The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

from the doorway, his voice another rolling thing through the morning’s stillness, like a dark shadow beneath all that shine. “This is about my satisfaction, cara. Not your feelings. Or it wouldn’t be torture, would it? It would be a holiday.”

      “By your account, I imagine I don’t have any feelings anyway, isn’t that right?” She hadn’t meant to say that, and certainly not in that challenging tone. She scowled at the stunning view, and reminded herself that she’d never really had a home and never would. Longing for a place like this was nothing more than masochistic, no matter how familiar it felt. “I’m nothing but a mercenary bitch who set out to destroy you once and is now, what? A delusional stalker who has insinuated herself into the middle of your family? For my own nefarious purposes, none of which have been in evidence at all over the past three years?”

      “I find parasite covers all the bases.” Giancarlo drawled that out, and it was worse, somehow, here in the midst of so much prettiness. Like a creeping black thing in the center of all that green, worse than a mere shadow. “No need to succumb to theatrics when you can merely call it what it is.”

      She shook her head, that same old anguish moving inside of her, making her shake deep in her gut, making her wish for things she knew better than to want. A home, at last. Love to fill it. A place to belong and a person to share it with—

      Paige had always known better. Dreams were one thing. They were harmless. No one could have survived the hard, barren place where she’d grown up, first her embittered mother’s teenage mistake and then her meal ticket, without a few dreams to keep them going. Much less what had happened ten years ago. What her mother had become. What Paige had nearly had to do in a vain attempt to save her.

      But wishes were nothing but borrowed trouble. And she supposed, looking back, that had been the issue from the start—being with Giancarlo had made her imagine she could dare to want things she knew, she knew, could never be hers. Never.

      You won’t make that mistake again in a hurry, her mother’s caustic voice jeered at her.

      Paige risked a look at Giancarlo then, despairing at the way her heart squeezed tight at the sight of him the way it always had, at that dark look on his face that was half hunger and half dislike, at the way she had always loved him and understood she always would, and to what end? He would have his revenge and she would endure it and somehow, somehow, she would survive him, too.

      It hurts a little bit more today than it usually does because you’re here and you’re tired, she tried to tell herself. But you’re fine. You’re always fine. Or you will be.

      “I know you don’t want to believe me,” she said, because she had always been such an idiot where this man was concerned. She had never had the slightest idea how to protect herself. Giancarlo had been the kind of man who had blistering affairs the way other people had dinner plans, but she had fallen head over heels in love with him at first glance and destroyed them both in the process. And now she wanted, so desperately, for him to see her, just for a moment. The real her. “But I would do anything for your mother. For a hundred different reasons. Chief among them that she’s been better to me than my own mother ever was.”

      “And here I thought you emerged fully grown from a bed of lies,” he said silkily. He paused, his dark eyes on her, as if recognizing how rare it was that Paige mentioned her own mother—but she watched him shrug it off instead of pursuing it and told herself it was for the best. “I was avoiding the city my mother lived in all these years and the kind of people who lived in it, not my mother. A crucial distinction, because believe me, Paige, I would also do anything for my mother. And I will.”

      There was a threat in the last three words. A promise. And there was no particular reason it should thud into her so hard, as if it might have taken her from her feet if she hadn’t already been braced against all of this. The pretty place, the sense of homecoming, the knowledge he was even more lost to her when he stood in front of her than he had been in all their years apart.

      “I loved my mother, too, Giancarlo,” Paige said, and she understood it was that scraped raw feeling that made her say such a thing. Giancarlo would never understand the kind of broken, terrible excuse for love that was the only kind Paige had ever known, before him. The sharp, scarring toll it exacted. How it festered inside and taught a person how to see the world only through the lens of it, no matter how blurred or cracked or deeply twisted. “And that never got me anything but bruises and a broken heart.” And then had taken the only things that had ever mattered to her. She swallowed. “I know the difference.”

      He moved out of the doorway of the cottage then, closing the distance between them with a few sure steps, and Paige couldn’t tell if that was worse or better. Everything seemed too mixed up and impossible and somehow right, too; the gentle green trees and the soft, lavender-scented breeze, and his dark gold eyes in the center of the world, making her heart beat loud and slow inside her chest.

      Stop it, she ordered herself. This is not your home. Neither is he.

      “Is this an appeal to my better nature?” Giancarlo asked softly. Dangerously. “I keep telling you, that man is dead. Killed by your own hand. Surely you must realize this by now.”

      “I know.” She tilted up her chin and hoped he couldn’t see how lost she felt. How utterly out of place. How hideously dislocated if it seemed that he was the only steady thing here, this man who detested her. “And here I am. Isolated and at your beck and call. Just think of all the ways you can make me pay for your untimely death.”

      She couldn’t read the shadow that moved over his face then. His hand moved as if it was outside his control and he ran the backs of his fingers over the line of her jaw, softly, so softly, and yet she knew better than to mistake his gentleness for kindness. She knew better than to trust her body’s interpretations of things when it came to this man and the things he could do to it with so seemingly careless a touch.

      The truth was in that fierce look in his eyes, that flat line of his delectable mouth. The painful truth that nothing she said could change, or would.

      He wanted to hurt her. He wanted all of this to hurt.

      “Believe me,” he said quietly. Thickly, as if that scraped raw thing was in him, too. “I have thought of little else.”

      Paige thought he might kiss her then, and that masochist in her yearned for it, no matter what came after. No matter how he made her pay for wanting him, which she knew he would. She swayed forward and lifted her mouth toward his and for a moment his attention seemed to drift toward her lips—

      But then he muttered one of those curses that sounded almost pretty because it was in Italian. And he stepped back, staring at her as if she was a ghost. A demon, more like. Sent to destroy him when it was clear to her that if there was going to be any destruction here, it would be at his hands.

      It was going to be her in pieces, not him. And Paige didn’t understand why she didn’t care about that the way she should. When he looked at her, she didn’t care about anything but him and all these terrible, pointless wishes that had wrecked her once already. She should have learned her lesson a long time ago. She’d thought she had.

      “I suggest you rest,” he said in a clipped tone, stalking back toward the driver’s side of the Jeep. “Dinner will be served at sunset and you’ll wake up starving sometime before then. That’s always the way with international flights.”

      As if he knew she’d never left the country before, when she’d thought she’d hidden it well today. His knowing anyway seemed too intimate, somehow. The sort of detail a lover might know, or perhaps a friend, and he was neither. She told herself she was being ridiculous, but it was hard to keep looking at him when she felt there had to be far too much written across her face then. Too much of that Arizona white trash dust, showing him all the things about her she’d gone to such lengths to keep him from ever knowing.

      “At the castello?” she asked, after the moment stretched on too long and his expression had begun to edge into impatience