Читать книгу The Revenge Collection 2018 - Кейт Хьюит, Эль Кеннеди - Страница 43

CHAPTER FIVE

“IF THIS IS your revenge,” Paige said, a current of laughter in her voice though her expression was mild, “I think I should confess to you that it tastes a whole lot like red wine.”

He should do something about that, Giancarlo thought, watching her move through the refurbished ground floor of his renovated house. She was still so graceful, so light on her feet. Like poetry in motion, and he’d never been able to reconcile how she could flow like that and have turned out so rotten within. He’d never understood it.

It doesn’t matter what you understand, he snapped at himself. Only what you do to make this thing for her go away—

But something had happened out there as the sun set. Something had shifted inside him, though he couldn’t quite identify it. He wasn’t certain he’d want to name it if he could.

“It may prove to be a long night, cara,” he told her darkly, pouring himself a glass of the wine they made here from Alessi grapes. “This is merely the beginning.”

“The civilized version of revenge, then,” she murmured, almost as if to herself, running her fingers along the length of the reclaimed wood table that marked his dining area in the great, open space he’d done himself. In soothing yet bright colors and historically contextual pieces, all of which dimmed next to that effortless, offhanded beauty of hers. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

This didn’t feel like revenge. This felt like a memory. Giancarlo didn’t want to think too closely about that, but the truth of it slapped at him all the same. It could have been any one of the long, lush evenings they’d shared in Malibu a decade back that still shimmered in his recollection, as if the two of them had been lit from within. It shimmered in him now, too. Again. As if this was the culmination of all the dreams he’d lied and told himself he’d never had, in all those years since he’d left Los Angeles and started bringing the estate back to life.

There was too much history between them, too much that had gone wrong to ever fix, and yet he still caught himself watching her as if this was a new beginning. But then, he had always been such a damned fool where this woman was concerned, hadn’t he?

Earlier he’d stood in the courtyard of the castello with Violet, toasting her first night back in Italy since his father’s funeral eight years ago, and he’d felt a sense of deep rightness. Of homecoming, long overdue. These hills held his happiest childhood memories, after all. When his parents had both been alive, and in those early years, so much in love it had colored the air around them.

“You’ve done a marvelous thing here, darling,” Violet had said, smiling as much at him as at the achingly perfect view.

“I remember the days when we couldn’t drive out the gates in Bel Air without having to fight our way through packs of photographers,” he’d said, gazing out at the slumbering hills, all of them his now, his birthright and his future. His responsibility. And not a single paparazzo in a thousand miles or more. No lies. No stories. Only the enduring beauty of the earth. “Just to get to school in the morning.”

“The tabloids giveth and the tabloids taketh away,” Violet had said drily, looking as chic and elegant as ever though she wore her version of lounge wear and what was, for her, a practically cosmetic-free face. “It’s never been particularly easy to navigate, I grant you, but there did used to be a line. Or perhaps I’m kidding myself.”

“I want this place to be a refuge,” he’d told her then. “It’s nearly fifteen miles to the nearest main road. Everything is private. It’s the perfect retreat for people who can’t hide anywhere else.”

Violet had tasted her wine and she’d taken her time looking at him again, and he’d still been unsure if she was pausing for dramatic effect or if that was simply how she processed emotion. She was still a mystery to him and he’d long since accepted she always would be. Or anyway, he’d been telling himself he’d accepted it. It might even have been true.

“Yes,” she’d said, “and it’s very beautiful. It’s always been beautiful. I imagine I could live here quite happily and transform myself into one of those portly, Italy-maddened expatriates who are forever writing those merry little Tuscan memoirs and waxing rhapsodic about the light.” Her brows had lifted. “But which one of us is it that feels they need a hiding place, Giancarlo? Is that meant to be you or me?”

“Never fear, Mother,” he’d replied evenly. “I have no intention of having children of my own. I won’t have any cause to hide away, the better to protect them from prying eyes and a judgmental world. Perhaps I, too, will flourish in the heat of so many spotlights.”

