days ten years ago she’d dared to imagine that she was, too.
And now she was finally here, and it turned out it was extraordinarily painful to visit a place that she’d once imagined might be her home and now knew never, ever would be. More than painful—but she told herself it was the jet lag that made her ache like that. Nothing a good night’s sleep on solid ground wouldn’t cure.
Even if it was this solid ground.
The vast estate sprawled across a part of Tuscany that had been in the Alessi family in one form or another since the Middle Ages. It was dotted with old farmhouses Giancarlo had spent the past decade painstakingly renovating for a very special class of clientele: people as wealthy as his mother and as allergic to invasions of their privacy as his father had been. As Paige supposed he must be himself now, after his too-public shaming at her own hands.
Here at Castello Alessi and all across its hilly lands, thick with olive groves and vineyards, lavender bushes and timeless forests of oak trees—according to the splashy website Paige had accessed a hundred times before and once again from the plane when she’d accepted she was really, truly coming here at last—such privacy-minded people could relax, secure in the knowledge that the “cottages” they’d paid dearly either to rent or to buy outright and fashion to their liking were as private and remote as it was possible to get while still enjoying world-class service akin to that of the finest hotels, thanks to Giancarlo’s private, around-the-clock staff.
But none of that applied to Paige, she was well aware.
They’d landed on a private airstrip in a nearby valley after flying all night. It had been a bright, somehow distinctly Italian summer morning, filled with yellow flowers and too-blue skies, and a waiting driver had whisked them off to the estate some forty minutes away. It was a long, gorgeous drive, winding in and around the hills of Tuscany that looked exactly as Paige had imagined them while also being somehow so much more than she’d anticipated. Violet had been installed in the lavishly remodeled castello itself, arrayed around a welcoming stone courtyard with heart-stopping views and her own private spa with waiting staff to pamper her at once, as if she was truly the High Queen of Italy.
Paige, on the other hand, Giancarlo ushered into a Jeep and then personally drove far out into the heart of the property, until all she could see in all directions was the gently rolling countryside and one lone house at the top of the nearest hill. All of it so gorgeous and yet so familiar, as if she’d been here before and recognized it like a homecoming, and yet, she was forced to keep telling herself, none of this was hers. Not the perfect sky, the charming lane, the pretty little houses on this or that ridge. Not hers. The man beside her least of all.
“Are you deliberately stranding me out here as some kind of punishment?” she asked him, when it became clear that a smaller cottage down in the valley beneath that lone house was where he was headed. She was doing her best not to look at him, braced beside her in the smaller-by-the-moment front of his Jeep as they bumped along the lazy dirt road that meandered toward the little stone house, because she was afraid it might make all these raw emotions inside of her spill over into tears. Or worse. “Don’t you think that looks a little bit strange?”
“My mother will be waited on hand and foot in the castello,” he said, his gruff voice either impatient or triumphant, and Paige couldn’t tell which. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “And if by some chance she needs you while undergoing a battalion of spa treatments, never fear, the Wi-Fi is excellent. I trust she can manage to send out an email should she require your presence.”
“So the answer is yes,” Paige said stiffly as he pulled up in front of the cottage. He turned the key in the ignition and the sudden quiet seemed to pour in through the open windows, as terrifying as it was sweet. “This is a punishment.”
“Yes,” he said in that low way of his that wrapped around her and made her yearn, then made her question her own sanity. “I am punishing you with Tuscany. It is a fate worse than death, obviously. Just look around.”
She didn’t want to look around, for a thousand complicated reasons and none she’d dare admit. It made her feel scraped to the bone and weak. So very weak. So she looked at him instead, which wasn’t really any better.
“You think I don’t know why you brought me here, but of course I do.” She laughed, though it was a hollow little sound and seemed to make that scraped sensation expand inside of her. “You’re making sure I have nowhere to run. I think that counts as the most basic of torture methods, doesn’t it?”
“Correction.” He aimed a smile at her that didn’t quite reach the storm in his eyes, but made her feel edgy all the same. “I don’t care if you know. It isn’t the same thing.”
Paige pushed her way out of the Jeep, not surprised when he climbed out himself. Was this all a prologue to another one of these scenes with him—as damaging as it was irresistible? She tucked her hands into the pockets of the jeans she’d worn on the long flight and wished she felt like herself. It’s only jet lag, she assured herself. Or so she hoped. You’ve read about jet lag. Everyone says it passes or no one would ever go anywhere, would they? But she didn’t feel particularly tired. She felt stripped to the bone instead. Flayed wide-open.
And the way he looked at her didn’t help.
“How long?” she asked, her voice not quite sounding like her own. “How long do you think you can keep me here?”
Giancarlo pulled her bags from the back and carried them to the door of the cottage, shouldering it open and disappearing inside. But Paige stayed where she was, next to the Jeep with her eyes on the rolling green horizon. The sweet blue of the summer sky was packed with fluffy white clouds that looked as if they were made of meringue and were far more beautiful than all of her dreams put together, and she tried her best not to cry, because this was a prison—she knew it was—and yet she couldn’t escape the notion that it was home.
“I’ll keep you as long as I like,” he said from the doorway, his voice another rolling thing through the morning’s stillness, like a dark shadow beneath all that shine. “This is about my satisfaction, cara. Not your feelings. Or it wouldn’t be torture, would it? It would be a holiday.”
“By your account, I imagine I don’t have any feelings anyway, isn’t that right?” She hadn’t meant to say that, and certainly not in that challenging tone. She scowled at the stunning view, and reminded herself that she’d never really had a home and never would. Longing for a place like this was nothing more than masochistic, no matter how familiar it felt. “I’m nothing but a mercenary bitch who set out to destroy you once and is now, what? A delusional stalker who has insinuated herself into the middle of your family? For my own nefarious purposes, none of which have been in evidence at all over the past three years?”
“I find parasite covers all the bases.” Giancarlo drawled that out, and it was worse, somehow, here in the midst of so much prettiness. Like a creeping black thing in the center of all that green, worse than a mere shadow. “No need to succumb to theatrics when you can merely call it what it is.”
She shook her head, that same old anguish moving inside of her, making her shake deep in her gut, making her wish for things she knew better than to want. A home, at last. Love to fill it. A place to belong and a person to share it with—
Paige had always known better. Dreams were one thing. They were harmless. No one could have survived the hard, barren place where she’d grown up, first her embittered mother’s teenage mistake and then her meal ticket, without a few dreams to keep them going. Much less what had happened ten years ago.
