Читать книгу The Revenge Collection 2018 - Кейт Хьюит, Эль Кеннеди - Страница 45

CHAPTER SEVEN

LUCCA WAS A walled city, an old fortress turned prosperous market town, and it was enchanting. Paige dutifully followed Violet through the bustle of tiled red roofs, sloped streets and the sheer tumult of such an ancient place, and told herself there was no reason at all she should feel so unequal to the task she’d done so well and well-nigh automatically for years.

But her heart wasn’t with her in the colorful city. It was back in the hills with the man she’d left there, with that look on his face and too much dark grief in his gaze.

And the longer Violet lingered—going in and out of every shop, pausing for cell phone photos every time she was recognized, settling in for a long dinner in a restaurant where the chef came racing out to serenade her and she was complimented theatrically for her few Italian phrases, all while Paige looked on and/or assisted—the more Paige wondered if the other woman was doing it deliberately. As if she knew what was going on between her son and her assistant.

But that was impossible, Paige kept telling herself.

This is called guilt, that caustic voice inside her snapped as Violet flirted outrageously with the chef. This is why you’re here. Why you work for his mother. Why you accept how he treats you. You deserve it. You earned it.

More than that, she missed him. One afternoon knowing Giancarlo wasn’t within reach, that there was no chance he’d simply appear and tumble her down onto the nearest flat surface, the way he’d done only yesterday with no advance warning, and she was a mess. If this was a preview of what her life was going to be like after this all ended, Paige thought as she handled Violet’s bill and called for the car, she was screwed.

“Like that’s anything new,” she muttered under her breath as she climbed into the car behind Violet, nearly closing the heavy door on the still-grasping hands of the little crowd that had gathered outside the restaurant to adore her.

“Pardon?” Violet asked.

Paige summoned her smile. Her professional demeanor, which she thought she’d last seen weeks ago in Los Angeles. “Did that do? Scratch the attention itch?”

“It did.” Violet sat across from her in the dark, her gaze out the window as the car started out of the city. “Giancarlo is a solitary soul. He doesn’t understand that some people recharge their batteries in different ways than he does. Not everyone can storm about a lonely field and feel recharged.”

Said the woman who had never passed a crowd she couldn’t turn into a fan base with a few sentences and a smile. Paige blinked, amazed at her churlishness even in her own head, and found Violet’s calm gaze on hers.

“You’re an extrovert.” Paige said evenly. “I’m sure he knows that by now. Just as he likely knows that therefore, his own needs are different from yours.”

“One would think,” Violet agreed in her serene, untroubled way, which shouldn’t have sent a little shiver of warning down Paige’s back. “But then, the most interesting men are not always in touch with what they need, are they?”

Violet didn’t speak much after that, yet Paige didn’t feel as if she could breathe normally until the car pulled off the country road and started along the winding drive into the estate. And she was impatient—the most impatient she’d ever been in Violet’s presence, though she tried valiantly to disguise it—as she helped the older woman into the castello and oversaw the staff as they sorted out her purchases.

And only when she was finally in the car again and headed toward her cottage did Paige understand what had been beating at her all day, clutching at her chest and her throat and making her want to scream in the middle of ancient Italian piazzas. Guilt, yes, but that was a heavy thing, a spiked weight that hung on her. The rest of it was panic.

Because any opportunity Giancarlo had to reflect on what was happening between them—not revenge, not the comeuppance he’d obviously planned—was the beginning of the end. She knew it, deep inside. She’d seen it in his eyes this morning.

And when she got to her cottage and found not only it but the house above it dark, it confirmed her fears.

Paige stood there in the dark outside her cottage long after the driver’s car disappeared into the night, staring up the hill, willing this shadow or that to separate from the rest and become Giancarlo. She was too afraid to think about what might happen if this was it. If that kiss he’d delivered in the garden was their last.

Too soon, she thought desperately, or perhaps that was the first prayer she’d dared make in years. It’s too soon.

