at him, and it was as dangerous as it had been earlier. It made him want things he knew he couldn’t have. He couldn’t have them, and more to the point, she couldn’t give them. Hadn’t he learned anything? “You realize, Giancarlo, that people might get the wrong idea. They might begin to think you’re a playboy whore.”
“They won’t.”
“Because you tell them so?” She shook her head, her expression serious though her mysterious eyes laughed at him. “I think that tactic only works with me. And not very well.”
“Because,” he said, his hands moving to her bottom again, then higher along the tempting indentation in her lovely back to tug her down to him, “a man is only a playboy whore when he appears to be having too much of a certain kind of uncontrolled fun in public. I can do all the same things in private and it doesn’t count. Didn’t you know?”
Her attention dropped to his mouth and he wanted it there. He was already hardening within her again and she shifted restlessly against him as if she encouraged it, making the fire inside him leap to new life that easily.
“It all counts,” she breathed. “Or none of it does.”
“Then I suppose that makes us all whores, doesn’t it?” he asked. He indulged himself and sank his hands deep into her hair, holding her head fast, as he tested the depth of her again and found her hotter around him. Wetter. Better, somehow, than before. That quickly, he was like steel. “But let’s be clear. How many lovers have you taken in the last ten years?”
“Less than your thousand,” she said, her voice a thin little thing, as her hips met his greedily. Deliciously. He grunted, and then pulled out to flip them around, coming down over her again and drawing her legs around his waist. He teased her heat with the tip of his hardness, and he didn’t know what it was that drove him then, but he didn’t let her pull him into her.
“How many?” he asked. He had no idea why he cared. He didn’t care. He’d imagined it a thousand times and it scraped at him and it changed nothing either way. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Tell me.”
Her eyes moved to his, then away, and they looked blue in the shadows. “What does it matter? Whatever number I pick, you’ll think the worst of me.”
“I already think the worst of you,” he said, the way he might have crooned love words a lifetime ago, and he couldn’t have said what he wanted here. To hurt her? Or himself? To make this all worse? Or was this simply his way of reminding them both who they were? “Why don’t you try the truth?”
“None,” she said, and there was an odd expression on her face as she said it. He might have called it vulnerable, were she someone else. “I told you there were no new tricks.”
It took another beat for him to process that, and then something roared in him, a primal force that was like some kind of howl, and he thought he shook though he knew he held himself perfectly still.
“Is that a joke?” But he was whispering. He barely knew his own voice.
Her wide mouth twisted and her gaze was dark with something he didn’t want to understand. Something that couldn’t possibly be real.
“Yes,” she said, her voice broken and fierce at once. “Ha ha, what a joke. I meant ten. Twenty. How many lovers do you imagine I’ve taken, Giancarlo? What number proves I’m who you think I am?”
He heard her voice break slightly as she asked the question, and a kind of ripple went through her lush body. He felt it. This time when she urged him into her, he went, slick and hard and even better than before, making him mutter a curse and press his forehead to hers. And he didn’t have the slightest idea if this was his form of an apology, or hers.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” he lied, and he didn’t want to talk about this any longer. He didn’t want to revisit all those images he’d tortured himself with over the years. Because his sad little secret was that he’d never imagined her in prison, the way he’d told her he had. He’d imagined her wrapped around some other man exactly like this and he’d periodically searched the internet to see if he could find any evidence that she was out there somewhere, doing it with all that same joy and grace that had undone him.
And it had killed him, every time. It still killed him.
So he took it out on her instead, in the best way possible. He set a hard pace, throwing them headfirst into that raging thing that consumed them both, and he laughed against the side of her neck when she couldn’t do anything but moan out her surrender.
He held on, building that perfect wildness all over again, making her thrash and keen, and when he thought he couldn’t take it any longer he reached between them and pressed hard against the center of her need, making her shatter all around him.
And he rode her until he could throw himself into that shattering, too. Until he could forget the truth he’d heard in her voice when she’d told him there hadn’t been anyone since him, because he couldn’t handle that—or what he’d seen on her face that he refused to believe. He refused.
He rode her until he could forget everything but this. Everything but her. Everything they built between them in this marvelous fire.
Until he lost himself all over again.
* * *
“Violet is asking for you,” Giancarlo said.
Paige had heard him coming from a long way off. First the Jeep, the engine announcing itself high on the hill and only getting louder as it wound its way down toward her cottage. Then the slam of the driver’s door. The thud of the cottage’s front door, and then, some minutes later, the slide of the glass doors that led out to where she sat, curled up beneath a graceful old oak tree with her book in her lap.
“That sounds like an accusation,” she said mildly, putting her book aside. He stood on the terrace with his hands on his lean hips, frowning at her. “Of course she’s asking for me. I’m her assistant. She might be on vacation here, but I’m not.”
“She needs to learn how to relax and handle her own affairs,” he replied, somewhat darkly. Paige climbed to her feet, brushing at the skirt she wore, and started toward him. It was impossible not feel that hunger at the sight of him, deep inside her, making her too warm, too soft.
“Possibly,” she said, trying to concentrate on something, anything but the sensual spell he seemed to weave simply by existing. “But I’m not her therapist, I’m her personal assistant. When she learns how to relax and handle her own affairs, I’m out of a job.”
Her heart set up its usual clatter at his proximity, worse the closer she got to him, and she didn’t understand how that could still happen. They’d been here almost a week. It should have settled down by now. She should have started to grow immune to him, surely. After all, she already knew how this would end. Badly. Unlike the last time, when she’d been so blissfully certain it would be the one thing in her life that ended well, this time she knew better. Their history was like a crystal ball, allowing her to see the future clearly.
Maybe too clearly. Not that it seemed to matter.
She stopped when she was near him but not too near him, and felt that warm thing in the vicinity of her heart when he scowled. He reached over and tugged her closer, so he could land a hard kiss on her mouth. Like a mark of possession, she thought, more than
