The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

he did, something he didn’t care to identify coursed through him. He told himself it was yet more anger. He had an endless well where this woman was concerned, surely.

      Giancarlo reached down and took her jaw in his hand, tugging her face up so he could look down into it, and it was the hardest thing he’d done in a long, long time to keep himself in check. In control. To crush the roaring thing that wanted only to take her, possess her and force himself to think, instead.

      “That’s not going to work,” he told her softly. He was so hard it very nearly hurt, but he stood there as if he could do this all night, and he felt the faintest shiver move through her, making it all worthwhile.

      “What do you mean? That’s what she said.”

      “It doesn’t matter if she hauled out her photo albums and wept over pictures of me as a fat, drooling infant,” he said mildly, though his hand was hard against her jaw and he could feel how much she wanted to yank herself back, away from him. He could feel the flat press of her hands on his thighs, and the heat there that neither one of them had ever been any good at harnessing. “You’re not bringing it up now, on your knees in the dirt because I ordered it, because you have a sudden interest in my emotional well-being.”

      “I could be interested in nothing but your emotional well-being and you’d tell me I was only running a con,” Nicola—Paige said, with more bravado than he might have displayed were he the one kneeling there in the dark. “I don’t know why I bother to speak.”

      “In this case,” he said silkily, moving his hand along the sweet line of her jaw, her cheek, cradling her head with a softness completely belied by the lash in his words, “it is because you hope to shame me into stopping this. Why else bring up my mother when you’re about to take me into your mouth at last?”

      Her mouth fell open slightly more, as if in stunned astonishment, and he laughed, though it wasn’t a very nice sound.

      “Fine,” she said, though her voice sounded like a stranger’s. “Whatever you want.”

      “That is the point I am trying to make to you, Paige,” he bit out then, holding her immobile, so she had no choice but to gaze back at him, and he was a terrible man indeed, to revel in the temper he saw in her changeable eyes. “‘Whatever I want’ isn’t an empty phrase. It could mean pleasuring me by the side of the road without any consultation whatsoever about your feelings on the subject. It is what I want. Are you beginning to understand me? How many object lessons do you think you will require before this sinks in?”

      She said something in reply but the night stole her words away, and she cleared her throat. She was trembling fully then, and he might have felt like the monster all that accusation in her gaze named him, but he could see the rest of it, too. The stain of color on her cheeks. That glassy heat in her eyes. And beneath the hand he still held to her face and against her neck, the wild drumming of her pulse, pounding out her arousal in an unmistakable beat.

      He knew that rhythm better than he knew himself. He thought it might have been the only honest thing about her, then and now.

      “How long?” she whispered.

      “Until what?”

      “Until this is done.” She moistened her lips and he felt it like her wicked mouth, wet and soft and deep, and nearly groaned where he stood.

      “Until I’m bored.”

      “A few hours, then,” she said, with a remnant of her usual fire, and he smiled.

      “I don’t imagine you’ll be that lucky.” He traced a pattern from that stubborn chin of hers to the delicate shell of her ear, then back. “I’ve had a long time to think about all the ways I’d like to make you crawl. Then pay. Then crawl some more. There’s no telling how long it could take.”

      “And yet when you had the chance, you talked to me for three seconds and then disappeared for a decade,” she pointed out.

      He felt that same wash of betrayal, that same kick in the gut he’d felt that long-ago day when he’d realized she’d used him the way his own mother always had—and it had been far more shattering, because Violet had only sold him out when he was clothed.

      “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, as harshly as he could in that same soft voice. “I didn’t then. I don’t now. I thought I’d made that clear.”

      A car passed by on the winding mountain drive, the headlights dancing over them, and he saw something bleak in her eyes, across her lovely face. He told himself there was no echo at all inside him, no hollow thing in his chest.

      “Then we’d better get started with the humiliation and sexual favors, hadn’t we?” she said with a cheerfulness that was as pointed as it was feigned, and he felt her hands tighten against his thighs. She moved them up toward his belt and he didn’t know he meant to stop her until he did.

      He watched her face as he helped her rise to her feet, and he didn’t let go of her arm when she was standing, the way he should have done.

      “And here I thought we were right on target to get arrested for public indecency,” she whispered, her voice still sharp but something raw in her chameleon gaze. “They could throw me in jail and charge me for solicitation and it would be like all your dreams come true in one evening.”

      “This is my dream,” he growled at her, his hand wrapped tight around her arm and that fever in his blood. His revenge, he thought. At last. “It’s not the act itself that matters, cara. That’s a privilege you haven’t earned. It’s the surrender. It’s all about the surrender.” He laughed then, a dark sound he felt in every part of him, as if it was a part of the night and as dangerous, and then he let her go. It was harder than it should have been. “You’ll learn.”

      * * *

      It became clear to Paige in the week that followed that it wasn’t Giancarlo’s intention to actually make her have sex with him whenever and wherever he chose, no matter what provocative things he might say to the contrary. That would have been easy, in its way. He was far more diabolical than that.

      He wanted her in a constant state of panic, with no idea what he might do next. He wanted her to think of nothing at all but him and the little things he made her do to prove her obedience that were slowly driving her insane.

      It’s all about the surrender, he’d said. Her surrender. And she was learning what he’d meant.

      One day—after nearly a week filled with anticipation and the faintest of touches, always in passing and always unexpected, all of which still felt like a metal collar around her neck that he tightened at will—he found her in Violet’s expansive closet, putting together a selection of outfits with appropriate accessories for Violet to choose between for the event the star was scheduled to attend that evening.

      “Pull up your skirt, take off your panties—if you are foolish enough to be wearing any—and hand them to me,” Giancarlo said without preamble, making Paige jump and shiver into a bright red awareness of him, especially because her mind had been a long way away.

      Ten years ago away, in fact, and treating her to a play-by-play, Technicolor and surround-sound replay of one of their more adventurous evenings in the Malibu house down on the beach she had no idea if he still owned.

      “What?” she stammered out, but her body wasn’t in any doubt about his instructions. Her breasts bloomed into an aching heaviness, making her bra feel too tight and too scratchy against her skin. Her stomach flipped over, and below, that shimmering heat became scalding.

      And that was only at the sound of his voice. What would happen if he touched her this time?

      “Is this your strategy, cara? To feign ignorance every time I speak to you?” He loomed in the doorway, looking untamed and edgy, furious and male. He’d forgone the exquisite suits and running apparel today and looked more like the Giancarlo she remembered in casual trousers and a top that was more like