done and then he’ll leave you broken and useless when he moves on to the next dumb whore. Don’t be so naive!
Giancarlo’s face changed then, and his hand froze in her hair. “I think I always forget you were so young,” he said after a moment, as if remembering her age shocked him. “What the hell was I doing? You were a kid.”
She laughed then. She couldn’t help it.
“My life wasn’t exactly pampered and easy before I came to Hollywood,” she told him, knowing as she said it that she’d never talked about that part of her life. He had been so bright, so beautiful—why would she talk about dark, grim things? “And I did that about ten minutes after I graduated from high school. My mom had the car packed and waiting on the last day of classes.” She shook her head at him as her laughter faded. “I was never really much of a kid.”
She hadn’t had the opportunity to be a kid, which wasn’t quite the same thing, but she didn’t tell him that. Even though she had the strangest idea that his childhood hadn’t been that different from hers, really. The trappings couldn’t have been more opposite, but she’d spent her whole life tiptoeing around, trying to predict what mood her mother would be in, how much she might have drunk, and how bad she could expect it to get of an evening. She wasn’t sure that was all that different from trying to gauge one of Violet’s moods.
It had never occurred to her that she’d traded one demanding mother for another, far classier one—and she wasn’t sure she liked the comparison. At least Violet cares for you in return, she told herself then. Which is more than Arleen ever did.
“I’m not sure that excuses me,” Giancarlo was saying, but then he laughed, and everything else shot straight out of her head and disappeared into that happy sound. “But then, I never had any control where you were concerned.”
“Neither did I,” she said, smiling at him, and they both stilled then. Perhaps aware in the same instant that they were straying too close to the very things they couldn’t let themselves talk about.
Or the words they couldn’t say. Words he’d told her he wouldn’t believe if she did dare speak them out loud.
But that didn’t keep her from feeling them. Nothing could.
He studied her face for a long moment, until she began to feel the breeze too keenly on her exposed skin. Or maybe that was her vulnerability. Having sex was much easier, for all it stripped her bare and seemed to involve every last cell in her body. It required only feeling and action. Doing. It was this talking that was killing her, making her want too much, making her imagine too many happy endings when, God help her, she knew better.
Paige pushed away from him, not willing to ruin this with a conversation that could only lead to more hurt. Or worse, something good that would be that much harder to leave behind when the time came. She sat up and gathered her clothes to her, pulling the flirty little sundress over her head as if the light material was armor. But she only wished it was.
“Was it ever real?” he asked quietly.
Paige didn’t ask him what he meant. She froze, her eyes on the rolling hills that spread out before her in the afternoon light, the glistening lake in the valley below. That stunning Tuscan sky studded with chubby white clouds, the vineyards and the flowers, and she didn’t think he understood that he was holding her heart between his palms and squeezing tight. Too tight.
Maybe he wouldn’t care if he did.
“It was for me,” she said, and her voice was too rough. Too dark. Too much emotion in it. “It always was for me, even at the end.”
She didn’t know what might happen then. What Giancarlo might say. Do. She felt spread open and hung out in all the open space around them, as if she was stretched across some tightrope high in the sky, subject to the whims of any passing wind—
His hand reached out and covered hers and he squeezed. Once.
And then he pulled on his clothes and he got to his feet and he never mentioned it again.
* * *
Giancarlo watched her sleep, and he did not require the chorus of angry voices inside of him to remind him that this was a bad idea.
He didn’t know what had woken him, only that he’d come alert in a rush and had turned to make sure she was still there beside him—the way he’d done for years after the photographs hit. He’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d dreamed it all away, dreamed she’d never betrayed him, dreamed that things had been different. He’d grown uncomfortably well used to lying there in his empty bed, glaring at the ceiling and wishing her ill even as he’d wanted her back, wherever she was.
But this time, she was right here. She was curled up beside him and sound asleep, so that she didn’t even murmur when he stretched out on his side, his front to her back, and held her there. The way he knew he wouldn’t do if she was awake, lest it give her too many ideas...
So much for your revenge plot, he chided himself, but it all seemed so absurd when she was lying beside him, her features taking on an angelic cast in the faint light that poured in from the skylight above them, the stars themselves lighting her with that special glow.
He found himself tracing the line of her cheek with his finger, the memories of ten years ago so strong he could almost have sworn that no time had passed. That the pictures and the separation had been the bad dream. Because he might be wary of her, but every day it seemed that was only because he thought he should be, not because he truly was. And every day it seemed to make less and less sense.
She had been so young.
He didn’t know how he’d forgotten that. How he’d failed to factor it in. When he’d been twenty he’d been a bona fide idiot, making an ass of himself at Stanford and enjoying every minute of it. He certainly hadn’t been performing for a living, running from this audition to that gig with no guarantee he’d ever make his rent or make some money or even get cast. When Violet had been twenty years old she’d been famously divorcing the much, much older producer who had married her and made her when she’d been only seventeen. No one had called her a mercenary bitch, at least, not to her face. She’d been lauded for her powerful choices and the control she’d taken over her career.
Maybe that was why he’d spent a decade this furious with Paige. Because he loved his mother, he truly did, but he’d wanted something else for himself. He’d wanted a girl who wouldn’t think of herself first, second, last and always. He’d wanted a girl who would put him first. Had he known Paige wouldn’t stick with dancing? Had he assumed she would gravitate toward the life she had here in Tuscany, which was more or less arranged around pleasing him?
He’d told her he wanted a partner, but nothing he’d done supported that. Back in Malibu, he’d been jealous of the time she spent practicing and really anything else that took her away from him. This time around he was jealous of her devotion to his own mother. Did he want a partner? Or did he want her to treat him like a partner while he did whatever he liked?
Giancarlo didn’t much care for the answers that came to him then, in the quiet night, the woman he couldn’t seem to get over lying so sweetly beside him. All he knew was that he was tired of fighting this, of holding her at arm’s length when he wanted her close. He was tired of the walls he put up. He hated himself more every time he hurt her—
We all must practice
