The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

line. Or perhaps I’m kidding myself.”

      “I want this place to be a refuge,” he’d told her then. “It’s nearly fifteen miles to the nearest main road. Everything is private. It’s the perfect retreat for people who can’t hide anywhere else.”

      Violet had tasted her wine and she’d taken her time looking at him again, and he’d still been unsure if she was pausing for dramatic effect or if that was simply how she processed emotion. She was still a mystery to him and he’d long since accepted she always would be. Or anyway, he’d been telling himself he’d accepted it. It might even have been true.

      “Yes,” she’d said, “and it’s very beautiful. It’s always been beautiful. I imagine I could live here quite happily and transform myself into one of those portly, Italy-maddened expatriates who are forever writing those merry little Tuscan memoirs and waxing rhapsodic about the light.” Her brows had lifted. “But which one of us is it that feels they need a hiding place, Giancarlo? Is that meant to be you or me?”

      “Never fear, Mother,” he’d replied evenly. “I have no intention of having children of my own. I won’t have any cause to hide away, the better to protect them from prying eyes and a judgmental world. Perhaps I, too, will flourish in the heat of so many spotlights.”

      She’d only smiled, enigmatic as ever, seemingly not in the least bit chastised by what he’d said. Had he expected otherwise? “Privacy can be overrated, my darling boy. Particularly when it better resembles a jail.”

      And now he stood in the cheerful lounge of the house he’d taken apart and put back together with his own two hands, and watched the woman he’d once loved more than any other walk through the monument—he wouldn’t call it a jail—he’d built to his own unhappiness, his lonely, broken, betrayed heart.

      How had he failed to realize, until this moment, that he’d built it for her? That he’d been hiding here these past ten years—deliberately keeping himself some kind of hermit, tucked away on this property and in this very cottage? That it was as much his refuge for her as it was from her?

      That notion made something like a storm howl in him, deep and long. And as if she could read his mind, Paige turned, a small smile on that distracting mouth of hers.

      “I always liked your films,” she said, her voice the perfect complement to the carefully decorated great room, the furnishings a mix of masculine ease and his Italian heritage, as if he’d planned for her to stand there in its center and make it all work. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that that kind of attention to detail should spill over into all the things you do.”

      “My films were laughable vanity projects at best,” he told her, that storm in his voice and clawing at the walls of his chest. “I should never have taken myself seriously, much less allowed anyone else to do the same. It’s an embarrassment.”

      Paige wrinkled her nose and he thought that might kill him, because finding her adorable was far more dangerous than simply wanting her. One was about sex, which was simple. The other had consequences. Terrible consequences he refused to pay.

      “I liked them.”

      “Shall we talk about the things you like?” Giancarlo asked, and he sounded overbearingly brooding to his own ears. As if he was performing a role because he thought the moment needed a villain, not because he truly wanted to put her back in her place. “Your interest in photography and amateur porn, for instance?”

      Some revenge, he thought darkly. Next you’ll try to cuddle her to death with your words.

      But she only smiled in that enigmatic way of hers, and moved closer to one of the paintings on the wall, her hands cupped around her glass of wine and that inky black hair of hers falling in abandon down her back, and it wasn’t cuddling he thought about as he watched her move. Then bite her lower lip as she peered up at the painting. It wasn’t cuddling that made his blood heat and his mouth dry.

      “I don’t understand why I’m here,” Paige said, so softly that it took him a moment to realize she’d spoken. She swiveled back to look at him, framed there like a snapshot, the woman who had destroyed him before the great, bright canvas that stretched high behind her, all shapes and emotion and a swirl of color, that he hadn’t understood until tonight had reminded him of her.

      Giancarlo told himself it was a sour realization, but his sex felt heavy and the air between them tasted thick. Like desire. Like need.

      Like fate.

      “It seems as if you’ve achieved what you set out to do,” she continued as if she couldn’t feel the thickness, though he knew, somehow, that she could. “You’ve separated me from Violet without seeming to do so deliberately, which I’m assuming was your purpose from the start. But why bring me all the way here? Why not leave me in California and spirit Violet away? And having made me come all the way here,” Paige continued, something he couldn’t identify making her eyes gleam green in the mellow light, “why not simply leave me to rot in my little cottage? It’s pretty as prison cells go, I grant you. Very pretty. It might take me weeks to realize I’m well and truly trapped there.”

      He let his gaze roam over her the way his hands itched to do. “You’ve forgotten the most important part.”

      “The sex, yes,” Paige supplied, and she didn’t sound particularly cowed by the idea, or even as outraged as she’d been back in Los Angeles. Her tone was bland. Perhaps too bland. “On command.”

      “I was going to say obedience,” he said, and he didn’t feel as if he was playing a game any longer. He was too busy letting his eyes trace over her curves, letting his hands relish the tactile memory of her face between them as if she’d burned her way into his flesh. He could still taste her, damn it. And he wanted more.

      “Obedience,” she repeated, as if testing each syllable of the word as she said it. “Does that include feeding me a gourmet dinner in this perfect little mansion only a count would call a cottage? Are you entirely sure you know what obedience involves?”

      Giancarlo smiled, or anyway, his mouth moved. “That’s the point. It involves whatever I say it involves.”

      He took a sip of his wine as he walked over to the open glass doors that led out to the loggia, nodding for her to join him outside. Stiffly, carefully—as if she was more shaken by their encounter than she appeared, and God help him, he wanted that to be true—she did.

      Because the truth was so pathetic, wasn’t it? He still so badly wanted her to be real. To have meant some part of the things that had happened between them. All these years later, he still wanted that. Giancarlo despaired of himself.

      A table waited out in the soft night air, bright with candles and laden with local produce and delicacies prepared on-site, while a rolling cart sat next to it with even more tempting dishes beneath silver covers. It was achingly romantic, precisely as he’d ordered. The hills and valleys of the estate rolled out beneath the stars, with lights winking here and there in the distance, making their isolation high up on this terrace at a remove from all the world seem profound.

      That, too, was the point.

      He moved to pull her chair out for her like the parody of the perfect gentleman he had never quite been and waited as she settled in, taking a moment to inhale her scent. Tonight she smelled of the high-end bath products he had his staff stock in the cottages, vanilla and apricots, and that hint of pure woman beneath.

      “This house was a ruin when I started working on it,” he told her, still standing behind her, because he didn’t know what his face might show and he didn’t want her to see it. To see him. He succumbed to a whim and ran his fingers through her hair, reveling in the heavy weight of the dark strands even as he remembered all the other times she’d wrapped him in the heat and sweetness of it. When she’d crawled over him in that wide bed in Malibu and let her hair slip and tumble all over his skin as she tortured him with that sweet mouth of hers, driving them both wild. Giancarlo hardened, remembering it, and her hair