The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

of a walk. It was a twenty-minute drive, at least.”

      “At the house on the hill,” he said, and jerked his head toward the farmhouse that squatted at the top of the nearest swell of pretty green, looking sturdy and complacent in the sunlight, all light stones and an impressive loggia. “Right there. Unless that’s too much of a hike for you these days, now that you live on a Bel Air estate and are neck deep in opulence day and night. None of it earned. Or yours.”

      Paige ignored the slap. “That really all depends on who lives there,” she replied, and it was remarkably hard to make her voice sound anything approximating light. “A troll? The Italian bogeyman? The big, bad wolf with his terrible fangs?”

      His mouth moved into that crooked thing that made her stomach flip over and her heart ache. More. Again. Always.

      “That would be me,” he said softly, and she thought he took a certain pleasure in it. “So that’s all of the above, I’d think. For your sins.”

      * * *

      A long nap and a very hot shower after she woke made Paige feel like a new person. Or herself again, at last. She had been too weary and inexplicably sad to explore the cottage when Giancarlo had driven away, so she did it now, with the whisper-soft robe she’d found in the master bathroom wrapped around her and her feet bare against the reclaimed stone floors, her wet hair feeling indulgent against her shoulders as she moved through the charming space.

      It was a two-story affair in what had looked from the outside like a very old stone outbuilding. Inside, it was filled with the early-evening light thanks to the tall windows everywhere, the exposed beams high above, and the fact the interior was wholly open to best take advantage of what would otherwise have felt like a small space. Stairs led from the stone ground floor to the loft above, which featured a large, extraordinarily comfortable bed in the airy room nestled in the eaves, a small sitting area with a balcony beyond, and the luxurious master bath Paige had just enjoyed.

      The main floor was divided into an efficient, cheerful kitchen with a happily stocked refrigerator, a cozy sitting area with deep sofas arranged around a wide stone fireplace, a small dining area that led out to a patio that spanned the length of the cottage and led into a small, well-tended garden. And everywhere she looked, behind everything and hovering near and far and more beautiful by the moment, the Tuscan view.

      Home, she thought, despite herself.

      Evening had crept in with long, deep shadows that settled in the valley and made art out of the soft green trees, the cypress sentries and the rounded hills on all sides. The road that had felt torturously remote when Giancarlo had driven her here looked like something from one of her beloved old books now, winding off into the distance or off into dreams. Paige stood there in the window until the air cooled around her, and realized only when she started back up the stairs that she hadn’t breathed like that—deeply and fully, all the way down to her feet, the way she had when she’d danced—in a very long time.

      Almost as if she was comfortable here. As if she belonged. She’d felt that way in only one other place in her whole life, and had been as wrong. Giancarlo’s Malibu home, all wood and glass, angled to best let the sea in, had only been a pretty house. This was a pretty place.

      And when you leave here, she told herself harshly, you will never come back. The same as that house in Malibu. Everyone feels at home in affluent places. That’s what they’re built to do.

      Paige dressed slowly and carefully, her nerves prickling into a new awareness as she rifled through her suitcase. Should she wear the sort of thing she would wear if this was a vacation in Italy she happened to be taking by herself? Or should she wear something she suspected Giancarlo would prefer, so he could better enact his revenge? On the one hand, jeans and a slouchy sweatshirt, all comfort and very little style. On the other, a flirty little dress he could get his hands under, like before. She didn’t have the slightest idea which way to go.

      “What do you want?” she asked her sleepy-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, her voice throaty from all that sleep.

      But that was the trouble. She still wanted the same things she’d always wanted. She could admit that, here and now, with Giancarlo’s Italy pressing in on her from all sides. The difference was that this time, she knew better than to imagine she’d get it.

      Paige dried her hair slowly, her mind oddly empty even as the rest of her felt tight with all the things she didn’t want to think about directly. Taut and on edge. She pulled on a pair of soft white trousers and a loose sort of tunic on top, a compromise between the jeans she’d have preferred and what she assumed Giancarlo would likely want to see her wear, given the circumstances.

      “What he’d really like is me, as naked as the day I was born and crawling up that hillside on my hands and knees,” she muttered out loud and then laughed at the image, the sound creaky and strange in the quiet of the cottage. She kept laughing until a wet heat pricked at the back of her eyes and she had to pull in a ragged breath to keep the tears from pouring over. Then another.

      Paige frowned as she slipped her feet into a pair of thonged flat sandals. When was the last time she’d laughed like that? About anything?

      What a sad creature you’ve become, she scolded herself as she dug out her smartphone from her bag and scrolled through her messages. But the truth was, she had always been a fairly sad thing, when she looked back at the progression of her life. Sad and studious or determined and stubborn, from the start. It had been the only way to survive the chaos that had been her mother. There had only been one two-month stretch of laughter in her life, gleaming and overflowing and dizzy with joy, and she’d ruined it ten years ago.

      “My goodness,” Violet said in her grand way when she picked up her private line, after Paige apologized for disappearing and then sleeping for hours, “this is Italia, Paige. One must soak in la dolce vita, especially when jet-lagged. I plan to spend the night in my lovely little castle, getting fat on all the marvelous local cuisine! I suggest you do the same.”

      And Paige would have loved to do the same, she thought when she finally stepped out of her cottage into the cool evening, the Tuscan sky turning to gold above her. But she had a date with her sins instead.

      Sins that felt like wishes granted, and what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to tell the difference between the two?

      She took her time and yet the walk was still too short. Much too short.

      And Giancarlo waited there at the crest of the hill, his eyes as hard as his body appeared loose and relaxed, in linen trousers and the sort of camel-colored sport coat that made her think of his aristocratic roots and her lack of them. And Paige was suddenly as wide-awake as if she’d drowned herself in a vat of espresso.

      He looked like something more than a man as he waited there, at first a shadow next to the bold upright thrust of a thick cypress tree, then, as she drew closer, very distinctly himself. He’d clearly watched her come all the way up the side of his hill, and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen him from afar without realizing it or if it was that odd magnetic pull inside of her that had done it, pointing her toward him as unerringly as if she’d been headed straight to him all along.

      Home, that thing in her whispered, and she didn’t have the strength to pretend she didn’t feel it when she did. Not tonight.

      She stopped when she was still some distance away and looked back the way she’d come, unable to keep the small sigh of pleasure from escaping her lips. There was the hint of mist in the valley the lower the sun inched toward the hills, adding an elegant sort of haunting to the shadows that danced between them, and far off in the distance the castello stood tall and proud, lights blazing against the coming night. It was so quiet and perfect and deeply satisfying in a way Paige hadn’t known anything could be. Gooseflesh prickled up and down her arms and she felt it all like a heavy sob in her chest, rolling through her, threatening her very foundations.

      Or maybe that was him. Maybe it had always been him.

      “It’s