The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

a joke. I meant ten. Twenty. How many lovers do you imagine I’ve taken, Giancarlo? What number proves I’m who you think I am?”

      He heard her voice break slightly as she asked the question, and a kind of ripple went through her lush body. He felt it. This time when she urged him into her, he went, slick and hard and even better than before, making him mutter a curse and press his forehead to hers. And he didn’t have the slightest idea if this was his form of an apology, or hers.

      “I don’t care one way or the other,” he lied, and he didn’t want to talk about this any longer. He didn’t want to revisit all those images he’d tortured himself with over the years. Because his sad little secret was that he’d never imagined her in prison, the way he’d told her he had. He’d imagined her wrapped around some other man exactly like this and he’d periodically searched the internet to see if he could find any evidence that she was out there somewhere, doing it with all that same joy and grace that had undone him.

      And it had killed him, every time. It still killed him.

      So he took it out on her instead, in the best way possible. He set a hard pace, throwing them headfirst into that raging thing that consumed them both, and he laughed against the side of her neck when she couldn’t do anything but moan out her surrender.

      He held on, building that perfect wildness all over again, making her thrash and keen, and when he thought he couldn’t take it any longer he reached between them and pressed hard against the center of her need, making her shatter all around him.

      And he rode her until he could throw himself into that shattering, too. Until he could forget the truth he’d heard in her voice when she’d told him there hadn’t been anyone since him, because he couldn’t handle that—or what he’d seen on her face that he refused to believe. He refused.

      He rode her until he could forget everything but this. Everything but her. Everything they built between them in this marvelous fire.

      Until he lost himself all over again.

      * * *

      “Violet is asking for you,” Giancarlo said.

      Paige had heard him coming from a long way off. First the Jeep, the engine announcing itself high on the hill and only getting louder as it wound its way down toward her cottage. Then the slam of the driver’s door. The thud of the cottage’s front door, and then, some minutes later, the slide of the glass doors that led out to where she sat, curled up beneath a graceful old oak tree with her book in her lap.

      “That sounds like an accusation,” she said mildly, putting her book aside. He stood on the terrace with his hands on his lean hips, frowning at her. “Of course she’s asking for me. I’m her assistant. She might be on vacation here, but I’m not.”

      “She needs to learn how to relax and handle her own affairs,” he replied, somewhat darkly. Paige climbed to her feet, brushing at the skirt she wore, and started toward him. It was impossible not feel that hunger at the sight of him, deep inside her, making her too warm, too soft.

      “Possibly,” she said, trying to concentrate on something, anything but the sensual spell he seemed to weave simply by existing. “But I’m not her therapist, I’m her personal assistant. When she learns how to relax and handle her own affairs, I’m out of a job.”

      Her heart set up its usual clatter at his proximity, worse the closer she got to him, and she didn’t understand how that could still happen. They’d been here almost a week. It should have settled down by now. She should have started to grow immune to him, surely. After all, she already knew how this would end. Badly. Unlike the last time, when she’d been so blissfully certain it would be the one thing in her life that ended well, this time she knew better. Their history was like a crystal ball, allowing her to see the future clearly.

      Maybe too clearly. Not that it seemed to matter.

      She stopped when she was near him but not too near him, and felt that warm thing in the vicinity of her heart when he scowled. He reached over and tugged her closer, so he could land a hard kiss on her mouth. Like a mark of possession, she thought, more than an indication of desire—but she didn’t care.

      It deepened, the way it always deepened. Giancarlo muttered something and angled his head, and when he finally pulled back she was wound all around him and flushed and there was that deep male satisfaction stamped all over his face.

      “Later,” he told her, like a promise, as if she’d been the one to start this.

      And in this past week, Paige had learned that she’d take this man any way she could have him. She imagined that said any number of unflattering things about her, but she didn’t care.

      “I might be busy later,” she told him loftily.

      He smiled that hard smile of his that made her ache, and he didn’t look particularly concerned. “I will take that chance.”

      And she would let him, she knew. Not because he told her to. Not because he was holding anything over her head. But because she was helpless before her own need, even though she knew perfectly well it would ruin her all over again....

      Later, she told herself. I’ll worry about it later.

      Because later was going to be all the years she got to live through on the other side of this little interlude, when he was nothing but a memory all over again. And she wasn’t delusional enough to imagine that there was any possibility that when this thing with Giancarlo ended he might permit her to remain with Violet, in any capacity. He was as likely to fall to his knees and propose marriage.

      She moved around him and into the house then, not wanting him to read that epic bit of silliness on her face, when that notion failed to make her laugh at herself the way it should have. When it made everything inside of her clutch hopefully instead. You are such a fool, she chided herself.

      But then again, that wasn’t news.

      Paige swept up her bag and hung it over her shoulder, then followed Giancarlo out to his Jeep. He climbed in and turned the key, and she clung to the handle on her side of the vehicle as he bumped his way up the old lane and then headed toward the castello in the distance.

      It was another beautiful summer’s day, bright and perfect with the olive trees a silvery presence on either side of the lane that wound through the hills toward Violet, and Paige told herself it was enough. This was enough. It was more than she’d ever imagined could happen with Giancarlo after what she’d done, and why did she want to ruin it with thoughts of more?

      But the sad truth was, she didn’t know how to be anything but greedy when it came to this man. She wanted all of him, not the parts of himself he doled out so carefully, so sparingly. Not when she could feel he kept so much of himself apart.

      She’d woken the morning after that first night to find herself in his bed. Alone. He’d left her there without so much as a note, and she’d lectured herself about the foolishness of her hurt feelings. She’d told herself she should count herself lucky he hadn’t tossed her out his front door at dawn, naked.

      What she told herself and what she actually went right on feeling, of course, were not quite the same thing.

      Modify your expectations, girl, she’d snapped at herself on the walk down the hill to her cottage. The birds had been singing joyfully, the sun had been cheerful against her face, she was in Italy of all places, and Giancarlo had made love to her again and again throughout the night. He could call it whatever he wanted. She would hold it in her battered little heart and call it what it had meant to her.

      Because she hadn’t lied to him. She hadn’t touched another man since him, and she’d grown to accept the fact she never would. At first it had hurt too much. She’d seen nothing but Giancarlo—and more important, his back, on that last morning when he’d walked away from her rather than talk about what had happened, what she’d done. Then she’d started working for Violet and it had seemed as if Giancarlo was everywhere, in pictures, in emails, in conversation.