The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

And Paige was running out of ways to rank which part of this was the worst part, but she couldn’t argue. Not with any of what he’d said. Yet rather than making her shrink down and curl up into the fetal position right there on the terra-cotta pavers beneath their feet, the way she’d done the last time he’d looked at her like that and called her names she’d richly deserved, it made something else shiver into being inside her. Something that made her straighten instead of shrink. Something that gave her the strength to meet his terrible glare, to lift her chin despite all of that furious, condemning gold.

“I love her.”

That hung there between them, stark and heavy. And, she realized belatedly, an echo of what she’d said ten years ago, when it had been much too late. When he’d believed her even less than he did now. When she’d known full well that saying it would only hurt him, and she’d done it anyway. I’m so sorry, Giancarlo. I love you.

“What did you say?” His voice was too quiet. So soft and deliberately menacing it made her shake inside, though she didn’t give in to it. She forced her spine even straighter. “What did you dare say to me?”

“This has nothing to do with you.” That was true, in its way. Paige wasn’t a lunatic, no matter what he might think. She’d simply understood a long time ago that she’d lost him and it was irrevocable. She’d accepted it. This wasn’t about getting him back. It was about paying a debt in the only way she could. “It never did have anything to do with you,” she continued when she was certain the shaking inside her wouldn’t bleed over into her voice. “Not the way you’re thinking. Not really.”

He shook his head slightly, as if he was reeling, and he muttered something in a stream of silken, shaken Italian that she shouldn’t have felt like that, all over her skin. Because it wasn’t a caress. It was its opposite.

“This is a nightmare.” He returned his furious glare to her and it was harder. Fiercer. Gold fury and that darkness inside it. “But nightmares end. You keep on, all these years later. It was two short months and too many explicit pictures. I knew better than to trust a woman like you in the first place, but this ought to be behind me.” His lips thinned. “Why won’t you go away, Nicola?”

“Paige.” She couldn’t tolerate that name. Never again. It was the emblem of all the things she’d lost, all the terrible choices she’d been forced to make, all the sacrifices she’d made for someone so unworthy it made her mouth taste acrid now, like ash and regret. “I’d rather you call me nothing but mercenary bitch instead of that.”

“I don’t care what you call yourself.” Not quite a shout. Not quite. But his voice thudded into her like a hail of bullets anyway, and she couldn’t disguise the way she winced. “I want you gone. I want this poison of yours out of my life, away from my mother. It disgusts me that you’ve been here all this time without my knowing it. Like a malignant cancer hiding in plain sight.”

And she should go. Paige knew she should. This was twisted and wrong and sick besides, no matter the purity of her intentions. All her rationalizations, all her excuses, what did any of them matter when she was standing here causing more pain to this man? He’d never deserved it. She really was a cancer, she thought. Her own mother had always thought so, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said, yet again, and she heard the bleakness in her own voice that went far beyond an apology. And his dark, hot eyes were on hers. Demanding. Furious. Still broken, and she knew she’d done that. It stirred up sensations inside of her that felt too much like ghosts, an ache and a fire at once. But Paige held his gaze. “More than you’ll ever know. But I can’t leave Violet. I promised her.”

Giancarlo’s dark gaze blazed into a brilliant fury then, and it took every bit of backbone and bravado Paige had not to fall a step back when he advanced on her. Or to turn tail and start running the way she’d wanted to do since she’d heard his voice, down the expansive lawn, through the garden and out into the wild canyon below, as far as she could get from this man. She wanted to flee. She wanted to run and never stop running. The urge to do it beat in her blood.

But she hadn’t done it ten years ago, when she should have, and from far scarier people than Giancarlo Alessi. She wouldn’t do it now. No matter how hard her heart catapulted itself against her chest. No matter how great and painful the sobs she refused to let loose from inside.

“You seem to be under the impression I am playing a game with you,” Giancarlo said softly, so very softly, the menace in it like his hand around her throat. What was the matter with her that the notion moved in her like a dark thrill instead of a threat? “I am not.”

