At the Count's Bidding. Caitlin Crews

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СКАЧАТЬ been ten minutes since they’d last touched instead of ten years. As if it knew him, recognized him, wanted him—as deeply and irrevocably as she always had. As if wanting him was some kind of virus that had only ever been in remission, for which there was no cure.

      The kind of virus that made her breasts heavy and her belly too taut and shivery at once. The kind of virus that made her wish she still danced the way she had in high school and those few years after, obsessively and constantly, as if that kind of extended, heedless movement might be the only way to survive it. Him. His marvelous mouth tightened as the silence dragged on and she sent up a prayer of thanks that he hadn’t thought to remove his mirrored sunglasses yet. She didn’t want to know what his dark gaze would feel like when she could actually see his eyes again. She didn’t want to know what that would do to her now. She still remembered what it had been like that last time, that short and harsh conversation on the doorstep of her apartment building that final morning, where he’d confronted her with those pictures and had truly understood what she’d done to him. When he’d looked at her as if he’d only then, in that moment, seen her true face—and it had been evil.

      Pull yourself together, she ordered herself fiercely. There was no going back. There were no do-overs. She knew that too well.

      “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out before he cut her off again. Before she melted into the tears she knew she’d cry later, in private. Before the loss and grief she’d pretended she was over for years now swamped her. “Giancarlo, I’m so sorry.”

      He went so rigid it was as if she’d slapped him, and yet she felt slapped. She hurt everywhere.

      “I don’t care why you’re here.” His voice was rough. A scrape that tore her open, ripping her right down her middle. “I don’t care what game you’re playing this time. You have five minutes to leave the premises.”

      But all Paige could hear was what swirled there beneath his words. Rage. Betrayal, as if it was new. Hot and furious, like a fire that still burned bright between them. And she was sick, she understood, because instead of being as frightened of that as she should have been, something in her rejoiced that he wasn’t indifferent. After all this time.

      “If you do not do this of your own accord,” Giancarlo continued with a certain vicious deliberation, and she knew he wanted that to hurt her, “I will take great pleasure in dumping you on the other side of the gates myself.”

      “Giancarlo—” she began, trying to sound calm, though her hands nervously smoothed at the soft blouse and the pencil skirt she wore. And even though she couldn’t see his eyes, she felt them there, tracing the curve of her hips and her legs beneath, as if she’d deliberately directed his gaze to parts of her body he’d once claimed he worshipped. Had she meant to do that? How could she not know?

      But he interrupted her again.

      “You may call me Count Alessi in the remaining four minutes before I kick you out of here,” he told her harshly. “But if you know what’s good for you, whatever name you’re using and whatever con you’re running today and have been running for years, I’d suggest you stay silent.”

      “I’m not running a con. I’m not—” Paige cut herself off, because this was all too complicated and she should have planned for this, shouldn’t she? She should have figured out what to say to someone who had no reason on earth to listen to her. And who wouldn’t believe a word she said even if he did. Why hadn’t she prepared herself? “I know you don’t want to hear a single thing I have to say, but none of this is what you think. It wasn’t back then, either. Not really.”

      He seemed to expand then, like a great wave. As if the force of his temper soared out from him and crashed over the whole of the grand terrace, the sloping lawn, the canyons all around, the complicated mess of Los Angeles stretched out below. It crackled as it cascaded over her, making every hair on her body seem to stand on end. That mouth of his flattened and he swept his sunglasses from his face at last—which was not an improvement. Because his eyes were dark and hot and gleamed a commanding sort of gold, and as he fastened them on her he made no attempt at all to hide the blistering light of his fury.

      It made her want to sit down, hard, before she fell. It made her worry her legs might give out. It made her want to cry the way she had ten years ago, so hard and so long she’d made herself sick, for all the good that had done. She felt dangerously, dizzyingly hollow.

      “Enlighten me,” he suggested, all silken threat and that humming sort of violence right there beneath his elegant surface. Or maybe not really beneath it, she thought, now that she could see his beautiful, terrible face in all its furious perfection. “Which part was not what I thought? The fact that you arranged to have photographs taken of us while we were having sex, though I am certain I told you how much I hated public exposure after a lifetime in the glare of my mother’s spotlight? Or the fact that you sold those photos to the tabloids?” He took a step toward her; his hands were in fists at his side, and she didn’t understand how she could simultaneously want to run for her life and run toward him. He was a suicide waiting to happen. She should know that better than anyone. “Or perhaps I am misunderstanding the fact that you have now infiltrated my mother’s house to further prey on my family?” He shook his head. “What kind of monster are you?”

      “Giancarlo—”

      “I will tell you exactly what kind.” His nostrils flared and she knew that look that flashed over his face then. She knew it far too well. It was stamped into her memories and it made her stomach heave with the same shame and regret. It made her flush with terrible heat. “You are a mercenary bitch and I believe I was perfectly clear about this ten years ago. I never, ever wanted to see your face again.”

      And Paige was running out of ways to rank which part of this was the worst part, but she couldn’t argue. Not with any of what he’d said. Yet rather than making her shrink down and curl up into the fetal position right there on the terra-cotta pavers beneath their feet, the way she’d done the last time he’d looked at her like that and called her names she’d richly deserved, it made something else shiver into being inside her. Something that made her straighten instead of shrink. Something that gave her the strength to meet his terrible glare, to lift her chin despite all of that furious, condemning gold.

      “I love her.”

      That hung there between them, stark and heavy. And, she realized belatedly, an echo of what she’d said ten years ago, when it had been much too late. When he’d believed her even less than he did now. When she’d known full well that saying it would only hurt him, and she’d done it anyway. I’m so sorry, Giancarlo. I love you.

      “What did you say?” His voice was too quiet. So soft and deliberately menacing it made her shake inside, though she didn’t give in to it. She forced her spine even straighter. “What did you dare say to me?”

      “This has nothing to do with you.” That was true, in its way. Paige wasn’t a lunatic, no matter what he might think. She’d simply understood a long time ago that she’d lost him and it was irrevocable. She’d accepted it. This wasn’t about getting him back. It was about paying a debt in the only way she could. “It never did have anything to do with you,” she continued when she was certain the shaking inside her wouldn’t bleed over into her voice. “Not the way you’re thinking. Not really.”

      He shook his head slightly, as if he was reeling, and he muttered something in a stream of silken, shaken Italian that she shouldn’t have felt like that, all over her skin. Because it wasn’t a caress. It was its opposite.

      “This is a nightmare.” СКАЧАТЬ