even have growled at him. “The only thing that would delight me more would be if you’d turn around and go away and pretend we never met. That’s what I’ve been doing and so far? It’s been the best three months of my life.”
He had that coming. He knew that. He told himself it didn’t even sting.
“I understand,” he began as carefully as he could, “that—”
“Don’t bother,” she snapped, cutting him off. He couldn’t recall she’d ever done that before. In fact, there was only one person in the world who interrupted him with impunity and she’d given birth to him—and wasn’t terribly thrilled with him at the moment, either. “I don’t want your explanations. I don’t care.”
She turned away from him, but the mirrors betrayed her, showing him a hint of the Paige he knew in the way her face twisted before she wrestled it back under control. Another sliver of hope, if he was a desperate man. He was.
Giancarlo walked farther into the studio, still studying her. She was in bare feet and a pair of leggings, with a loose tunic over them that drooped down over one shoulder. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He wanted to press his mouth to the bare skin of her shoulder, then explore that brand-new belly of hers. Then, perhaps, that molten heat of hers that he knew had only ever been his. He was primitive enough to relish that.
He’d believed her. It had taken him longer than it should have to admit that to himself. He’d believed her then, and he believed her now—but the fact she’d only ever given herself to him had meanings he’d been afraid to explore. He wasn’t afraid anymore.
Giancarlo had lost her once. What was there to fear now? He’d already lived through the worst thing that could happen to him. Twice.
“How did you find this place?” he asked as he walked toward her. He meant, how did you settle on this small, faraway, practically hidden town it took me three months to find? “Why did you come here in the first place?”
“I can’t imagine why you care.” Paige shoved her things into a bag and then straightened. “I doubt that you do.” She scowled at him when he kept coming, when he only stopped when he was within touching distance. “What do you want, Giancarlo?”
“I don’t know.” That wasn’t true, but he didn’t know how to express the rest of it, and not when she kept throwing him like this. He realized he’d never seen her angry before. Or anything but wild—wildly in love, wildly apologetic, wild beneath his hands. Never cold like this. Never furious. He supposed he deserved that, too. “You’re so angry.”
Paige actually laughed then, and it wasn’t her real laugh. It was a bitter little thing that made his chest hurt. More than it already did, than it had since that morning in Tuscany.
“You’re unbelievable,” she whispered. Then she shook her head. “I could be angry about any number of things, Giancarlo, but let’s pick one at random, shall we? You told me you never wanted to see me again, and I happen to think that’s the best plan you’ve had yet. So please, go back to wherever you came from. Go back to Italy and ruin someone else’s life. Leave me—leave us—alone.”
He wanted to pull her close to him. He wanted to taste her. He wanted. But he settled for shaking his head slightly and watching her face, instead, as if she might disappear again if he took his eyes off her.
“I’m sorry,” he said into the tense quiet. “It’s not that I’m not listening to you. But I’ve never seen you angry, ever. I didn’t think it was something you knew how to do.”
Paige blinked, and pulled the bag higher on her shoulder, gripping the strap with both of her hands.
“It wasn’t,” she said simply. “Especially around you. But it turns out, that’s not a very healthy way to live a life. It ends up putting you at the mercy of terrible people because you never say no. You never tell them to stop. You never stand up for yourself until it’s too late.”
And when her eyes met his, they slammed into him so hard it was like a punch, and Giancarlo understood she meant him. That he had done those things to her. That he was one more terrible person to her. It tasted sour in his mouth, that realization. And he hated it with almost as much force as he understood, at last, that it was true. That he’d treated her horribly. That he was precisely the kind of man he’d been raised to detest. That was why he’d come after her, was it not? To face these things.
But that didn’t make hearing it any easier.
“That is not the kind of life my baby is going to live, Giancarlo,” Paige told him fiercely. “Not if I have anything to say about it.” She tilted her chin up as if she expected him to argue. “This baby will have a home. This baby will be wanted. Loved. Celebrated. This baby is not a mistake. Or a problem. This baby will belong somewhere. With me.”
As if she really had punched him, and hard, it took Giancarlo a moment to recover from all her fierceness, and more, what it told him. And when he did, it was to see her storming across the room.
Away from him. Again.
“Come have dinner with me,” he began.
“No.”
“Coffee then.” He eyed her, remembering that tiny bump. “Or whatever you can drink.”
“And again, no.”
“Paige.” He didn’t have any idea what he was doing and he thought he hated that almost as much as the distance between them, which seemed much, much worse now that they were standing in the same room. “It’s my baby, too.”
She whirled back around, so fast he thought someone without her grace might have toppled over, and then she jabbed a finger in the air in a manner he imagined was meant to show him how very much she wished it was something sharp she could stick in a far more tender area.
“She is my baby!” And her voice grew louder with each word. “Mine. I knew I was pregnant with the baby of a man who hated me for five whole minutes before you ripped me into shreds and walked away, but believe me, Giancarlo, I heard you. You want nothing to do with me. You want nothing to do with this baby. And that is fine—”
“I never said I wanted nothing to do with the baby,” he protested. “Quite the opposite.”
“We can debate that when there’s a baby, then,” she hurled at him, hardly stopping to take a breath. “Which by my calculations gives me six months and then some of freedom from having to talk to you.”
“But I want to talk to you.” And he didn’t care that he sounded more demanding than apologetic, then. She might truly want nothing to do with him, ever again, and he understood he deserved that. But he had to be sure. “I want to see how you’re doing. I want to understand what happened between us in Italy.”
“No, you don’t.”
And her face twisted again, but her eyes were still that dark gray and they still burned, and he couldn’t tell what she wanted. Only that as ever, he was hurting her. The way he always did.
“You don’t want to understand me,” Paige told him. “You want me to understand you. And believe me, I already do. I understood you when you were the very wealthy, semifamous director
