him and he’d walked away—from her and from his entire life here. This was the bed she’d made, wasn’t it?
So she climbed from the car when he did, and then followed him over to that rail, wary and worried. Giancarlo didn’t look at her. He stared out at the ferocious sparkle, the chaos of light that was this city. It was dark where they stood, no streetlamps to relieve the night sky and almost supernaturally quiet so high in the hills, but she could see the intent look on his face in the reflected sheen of the mad city below, and it made her shake down deep inside.
“Come here.”
She didn’t want to do that either, but she’d promised to obey him, so Paige trusted that this was about shaming her, not hurting her—at least not physically—and drifted closer. She shuddered when he looped an arm around her neck and pulled her hard against the rock-hard wall of his chest. The world seemed to spin and lights flashed, but that was only the beaming headlights of a passing car.
Giancarlo stroked his fingers down the side of her face, then traced the seam of her lips.
Everything was hot. Too hot. He was still as hard and male as she remembered, and his torso was like a brand beside her, the arm over her shoulders deliciously heavy, and she felt that same old fire explode inside of her again, as if this was new. As if this was the first time he’d touched her.
He didn’t order her to open her mouth but she did anyway at the insistent movement, and then he thrust his thumb inside. It was hotter than it should have been, sexy and strange at once, and his dark eyes glittered as they met hers with all of Los Angeles at their feet.
“Remind me how exactly it was I lost my head over you,” he told her, all that fury and vengeance in his voice, challenging her to defy him. “Use your tongue.”
Paige didn’t know what demon it was that rose in her then, some painful mixture of long lost hopes and current regrets, not to mention that anger she tried to hide because it was unlikely to help her here, but she did as she was told. She grabbed his invading hand with both of hers and she worshipped his thumb as if it were another part of his anatomy entirely, and she didn’t break away from him while she did it.
She didn’t know how long it went on.
His eyes were darker than the night around them, and the same hectic gold lit them, even as it burned within her. She felt molten and wild, reckless and lost, and none of that mattered, because she could taste him. He might hate her, he might want nothing more than to hurt her, but Paige had never thought she’d taste him again. She’d never dreamed this could happen.
She told herself it didn’t matter, those things she felt deep inside her that she didn’t want to acknowledge. Only that this was a gift. It didn’t matter what else it was.
He pulled his thumb out then and shifted her so they were facing each other, and the space between them seemed dense. Electric.
“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your touch,” he said, and though his tone was cruel his voice was rougher than it had been, and she told herself that meant something. It meant the same thing her breathlessness did, or that manic tightening deep in her belly, that restlessness she’d only ever felt with him and knew only he could cure.
He smiled, and it was so beautiful it made her throat feel tight, and she should have known better. Because he wasn’t finished.
“Get on your knees, Paige,” he ordered her. “And do it right.”
FOR A MOMENT Paige thought she really had pitched over the side of the hill, and this taut, terrible noise in her head was her own scream. But she blinked and she was still standing there before Giancarlo, he was still waiting and she didn’t want him to repeat himself.
She could see from that faintly mocking lift to his dark brows and that twist to his lips that he knew full well she’d heard him.
“Not here, surely,” she said, and her voice sounded thin and faraway.
“Where I want. How I want. Was I unclear?”
“But I—” She cleared her throat. “I mean, I don’t—”
“You appear to be confused.” His hands were still on her, and that didn’t help. The offhanded sweep of his thumbs against the tender skin of her bare shoulders made her want to scream, but she didn’t think she’d stop if she started. “I this, I that. This isn’t about you. This is about me.”
“Giancarlo.”
“I told you what to do,” he said coolly. “And what will happen if you don’t.”
She jerked back out of his grip, furious in a sudden jolt, and not only because she knew he could have held her there if he liked. But because he hated her and she hated that he did. Because he was back in her life but not really, not in the way she’d refused to admit to herself she’d wanted him to be.
God, in those first months, those first years, she’d expected him to appear, hadn’t she? She’d expected him to seek her out once his initial anger passed, once the last of the scandal had died down. To continue that conversation they’d had outside her apartment the morning the pictures had run, so swift and terrible. Because they might have been together only a short time, but he’d known her better than anyone else ever had. Or ever would. Maybe not the details of her life, because she’d never wanted anyone to know those, but the truth of her heart. She’d been so sure that somehow, he’d understand that there had to have been extenuating circumstances....
But he’d never come.
So perhaps it was a very old grief that added to the fury and made her forget herself completely.
“Is this really what you want?” she demanded, forgetting to hold her tongue, the taste of his skin still a rich sort of wine in her mouth, making her feel something like drunk. “Is this what a decade did to you, Giancarlo?”
“This is what you did to me.” He didn’t use that name then, but she was sure they could both hear it, Nicola hanging in the air