dangerous.
It was much too tempting to simply forget himself, to pick up where he’d left off with her. With the woman who was no longer Nicola. As if she hadn’t engineered his ruin, deliberately, ten years ago. As if she hadn’t then tricked her way to her place at his mother’s side with a new name and God only knew what agenda.
As if, were he to bury himself in her body the way he wanted to do more than was wise and more than he cared to admit to himself, she might transform into the woman she’d already proved she wasn’t in the most spectacular way imaginable.
He was already slipping back into those old habits he’d thought he’d eradicated. The work he’d left in Italy was piling up high, and yet here he was, running off steam in the Bel Air hills the way he’d done when he was a sixteen-year-old. She was the first thing he thought of when he woke. She was what he dreamed about. She was taking over his life as surely as she ever had, very much as if this was her revenge, not his.
He was an addict. There was no other explanation for the state he was in, hard and ready and yearning, and he didn’t want that. He wanted her humbled, brought low, destroyed. He wanted her to feel how he’d felt when he’d woken that terrible morning to find his naked body splashed everywhere for the entire world to pick over, parse, comment upon, like every other time his private life been exploited for Violet’s gain—but much worse, because he hadn’t seen the betrayal coming. He hadn’t thought to brace himself for impact.
He wanted this to hurt.
Giancarlo straightened and shoved his hair back from his forehead, the past seeming to press against him too tightly. He remembered it all too well. Not just the affair with Nicola—Paige, he reminded himself darkly—in all its blistering, sensual perfection, as if their bodies had been created purely to drive each other wild. But the parts of that affair he’d preferred to pretend he didn’t remember, all these years later. Like the way he’d always found himself smiling when they’d spoken on the phone, wide and hopeful and giddy, as if she was sunshine in a bottle and only his. Or the way his heart had always thudded hard when she’d entered a room, in the moment before she’d seen him and had treated him to that dazzling smile of hers that had blotted out the rest of the world. The way she’d held his hand as if that connection alone would save them both from darkness, or dragons, or something far worse.
Oh yes, he remembered.
And he remembered the aftermath, too. After the pictures ran in all those papers. After those final, horrible moments with this woman he had loved so deeply and known not at all. After he’d done the best he could to clear his head and then made his way back to Italy. To face, at last, his elderly father.
His father, who had felt denim was for commoners and had thought the only thing more tawdry than Europe’s aristocracy was the British royals, with their divorces and dirty laundry and jeans. His father, Count Alessi, who could have taught propriety and manners to whole nunneries and probably had, in his day. His father, who had been as gentle and nobly well-meaning as he was blue-blooded. Truly the last of his kind.
“It is not your fault,” he’d told Giancarlo that first night in the wake of the scandal. He’d hugged his errant son and greeted him warmly, his body so frail it had moved in Giancarlo like a winter wind, a herald of the coming season he hadn’t wanted to face. Not then. Not yet. “When I married your mother I knew precisely who she was, Giancarlo. It was foolish to imagine she and I could raise a son untainted by that world. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”
Perhaps his father’s disappointment in him had cut all the deeper because it had been so matter-of-fact. Untouched by any hint of anger or vanity or sadness. There was nothing to fight against, and Giancarlo had understood that there had been no one to blame but himself for his poor judgment. His father might have been antiquated, a relic of another time, but he’d instilled his values in his only son and heir.
Strive to do good no matter what, he’d told Giancarlo again and again. Never make a spectacle of oneself. And avoid the base and the dishonorable, lest one become the same by association.
Giancarlo had failed on all counts. It was why he knew that the vows he’d made when he was younger were solid. Right. No marriage, because how could he ever be certain that someone wanted him? And no heirs of his own, because he’d never, ever, subject a child to the things he’d survived. He might not be able to save himself from his own father’s disappointment, he might find his life trotted out into public every time his mother starred in something new and needed to remind the world of her once upon an Italian count fairy-tale marriage, but it would end with him.
Damn Nicola—Paige—for making him think otherwise, even if it had only been for two mostly naked months a lifetime ago.
It was that, he thought as he broke into a run again, his pace harder and faster than before as he hurtled down the hill, that he found the most difficult to get past. He hated that she had betrayed him, yes. But far worse was this thing in him, dark and brooding, that yearned only for her surrender no matter how painful, and that he very much feared made him no different than she was.
He thought he hated that most of all.
AFTER A LONG SHOWER and the application of his own hand to the part of him that least listened to reason, Giancarlo prowled through the house, his fury at a dull simmer. An improvement, he was aware.
La Bellissima was the same as it ever was, as it had been throughout his life, he thought as he moved quietly through its hushed halls, gleaming with Violet’s wealth and consequence in all its details. The glorious art she’d collected from all over the planet. The specially sourced artisan touches here and there that gave little hints of the true Violet Sutherlin, who had been born under another name and raised in bohemian Berkeley, California. Old Hollywood glamor mixed with contemporary charm, the house managed to feel light and airy rather than overfed, somehow, on its own affluence.
Much like Violet herself, all these years after her pouty, sex kitten beginnings in the mid-seventies. He should know, having been trotted out at key moments during her transition from kitten to lion of the industry, as a kind of proof, perhaps, that Violet could do more than wear a bikini.
There was the time she’d released a selection of cards he’d written her as a small child, filled with declarations of love that the other kids at school had teased him about all the way up until his high school graduation. There was the time she’d spent five minutes of her appearance in a famous actor’s studio interview telling a long, involved anecdote about catching him and his first girlfriend in bed that had humiliated fourteen-year-old Giancarlo and made his then-girlfriend’s parents remove her to a far-off boarding school. He knew every inch of this house and none of it had ever been his; none of it had ever been safe. He was as much a prop as any of the other things Violet surrounded herself with—only unlike the vases, he loved her despite knowing how easily and unrepentantly she’d use him.
He followed the bright hall toward Violet’s quarters, knowing how much she liked to spend her days in the office there with its views of the city she’d conquered. He had memories of catapulting himself down this same hallway as a child, careening off the walls and coming to a skidding halt in that room, only to climb up on the chaise and lie at his mother’s feet as she’d run her lines and practiced her voices, her various accents, the postures that made her body into someone else’s. He’d found her fascinating, back then. He supposed he still did, and Giancarlo couldn’t remember, then, at what age he’d realized
