here, this man who detested her. “And here I am. Isolated and at your beck and call. Just think of all the ways you can make me pay for your untimely death.”
She couldn’t read the shadow that moved over his face then. His hand moved as if it was outside his control and he ran the backs of his fingers over the line of her jaw, softly, so softly, and yet she knew better than to mistake his gentleness for kindness. She knew better than to trust her body’s interpretations of things when it came to this man and the things he could do to it with so seemingly careless a touch.
The truth was in that fierce look in his eyes, that flat line of his delectable mouth. The painful truth that nothing she said could change, or would.
He wanted to hurt her. He wanted all of this to hurt.
“Believe me,” he said quietly. Thickly, as if that scraped raw thing was in him, too. “I have thought of little else.”
Paige thought he might kiss her then, and that masochist in her yearned for it, no matter what came after. No matter how he made her pay for wanting him, which she knew he would. She swayed forward and lifted her mouth toward his and for a moment his attention seemed to drift toward her lips—
But then he muttered one of those curses that sounded almost pretty because it was in Italian. And he stepped back, staring at her as if she was a ghost. A demon, more like. Sent to destroy him when it was clear to her that if there was going to be any destruction here, it would be at his hands.
It was going to be her in pieces, not him. And Paige didn’t understand why she didn’t care about that the way she should. When he looked at her, she didn’t care about anything but him and all these terrible, pointless wishes that had wrecked her once already. She should have learned her lesson a long time ago. She’d thought she had.
“I suggest you rest,” he said in a clipped tone, stalking back toward the driver’s side of the Jeep. “Dinner will be served at sunset and you’ll wake up starving sometime before then. That’s always the way with international flights.”
As if he knew she’d never left the country before, when she’d thought she’d hidden it well today. His knowing anyway seemed too intimate, somehow. The sort of detail a lover might know, or perhaps a friend, and he was neither. She told herself she was being ridiculous, but it was hard to keep looking at him when she felt there had to be far too much written across her face then. Too much of that Arizona white trash dust, showing him all the things about her she’d gone to such lengths to keep him from ever knowing.
“At the castello?” she asked, after the moment stretched on too long and his expression had begun to edge into impatience as he stood there, the Jeep in between them and his hand on the driver’s door. “That seems like a bit of a walk. It was a twenty-minute drive, at least.”
“At the house on the hill,” he said, and jerked his head toward the farmhouse that squatted at the top of the nearest swell of pretty green, looking sturdy and complacent in the sunlight, all light stones and an impressive loggia. “Right there. Unless that’s too much of a hike for you these days, now that you live on a Bel Air estate and are neck deep in opulence day and night. None of it earned. Or yours.”
Paige ignored the slap. “That really all depends on who lives there,” she replied, and it was remarkably hard to make her voice sound anything approximating light. “A troll? The Italian bogeyman? The big, bad wolf with his terrible fangs?”
His mouth moved into that crooked thing that made her stomach flip over and her heart ache. More. Again. Always.
“That would be me,” he said softly, and she thought he took a certain pleasure in it. “So that’s all of the above, I’d think. For your sins.”
* * *
A long nap and a very hot shower after she woke made Paige feel like a new person. Or herself again, at last. She had been too weary and inexplicably sad to explore the cottage when Giancarlo had driven away, so she did it now, with the whisper-soft robe she’d found in the master bathroom wrapped around her and her feet bare against the reclaimed stone floors, her wet hair feeling indulgent against her shoulders as she moved through the charming space.
It was a two-story affair in what had looked from the outside like a very old stone outbuilding. Inside, it was filled with the early-evening light thanks to the tall windows everywhere, the exposed beams high above, and the fact the interior was wholly open to best take advantage of what would otherwise have felt like a small space. Stairs led from the stone ground floor to the loft above, which featured a large, extraordinarily comfortable bed in the airy room nestled in the eaves, a small sitting area with a balcony beyond, and the luxurious master bath Paige had just enjoyed.
The main floor was divided into an efficient, cheerful kitchen with a happily stocked refrigerator, a cozy sitting area with deep sofas arranged around a wide stone fireplace, a small dining area that led out to a patio that spanned the length of the cottage and led into a small, well-tended garden. And everywhere she looked, behind everything and hovering near and far and more beautiful by the moment, the Tuscan view.
Home, she thought, despite herself.
Evening had crept in with long, deep shadows that settled in the valley and made art out of the soft green trees, the cypress sentries and the rounded hills on all sides. The road that had felt torturously remote when Giancarlo had driven her here looked like something from one of her beloved old books now, winding off into the distance or off into dreams. Paige stood there in the window until the air cooled around her, and realized only when she started back up the stairs that she hadn’t breathed like that—deeply and fully, all the way down to her feet, the way she had when she’d danced—in a very long time.
Almost as if she was comfortable here. As if she belonged. She’d felt that way in only one other place in her whole life, and had been as wrong. Giancarlo’s Malibu home, all wood and glass, angled to best let the sea in, had only been a pretty house. This was a pretty place.
And when you leave here, she told herself harshly, you will never come back. The same as that house in Malibu. Everyone feels at home in affluent places. That’s what they’re built to do.
Paige dressed slowly and carefully, her nerves prickling into a new awareness as she rifled through her suitcase. Should she wear the sort of thing she would wear if this was a vacation in Italy she happened to be taking by herself? Or should she wear something she suspected Giancarlo would prefer, so he could better enact his revenge? On the one hand, jeans and a slouchy sweatshirt, all comfort and very little style. On the other, a flirty little dress he could get his hands under, like before. She didn’t have the slightest idea which way to go.
“What do you want?” she asked her sleepy-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, her voice throaty from all that sleep.
But that was the trouble. She still wanted the same things she’d always wanted. She could admit that, here and now, with Giancarlo’s Italy pressing in on her from all sides. The difference was that this time, she knew better than to imagine she’d get it.
Paige dried her hair slowly, her mind oddly empty even as the rest of her felt tight with all the things she didn’t want to think about directly. Taut and on edge. She pulled on a pair of soft white trousers and a loose sort of tunic on top, a compromise between the jeans she’d have preferred and what she assumed Giancarlo would likely want to see her wear, given the circumstances.
“What he’d really like is me, as naked as the day I was born and crawling up that hillside on my hands and knees,” she muttered out loud and then laughed at the image, the sound creaky and strange in the quiet of the cottage. She kept laughing until a wet heat pricked at the back of her eyes and she had to pull in a ragged breath to keep the tears from pouring over. Then another.
Paige frowned as she slipped her feet into a pair of thonged flat sandals. When was the last time she’d laughed like that? About anything?
What a sad creature you’ve become, she scolded herself as she dug out her smartphone from her bag and