She’d only smiled, enigmatic as ever, seemingly not in the least bit chastised by what he’d said. Had he expected otherwise? “Privacy can be overrated, my darling boy. Particularly when it better resembles a jail.”

And now he stood in the cheerful lounge of the house he’d taken apart and put back together with his own two hands, and watched the woman he’d once loved more than any other walk through the monument—he wouldn’t call it a jail—he’d built to his own unhappiness, his lonely, broken, betrayed heart.

How had he failed to realize, until this moment, that he’d built it for her? That he’d been hiding here these past ten years—deliberately keeping himself some kind of hermit, tucked away on this property and in this very cottage? That it was as much his refuge for her as it was from her?

That notion made something like a storm howl in him, deep and long. And as if she could read his mind, Paige turned, a small smile on that distracting mouth of hers.

“I always liked your films,” she said, her voice the perfect complement to the carefully decorated great room, the furnishings a mix of masculine ease and his Italian heritage, as if he’d planned for her to stand there in its center and make it all work. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that that kind of attention to detail should spill over into all the things you do.”

“My films were laughable vanity projects at best,” he told her, that storm in his voice and clawing at the walls of his chest. “I should never have taken myself seriously, much less allowed anyone else to do the same. It’s an embarrassment.”

Paige wrinkled her nose and he thought that might kill him, because finding her adorable was far more dangerous than simply wanting her. One was about sex, which was simple. The other had consequences. Terrible consequences he refused to pay.

“I liked them.”

“Shall we talk about the things you like?” Giancarlo asked, and he sounded overbearingly brooding to his own ears. As if he was performing a role because he thought the moment needed a villain, not because he truly wanted to put her back in her place. “Your interest in photography and amateur porn, for instance?”

Some revenge, he thought darkly. Next you’ll try to cuddle her to death with your words.

But she only smiled in that enigmatic way of hers, and moved closer to one of the paintings on the wall, her hands cupped around her glass of wine and that inky black hair of hers falling in abandon down her back, and it wasn’t cuddling he thought about as he watched her move. Then bite her lower lip as she peered up at the painting. It wasn’t cuddling that made his blood heat and his mouth dry.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Paige said, so softly that it took him a moment to realize she’d spoken. She swiveled back to look at him, framed there like a snapshot, the woman who had destroyed him before the great, bright canvas that stretched high behind her, all shapes and emotion and a swirl of color, that he hadn’t understood until tonight had reminded him of her.

Giancarlo told himself it was a sour realization, but his sex felt heavy and the air between them tasted thick. Like desire. Like need.

Like fate.

“It seems as if you’ve achieved what you set out to do,” she continued as if she couldn’t feel the thickness, though he knew, somehow, that she could. “You’ve separated me from Violet without seeming to do so deliberately, which I’m assuming was your purpose from the start. But why bring me all the way here? Why not leave me in California and spirit Violet away? And having made me come all the way here,” Paige continued, something he couldn’t identify making her eyes gleam green in the mellow light, “why not simply leave me to rot in my little cottage? It’s pretty as prison cells go, I grant you. Very pretty. It might take me weeks to realize I’m well and truly trapped there.”

He let his gaze roam over her the way his hands itched to do. “You’ve forgotten the most important part.”

“The sex, yes,” Paige supplied, and she didn’t sound particularly cowed by the idea, or even as outraged as she’d been back in Los Angeles. Her tone was bland. Perhaps too bland. “On command.”

“I was going to say obedience,” he said, and he didn’t feel as if he was playing a game any longer. He was too busy letting his eyes trace over her curves, letting his hands relish the tactile memory of her face between them as if she’d burned her way into his flesh. He could still taste her, damn it. And he wanted more.

“Obedience,” she repeated, as if testing each syllable of the word as she said it. “Does that include feeding me a gourmet dinner in this perfect little mansion only a count would call a cottage? Are you entirely sure you know what obedience involves?”

Giancarlo smiled, or anyway, his mouth moved. “That’s the point. It involves whatever I say it involves.”

