Читать книгу The Revenge Collection 2018 - Кейт Хьюит, Эль Кеннеди - Страница 46
ОглавлениеPAIGE CLIMBED SHAKILY to her feet after his footsteps retreated. She rinsed her mouth out with a scoop of water from the sink and then she followed the directions on the package. She waited the requisite amount of time—she timed it on her phone, to the second—and when the alarm chirped at her she let herself look.
And just like that, everything was forever altered. But all she could do was stare at the little stick with its unmistakable plus sign and wish she wasn’t naked.
That didn’t merely say things about her character, she thought dimly. It said far more dire things about the kind of mother she’d be to the tiny little life that was somehow there inside her—
That was when it hit her. It was a tidal wave of raw feeling, impossible to categorize or separate or do anything but survive as it all tore through her. Terror. Joy. Panic. How could she be someone’s mother when all she’d ever known of mothering was Arleen? How could she be someone’s mother?
She was holding on to the sink in a death grip when it passed, tears in her eyes and her knees weak beneath her. It was hard to breathe, but Paige made herself do it. In, then out. Deep. Measured.
Then she remembered Giancarlo was waiting for her, and worse, what he’d said before he’d gone downstairs. And Paige understood then. That this was her worst fear come to life, literally.
That this was the other shoe she’d spent all this time knowing would drop.
She dressed before she went downstairs, glad she’d worn something more substantial than a silly dress the night before. That meant she could truly wrap herself up in her clothes as if they would offer her protection from whatever was about to come. She pulled her hair back into a tight knot at the nape of her neck and she took longer than she should have, and she only went to find him when she understood that dragging this out was going to make it worse. Was making it worse.
This will be fine, she told herself as she walked down the wide, smooth stairs, aware that she was delivering herself to her own execution. But there was, despite everything, that teeny tiny sliver of hope deep inside of her that maybe, just maybe, she’d be wrong about this. That he’d surprise her.
We’re both adults. These things happen...
Giancarlo waited for her in the open doors that led out to the loggia—which, she supposed with the faintest hint of the hysteria she fought to keep away for fear it might swamp her, was appropriate, given where this baby had likely been conceived. He didn’t turn when she came up behind him, he merely held out his hand.
Demonstrating how little he trusted her, she realized, when she finally understood what he was doing and what he expected her to put in his palm. Not her hand, for comfort. The pregnancy test. For proof.
Because he expected tricks and lies from her, even now. Even about this.
She felt something topple over inside of her, some foundation or other, but she couldn’t concentrate on that now. There was only Giancarlo, scowling down at the slender stick in his hand before he bit out a curse and flung it aside.
A thousand smart responses to that moved through her, but she was still shaky from that immense emotional slap that had walloped her upstairs, and she kept them all to herself. He stood there, every muscle tight, even his jaw a hard, granite accusation, and he didn’t look at her for a long time.
When he did, it was worse.
Paige waited for him to speak, even as something inside her protested that no, she did not deserve his anger here. That she hadn’t done this alone. But she shoved that down, too.
“I thought you were on the pill.”
She blinked at the ferocity in his tone. The bite.
“No, you didn’t. You used condoms after the first night. Why would you do that if you thought I was on the pill?” He stared at her, and the truth of that rolled over her. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe through it. Then she could, and it hurt. It more than hurt. Another foundation turned to dust in an instant. “Oh.”
“Tell me,” he said in that vicious, cruel way she hadn’t heard in almost a month now, so long she’d forgotten how awful it was, how deeply it clawed into her, “what possible reason you could have for sleeping with a man without protection?”
“You did the same thing.” But her tongue felt too thick and her head buzzed and she’d known this would happen. Maybe not this. Maybe not a pregnancy. But that look on his face. She’d always known she’d see that again. She hadn’t understood, until now, how very much she’d wanted to be wrong. “You were right there with me.”
“I thought you were on the pill.”
She felt helpless. Terrified. Sick. “Why?”
He swore again, not in Italian this time, and she flinched. “What kind of question is that? Because you were before.”
“That was different.” She was too shaken to think about what she was saying, so she told him the truth without any varnishing. “My mother was terrified I’d end up pregnant at sixteen and forced to raise the baby, like she was with me, so she had me on the pill from the moment I hit puberty.”
