The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

CHAPTER THREE

FOR A MOMENT Paige thought she really had pitched over the side of the hill, and this taut, terrible noise in her head was her own scream. But she blinked and she was still standing there before Giancarlo, he was still waiting and she didn’t want him to repeat himself.

She could see from that faintly mocking lift to his dark brows and that twist to his lips that he knew full well she’d heard him.

“Not here, surely,” she said, and her voice sounded thin and faraway.

“Where I want. How I want. Was I unclear?”

“But I—” She cleared her throat. “I mean, I don’t—”

“You appear to be confused.” 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 first, I want you on your knees. Right here. Right now. Don’t make me tell you again.”

* * *

He didn’t think she’d do it.

They stood together in the dark, close enough that any observer would think them lovers a scant inch away from a touch, and Giancarlo realized in a sudden flash that he didn’t want her to do it—that there was a part of him that wanted her to refuse. To walk away from this thing before it consumed them both whole and then wrecked them all over again.

To stop him, because he didn’t think he could—or would—stop himself.

Seeing her had taken the brakes off whatever passed for his self-control and he was careening down the side of a too-steep mountain now, heedless and reckless, and he didn’t care what he destroyed on the way down. He didn’t care about anything but exploring the phrase a pound of flesh in every possible way he could.

She didn’t blink. He didn’t think either one of them breathed. He saw her clench her hands into fists, saw her stiffen her spine. He wanted to stop her from running. From not running. From whatever was about to happen next in this too-close, too-dark night, where the only thing that moved was that long dress of hers, rippling slightly against the faint breeze from the far-off sea.

Then she moved, in a simple slide of pure grace that was worse, somehow, than all the rest. It reminded him of so many things. The supple strength and flexibility of her body, her lean curves, and all the ways he’d worshipped her back before he’d known who she really was. With his hands. His mouth. His whole body. She was his memory in lovely action, a stark and pretty slap across his face, and when she was finished she was settled there on her knees before him.

Just as he’d asked. Demanded.

Giancarlo stared down at her, willing back all of his self-righteous fury and the armor it provided, but it was hard to remember much of anything when she was staring up at him, her eyes wide and mysterious and her lips slightly parted, making the carnal way she’d taken his thumb inside her mouth seem to explode through him all over again.

Making him realize he was kidding himself if he thought he was in control of this.

As long as she didn’t realize that, Giancarlo thought, he’d manage. So he waited, watching her as he did. The night seemed much darker than it was, heavy on all sides and far fewer stars above than in the skies over his home in Tuscany, and he felt the ragged breath she took. That same old destructive need for her poured through him, rocketing through his veins and into his sex, making him clench his jaw too tight to keep from acting on it.

He felt like granite—everywhere—when she tilted herself forward and propped herself against his thighs, her palms like fire, her mouth much too close to the part of him that burned the hottest for her.

“Your mother thinks you’re lonely,” she said.

It took him a moment to understand the words she spoke in that husky tone of voice, and when he did, something he didn’t care to identify coursed through him. He told himself it was yet more anger. He had an endless well where this woman was concerned, surely.

Giancarlo reached down and took her jaw in his hand, tugging her face up so he could look down into it, and it was the hardest thing he’d done in a long, long time to keep himself in check. In control. To crush the roaring thing that wanted only to take her, possess her and force himself to think, instead.

“That’s not going to work,” he told her softly. He was so hard it very nearly hurt, but he stood there as if he could do this all night, and he felt the faintest shiver move through her, making it all worthwhile.

“What do you mean? That’s what she said.”

“It doesn’t matter if she hauled out her photo albums and wept over pictures of me as a fat, drooling infant,” he said mildly, though his hand was hard against her jaw and he could feel how much she wanted to yank herself back, away from him. He could feel the flat press of her hands on his thighs, and the heat there that neither one of them had ever been any good at harnessing. “You’re not bringing it up now, on your knees in the dirt because I ordered it, because you have a sudden interest in my emotional well-being.”

“I could be interested in nothing but your emotional well-being and you’d tell me I was only running a con,” Nicola—Paige said, with more bravado than he might have displayed were he the one kneeling there in the dark. “I don’t know why I bother to speak.”

“In this case,” he said silkily, moving his hand along the sweet line of her jaw, her cheek, cradling her head with a softness completely belied by the lash in his words, “it is because you hope to shame me into stopping this. Why else bring up my mother when you’re about to take me into your mouth at last?”

Her mouth fell open slightly more, as if in stunned astonishment, and he laughed, though it wasn’t a very nice sound.