“I understand that this is difficult for you, and that it’s unlikely you’ll believe that was never my intention.” Paige tried to sound conciliatory. She did. But she thought it came out sounding a whole lot more like panic, and panic was as useless as regret. She had no space for either. This was the life she’d made. This was what she’d sown. “But I’m afraid my loyalty is to your mother, not to you.”

“I apologize.” It was a snide snap, not an apology. “But the irony rendered me temporarily deaf. Did you—you—just utter the word loyalty?”

Paige gritted her teeth. She didn’t bow her head. “You didn’t hire me. She did.”

“A point that will be moot if I kill you with my bare hands,” he snarled at her, and she should have been afraid of him, but she wasn’t. She had no doubt that he’d throw her off the estate, that if he could tear her to shreds with his words he would, and gladly, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically. Not Giancarlo.

Maybe that was the last remnant of the girl she’d been, she thought then. That foolish, unbearably naive girl, who’d imagined that a bright and brand-new love could fix anything. That it was the only thing that mattered. She knew better now; she’d learned her lessons well and truly and in the harshest of ways, but she still believed Giancarlo was a good man. No matter what her betrayal had done to him.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was rough with all the emotion she knew she couldn’t show him. He’d only hate her more. “But you won’t.”

“Please,” he all but whispered, and she saw too much on his face then, the agony and the fury and the darkness between, “do not tell me you are so delusional as to imagine I wouldn’t rip you apart if I could.”

“Of course,” she agreed, and it was hard to tell what hurt when everything did. When she was sure she would leave this encounter with visible bruises. “If you could. But that’s not who you are.”

“The man you thought you knew is dead, Nicola,” he said, that hated name a deliberate blow, and Paige finally did step back then, it was so brutal. “He died ten years ago and there will be no breathing him back to life with your sad tales of loyalty and your pretty little lies. There will be no resurrection. I might look like the man you knew, for two profoundly stupid months a lifetime ago, but mark my words. He is gone as if he never was.”

It shouldn’t be so sad, when it was nothing more than a simple truth. Not a surprise. Not a slap, even, despite his harsh tone. There was absolutely no reason she should feel swollen anew with all that useless, unwieldy, impossible grief, as if it had never faded, never so much as shifted an inch, in all this time. As if it had only been waiting to flatten her all over again.

“I accept both responsibility and blame for what happened ten years ago,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could, and he would never know how hard that was. How exposed she felt, how off balance. Just as he would never know that those two months she’d lost herself in him had been the best of her life, worth whatever had come after. Worth anything, even this. “I can’t do anything else. But I promised Violet I wouldn’t leave her. Punish me if you have to, Giancarlo. Don’t punish her.”

* * *

Giancarlo Alessi was a man made almost entirely of faults, a fact he was all too familiar with after the bleakness of the past decade and the price he’d paid for his own foolishness, but he loved his mother. His complicated, grandiose, larger-than-life idol of a mother, who he knew adored him in her own, particular way. It didn’t matter how many times Violet had sold him out for her own purposes—to combat tales of her crumbling marriage, to give the tabloids something to talk about other than her romantic life, to serve this or that career purpose over the years.

He’d come to accept that having one’s private moments exposed to the public was par for the course when one was related to a Hollywood star of Violet’s magnitude—which was why he had vowed never, ever to have children that she could use for her own ends. No happy grandchildren to grace magazine articles about her surprising depths. No babies she could coo over in front of carefully selected cameras to shore up her image when necessary. He’d never condemn a child of his to that life, no matter how much he might love Violet himself. He’d pass on his Italian title to a distant cousin of his father’s and let the sharp brutality of all that Hollywood attention end with him.

He forgave his mother. It was who she was. It was this woman he wanted to hurt, not Violet.

This woman who could call herself any name she wanted, but who was still Nicola to him. The architect of his downfall. The agent of his deepest shame.

