she said again, with more force this time. “Stop talking.”
And he surrendered with a groan, thrusting deep and hard inside of her where there was nothing but the two of them—that shimmering truth that was only theirs, wild and dizzying and hotter every time—and that perfect, wondrous fire that swept them both away in its glory.
And Paige did her best to make them both forget.
* * *
Two more weeks passed, slow and sweet. The Tuscan summer started to edge toward the coming fall. The air began to feel crisp in the mornings, and the sky seemed bluer. And if she’d allowed herself to think about such things, Paige might have believed that the tension between her and Giancarlo was easing, too—all that heavy grief mellowing, turning blue like the sky, gold like the fields, lighter and softer with age.
Or perhaps she’d taught them both how to forget.
Whatever it was, it worked. No more did she spend her days trapped in her isolated cottage, available only to him and only when he wanted—and she told herself she didn’t miss it, all that forced proximity and breathlessness. Of course she didn’t miss it.
Paige’s days looked a great deal as they had back home. She met with Violet most mornings, and helped her plan out her leisure time. Violet was particularly fond of day trips to various Italian cities to soak in all the art and culture and fashion with a side helping of adulation from the locals, which she often expedited by taking Giancarlo’s helicopter that left from the roof of the castello and kicked up such a ruckus when it returned it could be heard for miles around.
“I’ve always preferred a big entrance,” Violet had murmured the first time, that famous smile of hers on her lips as the helicopter touched down.
But when Violet was in between her trips—which meant days of spa treatments and dedicated lounging beneath artfully placed umbrellas at the side of the castello’s private pool instead—Paige was left to her own devices, which usually meant she was left to Giancarlo’s.
One day he stopped the Jeep the moment it was out of sight of the castello’s stout tower and knelt down beside the passenger door, pulling her hips to his mouth and licking his way into Paige right there—making her sob out his name into the quiet morning, so loud it startled the birds from the nearby trees. Another time he drove them out to one of the private lakes that dotted the property and they swam beneath the hot sun, then brought each other to a shuddering release in the shallow end, Giancarlo holding her to him as she took advantage of the water’s buoyancy to make him groan.
Other times, they talked. He told her of his father’s dreams for this land, its long history and his own plans to monetize it while conserving it, that it might last for many more generations. He showed her around the Etruscan ruins that cropped up in the oddest spots and demonstrated, as much as possible, that a man who knew the ins and outs of three thousand acres in such extraordinary detail seemed something like magical when the landscape in question was a woman’s body. Her body.
Paige didn’t know which she treasured more. His words or his body. But she held them to her like gifts, and she tried not to think about what she deserved, what she knew she had coming to her. She tried to focus on what she had in her hands, instead.
One lazy afternoon they lay together in the warm sun, the sweet breeze playing over their heated skin. Paige propped her chin against his chest and looked into his eyes and it was dizzying, the way it was always dizzying. And then he smiled at her without a single stray shadow in his gorgeous eyes, and it was as if the world slammed to a stop and then started in the other direction.
“I saw you dancing in the garden the other night,” he said.
There was no reason to blush. She told herself the heat she felt move over her was the sun, the leftover fire of the way he’d torn her to pieces only moments before, and nothing more.
“I haven’t danced in a long while,” she said, and she wanted to tear her gaze away from his, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. He ran his hand through her hair, slow and sweet, and she was afraid of the things he could see in her. And so afraid of the things she wanted.
“Why not?”
And Paige didn’t know how to answer that. How to tell him the why of it without blundering straight into all the land mines they’d spent these weeks avoiding. That they’d managed to avoid entirely after that night she’d come back late from Lucca.
I want a woman I can trust, he’d said, and she wanted him to trust her. She might not deserve his trust, but she wanted it.
“I was good,” she said after a moment, because that was true enough, “but I wasn’t amazing. And there were so many other dancers who were as good as I was, but wanted it way more than I did.”
Especially after he’d left and she hadn’t had the heart for it any longer, or anything else involving the body she’d used to betray the one man she’d ever given it to. She’d auditioned for one more gig and her agent had told her they’d said it was like watching a marionette. That had been her last audition. Her last dance, period.
Because once she’d lost Giancarlo, she’d lost interest in the only other thing she’d had that’d ever had any meaning in her life. Her mother had descended even further into that abyss of hers and Paige had simply been lost. And when she’d run into a woman she’d met through Giancarlo on one of those Malibu weekends, who’d needed a personal assistant a few days a week and had kind of liked that Paige was a bit notorious, it had seemed like a good idea. And more, a way to escape, once and for all, the dark little world her mother lived in.
A year later, she’d been working for a longtime television star who had no idea that competent Paige Fielding was related to that Nicola Fielding. A few years after that, she had enough experience to sign with a very exclusive agency that catered to huge stars like Violet, and when Violet’s previous assistant left her, to put herself forward as a replacement. All of those things had seemed so random back then, as they happened. But now, looking back, it seemed anything but. As if Paige’s subconscious had plotted out the only course that could bring her back to Giancarlo.
But she didn’t want to think about that now. Or about what she’d do when she was without him again. How would she re-create herself this time? Where would she go? It occurred to her then that she’d never really planned beyond Violet. Beyond the road she’d known would bring her back to him.
I want a partner, he’d said, and the problem was, she was a liar. A deliberate amnesiac, desperate to keep their past at bay. That wasn’t a partner. That was a problem.
Giancarlo was still smiling, as if this was an easy conversation, and Paige wished it was. For once, just once, she wanted something to be as easy as it should have been.
“I’m surprised,” he said, and there was something very much like affection in his gaze, transforming his face until he looked like that younger version of himself again. She told herself that it didn’t make her ache. That it didn’t make her heart twist tight. “I would have said dancing was who you were, not something you did.”
“I was twenty years old,” she heard herself say, in a rueful sort of tone that suggested an amusement she didn’t quite feel. “I had no idea who I was.”
You’re his toy, Nicola, her mother had screamed at her in those final, dark days, when Paige had believed she’d somehow navigate her way through it all