“Fine,” she said, though her voice sounded like a stranger’s. “Whatever you want.”

“That is the point I am trying to make to you, Paige,” he bit out then, holding her immobile, so she had no choice but to gaze back at him, and he was a terrible man indeed, to revel in the temper he saw in her changeable eyes. “‘Whatever I want’ isn’t an empty phrase. It could mean pleasuring me by the side of the road without any consultation whatsoever about your feelings on the subject. It is what I want. Are you beginning to understand me? How many object lessons do you think you will require before this sinks in?”

She said something in reply but the night stole her words away, and she cleared her throat. She was trembling fully then, and he might have felt like the monster all that accusation in her gaze named him, but he could see the rest of it, too. The stain of color on her cheeks. That glassy heat in her eyes. And beneath the hand he still held to her face and against her neck, the wild drumming of her pulse, pounding out her arousal in an unmistakable beat.

He knew that rhythm better than he knew himself. He thought it might have been the only honest thing about her, then and now.

“How long?” she whispered.

“Until what?”

“Until this is done.” She moistened her lips and he felt it like her wicked mouth, wet and soft and deep, and nearly groaned where he stood.

“Until I’m bored.”

“A few hours, then,” she said, with a remnant of her usual fire, and he smiled.

“I don’t imagine you’ll be that lucky.” He traced a pattern from that stubborn chin of hers to the delicate shell of her ear, then back. “I’ve had a long time to think about all the ways I’d like to make you crawl. Then pay. Then crawl some more. There’s no telling how long it could take.”

“And yet when you had the chance, you talked to me for three seconds and then disappeared for a decade,” she pointed out.

He felt that same wash of betrayal, that same kick in the gut he’d felt that long-ago day when he’d realized she’d used him the way his own mother always had—and it had been far more shattering, because Violet had only sold him out when he was clothed.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, as harshly as he could in that same soft voice. “I didn’t then. I don’t now. I thought I’d made that clear.”

A car passed by on the winding mountain drive, the headlights dancing over them, and he saw something bleak in her eyes, across her lovely face. He told himself there was no echo at all inside him, no hollow thing in his chest.

“Then we’d better get started with the humiliation and sexual favors, hadn’t we?” she said with a cheerfulness that was as pointed as it was feigned, and he felt her hands tighten against his thighs. She moved them up toward his belt and he didn’t know he meant to stop her until he did.

He watched her face as he helped her rise to her feet, and he didn’t let go of her arm when she was standing, the way he should have done.

“And here I thought we were right on target to get arrested for public indecency,” she whispered, her voice still sharp but something raw in her chameleon gaze. “They could throw me in jail and charge me for solicitation and it would be like all your dreams come true in one evening.”

“This is my dream,” he growled at her, his hand wrapped tight around her arm and that fever in his blood. His revenge, he thought. At last. “It’s not the act itself that matters, cara. That’s a privilege you haven’t earned. It’s the surrender. It’s all about the surrender.” He laughed then, a dark sound he felt in every part of him, as if it was a part of the night and as dangerous, and then he let her go. It was harder than it should have been. “You’ll learn.”

* * *

It became clear to Paige in the week that followed that it wasn’t Giancarlo’s intention to actually make her have sex with him whenever and wherever he chose, no matter what provocative things he might say to the contrary. That would have been easy, in its way. He was far more diabolical than that.

He wanted her in a constant state of panic, with no idea what he might do next. He wanted her to think of nothing at all but him and the little things he made her do to prove her obedience that were slowly driving her insane.

It’s all about the surrender, he’d said. Her surrender. And she was learning what he’d meant.

One day—after nearly a week filled with anticipation and the faintest of touches, always in passing and always unexpected, all of which still felt like a metal collar around her neck that he tightened at will—he found her in Violet’s expansive closet, putting together a selection of outfits with appropriate accessories for Violet to choose between for the event the star was scheduled to attend that evening.

“Pull up your skirt, take off your panties—if you are foolish enough to be wearing any—and hand them to me,” Giancarlo said without preamble, making Paige jump and shiver into a bright red awareness of him, especially because her mind had been a long way away.

Ten years ago away, in fact, and treating her to a play-by-play, Technicolor and surround-sound replay of one of their more adventurous evenings in the Malibu house down on the beach she had no idea if he still owned.

“What?” she stammered out, but her body wasn’t in any doubt about his instructions. Her breasts bloomed into an aching heaviness, making her bra feel too tight and too scratchy against her skin. Her stomach flipped over, and below, that shimmering heat became scalding.