The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

against him, her hands splayed wide over his pectoral muscles, while her hips set a lazy, shattering, insistent rhythm against his. And Giancarlo was lost.

      He forgot about revenge. He forgot about their past. Her deceit, his foolish belief in her. All the terrible lies. The damned pictures themselves, grainy and humiliating. He lost his plans in the slide of her body against his, the sleek thrill that built in him with every rocking motion she made. Every life-altering stroke of the hardest part of him so deep, so very deep, in all of her soft heat.

      “Make me come,” he ordered her, in a stranger’s deep growl. He saw her skin prickle at the sound of it, saw the way she pulled her lower lip between her teeth as if she was fighting back the same wave of sensation he was. “Make it good.”

      Not that it could be anything but good. Not that it ever had been. This was a magical thing, this wild, hot fire that was only theirs. He could feel it every time he sank within her. He knew it every time he pulled back. He felt it in the sure pace she set with her hips, the tight hold of her flesh against his. He wanted it to go on forever, the way he’d thought it would when he’d met her that first time.

      The way it should have, that little voice that was still in love with her, that had never been anything but in love with her, whispered deep inside him.

      But she was following his orders and this was no time for regrets. She moved against him, lush and lovely, her hips a sinuous dance, a well-cast spell of longing and lust and too many other things he refused to name. He’d thought he’d lost her forever and yet she was here, moving above him, her lovely body on display because he’d wanted it, holding him so deep inside her he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began. He didn’t want to know.

      “Your wish is my command, my count,” she teased him, her voice a husky little dream, and then she did something complicated with her hips and the world turned to flames all around them.

      When he finally exploded, a bright rush of fire turned some kind of comet, rocketing over the edge of the night, he heard her call out his name.

      And then follow him into bliss.

      * * *

      Giancarlo did not welcome reality when it reasserted itself.

      Paige lay slumped over him, her face buried in his neck, while he was still deep inside of her. He opted not to think about how easy it was to hold her, or how she still seemed to have been crafted especially to fit in his arms, exactly this way. It took him much longer than it should have to get his breathing under control again. He held her the way a lover might, the way he always had before, and stared out over the top of her head at the faint lights on distant hills and the smear of starlight above.

      He wished he didn’t care about the past. More than that, he wished he could trust her the way he had once. He wished so many things, and yet all of the stars were fixed tonight, staring down at him from their cold positions, and he knew better.

      Paige was an accident waiting to happen. He’d been caught up in that accident once—he wouldn’t subject himself to it again. Even he wasn’t foolish enough to walk into the same trap twice. No matter that it felt like glory made flesh to touch her again, like coming home after too long away.

      He would learn to live without that, too. He had before.

      She shifted against him, and he felt the brush of her lips over his skin and told himself it was calculated. That everything about her was calculated. There was no use remembering the afternoons they’d spent curled around each other in his huge bed surrounded by the Malibu sea. When she’d tasted him everywhere with her eyes closed, as if she couldn’t help herself, as if her affection was as elemental as the ocean beyond his windows or the sky above and she had no choice but to sink into it with all of her senses.

      That had been an act. This was an act. He needed to remember it.

      But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the show.

      “You’ve obviously been practicing,” he said, to be horrible. To remind them both that this was here and now, not ten years back. “Quite a lot, I’d say, were I to hazard a guess.”

      He felt her tense against him, but almost thought he’d imagined it when she sat up a moment later, displaying her typical offhanded grace. And then she smiled slightly as she looked down at him.

      “I was about to compliment you on the same thing,” she said, a brittle sort of mischief and something else lighting up her gaze. “You must have slept with a thousand women to do that so well! My congratulations. Especially as I would have said there weren’t ten women you could sleep with in a hundred miles, much less a thousand. The privileges of wealth, I presume?”

      “You’re hilarious.” But he couldn’t help the crook of his mouth. “I have them flown in from Rome, of course.”

      “Of course.” She wrinkled her nose at him, and it was as dangerous as it had been earlier. It made him want things he knew he couldn’t have. He couldn’t have them, and more to the point, she couldn’t give them. Hadn’t he learned anything? “You realize, Giancarlo, that people might get the wrong idea. They might begin to think you’re a playboy whore.”

      “They won’t.”

      “Because you tell them so?” She shook her head, her expression serious though her mysterious eyes laughed at him. “I think that tactic only works with me. And not very well.”

      “Because,” he said, his hands moving to her bottom again, then higher along the tempting indentation in her lovely back to tug her down to him, “a man is only a playboy whore when he appears to be having too much of a certain kind of uncontrolled fun in public. I can do all the same things in private and it doesn’t count. Didn’t you know?”

      Her attention dropped to his mouth and he wanted it there. He was already hardening within her again and she shifted restlessly against him as if she encouraged it, making the fire inside him leap to new life that easily.

      “It all counts,” she breathed. “Or none of it does.”

      “Then I suppose that makes us all whores, doesn’t it?” he asked. He indulged himself and sank his hands deep into her hair, holding her head fast, as he tested the depth of her again and found her hotter around him. Wetter. Better, somehow, than before. That quickly, he was like steel. “But let’s be clear. How many lovers have you taken in the last ten years?”

      “Less than your thousand,” she said, her voice a thin little thing, as her hips met his greedily. Deliciously. He grunted, and then pulled out to flip them around, coming down over her again and drawing her legs around his waist. He teased her heat with the tip of his hardness, and he didn’t know what it was that drove him then, but he didn’t let her pull him into her.

      “How many?” he asked. He had no idea why he cared. He didn’t care. He’d imagined it a thousand times and it scraped at him and it changed nothing either way. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Tell me.”

      Her eyes moved to his, then away, and they looked blue in the shadows. “What does it matter? Whatever number I pick, you’ll think the worst of me.”

      “I already think the worst of you,” he said, the way he might have crooned love words a lifetime ago, and he couldn’t have said what he wanted here. To hurt her? Or himself? To make this all worse? Or was this simply his way of reminding them both who they were? “Why don’t you try the truth?”

      “None,” she said, and there was an odd expression on her face as she said it. He might have called it vulnerable, were she someone else. “I told you there were no new tricks.”

      It took another beat for him to process that, and then something roared in him, a primal force that was like some kind of howl, and he thought he shook though he knew he held himself perfectly still.

      “Is that a joke?” But he was whispering. He barely knew his own voice.

      Her wide mouth twisted and her gaze was dark with something he didn’t want to understand.