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. What her mother had become. What Paige had nearly had to do in a vain attempt to save her.
But wishes were nothing but borrowed trouble. And she supposed, looking back, that had been the issue from the start—being with Giancarlo had made her imagine she could dare to want things she knew, she knew, could never be hers. Never.
You won’t make that mistake again in a hurry, her mother’s caustic voice jeered at her.
Paige risked a look at Giancarlo then, despairing at the way her heart squeezed tight at the sight of him the way it always had, at that dark look on his face that was half hunger and half dislike, at the way she had always loved him and understood she always would, and to what end? He would have his revenge and she would endure it and somehow, somehow, she would survive him, too.
It hurts a little bit more today than it usually does because you’re here and you’re tired, she tried to tell herself. But you’re fine. You’re always fine. Or you will be.
“I know you don’t want to believe me,” she said, because she had always been such an idiot where this man was concerned. She had never had the slightest idea how to protect herself. Giancarlo had been the kind of man who had blistering affairs the way other people had dinner plans, but she had fallen head over heels in love with him at first glance and destroyed them both in the process. And now she wanted, so desperately, for him to see her, just for a moment. The real her. “But I would do anything for your mother. For a hundred different reasons. Chief among them that she’s been better to me than my own mother ever was.”
“And here I thought you emerged fully grown from a bed of lies,” he said silkily. He paused, his dark eyes on her, as if recognizing how rare it was that Paige mentioned her own mother—but she watched him shrug it off instead of pursuing it and told herself it was for the best. “I was avoiding the city my mother lived in all these years and the kind of people who lived in it, not my mother. A crucial distinction, because believe me, Paige, I would also do anything for my mother. And I will.”
There was a threat in the last three words. A promise. And there was no particular reason it should thud into her so hard, as if it might have taken her from her feet if she hadn’t already been braced against all of this. The pretty place, the sense of homecoming, the knowledge he was even more lost to her when he stood in front of her than he had been in all their years apart.
“I loved my mother, too, Giancarlo,” Paige said, and she understood it was that scraped raw feeling that made her say such a thing. Giancarlo would never understand the kind of broken, terrible excuse for love that was the only kind Paige had ever known, before him. The sharp, scarring toll it exacted. How it festered inside and taught a person how to see the world only through the lens of it, no matter how blurred or cracked or deeply twisted. “And that never got me anything but bruises and a broken heart.” And then had taken the only things that had ever mattered to her. She swallowed. “I know the difference.”
He moved out of the doorway of the cottage then, closing the distance between them with a few sure steps, and Paige couldn’t tell if that was worse or better. Everything seemed too mixed up and impossible and somehow right, too; the gentle green trees and the soft, lavender-scented breeze, and his dark gold eyes in the center of the world, making her heart beat loud and slow inside her chest.
Stop it, she ordered herself. This is not your home. Neither is he.
“Is this an appeal to my better nature?” Giancarlo asked softly. Dangerously. “I keep telling you, that man is dead. Killed by your own hand. Surely you must realize this by now.”
“I know.” She tilted up her chin and hoped he