The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

      “I appreciate the metaphor,” Paige said, with a certain grittiness to her voice that he suspected meant her teeth were clenched. He smiled.

      “Then I hope you’ll appreciate this, too,” he said as he rounded the table and sat down across from her, stretching out his legs before him as he did. “This is the Italian countryside and everything you can see in every direction is mine. You could scream for days and no one would hear you. You could try to escape and, unless you’ve taken up marathon running in your spare time, you’d run out of energy long before you found the road. You claimed to be obedient in Los Angeles because it suited you. You wanted your job more than you minded the loss of your self-respect, such as it is. Here?” He shrugged as he topped up their wineglasses with a bottle crafted from grapes he’d grown himself and then sat back, watching her closely, as she visibly fought not to react to his cool tone, his calmly belligerent words. “You have no other choice.”

      “That’s not at all creepy,” Paige said, though he could have sworn that gleam of green in her chameleon gaze was amusement, however beleaguered. “I’m definitely the terrifying stalker in this scenario, not you.”

      Giancarlo laughed. “Not that I would care if it really was creepy, but I don’t think you really think so, do you? Shall we put it to the test?”

      He wanted her to push him, he understood. He wanted to see for himself. He wanted to peel those crisp white trousers from her slim hips and lick his way into her wetness and heat and know it was all for him, the way he’d once believed it was. The way he’d once believed she was.

      Soon, he assured himself as his body reacted to that image with predictable enthusiasm. Soon enough.

      “Again,” Paige said tightly, taking a healthy gulp of her wine, “it seems to me that there are more effective forms of payback than a romantic dinner for two, served beneath the starry night sky on what might be the most intimate terrace on the entire planet.” She looked out at the view as the heavens sparkled back at her, as if they were performing for her pleasure. “I suspect you might be doing it wrong.”

      “Ah, Paige,” Giancarlo said softly. “You lack imagination.” Her eyes swung back to his and he smiled again, wider, pleased when that seemed to alarm her. “The romantic setting will only make it more poignant, will it not, when I order you to strip and sit there naked as we eat. Or when I demand that you please me with your mouth while I soak in the view. Or when I bend you over the serving table and make you scream out my name until I’m done.” He let his smile deepen as her eyes went very green, and very round. “The more civilized the setting, the more debauched the act,” he said mildly. “I find there is very little more effective.”

      She looked stunned, and then something like wistful, and he almost broke and hauled her into his arms—but somehow, somehow, he reined himself in. Just a little bit longer, he promised himself. She blinked, then coughed, and then she folded her hands together in her lap with such precision that Giancarlo knew she was torturing herself with all those images he’d put in her head.

       Va bene.

      “You say that as if this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.” Her voice was his own little victory, so raspy was it then, with that stunned heat in her gaze and that band of color high on her cheeks. “Do you spend a lot of time enacting complicated revenge fantasies, Giancarlo? Is that another one of your heretofore hidden talents—like architecture and interior design, apparently?”

      “I went to architecture school after university,” he said, and something about the fact she didn’t know that bothered him. Had he never told her his own story? Had he been as guilty of wearing a false persona ten years ago as she had been? Had it simply been the rush, the need that had kept them in bed and focused on other things? Had it been by her design—or had it been his own selfishness at play? He shoved that disconcerting thought aside. “But when I was finished, I decided I wanted to leverage my position as Violet’s son, instead. That didn’t work out very well for either one of us, did it?” He reached over and removed the silver cover from the plate of antipasti in front of her, then from his own, and smiled at her when she looked confused. “The salsicce di cinghiale is particularly good,” he told her. “And you should be certain to eat well. We have a very long night ahead of us.”

      He expected her to do as she was told. It took a moment or two for him to realize that she hadn’t moved. That she appeared to have frozen solid where she sat and was staring at him with a stricken sort of expression on her face.

      Giancarlo lifted a brow. “Was I unclear?”

      “I appreciate all the tension and drama,” Paige said after a moment. “I don’t think I realized how very much you take after your mother until now. That’s a compliment,” she added in a hurry when he frowned at her. “But I’ll pass.”

      “That is not an option you have.” He shrugged. “You persist in thinking what you want comes into play here. It doesn’t.”

      “What will you do?” she asked softly, so softly it took a moment for him to hear the challenge beneath the words, and then to see it there in her chameleon eyes. “Make me scream for people who won’t hear me? Make me walk for days in search of a road that’s still hours from anywhere? Force me to stay in that gorgeous little cottage down the hill like a bird in a cage?”

      “Or, alternatively, merely call my mother and tell her exactly who you are,” he suggested. “A fate you felt was worse than death and far more terrible than anything I might do a week ago.”

      But tonight she only shook her head and she didn’t avert her gaze, reminding him of that moment in his mother’s closet across the world. Reminding him he’d never controlled this woman, not even when she’d agreed to let him.

      “I think if you were going to do that, Giancarlo, you would have. You wouldn’t have dragged me across the planet and then presented me with wine and a four-course meal.”

      He laughed, a smoky little sound against the night. It did nothing to ease the mounting tension. “Do you really want to test that theory?”

      She leaned forward, holding his gaze, and his laughter dried up as if it had never been. He was aware of everything at once. The stars above them, the faint breeze that teased him with the intoxicating scent of her. The rich food before them, the dancing candlelight. The way she sat now, the wide neck of her brightly patterned tunic falling open as she leaned toward him, hinting at the soft curves beneath.

      And all that fire, as bright as it had ever been, burning them both where they sat.

      Her gaze was like a touch on his, and he felt it everywhere. “I have a different theory.”

      “I’m all ears, of course. Every inmate is innocent, every killer was merely misunderstood, every con man an artist in his soul, et cetera. Tell me your sob story, cara.” He felt his mouth crook. “I knew you would, sooner or later.”

      But Paige only smiled, and her eyes were so green tonight they rivaled his own lush fields. It moved in him like summer, an exultation of all that boundless heat that spiked the air between them.

      “You don’t want revenge. Not really. You want sex.”

      Her smile deepened when he only stared back at her, that mouth of hers still an utter distraction, still his undoing. Her gaze proud and unwavering and he had no defense against that, either.

      “You don’t want to admit it, given what happened the last time we had sex, but look where we are.” She lifted a shoulder, somehow encompassing the whole of the estate in that simple little gesture. “You’ve made sure there couldn’t possibly be a camera here. You’ve cut us off from the rest of the world. And you’re calling it revenge because you’re furious that you still want me.”

      “Or because wanting you is only part of it,” he replied, stiffer than he should have sounded, because it was that or let loose the wild thing in him that wanted nothing but her however he could have her.