She stared up the side of the hill as if that would call him to her, somehow. But the only thing around her was the soft summer night, pretty and quiet. Still and empty, for miles around.

When she grew too cold and he still didn’t appear, she made her way inside, feeling more punished by his absence than by anything else that had happened between them. Paige entertained visions of marching up the hill and taking what she wanted, or at least finding him and seeing for herself what had happened in her absence today, but the truth was, she didn’t dare. She was still so uncertain of her welcome.

Would he throw back the covers and yank her into his arms if she appeared at his bedside? Or would he send her right back out into the night again, with a cruel word or two as her reward? Paige found she was too unsure of the answer to test it.

There were red flags everywhere, she acknowledged as she got ready for bed and crawled beneath her sheets. Red flags and dark corners, and nothing safe. But maybe what mattered was that she knew that, this time. She’d known the moment she’d decided to apply for that job with Violet. She’d always known.

She would have to learn to live with that, too.

* * *

Later that night, Paige woke with a sudden start when a lean male form crawled into her bed, hauling her into his arms.

Giancarlo. Of course.

But her heart was already crashing against her ribs as he rolled so she was beneath him. Excitement. Relief. The usual searing hunger, sharper than usual this time.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” he gritted at her, temper and need and too many other dark and hungry things in his voice. Then the scrape of his teeth against the tender flesh of her neck, making her shudder.

Paige didn’t want to think about the contours of her fears now, her certainty he’d finished with this. With her. Not now, while he was braced above her, his body so familiar and hot against hers, making the night blaze with the wild need that was never far beneath the surface. Never far at all.

Not even when she thought she’d lost him again.

“I thought you’d gone to bed already.” I didn’t know if you’d want me to come find you, she thought, but wisely kept to herself. “All of your lights were out.”

She thought she saw a certain self-knowledge move over his face then, but it was gone so quickly she was sure she must have imagined it.

“Did you have a lovely day out with my mother?” he asked in a tone she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine was friendly, his dark eyes glittering in the faint light from the rising moon outside her windows. “Filled with her admirers, exactly as she wished?”

“Of course.” Paige ran her hands from his hard jaw to the steel column of his neck, as if trying to imprint the shape of him on her palms. Trying to make certain that if this was the last time, she’d remember it. That it couldn’t be snatched from her, not entirely. “When Violet decrees we are to have fun, that is precisely what we have. No mere crowd would dare defy the crown jewel of the Hollywood establishment.”

Giancarlo didn’t laugh. He shifted his body so he was hard against her and she melted the way she always did, ready to welcome him no matter his mood or hers, no matter the strange energy that crackled from him tonight, no matter the darkness that seemed wrapped around him even as he wound himself around her.

There were other words for what she was with this man, she knew, words she hadn’t heard in a long time but still remembered all too well. Words she’d dismissed as the unhealthy rantings of the worst person she’d ever known, the person who had taken everything she’d wanted from her—but it turned out dismissing them wasn’t the same thing as erasing them.

Even so, the hollow, gnawing thing that had sat inside her all day and made her feel so panicked was gone, because he was here. She filled it with his scent, his touch, his bold possession.

Him. Giancarlo.

The only man she’d ever touched. The only man she’d ever loved.

And this was the only way she could tell him any of that. With her body. Paige shifted so he was flush against her entrance and hooked her legs over his hips, letting him in. Loving him in the only way she knew. In the only way he’d let her.

“Maybe that didn’t always work out when you were a child,” she whispered, hoping he couldn’t read too much emotion in her eyes, across her face. “But my relationship with Violet is much easier. She pays, I agree, the end.”

Giancarlo bent his head to press hot, open kisses along the ridge of her collarbone. Paige moved restlessly, hungrily against him, tilting her head back to give him greater access. To give him anything—everything—he wanted.