The too-pretty dancer he’d lost his head over like a thousand shameful clichés, staining his ancient title, his relationship with his late father, and himself in the process. The grasping, conniving creature who had led him around by his groin and made him a stranger to himself in the process. The woman who had made him complicit in the very thing he hated above all others: his presence in the damned tabloids, his most private life on parade.

He’d yet to forgive himself. He’d never planned on forgiving her.

Standing here in this house he’d vowed he’d never enter again, the woman he’d been determined he’d cut from his memory if it killed him within his reach once more, he told himself the edgy thing that surged in him, making him feel something like drunk—dangerously unsteady, a little too close to dizzy—was a cold, clear, measured hatred. No more and no less than she deserved.

It had to be cold. Controlled. He wouldn’t permit it to be anything else. He wouldn’t let it run hot, burn within him the way loving her had, take charge of him and ruin him anew. He wasn’t that trusting, gullible fool any longer, not as he’d been then—so sure he’d been the experienced one, the calloused and jaded one, that no one could take advantage of. She’d made certain he’d never be that idiot again.

He would save that kind of heated, brooding dislike for the sprawling, sunbaked city of Los Angeles itself. For California, brown and gold with only its manufactured, moneyed swaths of green as relief in another breathless summer. For the elegant monstrosity that was La Bellissima. For his heedless, callow twenties playing silly playboy games with films and a parade of famous and beautiful lovers, which this woman had brought to a screeching, excruciatingly public halt. For that dry blast of relentless heat on the wind, spiced with smoke from far-off brushfires and the hint of the Pacific Ocean that never cooled it, that made him feel too edgy, too undone. For his mother’s recklessness in lovers and husbands and assistants, in all her personal relationships to the endless delight of the predatory press, a trait of hers Giancarlo had long despaired of and had shared but once.

Once.

Once had been enough.

He studied Nicola—Paige—as she stood there before him, gazing back at him from her liar’s eyes that were neither blue nor green, that fall of thick, dark hair with a hint of auburn that she’d tamed into a side plait falling over one bare, exquisitely formed shoulder. Back then her hair had been redder, longer. Less ink, more fire, and he wished he found the darker shade unpleasant, unattractive. She was still as tall as he remembered but had gone skinny in that way they all did here, as if the denial of every pleasure in the world might bring them the fame they wanted more than anything. More than breath, more than food. Much, much more than love, as he knew all too well.

Don’t even think that word, he snarled at himself.

She stiffened as he let his gaze roam all over her, so he kept doing it, telling himself he didn’t care what this woman, whatever the hell she called herself now, thought or felt. Because she’d made it clear that the only things she’d ever seen when she’d looked at him—no matter how many times he’d made her scream his name, no matter how many ways they’d torn each other up and turned each other inside out, no matter how deeply he’d fallen for her or how enthusiastically he’d upended his life for her in those two months they’d spent almost entirely in his bed—were Violet’s fame and a paycheck to match.

It wasn’t only his heart she’d broken. She’d ground his pride, his belief that he could read anyone’s intentions at a glance and keep himself safe from the kind of grasping predators who teemed over this city like ants, under her heel. She’d completely altered the way he’d seen himself, who he was, as surely as if she’d severed one of his limbs.

Yet she still held herself well, which irritated him. She still had that dancer’s easy grace and the supple muscle tone to match. He took in her small, high breasts beneath that sleeveless white shirt with the draped neck, then the efficient pencil skirt that clung to the swell of her hips, and his hands remembered the lush feel of both. The slick perfection of her curves beneath his palms, always such a marvel of femininity in such a lean frame. The exquisite way she fit in his hands and tasted against his tongue. She’d left her legs bare, toned and pretty, and all he could think about was the way she’d wrapped them around his hips or draped them over his shoulders while he’d thrust hard and deep inside of her.

Stop, a voice inside him ordered, or you will shame yourself anew.

