she saw the faintest hint of color high on those gorgeous cheeks of his. And that hectic glitter in his dark eyes that she recognized. Oh yes, she recognized it. She remembered it.
She knew as much about him as he did about her, after all. She knew every inch of his body. She knew his arousal when she saw it. She knew he’d be so hard he ached and that his control would be stretched to the breaking point. The chemistry between them wasn’t only his to exploit.
She stood there with her skirt at her waist, supposedly debasing herself before the only man she’d ever loved, and Paige felt better than she had in years. Powerful. Right, somehow.
“Looked your fill?” she asked sweetly when the silence stretched on, taut and nearly humming. He swallowed as if it hurt him, and she felt like a goddess as he dragged his gaze back to hers.
“Come here.” His voice was a rasp, thick and hot, and it moved in her like joy.
She obeyed him and this time, she was happy to do it. She walked toward him, reveling in the way her blood pounded through her and her skin seemed to shrink a size, too tight across her bones. Because he could call this revenge. He could talk about hatred and penance. But it was still the same thick madness that felt like a rope around her neck. It was still the same inexorable pull.
It was still them.
Paige stopped in front of him and let out a surprised breath when he moved, reaching down to gather her wrists in his big hands and then pull them behind her, securing them in one of his at the small of her back. Her skirt fell back into place against the sensitized skin of her thighs, her back arched almost of its own accord, and Giancarlo stared down at her, a hard wildness blazing from his eyes.
Paige remembered that, too.
She didn’t know what he looked for, much less what he saw. He stared at her for a moment that dragged out to forever and she felt it like panic beneath the surface of her skin. Like an itch.
And then he jerked her close, her hands still held immobile behind her back, and slammed his mouth to hers.
It wasn’t a brush of his mouth, a tease, like before. It wasn’t an introduction.
He took her mouth as if he was already deep inside of her. As if he was thrusting hard and driving them both toward that glimmering edge. It was more than wild, more than carnal. He bent her back over her own arms, pressing her breasts into the flat planes of his chest, and he simply possessed her with a ruthless sort of fury that set every part of her aflame.
She thrilled to his boldness, his shocking mastery. The glorious taste of him she’d pined for all these years. The sheer rightness.
Paige kissed him back desperately, deeply, forgetting about the games they played. Forgetting about penance, about trust. Forgetting her betrayal and his fury. She didn’t care what he wanted from her, or how he planned to hurt her, or anything at all but this.
This.
There was too much noise in her head and too much heat inside of her and she actually moaned in disappointment when he pulled back, holding her away from him with that iron strength of his that reminded her how gentle he was with it. How truly demanding, because he knew—as he’d always known—exactly what she wanted. How far away from force all of this really was.
“You kiss like a whore,” he said, and she could see it was meant to be an insult, but it came out sounding somehow reverent, instead.
She laughed. “Have you kissed many whores, then? You, the exalted Count Alessi, who could surely have any proper woman he wished?”
“Just the one.”
She should be wounded by that, Paige thought as she studied him. She should feel slapped down, put in her place, but she didn’t. She cocked her head to one side and saw the fever in his dark gaze, and she knew that whatever power he had over her, she had it over him, too. And more, he was as aware of that as she was.
“Then how would you know?” she asked him, her voice like a stranger’s, breathy and inviting. Nothing like hurt at all. “Maybe the whore is you.”
“Watch your mouth.” But he’d moved closer again, his shoulders filling her vision, her need expanding to swallow the whole world. Or maybe it was his need. Both of theirs, twined together and too big to fit beneath the sky.
“Make me,” she dared him, and he muttered something in Italian.
And then he did.
He let go of her hands to take her face between his hard palms, holding her where he wanted her as he plundered her mouth. As he took and took and then took even more, as if there was no end and no beginning and only the madness of their mouths, slick and hot and perfect. The fire between them danced high and roared louder, and he didn’t stop her when Paige melted against him. When she wound her arms around his neck and clung to him, kissing him back as if this was the reunion she’d always dreamed of. As if this was a solution, not another one of his clever little power games.
And she didn’t know when it changed. When it stopped being about fury and started to taste like heat. When it started to feel like the people they’d been long ago, before everything had gone so wrong.
He felt it, too. She felt him stiffen, and then he thrust her aside.
And for a long moment they only stared at each other, both of them breathing too fast, too hard. Paige tried to step back and her legs wobbled, and Giancarlo scowled at her even as his hand shot out to steady her.
“Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself. Her mouth felt marked, soft and plundered, and Giancarlo was looking at her as if she was a ghost. “That certainly taught me my place. All that punitive kissing.”
She didn’t know what moved across his face then, but it scraped at her. It hurt far worse than any of his words had. She had to bite her own tongue to keep from making the small sound of pain that welled up in her at the sight of it.
“It will,” he promised her, a bleakness in his voice that settled in her bones like a winter chill. Like the fate she’d been running from since the day she’d met him, loath as she was to admit it. “I can promise you that. Sooner or later, it will.”
* * *
Kissing her had been a terrible mistake.
Giancarlo ran until he thought his lungs might burst and his legs might collapse beneath him, and it was useless. The Southern California sun was unforgiving, the blue sky harsh and high and cloudless, and he couldn’t get her taste out of his mouth. He couldn’t get the feel of her out of his skin.
It was exactly as it had been a decade ago, all over again, except this time he couldn’t pretend he’d been blindsided. This time, he’d walked right into it. He’d been the one to kiss her.
He cursed himself in two languages and at last he stopped running, bending over to prop his hands on his knees and stare down the side of the mountain toward his mother’s estate and the sprawl of the city below it in the shimmering heat of high summer. It was too hot here. It was too familiar.
Too dangerous.
It was much too tempting to simply forget himself, to pick up where he’d left off with her. With
