At the Count's Bidding

It was just as he remembered it.

All that fire, arcing in him and in her, too, from the shocked sound she made. All that misery. Shame and fury and ten years of that terrible longing. He’d never quite got past it, and this was why. This thrumming, pounding excitement that had only ever happened here, with her. This unmatched hunger. This beautiful lie that would not wreck him this time. Not this time.

He needed to work it all out on that delectable body she’d wielded like a weapon, enslaving him and destroying him before she’d finally got around to killing him, too. He needed to make her pay the price for her betrayal in the most intimate way possible. He needed to work out his goddamned issues in the very place they’d started, and then, only then, would he finally be free of her. It had only been two months back then. It would have burned out on its own—he was sure of it, but they hadn’t had time. He wanted time to glut himself, because only then would he get past this.

Giancarlo had to believe that.

“I know exactly who you are,” he told her then, and he didn’t pretend he wasn’t enjoying this. That now that the shock had passed, he wasn’t thrilled she’d proved herself as deceitful as he remembered. That he wasn’t looking forward to this in a way he hoped scared her straight down into her bones—because it should. “It’s long past time you paid for what you did to me, and believe me when I tell you I have a very, very detailed memory.”

“You’ll regret it.” Her voice was like gauze and had as much effect.

“I’ve already regretted you for a decade, cara,” he growled. “What does it matter to me if I add a little more?”

He leaned in closer, felt her quiver against him and thrilled to it. To her, because he knew her true face this time. He knew her. There would be no losing himself. There would be no fanciful dreaming of marriage and happy-ever-afters in the Tuscan countryside, deep in all the sweet golden fields that were his heritage. There would only be penance. Hers. Hard, hot, bone-melting penance, until he was satisfied.

Which he anticipated might take some time.

“This doesn’t make sense.” Did she sound desperate or did he want her to? Giancarlo didn’t care. “You hate me!”

“This isn’t hate,” he said, and his smile deepened. Darkened. “Let’s be clear, shall we? This is revenge.”

* * *

Paige thought he would leap on her the moment she agreed.

And of course she agreed, how could she do anything but agree when Violet Sutherlin had become the mother her own had been far too addicted and selfish and hateful to pretend to be? How could she walk away from that when Violet was therefore the only family she had left?

But Giancarlo had only smiled that hard, deeply disconcerting smile of his that had skittered over her skin like electricity.

Then he’d dropped his hand, stepped away from her and left her alone.

For days. Three days, in fact. Three long days and much longer nights.

Paige had to carry on as if everything was perfectly normal, doing her usual work for Violet and pretending to be as thrilled as the older woman was about the return of her prodigal son. She’d had to maintain her poise and professionalism, insofar as there was any professionalism in this particular sort of job that was as much about handling Violet’s personal whims as anything else. She’d had to try not to give herself away every time she was in the same room with Giancarlo, when all she wanted to do was scream at him to end this tension—a tension he did not appear to feel, as he lounged about, swam laps in the pool and laughed with his mother.

And every night she locked herself into the little cottage down near the edge of the canyon that was her home on Violet’s property and tortured herself until dawn.

It was as if her brain had recorded every single moment of every single encounter she’d ever had with Giancarlo and could play it all back in excruciating detail. Every touch. Every kiss. That slick, hard thrust of his possession. The sexy noise he’d made against her neck each time he’d come. The sobs echoing back from this or that wall that she knew were hers, while she writhed in mindless pleasure, his in every possible way.

By the morning of the fourth day she was a mess.

“Sleep well?” he asked in that taunting way of his, his dark brows rising high when he met her on the back steps on her way into the big house to start her day. Violet took her breakfast and the trades on a tray in her room each morning and she expected to see Paige there, too, before she was finished.

Giancarlo stood on the wide steps that led up to the terrace, not precisely blocking her way, but Paige didn’t rate her chances for slipping past him, either. Had she not been lost in her own scorching world of regret and too many vivid memories as she’d walked up the hill from her cottage, she’d have seen him here, lying in wait. She’d have avoided him.

Would you? that sly voice inside her asked.

A smart woman would have left Los Angeles ten years ago, never to return to the scene of so much pain and betrayal and heartache. A smart woman certainly wouldn’t have got herself tangled up with her ex-lover’s mother, and even if she had, she would have rejected Giancarlo’s devil’s bargain outright. So Paige supposed that ship had sailed a long time ago.

“I slept like a baby,” she replied, because her memories were her business.

“I take it you mean that in the literal sense,” he said drily. “Up every two hours wailing down the walls and making life a misery, then?”

Paige gritted her teeth. He, of course, glowed with health and that irritating masculine vigor of his. He wore an athletic T-shirt in a technical fabric and a pair of running shorts, and was clearly headed out to get himself into even better shape on the surrounding trails that scored the mountains, if that were even possible. No wonder he maintained that lean, rangy body of his that appeared to scoff at the very notion of fat. She wished she could hate him. She wished that pounding thing in her chest, and much lower, was hate.

“I’ve never slept better in my life,” she said staunchly.

Her mistake was that she’d drifted too close to him as she said it, as if he was a magnet and she was powerless to resist the pull. She remembered that, too. It had been like a tractor beam, that terrible compulsion. As if they were drawn together no matter what. Across the cavernous warehouse where she’d met him on that shoot. Across rooms, beds, showers. Wherever, whenever.

Ten years ago she’d thought that meant they were made for each other. She knew better now. Yet she still felt that draw.

Paige only flinched a little bit when he reached over and ran one of his elegant fingers in a soft crescent shape beneath her eye. It was such a gentle touch it made her head spin, especially when it was at such odds with that harsh look on his face, that ever-present gleam of furious gold in his gaze.

It took her one shaky breath, then another, to realize he’d traced the dark circle beneath her eye. That it wasn’t a caress at all.

It was an accusation.

“Liar,” he murmured, as if he was reciting an old poem, and there was no reason it should feel like a sharp blade stuck hard beneath her ribs. “But I expect nothing else from you.”

Bite your tongue, she ordered herself when she started to reply. Because she might have got herself into this mess, twice, but that didn’t mean she had to make it worse. She poured her feelings into the way she looked at him, and one corner of that hard, uncompromising mouth of his kicked up. Resignation, she thought. If they’d been different people she might have called it a kind of rueful admiration.

But this was Giancarlo, who despised her.

“Be ready at eight,” he told her gruffly.

“That could cover a multitude of sins.” So much for her vow of silence. Paige smiled thinly when his brows edged higher. “Be ready for what?”

Giancarlo moved slightly then on the wide marble step, making her acutely aware of him. Of the width of his muscled shoulders, the long sweep of his chiseled torso. Of his strength, his heat. Reminding 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.