Her disguise—if that was what it was—did nothing to hide her particular, unusual beauty. She’d never looked like all the other girls who’d flocked around him back then. It was that fire in her that had called to him from that first, stunning clash of glances across the set of the music video where they’d met. She’d been a backup dancer in formfitting tights and a sport bra. He’d been the high-and-mighty pseudo director who shouldn’t have noticed her with a band full of pop stars hanging on his every word. And yet that single look had singed him alive.

He could still feel the same bright flames, even though she’d darkened her hair and wore sensible, professional clothes today that covered her mouthwatering midriff and failed to outline every last line of her thighs. Like the efficient secretary to his mother that he knew she’d proved herself to be over these past years, for some reason—and Giancarlo refused to let himself think about that. About her motives and intentions. Why she’d spent so long playing this game and why she’d bothered to excel in her position here while doing it. Why he couldn’t look at her without wanting her, even with all of this time between them. Even knowing exactly what she’d done.

“Is this where you tell me your sob story?” he asked coldly, taking a grim pleasure in the way she reacted to his voice. That little jump, as if she couldn’t control this crazy thing between them any more than he could. “There’s always one in these situations, is there not? So many reasons. So many excuses.”

“I’m not sobbing.” He couldn’t read that lovely oval of a face, with cheekbones made for a man to cradle between his palms and that wide mouth that begged to be tasted. Plundered. “And I don’t think I’ve made any excuses. I only apologized. It’s not the same thing.”

“No.” He let his gaze move over her mouth. That damned mouth. He could still feel the slide of it against his, or wrapped hot and warm around his hardness, trailing fire and oblivion wherever she used it. And nothing but lies when she spoke. “I’ll have to see what I can do about that.”

She actually sighed, as if he tried her patience, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or throttle her. He remembered that, too. From before. When she’d broken over his life like a hurricane and hadn’t stopped tearing up the trees and rearranging the earth until she was gone the same way she’d come, leaving nothing but scandal and the debris of her lies in her wake.

And yet she was still so pretty. He found that made him angrier than the rest of it.

“Glaring ferociously at me isn’t going to make me cry,” she said, and he wanted to see things in those chameleon eyes of hers. He wanted something, anything, to get to her—but he knew better, didn’t he? She hadn’t simply destroyed him, this time. She’d targeted his mother and she’d done it right under his nose. How could he imagine she was anything but evil? “It only makes the moment that much more uncomfortable.” She inclined her head slightly. “But if it makes you feel better, Giancarlo, you should go right ahead and try.”

He did laugh then. A short, humorless little sound.

“I am marveling at the sight of you,” he said, sounding cruel to his own ears, but she didn’t so much as blink. “You deserve to look like the person you really are, not the person you pretended you were.” He felt his mouth thin. “But I suppose this is Hollywood magic in action, no? The nastiest, most narcissistic things wrapped up tight in the prettiest packages. Of course you look as good as you did then.” He laughed softly, wanting it to hurt. Wanting something he said or did to have some effect on her—which told him a bit more than he wanted to know about his unresolved feelings about this woman. “That’s all you really have, is it not?”

CHAPTER TWO

GIANCARLO HAD FANCIED himself madly in love with her.

That was the thing he couldn’t forgive, much less permit himself to forget, especially when she was right here before him once again. The scandal that had ruined his budding film career, that had cast that deep, dark shadow over what had been left of his intensely private, deeply proper father’s life, that had made him question everything he’d thought he’d known about himself, that had made him finally leave this damned city and all its demons behind him within a day of the photos going live—that had been something a few shades worse than terrible and it remained a deep, indelible mark on Giancarlo’s soul. But however he might have deplored it, he supposed he could have eventually understood a pampered, thoughtless young man’s typical recklessness over a pretty girl. It was one of the oldest stories in the world.

It was his own parents’ story, come to that.

It was the fact that he’d been so deceived that he’d wanted to marry this creature despite his lifelong aversion to the institution, make her his countess, bring her to his ancestral home in Italy—he, who had vowed he’d never marry after witnessing the fallout from his parents’ tempestuous union—that made his blood boil even all these years later. He’d been plotting out weddings in his head while she’d been negotiating the price of his disgrace. The fury of it still made him feel much too close to wild.

