you when you were the beleaguered, betrayed ex, drawn back into an intense sexual relationship against his better judgment by the deceitful little seductress he couldn’t put behind him. I understood myself sick.”
She pulled in a breath, as if it hurt her, which was when Giancarlo realized he hadn’t breathed throughout this. That he couldn’t seem to draw a breath at all.
“And then,” Paige continued, her voice strong and even, “once I left, I understood that you have never, ever pretended to be there for me in any way. Not ten years ago. Not now. It never crossed your mind to ask me why I did something like sell those pictures, just as it never occurred to you to ask me how I felt about finding myself pregnant. The only thing you care about is you.”
“Paige.”
She ignored him. “You never asked me anything at all. You’ve never treated me liked anything but a storm you had to weather.” She shook her head. “You’re the damned hurricane, Giancarlo, but you blame me for the rain.” She shifted then, her hands moving to shelter that little bump, as if she needed to protect it from him, and he thought that might be the worst cut, the deepest wound. He was surprised to find he still stood. “All I want from you is what you’ve always given me. Your absence.”
The room seemed dizzy with her words when she’d stopped speaking, as if the mirrors could hardly bear the weight of them. Or maybe that was him. Maybe he’d fallen down and he simply couldn’t tell the difference.
“You said she.”
“What?”
Giancarlo didn’t know where that had come from. He hadn’t known he meant to speak at all. He was too busy seeing himself through her eyes—and not liking it at all. “Before. You called the baby a she.”
“Yes.” She seemed worn-out then, in a sudden rush. As if she’d lanced a wound with a surge of adrenaline and the poison had all run out, leaving nothing behind it. “I’m having a little girl in May.”
“A daughter.” His voice was gentle, yet filled with something it took him a moment to identify. Wonder. He heard it move through the room and he saw her shudder as she pulled in a breath, and he knew, somehow, that everything wasn’t lost. Not yet. Not quite yet. “We’re having a daughter.”
“Go away, Giancarlo,” she said, but it was a whisper. Just a whisper with none of that fury behind it, and a hint of the kind of sadness he’d become all too familiar with these past few months. And he wanted nothing more than to protect her, even if it was from himself.
Perhaps especially then.
“I can do that,” he said gruffly. “Tonight. But I’ll keep coming back, Paige. Every day until you talk to me. I can be remarkably persuasive.”
“Is that a threat?” She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and he thought she looked tired again, but not threatened. “This isn’t your land in Italy. I’m not a prisoner here.”
“I don’t want to keep you prisoner,” he said, which was not entirely true. He reminded himself he was a civilized man. Or the son of one anyway, little as he might have lived up to his father’s standards lately. “I want to have dinner with you.”
She eyed him, and he could see the uncertainty on her pretty face. “That’s all?”
“Do you want me to lie to you?” he asked quietly. “It’s a start. Just give me a start.”
She shook her head, but her eyes seemed less gray now and more that changeable blue-green he recognized, and Giancarlo couldn’t help but consider that progress.
“What if I don’t want a start?” she asked after a moment. “Any start? We’ve had two separate starts marked by ten years of agony and now this. It’s not fun.”
He smiled. “Then it’s dinner. Everyone needs to eat dinner. Especially pregnant women, I understand.”
“But not with you,” Paige said, and there was something different in her voice then. Some kind of resolve. “Not again. It’s not worth it.”
She turned away again and headed toward the door he could see in the back, and this time, he could tell, she was really going to leave.
And Giancarlo knew he should let her go. He knew he’d done more than enough already. The practical side of him pointed out that six months was a reasonable amount of time to win a person over, to say nothing of the following lifetime of the child they’d made. Their daughter. He had all the time in the world.
He’d spent three months trying to find her—what was another night? He knew he should forfeit this battle, the better to win the war. But he couldn’t do it.
Giancarlo couldn’t watch her walk away again.
LATER, PAIGE THOUGHT, she would hate herself for how difficult it was to march across the studio floor toward the door, her car beyond, and the brand-new life she was in the middle of crafting.
Later, she would despair of the kind of person she must be, that her heart had somersaulted nearly out of her chest when Giancarlo had stormed in, startling her so profoundly it had taken her a long moment to remember why that instant sense of relief she’d felt was more than a little sick. Later, she would beat herself up about how little she wanted to walk away from him, even now.
But first she had to really do it. Walk away. Mean what she said. Leave him standing—
Her first clue that he’d moved at all was a rush of air over her shoulder and then his hands were on her, gentle and implacable at once. He turned her, lifted her, and in a single smooth shift she was in his arms. Held high against his chest, so she was surrounded. By his scent. By his strength.
A scant breath away from that cruel mouth, that sensual mouth.
Much too close to everything she wanted, so desperately, to forget.
“Put me down.”
Her voice was so quiet it was hardly a breath of sound—but she knew, somehow, what that dark gold fury in his gaze was now. It was a warning that this situation could get out of control quickly, with a single kiss, and Paige rather doubted she’d be able to maintain any kind of moral high ground if she let him deep inside her again.
Especially because she wanted him there. Even now.
“First of all,” Giancarlo said, in that low and lethal way that still moved over her like a seduction, making her very bones feel weak, “I do not hate you. I have never hated you. I have spent years trying to convince myself that I hated you only to fail miserably at it, again and again.”
“Then you only act as if you hate me,” she grated at him, refusing to put her arm over his shoulders, holding herself tight and unyielding against him as if that might save her. From herself. “That’s much better.”
He stopped next to the line of old armchairs and love seats that sat against the wall and set her down in the biggest one, then shocked her to the core by kneeling down in front of her. She froze, which was why