He took a sip of his wine as he walked over to the open glass doors that led out to the loggia, nodding for her to join him outside. Stiffly, carefully—as if she was more shaken by their encounter than she appeared, and God help him, he wanted that to be true—she did.

Because the truth was so pathetic, wasn’t it? He still so badly wanted her to be real. To have meant some part of the things that had happened between them. All these years later, he still wanted that. Giancarlo despaired of himself.

A table waited out in the soft night air, bright with candles and laden with local produce and delicacies prepared on-site, while a rolling cart sat next to it with even more tempting dishes beneath silver covers. It was achingly romantic, precisely as he’d ordered. The hills and valleys of the estate rolled out beneath the stars, with lights winking here and there in the distance, making their isolation high up on this terrace at a remove from all the world seem profound.

That, too, was the point.

He moved to pull her chair out for her like the parody of the perfect gentleman he had never quite been and waited as she settled in, taking a moment to inhale her scent. Tonight she smelled of the high-end bath products he had his staff stock in the cottages, vanilla and apricots, and that hint of pure woman beneath.

“This house was a ruin when I started working on it,” he told her, still standing behind her, because he didn’t know what his face might show and he didn’t want her to see it. To see him. He succumbed to a whim and ran his fingers through her hair, reveling in the heavy weight of the dark strands even as he remembered all the other times she’d wrapped him in the heat and sweetness of it. When she’d crawled over him in that wide bed in Malibu and let her hair slip and tumble all over his skin as she tortured him with that sweet mouth of hers, driving them both wild. Giancarlo hardened, remembering it, and her hair was thick silk in his hands. “It sits on its original foundation, but everything else is changed. Perhaps the walls still stand, but everything inside is new, reclaimed, or altered entirely. It might look the same from a distance, but it isn’t.”

“I appreciate the metaphor,” Paige said, with a certain grittiness to her voice that he suspected meant her teeth were clenched. He smiled.

“Then I hope you’ll appreciate this, too,” he said as he rounded the table and sat down across from her, stretching out his legs before him as he did. “This is the Italian countryside and everything you can see in every direction is mine. You could scream for days and no one would hear you. You could try to escape and, unless you’ve taken up marathon running in your spare time, you’d run out of energy long before you found the road. You claimed to be obedient in Los Angeles because it suited you. You wanted your job more than you minded the loss of your self-respect, such as it is. Here?” He shrugged as he topped up their wineglasses with a bottle crafted from grapes he’d grown himself and then sat back, watching her closely, as she visibly fought not to react to his cool tone, his calmly belligerent words. “You have no other choice.”

“That’s not at all creepy,” Paige said, though he could have sworn that gleam of green in her chameleon gaze was amusement, however beleaguered. “I’m definitely the terrifying stalker in this scenario, not you.”

Giancarlo laughed. “Not that I would care if it really was creepy, but I don’t think you really think so, do you? Shall we put it to the test?”

He wanted her to push him, he understood. He wanted to see for himself. He wanted to peel those crisp white trousers from her slim hips and lick his way into her wetness and heat and know it was all for him, the way he’d once believed it was. The way he’d once believed she was.

Soon, he assured himself as his body reacted to that image with predictable enthusiasm. Soon enough.

“Again,” Paige said tightly, taking a healthy gulp of her wine, “it seems to me that there are more effective forms of payback than a romantic dinner for two, served beneath the starry night sky on what might be the most intimate terrace on the entire planet.” She looked out at the view as the heavens sparkled back at her, as if they were performing for her pleasure. “I suspect you might be doing it wrong.”

“Ah, Paige,” Giancarlo said softly. “You lack imagination.” Her eyes swung back to his and he smiled again, wider, pleased when that seemed to alarm her. “The romantic setting will only make it more poignant, will it not, when I order you to strip and sit there naked as we eat. Or when I demand that you please me with your mouth while I soak in the view. Or when I bend you over the serving table and make you scream out my name until I’m done.” He let his smile deepen as her eyes went very green, and very round. “The more civilized the setting, the more debauched the act,” he said mildly. “I find there is very little more effective.”

