His hands were still on her, and that didn’t help. The offhanded sweep of his thumbs against the tender skin of her bare shoulders made her want to scream, but she didn’t think she’d stop if she started. “I this, I that. This isn’t about you. This is about me.”
“Giancarlo.”
“I told you what to do,” he said coolly. “And what will happen if you don’t.”
She jerked back out of his grip, furious in a sudden jolt, and not only because she knew he could have held her there if he liked. But because he hated her and she hated that he did. Because he was back in her life but not really, not in the way she’d refused to admit to herself she’d wanted him to be.
God, in those first months, those first years, she’d expected him to appear, hadn’t she? She’d expected him to seek her out once his initial anger passed, once the last of the scandal had died down. To continue that conversation they’d had outside her apartment the morning the pictures had run, so swift and terrible. Because they might have been together only a short time, but he’d known her better than anyone else ever had. Or ever would. Maybe not the details of her life, because she’d never wanted anyone to know those, but the truth of her heart. She’d been so sure that somehow, he’d understand that there had to have been extenuating circumstances....
But he’d never come.
So perhaps it was a very old grief that added to the fury and made her forget herself completely.
“Is this really what you want?” she demanded, forgetting to hold her tongue, the taste of his skin still a rich sort of wine in her mouth, making her feel something like drunk. “Is this what a decade did to you, Giancarlo?”
“This is what you did to me.” He didn’t use that name then, but she was sure they could both hear it, Nicola hanging in the air and weaving in and out of the scent of the night-blooming jasmine and rosemary all around them. “And this is exactly what I want.”
“To force me. To make me do things I don’t want to do. To—” She found she couldn’t say it. Not to the man who was the reason she knew that love could be beautiful instead of dark and twisted and sick. Not to the man who had made her feel so alive, so powerful, so perfect beneath his touch. “There are words, you know. Terrible words.”
“None of which apply.” He thrust his hands in the pockets of that suit, and she wondered if he found it hard to keep them to himself. Was she as sick as he was if that made her feel better instead of worse? How could she tell anymore—what was the barometer? “You don’t have to do anything. I have no desire to force you. Quite the opposite.”
“You told me I had to do this—to—to—”
“Don’t stutter like the vestal virgin we both know you are not,” he said silkily, and she wondered if he’d forgotten that she’d been exactly that when she’d come to him ten years ago. If he thought that was another lie. “I told you that you had to obey me. In and out of bed.”
“That I had to have sex with you at your command or leave,” she gritted out.
He didn’t quite shrug, or smile. “Yes.”
“So then I do, in fact, have to do something. You are perfectly happy to use force.”
“Not at all.” He shrugged as if he didn’t care what happened next, but there was a tension to those muscled shoulders, around his eyes, that told her otherwise. And it wasn’t in the least bit comforting. “You’re welcome to leave. To say no at any time and go about your life, such as it is, using whatever name appeals to you. I won’t stop you.”
It was as if her heart was in her mouth and she felt dizzy again, but she couldn’t look away from that terrible face of his, so sensual and impassive and cruel.
“But if I do that, you’ll tell Violet who I am. You’ll tell her I...what? Stalked you? Deliberately hunted her down and befriended her to get to you?”
“I will.” His face hardened and his voice did, too. “It has the added benefit of being the truth.”
But Paige knew better, however little she could seem to express it to him. She knew what had grown between her and Violet in these past years, and how deeply it would wound the other woman to learn that Paige was yet one more leech. One more user, trying to suck Violet dry for her own purposes. It made her feel sick to imagine it.
“That’s no choice at all.”
“It’s a choice, Paige,” he said with lethal bite. “You don’t like it, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less of a choice, which is a good deal more than you offered me.”
“I can’t hurt her. Don’t you care about that? Shouldn’t you?”
“There are consequences to the choices you make,” he said with a certain ruthless patience. “Don’t you understand yet? This is a lesson. It’s not supposed to be fun.” That smile of his was a sharp blade she was certain drew blood. “For you.”
For a moment she thought she’d bolt, though it was a long walk to anywhere from high up on this hill. She didn’t know how she kept herself still, how she stayed in one piece. She didn’t know how she wasn’t already in a thousand shattered bits all over this little pull out on the side of the deserted road, like a busted-out car window.
“Tell me, then,” she managed after a moment, keeping her head high, though her eyes burned, “how does this lesson plan work, exactly? You say you don’t want to force me, but you’re okay with me forcing myself? When it’s the last thing I want?”
“Is it?” He shook his head at her, that smile of his no less painful. “Surely you must realize how little patience I have for lies, Paige.” He let out a small sound that was too lethal to be a laugh. “If I were to lift your dress and stroke my way inside your panties, what would I find? Disinterest?”
Damn him.
“That’s not the point. That’s biology, which isn’t the same thing as will.”
“Are you wet?”
It wasn’t really a question, and her silence answered it anyway. Her bright red cheeks that she was sure were like a flare against the night. A beacon. Her shame and fury and agony, and none of that mattered because she was molten between her legs, too hot and too slippery, and he knew it.
He knew it by looking at her, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more then. Only that she was caught tight in the grip of this thing and she had no idea how either one of them could survive it. How anything could survive it.
“Please,” she said. It was a whisper. She hardly knew she spoke.
And the worst part was that she had no idea what she was asking for.
“We’ll get to the begging,” he promised her.
Giancarlo looked as ruthless as she’d ever seen him then, and it only made that pulsing wet heat worse. It made her ache and hunger and want, and what the hell did that make her? Exactly what he thinks you are already, a voice inside her answered.
And he wasn’t finished. “But
