well-nigh automatically for years.
But her heart wasn’t with her in the colorful city. It was back in the hills with the man she’d left there, with that look on his face and too much dark grief in his gaze.
And the longer Violet lingered—going in and out of every shop, pausing for cell phone photos every time she was recognized, settling in for a long dinner in a restaurant where the chef came racing out to serenade her and she was complimented theatrically for her few Italian phrases, all while Paige looked on and/or assisted—the more Paige wondered if the other woman was doing it deliberately. As if she knew what was going on between her son and her assistant.
But that was impossible, Paige kept telling herself.
This is called guilt, that caustic voice inside her snapped as Violet flirted outrageously with the chef. This is why you’re here. Why you work for his mother. Why you accept how he treats you. You deserve it. You earned it.
More than that, she missed him. One afternoon knowing Giancarlo wasn’t within reach, that there was no chance he’d simply appear and tumble her down onto the nearest flat surface, the way he’d done only yesterday with no advance warning, and she was a mess. If this was a preview of what her life was going to be like after this all ended, Paige thought as she handled Violet’s bill and called for the car, she was screwed.
“Like that’s anything new,” she muttered under her breath as she climbed into the car behind Violet, nearly closing the heavy door on the still-grasping hands of the little crowd that had gathered outside the restaurant to adore her.
“Pardon?” Violet asked.
Paige summoned her smile. Her professional demeanor, which she thought she’d last seen weeks ago in Los Angeles. “Did that do? Scratch the attention itch?”
“It did.” Violet sat across from her in the dark, her gaze out the window as the car started out of the city. “Giancarlo is a solitary soul. He doesn’t understand that some people recharge their batteries in different ways than he does. Not everyone can storm about a lonely field and feel recharged.”
Said the woman who had never passed a crowd she couldn’t turn into a fan base with a few sentences and a smile. Paige blinked, amazed at her churlishness even in her own head, and found Violet’s calm gaze on hers.
“You’re an extrovert.” Paige said evenly. “I’m sure he knows that by now. Just as he likely knows that therefore, his own needs are different from yours.”
“One would think,” Violet agreed in her serene, untroubled way, which shouldn’t have sent a little shiver of warning down Paige’s back. “But then, the most interesting men are not always in touch with what they need, are they?”
Violet didn’t speak much after that, yet Paige didn’t feel as if she could breathe normally until the car pulled off the country road and started along the winding drive into the estate. And she was impatient—the most impatient she’d ever been in Violet’s presence, though she tried valiantly to disguise it—as she helped the older woman into the castello and oversaw the staff as they sorted out her purchases.
And only when she was finally in the car again and headed toward her cottage did Paige understand what had been beating at her all day, clutching at her chest and her throat and making her want to scream in the middle of ancient Italian piazzas. Guilt, yes, but that was a heavy thing, a spiked weight that hung on her. The rest of it was panic.
Because any opportunity Giancarlo had to reflect on what was happening between them—not revenge, not the comeuppance he’d obviously planned—was the beginning of the end. She knew it, deep inside. She’d seen it in his eyes this morning.
And when she got to her cottage and found not only it but the house above it dark, it confirmed her fears.
Paige stood there in the dark outside her cottage long after the driver’s car disappeared into the night, staring up the hill, willing this shadow or that to separate from the rest and become Giancarlo. She was too afraid to think about what might happen if this was it. If that kiss he’d delivered in the garden was their last.
Too soon, she thought desperately, or perhaps that was the first prayer she’d dared make in years. It’s too soon.
She stared up the side of the hill as if that would call him to her, somehow. But the only thing around her was the soft summer night, pretty and quiet. Still and empty, for miles around.
When she grew too cold and he still didn’t appear, she made her way inside, feeling more punished by his absence than by anything else that had happened between them. Paige entertained visions of marching up the hill and taking what she wanted, or at least finding him and seeing for herself what had happened in her absence today, but the truth was, she didn’t dare. She was still so uncertain of her welcome.
Would he throw back the covers and yank her into his arms if she appeared at his bedside? Or would he send her right back out into the night again, with a cruel word or two as her reward? Paige found she was too unsure of the answer to test it.
There were red flags everywhere, she acknowledged as she got ready for bed and crawled beneath her sheets. Red flags and dark corners, and nothing safe. But maybe what mattered was that she knew that, this time. She’d known the moment she’d decided to apply for that job with Violet. She’d always known.
She would have to learn to live with that, too.
* * *
Later that night, Paige woke with a sudden start when a lean male form crawled into her bed, hauling her into his arms.
Giancarlo. Of course.
But her heart was already crashing against her ribs as he rolled so she was beneath him. Excitement. Relief. The usual searing hunger, sharper than usual this time.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” he gritted at her, temper and need and too many other dark and hungry things in his voice. Then the scrape of his teeth against the tender flesh of her neck, making her shudder.
Paige didn’t want to think about the contours of her fears now, her certainty he’d finished with this. With her. Not now, while he was braced above her, his body so familiar and hot against hers, making the night blaze with the wild need that was never far beneath the surface. Never far at all.
Not even when she thought she’d lost him again.
“I thought you’d gone to bed already.” I didn’t know if you’d want me to come find you, she thought, but wisely kept to herself. “All of your lights were out.”
She thought she saw a certain self-knowledge move over his face then, but it was gone so quickly she was sure she must have imagined it.
“Did you have a lovely day out with my mother?” he asked in a tone she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine was friendly, his dark eyes glittering in the faint light from the rising moon outside her windows. “Filled with her admirers, exactly as she wished?”
“Of course.” Paige ran her hands from his hard jaw to the steel column of his neck, as if trying to imprint the shape of him on her palms. Trying to make certain that if this was the last time, she’d remember it. That it couldn’t be snatched from her, not entirely. “When Violet decrees we are to have fun, that is precisely what we have. No mere crowd would dare defy the crown