She looked stunned, and then something like wistful, and he almost broke and hauled her into his arms—but somehow, somehow, he reined himself in. Just a little bit longer, he promised himself. She blinked, then coughed, and then she folded her hands together in her lap with such precision that Giancarlo knew she was torturing herself with all those images he’d put in her head.

Va bene.

“You say that as if this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.” Her voice was his own little victory, so raspy was it then, with that stunned heat in her gaze and that band of color high on her cheeks. “Do you spend a lot of time enacting complicated revenge fantasies, Giancarlo? Is that another one of your heretofore hidden talents—like architecture and interior design, apparently?”

“I went to architecture school after university,” he said, and something about the fact she didn’t know that bothered him. Had he never told her his own story? Had he been as guilty of wearing a false persona ten years ago as she had been? Had it simply been the rush, the need that had kept them in bed and focused on other things? Had it been by her design—or had it been his own selfishness at play? He shoved that disconcerting thought aside. “But when I was finished, I decided I wanted to leverage my position as Violet’s son, instead. That didn’t work out very well for either one of us, did it?” He reached over and removed the silver cover from the plate of antipasti in front of her, then from his own, and smiled at her when she looked confused. “The salsicce di cinghiale is particularly good,” he told her. “And you should be certain to eat well. We have a very long night ahead of us.”

He expected her to do as she was told. It took a moment or two for him to realize that she hadn’t moved. That she appeared to have frozen solid where she sat and was staring at him with a stricken sort of expression on her face.

Giancarlo lifted a brow. “Was I unclear?”

“I appreciate all the tension and drama,” Paige said after a moment. “I don’t think I realized how very much you take after your mother until now. That’s a compliment,” she added in a hurry when he frowned at her. “But I’ll pass.”

“That is not an option you have.” He shrugged. “You persist in thinking what you want comes into play here. It doesn’t.”

“What will you do?” she asked softly, so softly it took a moment for him to hear the challenge beneath the words, and then to see it there in her chameleon eyes. “Make me scream for people who won’t hear me? Make me walk for days in search of a road that’s still hours from anywhere? Force me to stay in that gorgeous little cottage down the hill like a bird in a cage?”

“Or, alternatively, merely call my mother and tell her exactly who you are,” he suggested. “A fate you felt was worse than death and far more terrible than anything I might do a week ago.”

But tonight she only shook her head and she didn’t avert her gaze, reminding him of that moment in his mother’s closet across the world. Reminding him he’d never controlled this woman, not even when she’d agreed to let him.

“I think if you were going to do that, Giancarlo, you would have. You wouldn’t have dragged me across the planet and then presented me with wine and a four-course meal.”

He laughed, a smoky little sound against the night. It did nothing to ease the mounting tension. “Do you really want to test that theory?”

She leaned forward, holding his gaze, and his laughter dried up as if it had never been. He was aware of everything at once. The stars above them, the faint breeze that teased him with the intoxicating scent of her. The rich food before them, the dancing candlelight. The way she sat now, the wide neck of her brightly patterned tunic falling open as she leaned toward him, hinting at the soft curves beneath.

And all that fire, as bright as it had ever been, burning them both where they sat.

Her gaze was like a touch on his, and he felt it everywhere. “I have a different theory.”

“I’m all ears, of course. Every inmate is innocent, every killer was merely misunderstood, every con man an artist in his soul, et cetera. Tell me your sob story, cara.” He felt his mouth crook. “I knew you would, sooner or later.”

But Paige only smiled, and her eyes were so green tonight they rivaled his own lush fields. It moved in him like summer, an exultation of all that boundless heat that spiked the air between them.

“You don’t want revenge. Not really. You want sex.”

Her smile deepened when he only stared back at her, that mouth of hers still an utter distraction, still his undoing. Her gaze proud and unwavering and he had no defense against that, either.

“You don’t want to admit it, given what happened the last time we had sex, but look where we are.” She lifted a shoulder, somehow encompassing the whole of the estate in that simple little gesture. “You’ve made sure there couldn’t possibly be a camera here. You’ve cut us off from the rest of the world. And you’re calling it revenge because you’re furious that you still want me.”

