At the Count's Bidding. Caitlin Crews
below, as far as she could get from this man. She wanted to flee. She wanted to run and never stop running. The urge to do it beat in her blood.
But she hadn’t done it ten years ago, when she should have, and from far scarier people than Giancarlo Alessi. She wouldn’t do it now. No matter how hard her heart catapulted itself against her chest. No matter how great and painful the sobs she refused to let loose from inside.
“You seem to be under the impression I am playing a game with you,” Giancarlo said softly, so very softly, the menace in it like his hand around her throat. What was the matter with her that the notion moved in her like a dark thrill instead of a threat? “I am not.”
“I understand that this is difficult for you, and that it’s unlikely you’ll believe that was never my intention.” Paige tried to sound conciliatory. She did. But she thought it came out sounding a whole lot more like panic, and panic was as useless as regret. She had no space for either. This was the life she’d made. This was what she’d sown. “But I’m afraid my loyalty is to your mother, not to you.”
“I apologize.” It was a snide snap, not an apology. “But the irony rendered me temporarily deaf. Did you—you—just utter the word loyalty?”
Paige gritted her teeth. She didn’t bow her head. “You didn’t hire me. She did.”
“A point that will be moot if I kill you with my bare hands,” he snarled at her, and she should have been afraid of him, but she wasn’t. She had no doubt that he’d throw her off the estate, that if he could tear her to shreds with his words he would, and gladly, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically. Not Giancarlo.
Maybe that was the last remnant of the girl she’d been, she thought then. That foolish, unbearably naive girl, who’d imagined that a bright and brand-new love could fix anything. That it was the only thing that mattered. She knew better now; she’d learned her lessons well and truly and in the harshest of ways, but she still believed Giancarlo was a good man. No matter what her betrayal had done to him.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was rough with all the emotion she knew she couldn’t show him. He’d only hate her more. “But you won’t.”
“Please,” he all but whispered, and she saw too much on his face then, the agony and the fury and the darkness between, “do not tell me you are so delusional as to imagine I wouldn’t rip you apart if I could.”
“Of course,” she agreed, and it was hard to tell what hurt when everything did. When she was sure she would leave this encounter with visible bruises. “If you could. But that’s not who you are.”
“The man you thought you knew is dead, Nicola,” he said, that hated name a deliberate blow, and Paige finally did step back then, it was so brutal. “He died ten years ago and there will be no breathing him back to life with your sad tales of loyalty and your pretty little lies. There will be no resurrection. I might look like the man you knew, for two profoundly stupid months a lifetime ago, but mark my words. He is gone as if he never was.”
It shouldn’t be so sad, when it was nothing more than a simple truth. Not a surprise. Not a slap, even, despite his harsh tone. There was absolutely no reason she should feel swollen anew with all that useless, unwieldy, impossible grief, as if it had never faded, never so much as shifted an inch, in all this time. As if it had only been waiting to flatten her all over again.
“I accept both responsibility and blame for what happened ten years ago,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could, and he would never know how hard that was. How exposed she felt, how off balance. Just as he would never know that those two months she’d lost herself in him had been the best of her life, worth whatever had come after. Worth anything, even this. “I can’t do anything else. But I promised Violet I wouldn’t leave her. Punish me if you have to, Giancarlo. Don’t punish her.”
* * *
Giancarlo Alessi was a man made almost entirely of faults, a fact he was all too familiar with after the bleakness of the past decade and the price he’d paid for his own foolishness, but he loved his mother. His complicated, grandiose, larger-than-life idol of a mother, who he knew adored him in her own, particular way. It didn’t matter how many times Violet had sold him out for her own purposes—to combat tales of her crumbling marriage, to give the tabloids something to talk about other than her romantic life, to serve this or that career purpose over the years.
He’d come to accept that having one’s private moments exposed to the public was par for the course when one was related to a Hollywood star of Violet’s magnitude—which was why he had vowed never, ever to have children that she could use for her own ends. No happy grandchildren to grace magazine articles about her surprising depths. No babies she could coo over in front of carefully selected cameras to shore up her image when necessary. He’d never condemn a child of his to that life, no matter how much he might love Violet himself. He’d pass on his Italian title to a distant cousin of his father’s and let the sharp brutality of all that Hollywood attention end with him.
He forgave his mother. It was who she was. It was this woman he wanted to hurt, not Violet.
This woman who could call herself any name she wanted, but who was still Nicola to him. The architect of his downfall. The agent of his deepest shame.
The too-pretty dancer he’d lost his head over like a thousand shameful clichés, staining his ancient title, his relationship with his late father, and himself in the process. The grasping, conniving creature who had led him around by his groin and made him a stranger to himself in the process. The woman who had made him complicit in the very thing he hated above all others: his presence in the damned tabloids, his most private life on parade.
He’d yet to forgive himself. He’d never planned on forgiving her.
Standing here in this house he’d vowed he’d never enter again, the woman he’d been determined he’d cut from his memory if it killed him within his reach once more, he told himself the edgy thing that surged in him, making him feel something like drunk—dangerously unsteady, a little too close to dizzy—was a cold, clear, measured hatred. No more and no less than she deserved.
It had to be cold. Controlled. He wouldn’t permit it to be anything else. He wouldn’t let it run hot, burn within him the way loving her had, take charge of him and ruin him anew. He wasn’t that trusting, gullible fool any longer, not as he’d been then—so sure he’d been the experienced one, the calloused and jaded one, that no one could take advantage of. She’d made certain he’d never be that idiot again.
He would save that kind of heated, brooding dislike for the sprawling, sunbaked city of Los Angeles itself. For California, brown and gold with only its manufactured, moneyed swaths of green as relief in another breathless summer. For the elegant monstrosity that was La Bellissima. For his heedless, callow twenties playing silly playboy games with films and a parade of famous and beautiful lovers, which this woman had brought to a screeching, excruciatingly public halt. For that dry blast of relentless heat on the wind, spiced with smoke from far-off brushfires and the hint of the Pacific Ocean that never cooled it, that made him feel too edgy, too undone. For his mother’s recklessness in lovers and husbands and assistants, in all her personal relationships to the endless delight of the predatory press, a trait of hers Giancarlo had long despaired of and had shared but once.
Once.
Once had been enough.
He studied Nicola—Paige—as she stood there before him, gazing back at him from her liar’s eyes that were neither blue nor green, that fall of thick, dark hair with a hint of auburn that she’d tamed into a side plait falling over one bare, exquisitely formed shoulder. Back then her hair had been redder, longer. Less ink, more fire, and he wished he found the darker shade unpleasant, unattractive. She was still as tall as he remembered but had gone skinny in that way they all did here, as if the denial of every pleasure in the world might bring them the fame they wanted more than anything. More than breath, more than food. Much, much more than love, as he knew all too well.
Don’t