couldn’t reply. She was shaking so hard she was afraid she’d fall over, the tears were hot and endless, and he looked at her as if she was a stranger. As if he was. Crafted of marble, but far crueler. Marble might crush her. But he’d torn her into pieces first.
“Do you understand?” he asked, even harsher than before.
“Yes,” Paige managed to say. “I understand.” She scrubbed her hands over her face and sucked in a breath and tried one last time. “Giancarlo—”
But he was already gone.
It was over.
* * *
The slippery December roads were treacherous but the wind outside was even worse, rattling his SUV and shaking the skeletons of the trees on either side of the New England country roads.
And inside him, Giancarlo knew, it was colder and darker still.
He had not been in a good mood to begin with when he’d left Logan International Airport in Boston more than two hours earlier on this latest quest to find Paige. It was fair to say he’d been in a black mood for the past three months.
The tiny, lonely little Maine town a hundred miles from anywhere sat under a fresh coat of snow, lights twinkling as the December evening fell sudden and fast in the middle of what other places might still consider the afternoon, and he felt the stirrings of adrenaline as he navigated through the very few streets that comprised the village to the small, white clapboard house that was his destination.
He’d hired detectives. He’d scoured half of the West Coast and a good part of the East Coast himself. This was the last place on earth he’d have thought to look for her—which was, he could admit, why it had no doubt made such a perfect hiding place.
This time, he knew she was here. He’d seen the photo on his mobile when he’d landed in Boston from Italy, taken this very morning. But he wouldn’t believe it until he saw her with his own eyes.
He could admit the place held a certain desolate charm, Giancarlo thought grimly as he climbed from the car, the boots he only ever wore at ski resorts in places like Vail or St. Moritz crunching into the snow beneath him. The drive from Boston into the remote state of Maine had reminded him of the books he’d had to read while in his American high school. Lonely barns in barren fields and the low winter sky pressing down, gray and sullen. Here and there a hint of the wild, rocky Atlantic coast, lighthouses the only bit of faint cheer against the coming dark.
It felt like living inside his own bleak soul, in the great mess he’d made.
Giancarlo navigated his way over the salted sidewalk and up the old front steps to the clapboard house’s front door, able to hear the faint sound of piano music from inside. DANCE LESSONS, read the sign on the door, making his chest feel tight.
He stopped there, frozen on the porch with his hand on the doorknob, because he heard her voice. For the first time since that last, ugly morning in his Tuscan cottage. Counting off the beat.
Wedging its way into his heart like one of the vicious icicles that hung from the roof above him.
He wrenched the door open and walked inside, and then she was right there in front of him after all this time. Right there.
She took his breath away.
Giancarlo’s heart thundered in his chest and he forced himself to take stock of his surroundings. The ground floor of this house was its dance studio, an open space with only a few pillars and a class in session. And the woman he’d accused of a thousand different scams was not lounging about being fed bonbons she’d bought with his mother’s money or her own infamy, she was teaching the class. To what looked like a pack of very pink-faced, very uncoordinated young girls.
He was standing in what passed for the small studio’s lobby and if the glares from the women sitting in the couches and chairs along the wall were anything to go by, he’d disrupted the class with his loud entrance.
Not that Giancarlo cared about them in the slightest.
Paige, he noted as he forced himself to breathe again and not do anything rash, did not look at him at all, which was a feat indeed, given the mirrors on every available wall. She merely carried on teaching as if he was nothing to her.
But he refused to accept that. Particularly if it were true.
The class continued. And Giancarlo studied her as she moved in front of the small collection of preadolescents, calling out instructions and corrections and encouragement in equal measure. She looked as if she hadn’t slept much, but only when he studied her closely. Her hair was still that inky black, darker now than he remembered, and he wondered if it was the sun that brought out its auburn hints. She moved the way she did in all his dreams, all of that grace and ease, as if she flowed rather than walked.
And she was still slim, with only the faintest thickening at her belly to tell him what he hadn’t known until now, what he’d been afraid to wonder about until he’d finally tracked her down in what had to be, literally, one of the farthest places she could go in the opposite direction of Bel Air. And him.
That she was keeping the baby. His baby.
Giancarlo didn’t know what that was inside of him then. Relief. Fury. A new surge of determination. All the rest of the dark things he’d always felt for this woman, turned inside out. All mixed together until it felt new. Until he did.
She was keeping their baby.
He would have loved her anyway. He did. But he couldn’t help but view her continuing pregnancy as a sign. As hope.
As far more than he deserved.
It seemed like twenty lifetimes before the class ended, and the women in the chairs collected their young. He paid them no attention as they herded their charges past him out into the already-pitch-black night; he simply waited, arms crossed and his brooding gaze on Paige.
And eventually, the last stranger left and slammed the door shut behind her small town curiosity, and it was only the two of them in the glossy, bright room. Paige and him and all their history, and she still didn’t look at him.
“You decided to keep it.” He didn’t know why he said it like that, fierce and low, and he watched her stiffen, but it was too late to call it back.
“If you came here for an apology,” she said in a low voice he hardly recognized, and then she turned to face him fully and he blinked because she hardly looked like herself, “you can shove it right up your—”
“I don’t want an apology.” It was temper, he realized belatedly. Pure fury that transformed her lovely face and turned her eyes nearly gray. As if she would kill him with her own hands if she crossed the wide, battered floor and got too close to him, and there was no reason that should shock him and intrigue him in equal measure. “I spent three months tracking you down, Paige.”
Her eyes narrowed and if anything, grew darker.
“Are you sure that’s what you want to call me?” she threw at him. “I know that historically you’ve had some trouble keeping my name straight.”
Giancarlo felt a muscle move in his cheek and realized he was clenching his jaw.
“I