“Or because wanting you is only part of it,” he replied, stiffer than he should have sounded, because it was that or let loose the wild thing in him that wanted nothing but her however he could have her. That didn’t give a toss about the rest of it as long as he got his hands on her one more time. Just one more time. “And not mutually exclusive with revenge, I assure you.”

Her smile seemed to pierce straight through him then, heat and fire and danger, and it sank straight to his sex.

Making him nothing at all but that wildness within.

“Call it whatever you want,” she suggested in that rough voice of hers that hinted at her own dark excitement, that called to him like a song the way it always had. That sang in him still, no matter how he tried to deny it. “Call it hate sex. I don’t care, Giancarlo.” She shrugged. “Whatever it is, whatever you need to call it to feel better about it, I want it, too.”

* * *

“I beg your pardon?” Giancarlo’s voice was a rough whisper that somehow sounded in Paige like a bellow.

It was the wine, Paige told herself as she stared back at him, her own words seeming to cavort between them on the heavily laden tabletop, making it impossible to see or hear much of anything else. Of course it was the wine—though she’d only had a few sips—and the lingering jet lag besides, though she didn’t feel anything like tired at the moment.

Nothing else could possibly have made her say such things, she was sure, much less throw down the gauntlet to a battle she very much feared might be the end of her.

She opened her mouth to take it back, to laugh and claim she’d been kidding, to break the strange, taut spell that stretched between them and wrapped them tight together, caught somewhere in that arrested expression that transformed his beautiful face. But Giancarlo lifted an aristocratic hand that stopped her as surely as if he’d placed it over her mouth, and she knew she really shouldn’t have shivered in a rush of dark delight at the very image.

“I find I’m not as trusting as I used to be,” he told her, though untrusting wasn’t how she would have described the wolfish look in his dark eyes then. “It is a personality flaw, I am sure. But I’m afraid you’ll have to offer proof.”

She was watching his mouth as if it was a show, which was only part of the reason Paige didn’t understand what he’d said. She blinked. “Proof?”

“That this is not another one of your dirty little games that will end up painting the front page of every godforsaken gossip rag in existence.” He lounged back in his chair, but his eyes were hot, and she had the notion that he was coiled to strike. “You understand my reticence, I’m sure.”

“And I’d offer you my word,” she said, not sure how she kept her tone so light, as if dirty little games hadn’t pricked at her and hurt while it did, because he had no idea what kind of dirt she’d been drowning in back then, “but somehow, I’m betting that won’t be enough for you.”

“Sadly, no,” he agreed. He sounded anything but sad. “Though it pains me to cast such aspersions on your character, even if only by insinuation.”

“Oh, that’s what that look on your face is.” Her tone was arch and if she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t known it was impossible, she might have thought she was enjoying herself here. “It looks a bit more like glee than pain from this side of the table, I should tell you.”

Giancarlo smiled, dark and intent. “I can’t imagine why.”

The night air seemed to shimmer in the space between them, in the flickering light of the candles and in the velvety dark that surrounded the table like an embrace. He settled even farther back in his chair and stretched his legs out again, like an indolent god awaiting a sacrifice, and Paige knew she should put a stop to this before it got out of control—but she didn’t. The truth was she didn’t want to stop it. She didn’t want to do anything but this.

“Strip.” It was a hoarse command, rich and dark, like the finest chocolate poured over her skin, and she should have been outraged by his arrogance. Instead, she wanted to bathe in it. In him.

Wasn’t that always what she’d wanted?

She didn’t pretend she hadn’t heard him or that she didn’t understand. “Here?”

“Right here.” His dark gaze burned, gold and onyx, daring her. “Unless there is some new reason you refuse to obey me this time?”

“You mean, besides the fact that we’re sitting outside? Where anyone could see us engaged in all manner of shocking acts? I thought you had a horror of public displays of anything.”