“And you stopped?” He sounded furious and disbelieving, and Paige didn’t understand. How could he think she’d planned this? How could she have, even if she’d wanted to? You knew he didn’t use anything that first night. Why didn’t you say something? But she knew. She hadn’t wanted him to stop. She’d wanted him more than anything. “Why the hell would you do something like that?”
“I told you.”
Paige was whispering, and she’d backed up so her spine was against the far side of the open doorway as if the house might keep her from collapsing to the floor, but Giancarlo hadn’t moved at all. He didn’t have to move. His black fury took up all the air. It blocked out the sun.
This is what you deserve, her mother’s voice said in her head, filled with a sick glee. This is what happens to little whores like you, Nicola. You end up like me.
“You’re the only man I’ve slept with the past ten years,” she told him, bald and unflinching. He let out a sound she couldn’t interpret and so she kept going, because she was certain she could explain this to him so he would understand. He had to understand. They were going to be parents whether he liked it or not. “You’re the only man I’ve ever slept with, Giancarlo.”
“Do not try to sell me that nonsense, not now,” he barked at her, as if the words were welling up from somewhere deep inside of him. “I didn’t believe the story that you were a virgin then, not even when I thought I could trust you. I’ll hand it to you, though. You really do remember all the tortured details of the lies you spin.”
“What are you talking about?” Paige shook her head, trying to keep her panic at bay, trying to keep the tears from her voice, and not really succeeding at either. “Who lies about being a virgin at twenty?”
“I can’t believe I fell for this twice,” he spat, his gaze a molten fury of dark gold, his mouth grim. “I can’t believe I walked straight into this. Let me guess. You’ve never given motherhood a moment’s thought, but today, as you gazed upon the test that confirmed your pregnancy, something stirred within you that you’d never felt before.” His laugh felt like acid. “Is that about right?”
“Why are you talking to me like I planned this?” she cried. “No one forced you to have sex with me! And no one forced you to do it without a condom!”
“You’re good,” he said, still in that horrible way that curled inside of her, oily and thick. “I’ll give you that. I never saw this coming. I thought I was being too hard on you. I was falling in love with you all over again, but in the end, you’re just like her. You always have been. I’m such an idiot.”
“For all you know I have no intention of keeping it,” she threw at him, desperate to make him look at her like a person again, not like a scam with two legs. Exactly the way he had ten years ago, when he’d waved that magazine in the air outside her apartment and she’d almost wished he’d thrown it at her—because that would be better, she’d thought then, and less violent than that look on his face in that moment before he’d turned and walked away.
But the look of contempt he gave her now was not an improvement.
And his words finally penetrated. I was falling in love with you.
“Am I to understand that this is your threat?” he asked in that low, lethal way of his that made her shudder. That made that hollow thing inside of her grow wide and grow teeth. That made it perfectly clear any love he might have felt for her was very much past tense. “I applaud you, Nicola,” and that name was worse than acid. If he’d hauled off and hit her, he couldn’t have hurt her more. “Most women would dance around the issue. But you, as ever, go right to the heart of it.”
“I’m not threatening you,” she said wildly, only realizing when her cheeks felt cool in the breeze that tears were running down her face. “This wasn’t planned. I don’t know why you insist on thinking the worst of me—”
“Stop.” It was a command, harsh and cold. “I’m not doing this with you again. I’m not pretending it matters what you say. You’ll do what you like, Nicola. You always do. And like a cockroach I have no doubt you’ll survive whatever happens and come back even stronger. Violet’s protégé in more ways than I realized.”
“Why would I force a child on you?” she demanded. “Why?”
“Perhaps you thought your payday last time wasn’t enough,” he bit out. “Perhaps you want to make certain you really will make it into Violet’s will. Perhaps you’re looking forward to selling as many tabloid stories as you can. It wouldn’t take much effort to position yourself as one of those celebrities for no apparent reason, not with Violet’s grandchild in your clutches. To say nothing of the Alessi estate. You must know by now I’d never keep my heritage from my own child.” He was nearly white with fury. “Which are only a few of the reasons I never wanted one.”
“Giancarlo—”
But he straightened, his expression changed, and it was as if he disappeared, right there in front of her. As if the man she knew was simply...gone.
