you said about me is true,” he told her. “I can’t deny any of it. But I want to understand you, Paige. I want to dedicate the next ten years to learning every single thing that makes you you. I don’t simply want a partner, I want to be one. I want to be yours. I want you to yell at me and put me in my place and I want to help you teach our daughter never to surrender herself to terrible men like her father.” His voice was scratchy then. “Not ever.”
“Stop,” she said, and she didn’t mean to reach over to him. She didn’t mean to slide her hand along his perfect, lean cheek. “I never gave you anything I didn’t want to give. You must know that. It was only that I knew it would end.”
“This won’t,” he whispered. “It hasn’t in ten years. It won’t in ten more, or ten after that, or ever.” He leaned forward, sliding his hand over her belly to cup that small, unmistakable swell, and the smile that moved over that mouth of his broke her heart and made it leap at once. Then he made it far worse, leaning in to press a reverent kiss there. “I love you, Paige. Please. Let me show you.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered, because what was the point in pretending otherwise? They’d already lost so much time. “But trust is a whole lot more than a pretty ring. I’ll always be the woman who sold you out.”
“And I’ll always be the man who greeted the news of his daughter’s impending arrival like a pig,” he retorted. “Based on the wild fears of the four-year-old boy I haven’t been in decades.”
“That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
“I know.” He shifted then, pulling the ring from its box and slipping it onto her finger. It fit perfectly, and Paige couldn’t seem to breathe. And his eyes were so bright, and she felt three times the size of her skin, and she didn’t want to let him go this time. She didn’t want to sacrifice him, ever again. “Believe me, I know, but it’s not. It only means we’ve tested each other and we’re still here.”
He picked up her hand with its sparkling diamond and carried it to his lips. “Wear this and we’ll work on it,” he murmured, his eyes on her and the words seeming to thud straight into her heart, her flesh, her bones. “Every day. I promise I won’t rest until you’re happy enough to burst.”
“Until we both are,” she corrected him.
And then he leaned in close, and he wrapped himself around her and he kissed her. Again and again. Until she was dizzy with longing and love. Until neither one of them could breathe.
And Giancarlo gave her a detailed demonstration of his commitment to the cause, right there on one of the sofas in that bright, big room.
SHE MADE HIM work for it. And she made him wait.
And Giancarlo had no one to blame but himself for either.
“How do I know that you want to marry me and not simply to claim the baby in some appalling display of machismo?” she had asked him that first night, naked and astride him, when his intentions toward her, personally, could not have been more obvious.
“Set me any test,” he’d told her then. “I’ll pass it.”
She’d considered him for a long moment, her inky hair in that tangle he loved and her eyes that brilliant green. And the way she fit him. God, the fit.
“Don’t ask me again,” she said, her tone very serious, her green gaze alight. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
“Take your time,” he’d told her with all the patience of a desperate man. “I want you to trust me.”
“I want to trust you, too,” she’d whispered in return.
But the truth was they learned to trust each other.
He flew back and forth from Italy as needed, and didn’t argue when sometimes, she refused to go with him. He shared her tiny studio apartment with her in her snowy New England town, a hundred miles or more from anywhere, and he didn’t complain. He shoveled snow. He salted paths. He made certain her car was well-maintained and he never pressured her to move.
She told him more about her childhood with that terrible woman. He told her about his childhood with a woman less terrible perhaps, but deeply complicated all the same. And they held each other. They soothed each other.
They came to know each other in all the ways they hadn’t had time to get to know each other ten years ago. Layer on top of layer.
Until he came back from another trip to Italy one snowy March weekend and Paige said that maybe, if he had a better place in mind for them to live, she’d consider it.
“I don’t know anything about homes,” she told him, her attention perhaps too focused on the book she held in her lap. “But you seem to have quite a few.”
“You make every house I have a home, il mio amore,” he told her. “Without you, they are but adventures in architecture.”
And he had them back in his house in Malibu by the following afternoon, as if they’d never left it ten years ago. The sea in front of him, the mountains behind him and his woman at his side.
Giancarlo had never been happier. Except for one small thing.
“Why haven’t you married her yet?” Violet demanded every time she saw him, particularly when Paige was with him. He could only raise his brows at this woman he loved more than he’d imagined it was possible to love anyone, and wait for her to answer.
Which she was happy to do.
“I’m not sure I’ll have him, Violet,” Paige would reply airily. She would pat her ever-larger belly and smile blandly, and Giancarlo thought that they’d both transitioned from a working relationship to family rather easily. Almost as if Violet had planned it. “I’m considering all my options.”
“I don’t blame you,” Violet would say with a sniff. “He was horrible. I’d tell you he gets that sort of inexcusable behavior from his father but, alas, Count Alessi was the most polite and well-mannered man I ever met. It’s all me.”
“I don’t think anyone thought otherwise,” Giancarlo would say then, and everyone would laugh.
But he never asked Paige again. He kept his promise.
“And if a single photograph or unauthorized mention of my daughter appears anywhere, for any reason, in a manner which benefits you without my express, written consent,” he told the great screen legend Violet Sutherlin one pretty afternoon, in her office in front of her new assistant so there could be no mistake that he meant business, “you will never see her again. Until she is at least thirty. Do you understand me, Mother? I am no longer that four-year-old. My daughter never will be.”
Violet had gazed at him for a long time. She hadn’t showed him that smile of hers. She hadn’t said anything witty. In the end, she’d only nodded, once. Sharp and jerky.
But he knew she understood that he’d meant it.
Five months