“How shocking could a simple strip show be?” he asked, and there was something else in his gaze then, sharp and hard. “It has slipped your mind, perhaps, that the entire world has already seen us having sex. I doubt anything we do could possibly shock them now. Unless you’ve learned new tricks since I last saw you?”

“Nothing but the same old tricks here,” she said, keeping her tone the same as it was, as if that slap of history hadn’t made her feel dizzy at all. It was too bad nothing seemed to keep her from wanting him. She was that masochistic. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Should I keep my clothes on?”

Paige saw that flash of fury in his gaze once more, but it melted into molten heat in the space of a heartbeat, as if they were both masochists here. Somehow, that made her feel better.

“No,” he said in a low voice. “You most certainly should not.”

“Then it seems I have no choice but to obey you, as promised,” she said quietly. “Despite your poor, apparently unshockable neighbors and the things they might see.”

“The closest resident aside from my mother is over forty miles away tonight,” Giancarlo said, as if impatient. But she could see the fire in his gaze. She could practically taste his need. “Your modesty is safe enough, such as it is. What other excuses do you have?” He let out a bark of something not quite laughter. “We might as well address them all now and be done with them.”

“What happens after I strip for you?” Paige asked, almost idly, but she was already pushing her chair back with a too-loud scrape against the stones, then rising to her feet. “This is daring, indeed, to get me naked and then leave me standing here all alone. Is that the plan? It’s something of a waste, I’d think.”

“First we’ll worry about whatever cameras you might have secreted on that body of yours,” he told her, and if she hadn’t known him she might have thought him cold. Unmoved by all of this. But that wild, uninhibited lover she’d known lurked there in the sensual curve of his lips, that gleaming thing deep in his gaze. Giancarlo might hate her, but he wanted her as much as she did him. And Paige clung to that, perhaps harder than she should have. She clung to it as if it was everything and opted not to listen to the alarms that rang out in her at the thought. “Then we’ll worry about what to do with that body.”

“Whatever you say, Count Alessi,” she murmured, which was as close to obedient as she’d ever come. She saw a certain appreciation for that—or for her wry tone, more like—in his dark eyes, but then it was time to dance.

Because that was what this was. Paige didn’t pretend otherwise. The only music was his breath and hers, the only audience the primeval explosion of stars above them. She hadn’t danced in years. Ten years, in fact. But she could feel him in her feet, in her hips. In the glorious stretch of her arms over her head. Her pulse and her breath. She could feel him everywhere, better than any sound track with her own hopeful heartbeat like the kick of drums, and she danced.

She poured herself into each undulation of her hips, each exultant reach of her hands. She’d kicked off her shoes when she’d stood and she curled her toes down hard into the smooth stones beneath her, feeling what was left of the day’s heat against her soles and that wildfire that only arced higher between the two of them as she moved. She tried her best to catch the sensation in the movement of her hips, her legs, her torso. She took her time peeling off her trousers, managing to kick them aside with a flourish, and then she moved closer to him as she rid herself of her shirt, as if his intent expression beckoned her to him.

She took her time with her bra, offering her breasts to him when she finally dropped it at her side, and she smiled at the way he moved in his chair, his gaze a wild touch on her skin, so fierce it made her nipples pull taut. And she wasn’t done. She kept up the dance, the ecstatic dance, and she made it her apology, her regret. She told him all about her love and her silly, shattered hopes with every move she made, and when she stepped out of her panties she didn’t know which one of them was breathing more heavily.

Paige only knew that he was standing, too. And that she was naked before him and she still wasn’t done.

Naked in the Tuscan night, she danced for all those dreams she’d let carry her away as a girl. For the dream she’d destroyed with a single phone call and a cashed check ten years ago, and none of it worth the sacrifice, in the end. It was like skinny-dipping, warm and cool at once, the summer air a sensual caress against her flesh. She danced for the joy she’d only ever felt in this man’s presence, the laughter she still missed, the love she’d squandered for good reasons that seemed nothing but sad in retrospect.

She danced and she danced, and she might have danced all night, but Giancarlo swept her into his arms instead, high against his chest, and that was like a much better dance. Hotter and more intense, and then his mouth came down on hers, claiming her and destroying her that easily.

