The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

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      He watched her face as he helped her rise to her feet, and he didn’t let go of her arm when she was standing, the way he should have done.

      “And here I thought we were right on target to get arrested for public indecency,” she whispered, her voice still sharp but something raw in her chameleon gaze. “They could throw me in jail and charge me for solicitation and it would be like all your dreams come true in one evening.”

      “This is my dream,” he growled at her, his hand wrapped tight around her arm and that fever in his blood. His revenge, he thought. At last. “It’s not the act itself that matters, cara. That’s a privilege you haven’t earned. It’s the surrender. It’s all about the surrender.” He laughed then, a dark sound he felt in every part of him, as if it was a part of the night and as dangerous, and then he let her go. It was harder than it should have been. “You’ll learn.”

      * * *

      It became clear to Paige in the week that followed that it wasn’t Giancarlo’s intention to actually make her have sex with him whenever and wherever he chose, no matter what provocative things he might say to the contrary. That would have been easy, in its way. He was far more diabolical than that.

      He wanted her in a constant state of panic, with no idea what he might do next. He wanted her to think of nothing at all but him and the little things he made her do to prove her obedience that were slowly driving her insane.

      It’s all about the surrender, he’d said. Her surrender. And she was learning what he’d meant.

      One day—after nearly a week filled with anticipation and the faintest of touches, always in passing and always unexpected, all of which still felt like a metal collar around her neck that he tightened at will—he found her in Violet’s expansive closet, putting together a selection of outfits with appropriate accessories for Violet to choose between for the event the star was scheduled to attend that evening.

      “Pull up your skirt, take off your panties—if you are foolish enough to be wearing any—and hand them to me,” Giancarlo said without preamble, making Paige jump and shiver into a bright red awareness of him, especially because her mind had been a long way away.

      Ten years ago away, in fact, and treating her to a play-by-play, Technicolor and surround-sound replay of one of their more adventurous evenings in the Malibu house down on the beach she had no idea if he still owned.

      “What?” she stammered out, but her body wasn’t in any doubt about his instructions. Her breasts bloomed into an aching heaviness, making her bra feel too tight and too scratchy against her skin. Her stomach flipped over, and below, that shimmering heat became scalding.

      And that was only at the sound of his voice. What would happen if he touched her this time?

      “Is this your strategy, cara? To feign ignorance every time I speak to you?” He loomed in the doorway, looking untamed and edgy, furious and male. He’d forgone the exquisite suits and running apparel today and looked more like the Giancarlo she remembered in casual trousers and a top that was more like a devotional poem extolling the perfection of his torso than anything so prosaic as a T-shirt. “It’s already tiresome.”

      She was standing too straight, too still, on the other side of the central island that housed Violet’s extensive jewelry collection, entirely too aware that she resembled a deer stuck fast in the glare of oncoming headlights. But she couldn’t seem to move.

      Anything besides her mouth, that was. “I did try to warn you that this would get boring.”

      Giancarlo’s mouth crooked slightly and made hers water. His eyes were so dark the gold in them felt as much like a caress as a warning, and she was terribly afraid she could no longer tell the difference.

      “Show me that you know how to follow directions.” He folded his arms over that chest of his and propped a shoulder against the doorjamb, but Paige wasn’t the least bit fooled. He looked about as casual and relaxed as a predator three seconds before launching an attack. “And I’d think twice before making me wait, if I were you.”

      “It’s all the threats,” she grated at him. “They make me dizzy with fear. It’s hard to hear the instructions over all the heart palpitations.”

      “I’m certain that’s true.” That crook in his mouth deepened. She was fascinated. “But I think we both know it isn’t fear.”

      Paige couldn’t really argue with that, and she certainly didn’t want him to wander any closer and prove his point—did she? She glanced down at her outfit, the short, flirty little skirt with nothing on beneath it, and realized that she’d obeyed him without thinking about it when she’d dressed this morning. Make sure that I have access to you, should I desire it, he’d told her two nights ago, a harsh whisper in the hallway outside Violet’s office. She’d obeyed him and in so doing, she’d revealed herself completely.

      When she raised her gaze to his again, he was smiling, a fierce satisfaction in his dark gold eyes and stamped across that impossibly elegant face of his. He jerked his chin at her, wordlessly ordering her to show him, and her hands moved convulsively, as if her body wanted nothing more than to prove itself to him. To prove herself trustworthy again, to jump through any hoop he set before her—

      But that wasn’t where this was headed. This wasn’t a love story. No matter how many memories she used to torture herself into imagining otherwise.

      “Come over here and find out for yourself, if you want to know,” she heard herself say. Suicidally.

      Giancarlo only shook his head at her, as if saddened. “You seem to miss the point. Again. This is not a game that lovers play, cara. This is not some delightful entertainment en route to a blissful afternoon in bed. This is—”

      “Penance,” she finished for him, with far more bitterness than she should have allowed him to hear. “Punishment. I know.”

      “Then stop stalling. Show me.”

      Paige could see he meant it.

      She told herself it didn’t matter. That he’d seen all of her before, and in a far more intimate setting than this. That more than that, he’d had his mouth and his hands on every single inch of her skin, in ways so devastating and intense that she could still feel it ten years later. So what did it matter now? He was all the way across the room and he wanted her to balk. To hate him. That was why he was doing this, she was sure.

      So instead, she laughed, like the carefree girl she’d never been. Paige stepped out from behind the center island so there could be no accusations of hiding. She watched his hard, hard face and then, slowly, she reached down and pulled her skirt up to her hips.

      “Satisfied?” she asked when she was fully bared to his view—because she was.

      She’d been so lost in her guilt, her shame, her own anger at everything that had happened and Giancarlo too, that she’d forgotten one very important fact about this thing between them that Giancarlo had been using to such great effect.

      It ran both ways.

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