home in Italy—he, who had vowed he’d never marry after witnessing the fallout from his parents’ tempestuous union—that made his blood boil even all these years later. He’d been plotting out weddings in his head while she’d been negotiating the price of his disgrace. The fury of it still made him feel much too close to wild.
She only inclined her head again, as if she was perfectly happy to accept any and all blame he heaped on her, and Giancarlo didn’t understand why that made him even more enraged.
“Have you nothing to say?” he taunted her. “I don’t believe it. You must have lost your touch in all these years, Nicola.” He saw her jerk, as if she really did hate that name, and filed that away as ammunition. “I beg your pardon. Paige. You can call yourself whatever you want. You’ve obviously spent too much time with a lonely old woman if this is the best you can do.”
“She is lonely,” Paige agreed, and he thought that was temper that lit up her cheeks, staining them, though her voice was calm. “This was never meant to be a long-term situation, Giancarlo. I assumed you’d come home and recognize me within the month. Of course, that was three years ago.”
It took him a moment to understand what it was he was feeling then, and he didn’t like it when he did. Shame. Hot and new and unacceptable.
“The world will collide with the sun before I explain myself to you,” he bit out. Like how he’d managed to let so much time slip by—always so busy, always a crisis on the estate in Italy, always something. How he’d avoided coming here and hurt his mother in the process. Those things might have been true—they were why he’d finally forced himself to come after an entire eighteen months without seeing Violet on one of her usual press junkets around the globe—but they certainly weren’t this woman’s business.
“I didn’t ask you to explain anything.” She lifted one shoulder, still both delicate and toned, he was annoyed to notice, and then dropped it. “It’s simply the truth.”
“Please,” he scoffed, and rubbed his hand over his face to keep from reacting like the animal he seemed to become in her presence. Ten years ago he’d thought that compulsion—that need—was passion. Fate. He knew better now. It was sheer, unadulterated madness. “Do not use words you cannot possibly know the meaning of. It only makes you look even more grasping and base than we both know you are already.”
She blinked, then squared her shoulders, her chin rising as she held his gaze. “Do I have time to get a list of approved vocabulary words in what remains of my five minutes? Before you have me thrown over Violet’s walls and onto the street?”
Giancarlo looked at her, the breeze playing in her inky dark hair with its auburn accents, the sun shifting through the vines that stretched lazily above them in a fragrant canopy, and understood with a painful surge of clarity that this was an opportunity. This woman had been like a dark, grim shadow stretching over his life, but that was over now. And he was so different from the man he’d been when she’d sunk her claws in him that he might as well have been a stranger.
She had never been the woman she’d convinced him she was. Because that woman, he had loved. That woman had been like a missing piece to his own soul that he’d never known he lacked and yet had recognized instantly the moment he’d seen her.
But that was nothing but a performance, a stern voice whispered in his head.
And this was the second act.
“Does my mother know that you are the woman who starred in all those photos a decade ago?” he asked, sounding almost idle, though he felt anything but. He slid his hands into his pockets and regarded her closely, noting how pale she went, and how her lips pressed hard together.
“Of course not,” she whispered, and there was a part of him that wondered why she wanted so badly to maintain his mother’s good opinion. Why should that matter? But he reminded himself this was the way she played her games. She was good—so good—at pretending to care. It was just another lie and this time, he’d be damned if he believed any part of it.
“Then this is what will happen.” He said it calmly. Quietly. Because the shock of seeing her had finally faded and now there was only this. His revenge, served nice and cold all these years later. “I wouldn’t want to trouble my mother with the truth about her favorite assistant yet. I don’t think she’d like it.”
“She would hate it, and me,” Nicola—Paige threw at him. “But it would also break her heart. If that’s your goal here, it’s certainly an easy way to achieve it.”
“Am I the villain in this scenario?” He laughed again, but this time, he really was amused, and he saw a complex wash of emotion move over her face. He didn’t want to know why. He knew exactly what he did want, he reminded himself. His own back, in a way best suited to please him, for a change. This was merely the dance necessary to get it. “You must have become even more delusional than your presence here already suggests.”
“Giancarlo—”
“You will resign and leave of your own volition. Today. Now.”
She lifted her hands, which he saw were in tight fists, then dropped them back to her sides, and he admired the act. It almost looked real. “I can’t do that.”
“You will.” He decided he was enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. “This isn’t a debate, Paige.”
Her pretty face twisted into a convincing rendition of misery. “I can’t.”
“Because you haven’t managed to rewrite her will to leave it all to you yet?” he asked drily. “Or are you swapping out all the art on the walls for fakes? I thought the Rembrandt looked a bit odd in the front hall, but I imagined it was the light.”
“Because whatever you might think about me, and I’m not saying I don’t understand why you think it,” she rasped, “I care about her. And I don’t mean this to be insulting, Giancarlo, but I’m all she has.” Her eyes widened at the dark look he leveled at her, and she hurried on. “You haven’t visited her in years. She’s surrounded by acolytes and users the moment she steps off this property. I’m the only person she trusts.”
“Again, the irony is nearly edible.” He shrugged. “And you are wasting your breath. You should thank me for my mercy in letting you call this a resignation. If I were less benevolent, I’d have you arrested.”
She held his gaze for a moment too long. “Don’t make me call your bluff,” she said quietly. “I doubt very much you want the scandal.”
“Don’t make me call your bluff,” he hurled back at her. “Do you think I haven’t looked for the woman who ruined my life over the years? Hoping against hope she’d be locked up in prison where she belongs?” He smiled thinly when she stiffened. “Nicola Fielding fell off the face of the planet after those pictures went viral. That suggests to me that you aren’t any more keen to have history reveal itself in the tabloids than I am.” He lifted his brows. “Stalemate, cara. If I were you, I’d start packing.”
She took a deep breath and then let it out, long and slow, and there was no reason that should have bothered him the way it did, sneaking under his skin and making him feel edgy and annoyed, as if it was tangling up his intentions or bending the present into the past.
“I genuinely love Violet,” she said, her eyes big and pleading on his, and