“If you decide to have the baby, inform my lawyers,” he told her with a hideous finality that shuddered through her like an earthquake. There was none of that bright gold fury in his eyes any longer when he looked at her. There was only emptiness. A dark, cold nothing that made everything inside her twist into blackness. “I will pay whatever child support you deem necessary, and I will pay more if you honor my wish for privacy and keep my name to yourself. But I don’t expect that’s in your nature, is it? How can you leverage my privacy to your best advantage?”
“Please,” she said, pleading with him now, unable to stop the sobs that poured out of her, worse, perhaps, because she’d always known this was coming. But not today. Not like this. She still wasn’t ready. “You can’t—”
“Do not attempt to contact my mother again.” His voice got dangerous then. Flint and fury, and still, he was a stranger. “I will have you arrested and thrown in jail and no judge in any country would ever grant a woman with mental problems and a prison record custody of a child over me. I want you to remember that. You so much as text Violet and you’ll never see that child again.”
“Stop,” she threw at him, in a terrible whisper. “You can’t think—”
“A driver will pick you up in an hour,” he told her, and he was merciless. Pitiless. As if he was made of marble and was that soft, that bendable. “I want you gone. And I never, ever want to see you again. Not in ten minutes. Not in another ten years. Is that clear?”
Paige couldn’t reply. She was shaking so hard she was afraid she’d fall over, the tears were hot and endless, and he looked at her as if she was a stranger. As if he was. Crafted of marble, but far crueler. Marble might crush her. But he’d torn her into pieces first.
“Do you understand?” he asked, even harsher than before.
“Yes,” Paige managed to say. “I understand.” She scrubbed her hands over her face and sucked in a breath and tried one last time. “Giancarlo—”
But he was already gone.
It was over.
* * *
The slippery December roads were treacherous but the wind outside was even worse, rattling his SUV and shaking the skeletons of the trees on either side of the New England country roads.
And inside him, Giancarlo knew, it was colder and darker still.
He had not been in a good mood to begin with when he’d left Logan International Airport in Boston more than two hours earlier on this latest quest to find Paige. It was fair to say he’d been in a black mood for the past three months.
The tiny, lonely little Maine town a hundred miles from anywhere sat under a fresh coat of snow, lights twinkling as the December evening fell sudden and fast in the middle of what other places might still consider the afternoon, and he felt the stirrings of adrenaline as he navigated through the very few streets that comprised the village to the small, white clapboard house that was his destination.
He’d hired detectives. He’d scoured half of the West Coast and a good part of the East Coast himself. This was the last place on earth he’d have thought to look for her—which was, he could admit, why it had no doubt made such a perfect hiding place.
This time, he knew she was here. He’d seen the photo on his mobile when he’d landed in Boston from Italy, taken this very morning. But he wouldn’t believe it until he saw her with his own eyes.
He could admit the place held a certain desolate charm, Giancarlo thought grimly as he climbed from the car, the boots he only ever wore at ski resorts in places like Vail or St. Moritz crunching into the snow beneath him. The drive from Boston into the remote state of Maine had reminded him of the books he’d had to read while in his American high school. Lonely barns in barren fields and the low winter sky pressing down, gray and sullen. Here and there a hint of the wild, rocky Atlantic coast, lighthouses the only bit of faint cheer against the coming dark.
It felt like living inside his own bleak soul, in the great mess he’d made.
Giancarlo navigated his way over the salted sidewalk and up the old front steps to the clapboard house’s front door, able to hear the faint sound of piano music from inside. DANCE LESSONS, read the sign on the door, making his chest feel tight.
He stopped there, frozen on the porch with his hand on the doorknob, because he heard her voice. For the first time since that last, ugly morning in his Tuscan cottage. Counting off the beat.
Wedging its way into his heart like one of the vicious icicles that hung from the roof above him.
He wrenched the door open and walked inside, and then she was right there in front of him after all this time. Right there.
She took his breath away.
Giancarlo’s heart thundered in his chest and he forced himself to take stock of his surroundings. The ground floor of this house was its dance studio, an open space with only a few pillars and a class in session. And the woman he’d accused of a thousand different scams was not lounging about being fed bonbons she’d bought with his mother’s money or her own infamy, she was teaching the class. To what looked like a pack of very pink-faced, very uncoordinated young girls.