Because this won’t last forever, that harsh voice that was too much an echo of her mother’s reminded her. That was what today had taught her. There were no fairy tales. This situation had an expiration date, and every moment she had with him was one moment closer to the end.

“In a way,” Giancarlo said, still too dark, still too rough, his mouth against her skin so Paige could feel the rumble of his words inside of her as he spoke, “that is every relationship that Violet has.”

She heard that same tense grief that had been in him in the castello that morning and this time, no one was watching. She could soothe him, or try. She ran her fingers through his thick hair and smiled when he pressed into her touch, like a very large cat.

“I don’t think it can be easy to be a great figure,” Paige said after a moment, concentrating on the feel of his scalp beneath her fingertips, the drag of his thick hair as she moved her hands through it, the exquisite sensation of stroking him. “Too many expectations. Too much responsibility to something far bigger than oneself. The constant worry that it will be taken away. But it must be harder still to be that person’s child.”

He shifted away from her, propping himself up on his elbows, though he kept himself cradled there between her thighs, his arousal a delicious weight against her softness. A promise. The silence stretched out and his face was in shadow, so all she could see was the glitter of his dark gold eyes, and the echo of it deep inside her.

“It’s not hard,” he said, and she’d never heard that tone before, had she? Clipped and resigned at once. And yet somehow, that pit in her belly yawned open again as he spoke. “As long as you remember that she is always playing a role. The grande dame as benevolent mother. The living legend as compassionate parent. The great star whose favorite role of all is mom. When she was younger there were different roles threaded into the mix, but the same principle applied. You learn this as a child in a thousand painful ways and you vow, if you are at all wise, never to inflict it on another. To let it end with you.”

Paige tried to imagine Giancarlo as a small boy, all stubborn chin and fathomless eyes, and ached for him, though that didn’t explain her nervousness. It was something in the way he held himself apart from her, a certain danger rippling down the length of his body, as hard and as steel-hewn as he was. It was the way he watched her, too still, too focused.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she wanted to say so much more. She didn’t dare. Just like before, when she’d stood outside and wanted him and had known better than to go and find him, she was too uncertain. “That can’t have been easy.”

“Is that sympathy for me, cara? Don’t bother.”

He wasn’t quite scoffing at her. Not quite, though his face went fierce in the darkness, edging toward cruel the way he’d been in the beginning, and she found she was bracing herself—unable to open her mouth and stop him. Unable to defend herself at all. Whatever he’s about to say, that hard voice reminded her, like another slap, you deserve.

“Here is what I learned from my mother, the great actress,” Giancarlo said. “That she is a mystery, unknowable even to herself. That she prefers it that way. That intimacy is anathema to her because it cannot be controlled, it cannot be directed, it cannot cut to print when she is satisfied with her performance. It is one long take with no rehearsal and no do-overs, and she goes to great lengths indeed to avoid it.”

Paige wasn’t sure why she felt so stricken then, so stripped raw when he wasn’t talking about her—but then he moved again, dropping his weight against her to whisper in her ear, hot and close and dark. So very dark.

You deserve this, she told herself. Whatever it is.

“I want a woman I can trust, Paige,” he said with a ruthless inevitability. And it didn’t even hurt. It was like a deep slice of a sharp blade. She knew he’d cut her and now there was only the wait for blood. For the pain that would surely follow. And he wasn’t finished. “A woman I can know inside and out. A woman who carries no secrets, who does not hide herself away from me or from the world, who never plays a role. A woman who wants a partner, not an audience.”

“Giancarlo.” She felt torn apart even though he was holding her close. Wrecked as surely as if he’d thrown her from the roof of the towering castello. “Please.”

But the worst part was, he knew what he was doing. She’d seen it in the cast of his sensual mouth. She’d felt it in the way he’d very nearly trembled as he’d held himself above her.

He knew he was hurting her. And he kept going.