He came down hard on top of her and she loved it. That lean, hard body of his crushing her with his delicious weight, his narrow hips keeping her legs apart, and it took her a moment to realize that he’d moved them over to one of the sun chaises that sat around the gleaming, sleek pool that jutted out from the loggia toward the vineyards. And that he’d lost his jacket in the move.

And he looked as gorgeously undone as she felt, and very nearly as wild.

“Giancarlo,” she whispered, the dance still running madly in her veins, almost as addictive as he was. “Don’t stop.”

“I give the orders, not you,” he growled, but his lips were curved when they took hers all over again.

And then everything slowed down. Turned to honey, thick and sweet.

Giancarlo feasted on her as if she were the gourmet meal his chefs had prepared for him, and beneath his talented mouth she felt almost that cherished, that perfect. She wanted his naked skin pressed to hers more than she could remember wanting anything else, ever, but he kept her too busy to peel his shirt back from his strong shoulders.

He kissed her until her head spun, and then he followed the line of her neck, tasting her and muttering dark things in Italian that she told herself she was happy she didn’t understand.

Even if they moved in her like music, dark and compelling, sex and magic and Giancarlo, at long last.

He found her breasts and pulled one of the proud nipples deep into his hot mouth, and she didn’t care what he said. Or in what language. She arched into him, mindless and needy, and he punished and praised her with his lips, his tongue, the scrape of his teeth. He played with her until she begged him to stop and then he only laughed and kept going, sending a catapult of pure wildfire straight down into her core.

She thought for a panicky, wondrous second that he might throw her straight over the edge with only this—

But he stopped, as diabolical as ever, raising his dark head to take in the flushed heat on her face and all down her neck. Her sensual distress. Her driving need.

“This punishment appears to be far more effective than you imagined it would be, cara,” he murmured, his voice another sensual shiver against her sensitive skin, with its echoes of the playfully wicked lover she’d met so long ago. “It’s almost as if you forgot what I can do to you.”

“Thank you for the harsh lesson, Count Alessi,” she whispered, not trying too hard to keep her tone anything approaching respectful when she was this close to the edge. “May I have another?”

He laughed, and she did too, and she didn’t know if she’d been kidding or if she’d meant it when he returned his attention to her body, shifting to crawl down farther. If these were harsh lessons indeed, or gifts. He left a shimmering trail of fire from her breasts to her belly, and when he paused there, his breath fanning out over the hungriest part of her, Paige realized she was breathing as heavily as if she was running a race. The marathon he’d mentioned earlier, God help her.

“You’d better hold on,” he warned her, dark and stirring and right there against her sex. “I’m going to stop when I’m done, not when you are.”

And then he simply bent his head and licked his way into her.

Paige ignited.

She went from the mere sensation of burning straight into open flame. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She arched against the exquisite torment of his wickedly clever mouth, or she tried to escape it, and either way, it didn’t matter. He gripped her hips in his strong hands and he tasted her molten heat as if it was his own greatest pleasure, and before she knew it she was bucking against him, her hands buried deep in his thick, dark hair.

Calling out his name like a prayer into the night.

And he was as good as his word. He didn’t stop. He didn’t wait for her to come back down, to come back to herself. He simply kept on tasting her, settling in and taking his time, laughing against her tender flesh when she begged him to stop, laughing more when she begged him to keep on going.

The fire poured back into her, hotter and higher than before, and then he plunged two fingers deep inside of her and threw her over the side of the world. Again.

This time, when she shuddered her way back to earth, Giancarlo had moved off her to stand beside her, his hard hands impatient as he pulled her to her feet. It took her a moment to realize he’d finally stripped but she had no time to appreciate it, because he was lying back on the chaise and pulling her down to sit astride him.

“I want to watch,” he told her, his voice dark and nearly grim with need, and it lit that flame inside of her all over again.

And then he simply curled his strong hands around her hips the way he had a thousand times before, the way she’d never dreamed he would again, and thrust home.