The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

her. He’d walked away from her without a single backward glance. Why should he care what she did?

      And yet somehow, each of these ten years had crept by and he was still the only man she’d ever slept with. She’d been unable to contain the small, humming thing inside her then as that thought had kept her company on her walk. It had felt a little bit too much like a kind of silly joy she ought to have known better than to indulge.

      But he’d turned up that night, his face drawn as if he’d fought a great battle with himself, and he hadn’t seemed interested in talking about whether he’d lost or won. He’d led her up her stairs, thrown her on her bed, and kept them up for another night—this time, she’d noted, with the condoms they’d failed to use before.

      They hadn’t talked about that first night and its lack of birth control. Just like ten years ago, they hadn’t talked about a thing.

      And that was how it had been since her arrival, Paige thought now, as they drew closer to the castello. She’d never spent much time wondering what it felt like to be a rich man’s kept woman before now. What she thought people in this part of the world might call a mistress. But she imagined it must be something like this past week.

      Nothing but the pleasures of their flesh. No unpleasant topics, save the odd bout of teasing that never quite landed a hard punch. Nothing but sex and food and sex again, until she felt glutted on it. Replete. Able to know him at a touch, taste him when he wasn’t there, scent him on any breeze.

      The last time she’d felt so deeply a part of her own body, her own physical space, she’d been dancing more hours of the day than she’d slept.

      She didn’t tell him that, either. That she filled these golden, blue-skied days with dancing, as if the first dancing she’d done on that initial night with him had freed her. Paige hadn’t understood how lost she’d been until she found herself out in the field near her cottage, dancing in great, wide circles beneath the glorious Tuscan sky with tears running down her face and her arms stretched toward the sun. She wanted nothing more than to share that with him.

      But Giancarlo drove the Jeep with the same ferocity he did everything else—except in bed, where he indulged every sense and took his sweet time—and with that same hard edge of his old dark fury beneath it.

      Almost as if he, too, preferred the little fairy tale they’d been living this past week, where she existed purely to please him, and did, again and again.

      Paige knew better than to ask him about it. Or to tell him the things that moved in her, sharp and sweet, in this place that felt more like home every day. This was a no-talking zone. This was a place of sun and sex and silence. It was the only possible way it could work.

      Like all temporary things, all stolen moments, it could only be a secret, or it would implode.

      “What have you been up to all this time?” Violet asked, peering at Paige from her position on one of the castello’s lovely couches, her iPad in her lap and her voice no more than mildly reproving. “I thought perhaps you’d been sucked into one of the olive groves, never to be seen again.”

      “You should have told me you needed me!” Paige exclaimed instead of answering the question. Because she didn’t want to know what Violet would think about the help touching her son. She didn’t want to risk her relationship with either one of them. “I thought I was giving you some much-needed time and space to yourself!”

      “My dear girl,” Violet said, sounding amused, “if I wanted time and space to myself, I would have chosen a different life altogether.”

      Paige was too aware of Giancarlo’s dark, brooding presence on the other side of the living room then, lounging there against the massive stone fireplace, supposedly scrolling through his phone’s display. She was certain he was hanging on every word. Or did she simply want to be that important to him?

      There was no answer to that. Not one that came without a good dose of pain in its wake.

      “I’m here now,” Paige said stoutly, trying to focus on the woman who had always been good to her, without all these complications and regrets. Not that she’d give you the time of day if she knew who you really were, that rough voice that was so much like her mother’s snarled at her.

      “Then I have two questions for you,” Violet replied, snapping Paige back to the present. “Can you operate a manual transmission?”

      That hadn’t been what Paige was expecting, but that was Violet. Paige rolled with it. “I can.”

      It was, in fact, one of the few things she could say her mother had taught her. Even if it had been mostly so that Paige could drive the beat-up car she owned to pick her up, drunk and belligerent, from the rough bars down near the railroad tracks.

      “And do you want to drive me to Lucca?” Violet smiled serenely when Giancarlo made an irritated sort of noise from the fireplace across the room and kept her eyes trained on Paige. “If memory serves, it has wonderful shopping. And I’m in the mood for an adventure.”

      “An adventure with attention or without?” Paige asked without missing a beat, though she was well aware it had been a long time since Violet had gone out on one of her excursions into the public without expecting attention from the people who would see her out and about.

      “Without,” Giancarlo snapped, from much closer by, and Paige had to control a little jump. She hadn’t heard him move.

      “With, of course,” Violet said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “No one has fawned over me in a whole week, and I require attention the way plants require sunlight, you know. It’s how I maintain my youthful facade.”

      She said it as if she was joking, but in that way of hers that didn’t actually allow for any argument. Not that it was Paige’s place to argue. Her son, however, was a different story.

      “You’re one of the most famous women in the world,” Giancarlo pointed out, and the dark thing Paige heard in his voice was a different animal than the one he used when he spoke to her. More exasperated, perhaps. Or more formal. “It’s not safe for you to simply wander the streets alone.”

      “I won’t be alone. I’ll have Paige,” Violet replied.

      “And what, pray, will Paige do should you find yourself surrounded? Mobbed?” Giancarlo rolled his eyes. “Hold the crowd off with a smart remark or two?”

      “I wouldn’t underestimate the power of a smart remark,” Paige retorted, glaring at him—but his gaze was on his mother.

      “That was a long time ago,” Violet said softly. With a wealth of compassion that made Paige stiffen in surprise and Giancarlo jerk back as if she’d slapped him. “I was a very foolish young woman. I underestimated the kind of interest there would be—not only in me, but in you. Your father was livid.” She studied her son for a moment and then rose to her feet, smiling faintly at Paige. “We were in the south of France and I thought it would be a marvelous idea to go out and poke around the shops by myself. Giancarlo was four. And when the crowds surrounded us, he was terrified.”

      “The police were called,” he said, furiously, Paige thought, though his voice was cold. “You had to be rescued by armed officials and you never went out without security again—and neither did I. I hope you haven’t spent your life telling this story as if I was an overimaginative child who caused a fuss. It wasn’t a monster in my closet. It was a pack of shouting cameramen and a mob of fans.”

      “The point is, my darling, you were four,” Violet said quietly. “You are not four any longer. And while I flatter myself that I remain relevant, I am an old woman who has not commanded the attention of packs of paparazzi in a very long time. I’m perfectly capable of enjoying an afternoon with my assistant and, if you insist, one driver.”

      “And you wonder why I refuse to have children,” he growled at her, and it took every shred of self-preservation Paige had to keep from reacting to that. To Giancarlo and the pain she could hear beneath the