“I want a woman I can believe when she tells me she loves me,” he said, raw and fierce and she knew she deserved that, she knew she did, even though it felt a little bit like dying. And then he lifted his head to look her straight in the eyes, making it that much worse. “And that can never be you, can it? It never was. It never will be.”

Later, she thought she might take that apart and live awhile in the misery he’d packed into those last two sentences. Later, she thought she might cry for days and check herself for scars, the way she’d done ten years ago. But that was later.

Tonight Paige thought the pain in him was far greater than the hurt he’d caused—that she deserved, that voice kept telling her, and she agreed no matter how it cut her up—and she couldn’t bear it.

She didn’t care if he still hated her, even now, after another week in his bed when he’d tasted every part of her and had to have recognized the sheer honesty in her response to him. She told herself she didn’t care about that at all and some part of her believed it.

Or wanted to believe it.

But worrying about that was for later, too. Later, when she could put herself together again. Later, when she could think about something other than the man who stretched over her and broke her heart, again and again and again. Because he could.

“Giancarlo,” she said again, with more force this time. “Stop talking.”

And he surrendered with a groan, thrusting deep and hard inside of her where there was nothing but the two of them—that shimmering truth that was only theirs, wild and dizzying and hotter every time—and that perfect, wondrous fire that swept them both away in its glory.

And Paige did her best to make them both forget.

* * *

Two more weeks passed, slow and sweet. The Tuscan summer started to edge toward the coming fall. The air began to feel crisp in the mornings, and the sky seemed bluer. And if she’d allowed herself to think about such things, Paige might have believed that the tension between her and Giancarlo was easing, too—all that heavy grief mellowing, turning blue like the sky, gold like the fields, lighter and softer with age.

Or perhaps she’d taught them both how to forget.

Whatever it was, it worked. No more did she spend her days trapped in her isolated cottage, available only to him and only when he wanted—and she told herself she didn’t miss it, all that forced proximity and breathlessness. Of course she didn’t miss it.

Paige’s days looked a great deal as they had back home. She met with Violet most mornings, and helped her plan out her leisure time. Violet was particularly fond of day trips to various Italian cities to soak in all the art and culture and fashion with a side helping of adulation from the locals, which she often expedited by taking Giancarlo’s helicopter that left from the roof of the castello and kicked up such a ruckus when it returned it could be heard for miles around.

“I’ve always preferred a big entrance,” Violet had murmured the first time, that famous smile of hers on her lips as the helicopter touched down.

But when Violet was in between her trips—which meant days of spa treatments and dedicated lounging beneath artfully placed umbrellas at the side of the castello’s private pool instead—Paige was left to her own devices, which usually meant she was left to Giancarlo’s.

One day he stopped the Jeep the moment it was out of sight of the castello’s stout tower and knelt down beside the passenger door, pulling her hips to his mouth and licking his way into Paige right there—making her sob out his name into the quiet morning, so loud it startled the birds from the nearby trees. Another time he drove them out to one of the private lakes that dotted the property and they swam beneath the hot sun, then brought each other to a shuddering release in the shallow end, Giancarlo holding her to him as she took advantage of the water’s buoyancy to make him groan.

Other times, they talked. He told her of his father’s dreams for this land, its long history and his own plans to monetize it while conserving it, that it might last for many more generations. He showed her around the Etruscan ruins that cropped up in the oddest spots and demonstrated, as much as possible, that a man who knew the ins and outs of three thousand acres in such extraordinary detail seemed something like magical when the landscape in question was a woman’s body. Her body.

Paige didn’t know which she treasured more. His words or his body. But she held them to her like gifts, and she tried not to think about what she deserved, what she knew she had coming to her. She tried to focus on what she had in her hands, instead.

One lazy afternoon they lay together in the warm sun, the sweet breeze playing over their heated skin. Paige propped her chin against his chest and looked into his eyes and it was dizzying, the way it was always dizzying. And then he smiled at her without a single stray shadow in his gorgeous eyes, and it was as if the world slammed to a stop and then started in the other direction.