He was standing in what passed for the small studio’s lobby and if the glares from the women sitting in the couches and chairs along the wall were anything to go by, he’d disrupted the class with his loud entrance.
Not that Giancarlo cared about them in the slightest.
Paige, he noted as he forced himself to breathe again and not do anything rash, did not look at him at all, which was a feat indeed, given the mirrors on every available wall. She merely carried on teaching as if he was nothing to her.
But he refused to accept that. Particularly if it were true.
The class continued. And Giancarlo studied her as she moved in front of the small collection of preadolescents, calling out instructions and corrections and encouragement in equal measure. She looked as if she hadn’t slept much, but only when he studied her closely. Her hair was still that inky black, darker now than he remembered, and he wondered if it was the sun that brought out its auburn hints. She moved the way she did in all his dreams, all of that grace and ease, as if she flowed rather than walked.
And she was still slim, with only the faintest thickening at her belly to tell him what he hadn’t known until now, what he’d been afraid to wonder about until he’d finally tracked her down in what had to be, literally, one of the farthest places she could go in the opposite direction of Bel Air. And him.
That she was keeping the baby. His baby.
Giancarlo didn’t know what that was inside of him then. Relief. Fury. A new surge of determination. All the rest of the dark things he’d always felt for this woman, turned inside out. All mixed together until it felt new. Until he did.
She was keeping their baby.
He would have loved her anyway. He did. But he couldn’t help but view her continuing pregnancy as a sign. As hope.
As far more than he deserved.
It seemed like twenty lifetimes before the class ended, and the women in the chairs collected their young. He paid them no attention as they herded their charges past him out into the already-pitch-black night; he simply waited, arms crossed and his brooding gaze on Paige.
And eventually, the last stranger left and slammed the door shut behind her small town curiosity, and it was only the two of them in the glossy, bright room. Paige and him and all their history, and she still didn’t look at him.
“You decided to keep it.” He didn’t know why he said it like that, fierce and low, and he watched her stiffen, but it was too late to call it back.
“If you came here for an apology,” she said in a low voice he hardly recognized, and then she turned to face him fully and he blinked because she hardly looked like herself, “you can shove it right up your—”
“I don’t want an apology.” It was temper, he realized belatedly. Pure fury that transformed her lovely face and turned her eyes nearly gray. As if she would kill him with her own hands if she crossed the wide, battered floor and got too close to him, and there was no reason that should shock him and intrigue him in equal measure. “I spent three months tracking you down, Paige.”
Her eyes narrowed and if anything, grew darker.
“Are you sure that’s what you want to call me?” she threw at him. “I know that historically you’ve had some trouble keeping my name straight.”
Giancarlo felt a muscle move in his cheek and realized he was clenching his jaw.
“I know your name.”
“I can’t tell you how that delights me.” Her temper was like a fog in the air between them, thick and impenetrable, and he thought she might even have growled at him. “The only thing that would delight me more would be if you’d turn around and go away and pretend we never met. That’s what I’ve been doing and so far? It’s been the best three months of my life.”
He had that coming. He knew that. He told himself it didn’t even sting.
“I understand,” he began as carefully as he could, “that—”
“Don’t bother,” she snapped, cutting him off. He couldn’t recall she’d ever done that before. In fact, there was only one person in the world who interrupted him with impunity and she’d given birth to him—and wasn’t terribly thrilled with him at the moment, either. “I don’t want your explanations. I don’t care.”
She turned away from him, but the mirrors betrayed her, showing him a hint of the Paige he knew in the way her face twisted before she wrestled it back under control. Another sliver of hope, if he was a desperate man. He was.
Giancarlo walked farther into the studio, still studying her. She was in bare feet and a pair of leggings, with a loose tunic over them that drooped down over one shoulder. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He wanted to press his mouth to the bare skin of her shoulder, then explore that brand-new belly of hers. Then, perhaps, that molten heat of hers that he knew had only ever been his. He was primitive enough to relish that.
He’d believed her. It had taken him longer than it should have to admit that to himself. He’d believed her then, and he believed her now—but the fact she’d only ever given herself to him had meanings he’d been afraid to explore. He wasn’t afraid anymore.
