The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

your mouth.” But he’d moved closer again, his shoulders filling her vision, her need expanding to swallow the whole world. Or maybe it was his need. Both of theirs, twined together and too big to fit beneath the sky.

      “Make me,” she dared him, and he muttered something in Italian.

      And then he did.

      He let go of her hands to take her face between his hard palms, holding her where he wanted her as he plundered her mouth. As he took and took and then took even more, as if there was no end and no beginning and only the madness of their mouths, slick and hot and perfect. The fire between them danced high and roared louder, and he didn’t stop her when Paige melted against him. When she wound her arms around his neck and clung to him, kissing him back as if this was the reunion she’d always dreamed of. As if this was a solution, not another one of his clever little power games.

      And she didn’t know when it changed. When it stopped being about fury and started to taste like heat. When it started to feel like the people they’d been long ago, before everything had gone so wrong.

      He felt it, too. She felt him stiffen, and then he thrust her aside.

      And for a long moment they only stared at each other, both of them breathing too fast, too hard. Paige tried to step back and her legs wobbled, and Giancarlo scowled at her even as his hand shot out to steady her.

      “Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself. Her mouth felt marked, soft and plundered, and Giancarlo was looking at her as if she was a ghost. “That certainly taught me my place. All that punitive kissing.”

      She didn’t know what moved across his face then, but it scraped at her. It hurt far worse than any of his words had. She had to bite her own tongue to keep from making the small sound of pain that welled up in her at the sight of it.

      “It will,” he promised her, a bleakness in his voice that settled in her bones like a winter chill. Like the fate she’d been running from since the day she’d met him, loath as she was to admit it. “I can promise you that. Sooner or later, it will.”

      * * *

      Kissing her had been a terrible mistake.

      Giancarlo ran until he thought his lungs might burst and his legs might collapse beneath him, and it was useless. The Southern California sun was unforgiving, the blue sky harsh and high and cloudless, and he couldn’t get her taste out of his mouth. He couldn’t get the feel of her out of his skin.

      It was exactly as it had been a decade ago, all over again, except this time he couldn’t pretend he’d been blindsided. This time, he’d walked right into it. He’d been the one to kiss her.

      He cursed himself in two languages and at last he stopped running, bending over to prop his hands on his knees and stare down the side of the mountain toward his mother’s estate and the sprawl of the city below it in the shimmering heat of high summer. It was too hot here. It was too familiar.

      Too dangerous.

      It was much too tempting to simply forget himself, to pick up where he’d left off with her. With the woman who was no longer Nicola. As if she hadn’t engineered his ruin, deliberately, ten years ago. As if she hadn’t then tricked her way to her place at his mother’s side with a new name and God only knew what agenda.

      As if, were he to bury himself in her body the way he wanted to do more than was wise and more than he cared to admit to himself, she might transform into the woman she’d already proved she wasn’t in the most spectacular way imaginable.

      He was already slipping back into those old habits he’d thought he’d eradicated. The work he’d left in Italy was piling up high, and yet here he was, running off steam in the Bel Air hills the way he’d done when he was a sixteen-year-old. She was the first thing he thought of when he woke. She was what he dreamed about. She was taking over his life as surely as she ever had, very much as if this was her revenge, not his.

      He was an addict. There was no other explanation for the state he was in, hard and ready and yearning, and he didn’t want that. He wanted her humbled, brought low, destroyed. He wanted her to feel how he’d felt when he’d woken that terrible morning to find his naked body splashed everywhere for the entire world to pick over, parse, comment upon, like every other time his private life been exploited for Violet’s gain—but much worse, because he hadn’t seen the betrayal coming. He hadn’t thought to brace himself for impact.

      He wanted this to hurt.

      Giancarlo straightened and shoved his hair back from his forehead, the past seeming to press against him too tightly. He remembered it all too well. Not just the affair with Nicola—Paige, he reminded himself darkly—in all its blistering, sensual perfection, as if their bodies had been created purely to drive each other wild. But the parts of that affair he’d preferred to pretend he didn’t remember, all these years later. Like the way he’d always found himself smiling when they’d spoken on the phone, wide and hopeful and giddy, as if she was sunshine in a bottle and only his. Or the way his heart had always thudded hard when she’d entered a room, in the moment before she’d seen him and had treated him to that dazzling smile of hers that had blotted out the rest of the world. The way she’d held his hand as if that connection alone would save them both from darkness, or dragons, or something far worse.

      Oh yes, he remembered.

      And he remembered the aftermath, too. After the pictures ran in all those papers. After those final, horrible moments with this woman he had loved so deeply and known not at all. After he’d done the best he could to clear his head and then made his way back to Italy. To face, at last, his elderly father.

      His father, who had felt denim was for commoners and had thought the only thing more tawdry than Europe’s aristocracy was the British royals, with their divorces and dirty laundry and jeans. His father, Count Alessi, who could have taught propriety and manners to whole nunneries and probably had, in his day. His father, who had been as gentle and nobly well-meaning as he was blue-blooded. Truly the last of his kind.

      “It is not your fault,” he’d told Giancarlo that first night in the wake of the scandal. He’d hugged his errant son and greeted him warmly, his body so frail it had moved in Giancarlo like a winter wind, a herald of the coming season he hadn’t wanted to face. Not then. Not yet. “When I married your mother I knew precisely who she was, Giancarlo. It was foolish to imagine she and I could raise a son untainted by that world. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

      Perhaps his father’s disappointment in him had cut all the deeper because it had been so matter-of-fact. Untouched by any hint of anger or vanity or sadness. There was nothing to fight against, and Giancarlo had understood that there had been no one to blame but himself for his poor judgment. His father might have been antiquated, a relic of another time, but he’d instilled his values in his only son and heir.

      Strive to do good no matter what, he’d told Giancarlo again and again. Never make a spectacle of oneself. And avoid the base and the dishonorable, lest one become the same by association.

      Giancarlo had failed on all counts. It was why he knew that the vows he’d made when he was younger were solid. Right. No marriage, because how could he ever be certain that someone wanted him? And no heirs of his own, because he’d never, ever, subject a child to the things he’d survived. He might not be able to save himself from his own father’s disappointment, he might find his life trotted out into public every time his mother starred in something new and needed to remind the world of her once upon an Italian count fairy-tale marriage, but it would end with him.

      Damn Nicola—Paige—for making him think otherwise, even if it had only been for two mostly naked months a lifetime ago.

      It was that, he thought as he broke into a run again, his pace harder and faster than before as he hurtled down the hill, that he found the most difficult to get past. He hated that she had betrayed him, yes. But far worse was this thing in him, dark and brooding, that yearned only for her surrender no matter how painful, and that he very