The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

ourselves. Conserve it and care for it, and we become greater in its glory. Sometimes I think he was a madman, a farmer hiding in an aristocrat’s body.” His gaze moved over her face, then beyond her, toward the setting sun. “And then another sunset reminds me that he was right. Beauty is always worth it. It feeds the soul.”

      “He sounds like some kind of poet.”

      “Not my father. Poets and artists were to be championed, as one must always support art and culture for the same reason one tends the land, but Alessis had a higher calling.” He shook his head. “Endless debt and responsibility, apparently. I might have been better off as an artist, come to that.”

      “If I had a home like this, I don’t think I’d mind doing whatever it took to keep it,” Paige said then. She remembered herself. “I don’t think anyone would.”

      She thought Giancarlo smiled, though his face was obscured in the falling dark and then she knew she must have imagined it, because this wasn’t that kind of evening no matter how lovely it was. He wasn’t that kind of man. Not anymore. Not for her.

      “Come,” he said. He reached out his hand and held it there in the last gasp of golden light, and Paige knew, somehow, that everything would be divided into before and after she took it. The world. Her life. This thing that was still between them. And that precarious, wildly beating creature inside her chest that was the battered ruins of her heart.

      His mouth crooked slightly as the moment stretched out. She made no move; she was frozen into place and wasn’t sure she could do anything about it, but he didn’t drop his hand.

      “Did you make me dinner?” she asked, her voice shockingly light when there was nothing but heaviness and their history and her treacherous heart inside of her, and she thought neither one of them was fooled. “Because food poisoning really would be a punishment, all joking aside.”

      “I am Italian,” he said, with a note of amused outrage in his voice, which reminded her too strongly of all that laughter they’d shared a lifetime ago. As if the only things that had mattered in the whole world had been there in his smile. She’d thought so then. She thought maybe she still did, for all the good that would do her here. “Of course I can cook.” He paused, as if noticing how friendly he sounded and remembering how inappropriate that was tonight. As if he, too, was finding it hard to recall the battle lines he’d drawn. “But even if I couldn’t, the estate has a fleet of chefs on call. Meals are always gourmet here, no matter who prepares them.”

      “Careful,” she said softly, more to her memories and her silly heart than the man who stood there before her, still reaching out to her, still her greatest temptation made flesh. Still the perfect embodiment of all the things she’d always wanted and couldn’t have. “I might forget to be suitably intimidated and start enjoying myself. And then what would happen?”

      He definitely smiled that time, and Paige felt it like a deep, golden fire, lighting her up from the inside out. Making her shiver.

      “Surrender takes many forms,” he replied into the indigo twilight that cloaked them both, now that the sun had finally sunk beneath the furthest hill. “I want yours every way I can get it.”

      “I can surrender to la dolce vita,” she said, as airily as possible, as if her tone of voice might make it so. “I understand that’s the point of Italy.”

      He still stood there, his hand out, as if he could stand like that forever. “That’s as good a place to start as any.”

      And there was no real decision, in the end. There had been so many choices along the way, hadn’t there? Paige could have got a different job three years ago. She could have left Violet’s house and employ the moment Giancarlo had appeared, or anytime since. She could have declined the offer of that “date” that night, she could have stayed standing up instead of sinking to her knees by the side of that road, she could have shown him nothing in Violet’s closet that day but her back as she walked away from him. She could have refused to board his plane, refused to leave her cottage tonight, locked herself inside rather than climb this hill to stand before him like this.

      He hadn’t happened to her, like the weather. She’d chosen this, every step of the way, and even here, even stranded in the countryside with this man who thought so ill of her, she felt more at home than she had in years. Maybe ever. She supposed that meant she’d made her decision a long time ago.

      So Paige reached out her hand and slid it into his. She let the heat of him wash through her at that faintly rough touch, his palm warm and strong and perfect, and told herself it didn’t matter what happened next.

      That she’d surrendered herself to Giancarlo a long time ago, whether he understood that or not.

CHAPTER FIVE

      “IF THIS IS your revenge,” Paige said, a current of laughter in her voice though her expression was mild, “I think I should confess to you that it tastes a whole lot like red wine.”

      He should do something about that, Giancarlo thought, watching her move through the refurbished ground floor of his renovated house. She was still so graceful, so light on her feet. Like poetry in motion, and he’d never been able to reconcile how she could flow like that and have turned out so rotten within. He’d never understood it.

      It doesn’t matter what you understand, he snapped at himself. Only what you do to make this thing for her go away—

      But something had happened out there as the sun set. Something had shifted inside him, though he couldn’t quite identify it. He wasn’t certain he’d want to name it if he could.

      “It may prove to be a long night, cara,” he told her darkly, pouring himself a glass of the wine they made here from Alessi grapes. “This is merely the beginning.”

      “The civilized version of revenge, then,” she murmured, almost as if to herself, running her fingers along the length of the reclaimed wood table that marked his dining area in the great, open space he’d done himself. In soothing yet bright colors and historically contextual pieces, all of which dimmed next to that effortless, offhanded beauty of hers. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

      This didn’t feel like revenge. This felt like a memory. Giancarlo didn’t want to think too closely about that, but the truth of it slapped at him all the same. It could have been any one of the long, lush evenings they’d shared in Malibu a decade back that still shimmered in his recollection, as if the two of them had been lit from within. It shimmered in him now, too. Again. As if this was the culmination of all the dreams he’d lied and told himself he’d never had, in all those years since he’d left Los Angeles and started bringing the estate back to life.

      There was too much history between them, too much that had gone wrong to ever fix, and yet he still caught himself watching her as if this was a new beginning. But then, he had always been such a damned fool where this woman was concerned, hadn’t he?

      Earlier he’d stood in the courtyard of the castello with Violet, toasting her first night back in Italy since his father’s funeral eight years ago, and he’d felt a sense of deep rightness. Of homecoming, long overdue. These hills held his happiest childhood memories, after all. When his parents had both been alive, and in those early years, so much in love it had colored the air around them.

      “You’ve done a marvelous thing here, darling,” Violet had said, smiling as much at him as at the achingly perfect view.

      “I remember the days when we couldn’t drive out the gates in Bel Air without having to fight our way through packs of photographers,” he’d said, gazing out at the slumbering hills, all of them his now, his birthright and his future. His responsibility. And not a single paparazzo in a thousand miles or more. No lies. No stories. Only the enduring beauty of the earth. “Just to get to school in the morning.”

      “The tabloids giveth and the tabloids taketh away,” Violet had said drily,