home.
HE WAS INSIDE her again. At last.
Finally.
Giancarlo thought the sensation—far better than all his pale memories across these long years, far better than his own damned hand had ever been—might make him become a religious man.
She was so damned hot, molten and sweet and slick and his, and she still held him so tightly, so snugly, it was nearly his undoing. Her hair was that deep black ink with hints of fire and it tumbled all around her in a seductive tousle, falling to those breasts of hers, still high and pert, the tips already tight again and begging for his mouth.
Paige looked soft and stunned, exactly how he liked her best, exactly how he remembered her, and then she made everything better by reaching out to prop her hands against his chest. The shift in position made her sink down even farther on him, making them both groan.
He let his hands travel back to cup the twin globes of her delectable bottom, and tested the depth of her, the friction. God help him, but she was perfect. She had always been perfect. The perfect fit. The perfect fire.
Perfect for him.
Giancarlo had somehow forgotten that, in all the long years since he’d last been inside her. He’d convinced himself he’d exaggerated this as some kind of excuse for his own idiocy—that she’d been nothing more than a pretty girl with a dancer’s body and all the rest had been a kind of madness that would make no sense if revisited.
But this was no exaggeration. This was pure, hot, bliss. This was that same true perfection he remembered, at last.
Paige looked down at him, her gaze unreadable. Bright and something like awed. And then she started to move.
He had watched her dance ten years ago, and he had wanted her desperately. He’d watched her dance tonight, that astonishing performance for him alone, equal parts sensual and inviting, and he’d thought he might die if he didn’t find a way inside her. But nothing compared to this dance. Nothing came close.
She braced herself against him, her hands splayed wide over his pectoral muscles, while her hips set a lazy, shattering, insistent rhythm against his. And Giancarlo was lost.
He forgot about revenge. He forgot about their past. Her deceit, his foolish belief in her. All the terrible lies. The damned pictures themselves, grainy and humiliating. He lost his plans in the slide of her body against his, the sleek thrill that built in him with every rocking motion she made. Every life-altering stroke of the hardest part of him so deep, so very deep, in all of her soft heat.
“Make me come,” he ordered her, in a stranger’s deep growl. He saw her skin prickle at the sound of it, saw the way she pulled her lower lip between her teeth as if she was fighting back the same wave of sensation he was. “Make it good.”
Not that it could be anything but good. Not that it ever had been. This was a magical thing, this wild, hot fire that was only theirs. He could feel it every time he sank within her. He knew it every time he pulled back. He felt it in the sure pace she set with her hips, the tight hold of her flesh against his. He wanted it to go on forever, the way he’d thought it would when he’d met her that first time.
The way it should have, that little voice that was still in love with her, that had never been anything but in love with her, whispered deep inside him.
But she was following his orders and this was no time for regrets. She moved against him, lush and lovely, her hips a sinuous dance, a well-cast spell of longing and lust and too many other things he refused to name. He’d thought he’d lost her forever and yet she was here, moving above him, her lovely body on display because he’d wanted it, holding him so deep inside her he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began. He didn’t want to know.
“Your wish is my command, my count,” she teased him, her voice a husky little dream, and then she did something complicated with her hips and the world turned to flames all around them.
When he finally exploded, a bright rush of fire turned some kind of comet, rocketing over the edge of the night, he heard her call out his name.
And then follow him into bliss.
* * *
Giancarlo did not welcome reality when it reasserted itself.
Paige lay slumped over him, her face buried in his neck, while he was still deep inside of her. He opted not to think about how easy it was to hold her, or how she still seemed to have been crafted especially to fit in his arms, exactly this way. It took him much longer than it should have to get his breathing under control again. He held her the way a lover might, the way he always had before, and stared out over the top of her head at the faint lights on distant hills and the smear of starlight above.
He wished he didn’t care about the past. More than that, he wished he could trust her the way he had once. He wished so many things, and yet all of the stars were fixed tonight, staring down at him from their cold positions, and he knew better.
Paige was an accident waiting to happen. He’d been caught up in that accident once—he wouldn’t subject himself to it again. Even he wasn’t foolish enough to walk into the same trap twice. No matter that it felt like glory made flesh to touch her again, like coming home after too long away.
He would learn to live without that, too. He had before.
She shifted against him, and he felt the brush of her lips over his skin and told himself it was calculated. That everything about her was calculated. There was no use remembering the afternoons they’d spent curled around each other in his huge bed surrounded by the Malibu sea. When she’d tasted him everywhere with her eyes closed, as if she couldn’t help herself, as if her affection was as elemental as the ocean beyond his windows or the sky above and she had no choice but to sink into it with all of her senses.
That had been an act. This was an act. He needed to remember it.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the show.
“You’ve obviously been practicing,” he said, to be horrible. To remind them both that this was here and now, not ten years back. “Quite a lot, I’d say, were I to hazard a guess.”
He felt her tense against him, but almost thought he’d imagined it when she sat up a moment later, displaying her typical offhanded grace. And then she smiled slightly as she looked down at him.
“I was about to compliment you on the same thing,” she said, a brittle sort of mischief and something else lighting up her gaze. “You must have slept with a thousand women to do that so well! My congratulations. Especially as I would have said there weren’t ten women you could sleep with in a hundred miles, much less a thousand. The privileges of wealth, I presume?”
“You’re hilarious.” But he couldn’t help the crook of his mouth. “I have them flown in from Rome, of course.”
“Of course.” She wrinkled her nose at him, and it was as dangerous as it had been earlier. It made him want things he knew he couldn’t have. He couldn’t have them, and more to the point, she couldn’t give them. Hadn’t he learned anything? “You realize, Giancarlo, that people might get the wrong idea. They might begin to