She only inclined her head again, as if she was perfectly happy to accept any and all blame he heaped on her, and Giancarlo didn’t understand why that made him even more enraged.

“Have you nothing to say?” he taunted her. “I don’t believe it. You must have lost your touch in all these years, Nicola.” He saw her jerk, as if she really did hate that name, and filed that away as ammunition. “I beg your pardon. Paige. You can call yourself whatever you want. You’ve obviously spent too much time with a lonely old woman if this is the best you can do.”

“She is lonely,” Paige agreed, and he thought that was temper that lit up her cheeks, staining them, though her voice was calm. “This was never meant to be a long-term situation, Giancarlo. I assumed you’d come home and recognize me within the month. Of course, that was three years ago.”

It took him a moment to understand what it was he was feeling then, and he didn’t like it when he did. Shame. Hot and new and unacceptable.

“The world will collide with the sun before I explain myself to you,” he bit out. Like how he’d managed to let so much time slip by—always so busy, always a crisis on the estate in Italy, always something. How he’d avoided coming here and hurt his mother in the process. Those things might have been true—they were why he’d finally forced himself to come after an entire eighteen months without seeing Violet on one of her usual press junkets around the globe—but they certainly weren’t this woman’s business.

“I didn’t ask you to explain anything.” She lifted one shoulder, still both delicate and toned, he was annoyed to notice, and then dropped it. “It’s simply the truth.”

“Please,” he scoffed, and rubbed his hand over his face to keep from reacting like the animal he seemed to become in her presence. Ten years ago he’d thought that compulsion—that need—was passion. Fate. He knew better now. It was sheer, unadulterated madness. “Do not use words you cannot possibly know the meaning of. It only makes you look even more grasping and base than we both know you are already.”

She blinked, then squared her shoulders, her chin rising as she held his gaze. “Do I have time to get a list of approved vocabulary words in what remains of my five minutes? Before you have me thrown over Violet’s walls and onto the street?”

Giancarlo looked at her, the breeze playing in her inky dark hair with its auburn accents, the sun shifting through the vines that stretched lazily above them in a fragrant canopy, and understood with a painful surge of clarity that this was an opportunity. This woman had been like a dark, grim shadow stretching over his life, but that was over now. And he was so different from the man he’d been when she’d sunk her claws in him that he might as well have been a stranger.

She had never been the woman she’d convinced him she was. Because that woman, he had loved. That woman had been like a missing piece to his own soul that he’d never known he lacked and yet had recognized instantly the moment he’d seen her.

But that was nothing but a performance, a stern voice whispered in his head.

And this was the second act.

“Does my mother know that you are the woman who starred in all those photos a decade ago?” he asked, sounding almost idle, though he felt anything but. He slid his hands into his pockets and regarded her closely, noting how pale she went, and how her lips pressed hard together.

“Of course not,” she whispered, and there was a part of him that wondered why she wanted so badly to maintain his mother’s good opinion. Why should that matter? But he reminded himself this was the way she played her games. She was good—so good—at pretending to care. It was just another lie and this time, he’d be damned if he believed any part of it.

“Then this is what will happen.” He said it calmly. Quietly. Because the shock of seeing her had finally faded and now there was only this. His revenge, served nice and cold all these years later. “I wouldn’t want to trouble my mother with the truth about her favorite assistant yet. I don’t think she’d like it.”

“She would hate it, and me,” Nicola—Paige threw at him. “But it would also break her heart. If that’s your goal here, it’s certainly an easy way to achieve it.”

“Am I the villain in this scenario?” He laughed again, but this time, he really was amused, and he saw a complex wash of emotion move over her face. He didn’t want to know why. He knew exactly what he did want, he reminded himself. His own back, in a way best suited to please him, for a change. This was merely the dance necessary to get it. “You must have become even more delusional than your presence here already suggests.”