he thinks you are already, a voice inside her answered.
And he wasn’t finished. “But first, I want you on your knees. Right here. Right now. Don’t make me tell you again.”
* * *
He didn’t think she’d do it.
They stood together in the dark, close enough that any observer would think them lovers a scant inch away from a touch, and Giancarlo realized in a sudden flash that he didn’t want her to do it—that there was a part of him that wanted her to refuse. To walk away from this thing before it consumed them both whole and then wrecked them all over again.
To stop him, because he didn’t think he could—or would—stop himself.
Seeing her had taken the brakes off whatever passed for his self-control and he was careening down the side of a too-steep mountain now, heedless and reckless, and he didn’t care what he destroyed on the way down. He didn’t care about anything but exploring the phrase a pound of flesh in every possible way he could.
She didn’t blink. He didn’t think either one of them breathed. He saw her clench her hands into fists, saw her stiffen her spine. He wanted to stop her from running. From not running. From whatever was about to happen next in this too-close, too-dark night, where the only thing that moved was that long dress of hers, rippling slightly against the faint breeze from the far-off sea.
Then she moved, in a simple slide of pure grace that was worse, somehow, than all the rest. It reminded him of so many things. The supple strength and flexibility of her body, her lean curves, and all the ways he’d worshipped her back before he’d known who she really was. With his hands. His mouth. His whole body. She was his memory in lovely action, a stark and pretty slap across his face, and when she was finished she was settled there on her knees before him.
Just as he’d asked. Demanded.
Giancarlo stared down at her, willing back all of his self-righteous fury and the armor it provided, but it was hard to remember much of anything when she was staring up at him, her eyes wide and mysterious and her lips slightly parted, making the carnal way she’d taken his thumb inside her mouth seem to explode through him all over again.
Making him realize he was kidding himself if he thought he was in control of this.
As long as she didn’t realize that, Giancarlo thought, he’d manage. So he waited, watching her as he did. The night seemed much darker than it was, heavy on all sides and far fewer stars above than in the skies over his home in Tuscany, and he felt the ragged breath she took. That same old destructive need for her poured through him, rocketing through his veins and into his sex, making him clench his jaw too tight to keep from acting on it.
He felt like granite—everywhere—when she tilted herself forward and propped herself against his thighs, her palms like fire, her mouth much too close to the part of him that burned the hottest for her.
“Your mother thinks you’re lonely,” she said.
It took him a moment to understand the words she spoke in that husky tone of voice, and when he did, something he didn’t care to identify coursed through him. He told himself it was yet more anger. He had an endless well where this woman was concerned, surely.
Giancarlo reached down and took her jaw in his hand, tugging her face up so he could look down into it, and it was the hardest thing he’d done in a long, long time to keep himself in check. In control. To crush the roaring thing that wanted only to take her, possess her and force himself to think, instead.
“That’s not going to work,” he told her softly. He was so hard it very nearly hurt, but he stood there as if he could do this all night, and he felt the faintest shiver move through her, making it all worthwhile.
“What do you mean? That’s what she said.”
“It doesn’t matter if she hauled out her photo albums and wept over pictures of me as a fat, drooling infant,” he said mildly, though his hand was hard against her jaw and he could feel how much she wanted to yank herself back, away from him. He could feel the flat press of her hands on his thighs, and the heat there that neither one of them had ever been any good at harnessing. “You’re not bringing it up now, on your knees in the dirt because I ordered it, because you have a sudden interest in my emotional well-being.”
“I could be interested in nothing but your emotional well-being and you’d tell me I was only running a con,” Nicola—Paige said, with more bravado than he might have displayed were he the one kneeling there in the dark. “I don’t know why I bother to speak.”
“In this case,” he said silkily, moving his hand along the sweet line of her jaw, her cheek, cradling her head with a softness completely belied by the lash in his words, “it is because you hope to shame me into stopping this. Why else bring up my mother when you’re about to take me into your mouth at last?”
Her mouth fell open slightly more, as if in stunned astonishment, and he laughed, though it wasn’t a very nice sound.
“Fine,” she said, though her voice sounded like a stranger’s. “Whatever you want.”
“That is the point I am trying to make to you, Paige,” he bit out then, holding her immobile, so she had no choice but to gaze back at him, and he was a terrible man indeed, to revel in the temper he saw in her changeable eyes. “‘Whatever I want’ isn’t an empty phrase. It could mean pleasuring me by the side of the road without any consultation whatsoever about your feelings on the subject. It is what I want. Are you beginning to understand me? How many object lessons do you think you will require before this sinks in?”
She said something in reply but the night stole her words away, and she cleared her throat. She was trembling fully then, and he might have felt like the monster all that accusation in her gaze named him, but he could see the rest of it, too. The stain of color on her cheeks. That glassy heat in her eyes. And beneath the hand he still held to her face and against her neck, the wild drumming of her pulse, pounding out her arousal in an unmistakable beat.
He knew that rhythm better than he knew himself. He thought it might have been the only honest thing about her, then and now.
“How long?” she whispered.
“Until what?”
“Until this is done.” She moistened her lips and he felt it like her wicked mouth, wet and soft and deep, and nearly groaned where he stood.
“Until I’m bored.”
“A few hours, then,” she said, with a remnant of her usual fire, and he smiled.
“I don’t imagine you’ll be that lucky.” He traced a pattern from that stubborn chin of hers to the delicate shell of her ear, then back. “I’ve had a long time to think about all the ways I’d like to make you crawl. Then pay. Then crawl some more. There’s no telling how long it could take.”
“And yet when you had the chance, you talked to me for three seconds and then disappeared for a decade,” she pointed out.
He felt that same wash of betrayal, that same kick in the gut he’d felt that long-ago day when he’d realized she’d used him the way his own mother always had—and it had been far more shattering, because Violet had only sold him out when he was clothed.
“I