“I saw you dancing in the garden the other night,” he said.

There was no reason to blush. She told herself the heat she felt move over her was the sun, the leftover fire of the way he’d torn her to pieces only moments before, and nothing more.

“I haven’t danced in a long while,” she said, and she wanted to tear her gaze away from his, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. He ran his hand through her hair, slow and sweet, and she was afraid of the things he could see in her. And so afraid of the things she wanted.

“Why not?”

And Paige didn’t know how to answer that. How to tell him the why of it without blundering straight into all the land mines they’d spent these weeks avoiding. That they’d managed to avoid entirely after that night she’d come back late from Lucca.

I want a woman I can trust, he’d said, and she wanted him to trust her. She might not deserve his trust, but she wanted it.

“I was good,” she said after a moment, because that was true enough, “but I wasn’t amazing. And there were so many other dancers who were as good as I was, but wanted it way more than I did.”

Especially after he’d left and she hadn’t had the heart for it any longer, or anything else involving the body she’d used to betray the one man she’d ever given it to. She’d auditioned for one more gig and her agent had told her they’d said it was like watching a marionette. That had been her last audition. Her last dance, period.

Because once she’d lost Giancarlo, she’d lost interest in the only other thing she’d had that’d ever had any meaning in her life. Her mother had descended even further into that abyss of hers and Paige had simply been lost. And when she’d run into a woman she’d met through Giancarlo on one of those Malibu weekends, who’d needed a personal assistant a few days a week and had kind of liked that Paige was a bit notorious, it had seemed like a good idea. And more, a way to escape, once and for all, the dark little world her mother lived in.

A year later, she’d been working for a longtime television star who had no idea that competent Paige Fielding was related to that Nicola Fielding. A few years after that, she had enough experience to sign with a very exclusive agency that catered to huge stars like Violet, and when Violet’s previous assistant left her, to put herself forward as a replacement. All of those things had seemed so random back then, as they happened. But now, looking back, it seemed anything but. As if Paige’s subconscious had plotted out the only course that could bring her back to Giancarlo.

But she didn’t want to think about that now. Or about what she’d do when she was without him again. How would she re-create herself this time? Where would she go? It occurred to her then that she’d never really planned beyond Violet. Beyond the road she’d known would bring her back to him.

I want a partner, he’d said, and the problem was, she was a liar. A deliberate amnesiac, desperate to keep their past at bay. That wasn’t a partner. That was a problem.

Giancarlo was still smiling, as if this was an easy conversation, and Paige wished it was. For once, just once, she wanted something to be as easy as it should have been.

“I’m surprised,” he said, and there was something very much like affection in his gaze, transforming his face until he looked like that younger version of himself again. She told herself that it didn’t make her ache. That it didn’t make her heart twist tight. “I would have said dancing was who you were, not something you did.”

“I was twenty years old,” she heard herself say, in a rueful sort of tone that suggested an amusement she didn’t quite feel. “I had no idea who I was.”

You’re his toy, Nicola, her mother had screamed at her in those final, dark days, when Paige had believed she’d somehow navigate her way through it all unscathed—that she’d manage to keep Giancarlo, please her mother and her mother’s terrible friends, and pay off all of that debt besides. He’ll play with you until he’s done and then he’ll leave you broken and useless when he moves on to the next dumb whore. Don’t be so naive!

Giancarlo’s face changed then, and his hand froze in her hair. “I think I always forget you were so young,” he said after a moment, as if remembering her age shocked him. “What the hell was I doing? You were a kid.”

She laughed then. She couldn’t help it.

“My life wasn’t exactly pampered and easy before I came to Hollywood,” she told him, knowing as she said it that she’d never talked about that part of her life. He had been so bright, so beautiful—why would she talk about dark, grim things? “And I did that about ten minutes after I graduated from high school. My mom had the car packed and waiting on the last day of classes.” She shook her head at him as her laughter faded. “I was never really much of a kid.”