Giancarlo had lost her once. What was there to fear now? He’d already lived through the worst thing that could happen to him. Twice.
“How did you find this place?” he asked as he walked toward her. He meant, how did you settle on this small, faraway, practically hidden town it took me three months to find? “Why did you come here in the first place?”
“I can’t imagine why you care.” Paige shoved her things into a bag and then straightened. “I doubt that you do.” She scowled at him when he kept coming, when he only stopped when he was within touching distance. “What do you want, Giancarlo?”
“I don’t know.” That wasn’t true, but he didn’t know how to express the rest of it, and not when she kept throwing him like this. He realized he’d never seen her angry before. Or anything but wild—wildly in love, wildly apologetic, wild beneath his hands. Never cold like this. Never furious. He supposed he deserved that, too. “You’re so angry.”
Paige actually laughed then, and it wasn’t her real laugh. It was a bitter little thing that made his chest hurt. More than it already did, than it had since that morning in Tuscany.
“You’re unbelievable,” she whispered. Then she shook her head. “I could be angry about any number of things, Giancarlo, but let’s pick one at random, shall we? You told me you never wanted to see me again, and I happen to think that’s the best plan you’ve had yet. So please, go back to wherever you came from. Go back to Italy and ruin someone else’s life. Leave me—leave us—alone.”
He wanted to pull her close to him. He wanted to taste her. He wanted. But he settled for shaking his head slightly and watching her face, instead, as if she might disappear again if he took his eyes off her.
“I’m sorry,” he said into the tense quiet. “It’s not that I’m not listening to you. But I’ve never seen you angry, ever. I didn’t think it was something you knew how to do.”
Paige blinked, and pulled the bag higher on her shoulder, gripping the strap with both of her hands.
“It wasn’t,” she said simply. “Especially around you. But it turns out, that’s not a very healthy way to live a life. It ends up putting you at the mercy of terrible people because you never say no. You never tell them to stop. You never stand up for yourself until it’s too late.”
And when her eyes met his, they slammed into him so hard it was like a punch, and Giancarlo understood she meant him. That he had done those things to her. That he was one more terrible person to her. It tasted sour in his mouth, that realization. And he hated it with almost as much force as he understood, at last, that it was true. That he’d treated her horribly. That he was precisely the kind of man he’d been raised to detest. That was why he’d come after her, was it not? To face these things.
But that didn’t make hearing it any easier.
“That is not the kind of life my baby is going to live, Giancarlo,” Paige told him fiercely. “Not if I have anything to say about it.” She tilted her chin up as if she expected him to argue. “This baby will have a home. This baby will be wanted. Loved. Celebrated. This baby is not a mistake. Or a problem. This baby will belong somewhere. With me.”
As if she really had punched him, and hard, it took Giancarlo a moment to recover from all her fierceness, and more, what it told him. And when he did, it was to see her storming across the room.
Away from him. Again.
“Come have dinner with me,” he began.
“No.”
“Coffee then.” He eyed her, remembering that tiny bump. “Or whatever you can drink.”
“And again, no.”
“Paige.” He didn’t have any idea what he was doing and he thought he hated that almost as much as the distance between them, which seemed much, much worse now that they were standing in the same room. “It’s my baby, too.”
She whirled back around, so fast he thought someone without her grace might have toppled over, and then she jabbed a finger in the air in a manner he imagined was meant to show him how very much she wished it was something sharp she could stick in a far more tender area.
“She is my baby!” And her voice grew louder with each word. “Mine. I knew I was pregnant with the baby of a man who hated me for five whole minutes before you ripped me into shreds and walked away, but believe me, Giancarlo, I heard you. You want nothing to do with me. You want nothing to do with this baby. And that is fine—”
“I never said I wanted nothing to do with the baby,” he protested. “Quite the opposite.”
“We can debate that when there’s a baby, then,” she hurled at him, hardly stopping to take a breath. “Which by my calculations gives me six months and then some of freedom from having to talk to you.”
“But I want to talk to you.” And he didn’t care that he sounded more demanding than apologetic, then. She might truly want nothing to do with him, ever again, and he understood he deserved that. But he had to be sure. “I want to see how you’re doing. I want to understand what happened between us in Italy.”
“No, you don’t.”
