The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

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