She hadn’t had the opportunity to be a kid, which wasn’t quite the same thing, but she didn’t tell him that. Even though she had the strangest idea that his childhood hadn’t been that different from hers, really. The trappings couldn’t have been more opposite, but she’d spent her whole life tiptoeing around, trying to predict what mood her mother would be in, how much she might have drunk, and how bad she could expect it to get of an evening. She wasn’t sure that was all that different from trying to gauge one of Violet’s moods.

It had never occurred to her that she’d traded one demanding mother for another, far classier one—and she wasn’t sure she liked the comparison. At least Violet cares for you in return, she told herself then. Which is more than Arleen ever did.

“I’m not sure that excuses me,” Giancarlo was saying, but then he laughed, and everything else shot straight out of her head and disappeared into that happy sound. “But then, I never had any control where you were concerned.”

“Neither did I,” she said, smiling at him, and they both stilled then. Perhaps aware in the same instant that they were straying too close to the very things they couldn’t let themselves talk about.

Or the words they couldn’t say. Words he’d told her he wouldn’t believe if she did dare speak them out loud.

But that didn’t keep her from feeling them. Nothing could.

He studied her face for a long moment, until she began to feel the breeze too keenly on her exposed skin. Or maybe that was her vulnerability. Having sex was much easier, for all it stripped her bare and seemed to involve every last cell in her body. It required only feeling and action. Doing. It was this talking that was killing her, making her want too much, making her imagine too many happy endings when, God help her, she knew better.

Paige pushed away from him, not willing to ruin this with a conversation that could only lead to more hurt. Or worse, something good that would be that much harder to leave behind when the time came. She sat up and gathered her clothes to her, pulling the flirty little sundress over her head as if the light material was armor. But she only wished it was.

“Was it ever real?” he asked quietly.

Paige didn’t ask him what he meant. She froze, her eyes on the rolling hills that spread out before her in the afternoon light, the glistening lake in the valley below. That stunning Tuscan sky studded with chubby white clouds, the vineyards and the flowers, and she didn’t think he understood that he was holding her heart between his palms and squeezing tight. Too tight.

Maybe he wouldn’t care if he did.

“It was for me,” she said, and her voice was too rough. Too dark. Too much emotion in it. “It always was for me, even at the end.”

She didn’t know what might happen then. What Giancarlo might say. Do. She felt spread open and hung out in all the open space around them, as if she was stretched across some tightrope high in the sky, subject to the whims of any passing wind—

His hand reached out and covered hers and he squeezed. Once.

And then he pulled on his clothes and he got to his feet and he never mentioned it again.

* * *

Giancarlo watched her sleep, and he did not require the chorus of angry voices inside of him to remind him that this was a bad idea.

He didn’t know what had woken him, only that he’d come alert in a rush and had turned to make sure she was still there beside him—the way he’d done for years after the photographs hit. He’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d dreamed it all away, dreamed she’d never betrayed him, dreamed that things had been different. He’d grown uncomfortably well used to lying there in his empty bed, glaring at the ceiling and wishing her ill even as he’d wanted her back, wherever she was.

But this time, she was right here. She was curled up beside him and sound asleep, so that she didn’t even murmur when he stretched out on his side, his front to her back, and held her there. The way he knew he wouldn’t do if she was awake, lest it give her too many ideas...

So much for your revenge plot, he chided himself, but it all seemed so absurd when she was lying beside him, her features taking on an angelic cast in the faint light that poured in from the skylight above them, the stars themselves lighting her with that special glow.

He found himself tracing the line of her cheek with his finger, the memories of ten years ago so strong he could almost have sworn that no time had passed. That the pictures and the separation had been the bad dream. Because he might be wary of her, but every day it seemed that was only because he thought he should be, not because he truly was. And every day it seemed to make less and less sense.

She had been so young.