And her face twisted again, but her eyes were still that dark gray and they still burned, and he couldn’t tell what she wanted. Only that as ever, he was hurting her. The way he always did.
“You don’t want to understand me,” Paige told him. “You want me to understand you. And believe me, I already do. I understood you when you were the very wealthy, semifamous director who took an unexpected interest in a backup dancer. I understood you when you were the noble son standing up for his mother against the potential lunatic who had infiltrated her home behind your back. I even understood you when you were the beleaguered, betrayed ex, drawn back into an intense sexual relationship against his better judgment by the deceitful little seductress he couldn’t put behind him. I understood myself sick.”
She pulled in a breath, as if it hurt her, which was when Giancarlo realized he hadn’t breathed throughout this. That he couldn’t seem to draw a breath at all.
“And then,” Paige continued, her voice strong and even, “once I left, I understood that you have never, ever pretended to be there for me in any way. Not ten years ago. Not now. It never crossed your mind to ask me why I did something like sell those pictures, just as it never occurred to you to ask me how I felt about finding myself pregnant. The only thing you care about is you.”
“Paige.”
She ignored him. “You never asked me anything at all. You’ve never treated me liked anything but a storm you had to weather.” She shook her head. “You’re the damned hurricane, Giancarlo, but you blame me for the rain.” She shifted then, her hands moving to shelter that little bump, as if she needed to protect it from him, and he thought that might be the worst cut, the deepest wound. He was surprised to find he still stood. “All I want from you is what you’ve always given me. Your absence.”
The room seemed dizzy with her words when she’d stopped speaking, as if the mirrors could hardly bear the weight of them. Or maybe that was him. Maybe he’d fallen down and he simply couldn’t tell the difference.
“You said she.”
“What?”
Giancarlo didn’t know where that had come from. He hadn’t known he meant to speak at all. He was too busy seeing himself through her eyes—and not liking it at all. “Before. You called the baby a she.”
“Yes.” She seemed worn-out then, in a sudden rush. As if she’d lanced a wound with a surge of adrenaline and the poison had all run out, leaving nothing behind it. “I’m having a little girl in May.”
“A daughter.” His voice was gentle, yet filled with something it took him a moment to identify. Wonder. He heard it move through the room and he saw her shudder as she pulled in a breath, and he knew, somehow, that everything wasn’t lost. Not yet. Not quite yet. “We’re having a daughter.”
“Go away, Giancarlo,” she said, but it was a whisper. Just a whisper with none of that fury behind it, and a hint of the kind of sadness he’d become all too familiar with these past few months. And he wanted nothing more than to protect her, even if it was from himself.
Perhaps especially then.
“I can do that,” he said gruffly. “Tonight. But I’ll keep coming back, Paige. Every day until you talk to me. I can be remarkably persuasive.”
“Is that a threat?” She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and he thought she looked tired again, but not threatened. “This isn’t your land in Italy. I’m not a prisoner here.”
“I don’t want to keep you prisoner,” he said, which was not entirely true. He reminded himself he was a civilized man. Or the son of one anyway, little as he might have lived up to his father’s standards lately. “I want to have dinner with you.”
She eyed him, and he could see the uncertainty on her pretty face. “That’s all?”
“Do you want me to lie to you?” he asked quietly. “It’s a start. Just give me a start.”
She shook her head, but her eyes seemed less gray now and more that changeable blue-green he recognized, and Giancarlo couldn’t help but consider that progress.
“What if I don’t want a start?” she asked after a moment. “Any start? We’ve had two separate starts marked by ten years of agony and now this. It’s not fun.”
He smiled. “Then it’s dinner. Everyone needs to eat dinner. Especially pregnant women, I understand.”
“But not with you,” Paige said, and there was something different in her voice then. Some kind of resolve. “Not again. It’s not worth it.”
She turned away again and headed toward the door he could see in the back, and this time, he could tell, she was really going to leave.
And Giancarlo knew he should let her go. He knew he’d done more than enough already. The practical side of him pointed out that six months was a reasonable amount of time to win a person over, to say nothing of the following lifetime of the child they’d made. Their daughter. He had all the time in the world.
He’d spent three months trying to find her—what was another night? He knew he should forfeit this battle, the better to win the war. But he couldn’t do it.
Giancarlo couldn’t watch her walk away again.
