him. She still had that dancer’s easy grace and the supple muscle tone to match. He took in her small, high breasts beneath that sleeveless white shirt with the draped neck, then the efficient pencil skirt that clung to the swell of her hips, and his hands remembered the lush feel of both. The slick perfection of her curves beneath his palms, always such a marvel of femininity in such a lean frame. The exquisite way she fit in his hands and tasted against his tongue. She’d left her legs bare, toned and pretty, and all he could think about was the way she’d wrapped them around his hips or draped them over his shoulders while he’d thrust hard and deep inside of her.
Stop, a voice inside him ordered, or you will shame yourself anew.
Her disguise—if that was what it was—did nothing to hide her particular, unusual beauty. She’d never looked like all the other girls who’d flocked around him back then. It was that fire in her that had called to him from that first, stunning clash of glances across the set of the music video where they’d met. She’d been a backup dancer in formfitting tights and a sport bra. He’d been the high-and-mighty pseudo director who shouldn’t have noticed her with a band full of pop stars hanging on his every word. And yet that single look had singed him alive.
He could still feel the same bright flames, even though she’d darkened her hair and wore sensible, professional clothes today that covered her mouthwatering midriff and failed to outline every last line of her thighs. Like the efficient secretary to his mother that he knew she’d proved herself to be over these past years, for some reason—and Giancarlo refused to let himself think about that. About her motives and intentions. Why she’d spent so long playing this game and why she’d bothered to excel in her position here while doing it. Why he couldn’t look at her without wanting her, even with all of this time between them. Even knowing exactly what she’d done.
“Is this where you tell me your sob story?” he asked coldly, taking a grim pleasure in the way she reacted to his voice. That little jump, as if she couldn’t control this crazy thing between them any more than he could. “There’s always one in these situations, is there not? So many reasons. So many excuses.”
“I’m not sobbing.” He couldn’t read that lovely oval of a face, with cheekbones made for a man to cradle between his palms and that wide mouth that begged to be tasted. Plundered. “And I don’t think I’ve made any excuses. I only apologized. It’s not the same thing.”
“No.” He let his gaze move over her mouth. That damned mouth. He could still feel the slide of it against his, or wrapped hot and warm around his hardness, trailing fire and oblivion wherever she used it. And nothing but lies when she spoke. “I’ll have to see what I can do about that.”
She actually sighed, as if he tried her patience, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or throttle her. He remembered that, too. From before. When she’d broken over his life like a hurricane and hadn’t stopped tearing up the trees and rearranging the earth until she was gone the same way she’d come, leaving nothing but scandal and the debris of her lies in her wake.
And yet she was still so pretty. He found that made him angrier than the rest of it.
“Glaring ferociously at me isn’t going to make me cry,” she said, and he wanted to see things in those chameleon eyes of hers. He wanted something, anything, to get to her—but he knew better, didn’t he? She hadn’t simply destroyed him, this time. She’d targeted his mother and she’d done it right under his nose. How could he imagine she was anything but evil? “It only makes the moment that much more uncomfortable.” She inclined her head slightly. “But if it makes you feel better, Giancarlo, you should go right ahead and try.”
He did laugh then. A short, humorless little sound.
“I am marveling at the sight of you,” he said, sounding cruel to his own ears, but she didn’t so much as blink. “You deserve to look like the person you really are, not the person you pretended you were.” He felt his mouth thin. “But I suppose this is Hollywood magic in action, no? The nastiest, most narcissistic things wrapped up tight in the prettiest packages. Of course you look as good as you did then.” He laughed softly, wanting it to hurt. Wanting something he said or did to have some effect on her—which told him a bit more than he wanted to know about his unresolved feelings about this woman. “That’s all you really have, is it not?”
GIANCARLO HAD FANCIED himself madly in love with her.
That was the thing he couldn’t forgive, much less permit himself to forget, especially when she was right here before him once again. The scandal that had ruined his budding film career, that had cast that deep, dark shadow over what had been left of his intensely private, deeply proper father’s life, that had made him question everything he’d thought he’d known about himself, that had made him finally leave this damned city and all its demons behind him within a day of the photos going live—that had been something a few shades worse than terrible and it remained a deep, indelible mark on Giancarlo’s soul. But however he might have deplored it, he supposed he could have eventually understood a pampered, thoughtless young man’s typical recklessness over a pretty girl. It was one of the oldest stories in the world.
It was his own parents’ story, come to that.
It was the fact that he’d been so deceived that he’d wanted to marry this creature despite his lifelong aversion to the institution, make her his countess, bring her to his ancestral 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