He didn’t know how he’d forgotten that. How he’d failed to factor it in. When he’d been twenty he’d been a bona fide idiot, making an ass of himself at Stanford and enjoying every minute of it. He certainly hadn’t been performing for a living, running from this audition to that gig with no guarantee he’d ever make his rent or make some money or even get cast. When Violet had been twenty years old she’d been famously divorcing the much, much older producer who had married her and made her when she’d been only seventeen. No one had called her a mercenary bitch, at least, not to her face. She’d been lauded for her powerful choices and the control she’d taken over her career.

Maybe that was why he’d spent a decade this furious with Paige. Because he loved his mother, he truly did, but he’d wanted something else for himself. He’d wanted a girl who wouldn’t think of herself first, second, last and always. He’d wanted a girl who would put him first. Had he known Paige wouldn’t stick with dancing? Had he assumed she would gravitate toward the life she had here in Tuscany, which was more or less arranged around pleasing him?

He’d told her he wanted a partner, but nothing he’d done supported that. Back in Malibu, he’d been jealous of the time she spent practicing and really anything else that took her away from him. This time around he was jealous of her devotion to his own mother. Did he want a partner? Or did he want her to treat him like a partner while he did whatever he liked?

Giancarlo didn’t much care for the answers that came to him then, in the quiet night, the woman he couldn’t seem to get over lying so sweetly beside him. All he knew was that he was tired of fighting this, of holding her at arm’s length when he wanted her close. He was tired of the walls he put up. He hated himself more every time he hurt her—

We all must practice what we preach if we are to achieve anything in this life, his father had told him a long time ago as they’d walked the land together, plotting out the placement of vineyards the older man hadn’t lived to see to completion. The trouble is we’re all much better at the preaching and not so good at the listening, even to ourselves.

It had to stop. He had to stop. There was no point demanding her trust if he refused to give his own.

He shifted beside her, pulling her close and burying his face in the sweet heat of her neck.

It was time to admit what he’d known for years. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, no matter what she called herself. No matter what she’d done when she was little more than a kid. And he’d never stopped loving her.

“Come sei bella,” he whispered into the dark. How beautiful you are. And, “Mi manchi.” I miss you. And then, “I love you,” in English, though he knew she couldn’t hear him.

Giancarlo understood then, in the soft darkness, Paige snuggled close in his arms as if she’d been there all along, that he always had. He always would.

He just needed to tell her when she could hear him.

* * *

Paige woke up the next morning in her usual rush when the morning light danced over her face from the skylights above. Giancarlo was next to her, his big body wrapped around her, and she thought, this is my favorite day.

She thought that every day, lately. No matter what that voice in her head had to say about it.

And she continued to think it until her stomach went funny in a sudden, hideous lurch, and she had to pull away from him and race for the toilet.

“I must have eaten something strange,” she said when she came out of the bathroom to find him frowning with concern, sitting on the side of his bed. She grimaced. “Your mother insisted we eat those weird sausages in Cinque Terre yesterday. One must not have agreed with me.”

But Violet wasn’t affected. “I have a stomach of steel, my dear girl,” she proclaimed when Paige called her to check in, “which is handy when one is living off craft service carts for weeks at a time in all the corners of the earth.” And it happened again the next morning. And then the morning after that.

And on the fourth morning, when Paige ran for the bathroom, Giancarlo came in after her and placed a package on the floor beside her as she knelt there, pale and sick and wishing for death. It took her a long moment to calm the wild, lurching beat of her heart. To force back the dizziness as that awful feeling in her stomach retreated again. To feel well enough to focus on what he’d put there in front of her.

Only to feel even more light-headed when she did.

It was a pregnancy test.

“Use it,” Giancarlo said, his voice so clipped and stern she didn’t dare look up at him to see if his expression matched. She didn’t think her stomach could take it. She knew her heart couldn’t. “Bring me the result. Then we’ll talk.”