back. It was about paying a debt in the only way she could. “It never did have anything to do with you,” she continued when she was certain the shaking inside her wouldn’t bleed over into her voice. “Not the way you’re thinking. Not really.”
He shook his head slightly, as if he was reeling, and he muttered something in a stream of silken, shaken Italian that she shouldn’t have felt like that, all over her skin. Because it wasn’t a caress. It was its opposite.
“This is a nightmare.” He returned his furious glare to her and it was harder. Fiercer. Gold fury and that darkness inside it. “But nightmares end. You keep on, all these years later. It was two short months and too many explicit pictures. I knew better than to trust a woman like you in the first place, but this ought to be behind me.” His lips thinned. “Why won’t you go away, Nicola?”
“Paige.” She couldn’t tolerate that name. Never again. It was the emblem of all the things she’d lost, all the terrible choices she’d been forced to make, all the sacrifices she’d made for someone so unworthy it made her mouth taste acrid now, like ash and regret. “I’d rather you call me nothing but mercenary bitch instead of that.”
“I don’t care what you call yourself.” Not quite a shout. Not quite. But his voice thudded into her like a hail of bullets anyway, and she couldn’t disguise the way she winced. “I want you gone. I want this poison of yours out of my life, away from my mother. It disgusts me that you’ve been here all this time without my knowing it. Like a malignant cancer hiding in plain sight.”
And she should go. Paige knew she should. This was twisted and wrong and sick besides, no matter the purity of her intentions. All her rationalizations, all her excuses, what did any of them matter when she was standing here causing more pain to this man? He’d never deserved it. She really was a cancer, she thought. Her own mother had always thought so, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, yet again, and she heard the bleakness in her own voice that went far beyond an apology. And his dark, hot eyes were on hers. Demanding. Furious. Still broken, and she knew she’d done that. It stirred up sensations inside of her that felt too much like ghosts, an ache and a fire at once. But Paige held his gaze. “More than you’ll ever know. But I can’t leave Violet. I promised her.”
Giancarlo’s dark gaze blazed into a brilliant fury then, and it took every bit of backbone and bravado Paige had not to fall a step back when he advanced on her. Or to turn tail and start running the way she’d wanted to do since she’d heard his voice, down the expansive lawn, through the garden and out into the wild canyon below, as far as she could get from this man. She wanted to flee. She wanted to run and never stop running. The urge to do it beat in her blood.
But she hadn’t done it ten years ago, when she should have, and from far scarier people than Giancarlo Alessi. She wouldn’t do it now. No matter how hard her heart catapulted itself against her chest. No matter how great and painful the sobs she refused to let loose from inside.
“You seem to be under the impression I am playing a game with you,” Giancarlo said softly, so very softly, the menace in it like his hand around her throat. What was the matter with her that the notion moved in her like a dark thrill instead of a threat? “I am not.”
“I understand that this is difficult for you, and that it’s unlikely you’ll believe that was never my intention.” Paige tried to sound conciliatory. She did. But she thought it came out sounding a whole lot more like panic, and panic was as useless as regret. She had no space for either. This was the life she’d made. This was what she’d sown. “But I’m afraid my loyalty is to your mother, not to you.”
“I apologize.” It was a snide snap, not an apology. “But the irony rendered me temporarily deaf. Did you—you—just utter the word loyalty?”
Paige gritted her teeth. She didn’t bow her head. “You didn’t hire me. She did.”
“A point that will be moot if I kill you with my bare hands,” he snarled at her, and she should have been afraid of him, but she wasn’t. She had no doubt that he’d throw her off the estate, that if he could tear her to shreds with his words he would, and gladly, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically. Not Giancarlo.
Maybe that was the last remnant of the girl she’d been, she thought then. That foolish, unbearably naive girl, who’d imagined that a bright and brand-new love could fix anything. That it was the only thing that mattered. She knew better now; she’d learned her lessons well and truly and in the harshest of ways, but she still believed Giancarlo was a good man. No matter what her betrayal had done to him.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was rough with all the emotion she knew she couldn’t show him. He’d only hate her more. “But you won’t.”
“Please,” he all but whispered, and she saw too much on his face then, the agony and the fury and the darkness between, “do not tell me you are so delusional as to imagine I wouldn’t rip you apart if I could.”
“Of course,” she agreed, and it was hard to tell what hurt when everything did. When she was sure she would leave this encounter with visible bruises. “If you could. But that’s not who you are.”
“The man you thought you knew is dead, Nicola,” he said, that hated name a deliberate blow, and Paige finally did step back then, it was so brutal. “He died ten years ago and there will be no breathing him back to life with your sad tales of loyalty and your pretty little lies. There will be no resurrection. I might look like the man you knew, for two profoundly stupid months a lifetime ago, but mark my words. He is gone as if he never was.”
It shouldn’t be so sad, when it was nothing more than a simple truth. Not a surprise. Not a slap, even, despite his harsh tone. There was absolutely no reason she should feel swollen anew with all that useless, unwieldy, impossible grief, as if it had never faded, never so much as shifted an inch, in all this time. As if it had only been waiting to flatten her all over again.
“I accept both responsibility and blame for what happened ten years ago,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could, and he would never know how hard that was. How exposed she felt, how off balance. Just as he would never know that those two months she’d lost herself in him had been the best of her life, worth whatever had come after. Worth anything, even this. “I can’t do anything else. But I promised Violet I wouldn’t leave her. Punish me if you have to, Giancarlo. Don’t punish her.”
* * *
Giancarlo Alessi was a man made almost entirely of faults, a fact he was all too familiar with after the bleakness of the past decade and the price he’d paid for his own foolishness, but he loved his mother. His complicated, grandiose, larger-than-life idol of a mother, who he knew adored him in her own, particular way. It didn’t matter how many times Violet had sold him out for her own purposes—to combat tales of her crumbling marriage, to give the tabloids something to talk about other than her romantic life, to serve this or that career purpose over the years.
He’d come to accept that having one’s private moments exposed to the public was par for the course when one was related to a Hollywood star of Violet’s magnitude—which was why he had vowed never, ever to have children that she could use for her own ends. No happy grandchildren to grace magazine articles about her surprising depths. No babies she could coo over in front of carefully selected cameras to shore up her image when necessary. He’d never condemn a child of his to that life, no matter how much he might love Violet himself. He’d pass on his Italian title to a distant cousin of his father’s and let the sharp brutality of all that Hollywood attention end with him.
He
