At the Count's Bidding(16)

                She felt her breath desert her, and she thought she saw the man she remembered in his dark gaze, the man as lost in this as she always had been, but it was gone almost at once as if it had never been. As if that had been nothing but wishful thinking on her part.

                “Wear something I can get my hands under,” he told her, and there was a cruel cast to his desperately sensual mouth then that should have made her want to cry—but that wasn’t the sensation that tripped through her blood, making her feel dizzy with something she’d die before she’d call excitement.

                And as if he knew that too, he smiled.

                Then he left her there—trying to sort out all the conflicting sensations inside of her right there in the glare of another California summer morning, trying not to fall apart when she suspected that was what he wanted her to do—without a backward glance.

                * * *

                “I think he must be a terribly lonely man,” Violet said.

                They were sitting in one of the great legend’s favorite rooms in this vast house, the sunny, book-lined and French-doored affair she called her office, located steps from her personal garden and festooned with her many awards.

                Violet lounged back on the chaise she liked to sit on while tending to her empire—“because what, pray, is the point of being an international movie star if I can’t conduct business on a chaise?” Violet had retorted when asked why by some interviewer or another during awards season some time back—with her eyes on the city that preened before her beneath the ever-blue California sky and sighed. She was no doubt perfectly aware of the way the gentle light caught the face she’d allowed age to encroach upon, if only slightly. She looked wise and gorgeous at once, her fine blond hair brushed back from her face and only hinting at her sixty-plus years, dressed in her preferred “at home” outfit of butter-soft jeans that had cost her a small fortune and a bespoke emerald-green blouse that played up the remarkable eyes only a keen observer would note were enhanced by cosmetics.

                This was the star in her natural habitat.

                Sitting in her usual place at the elegant French secretary on the far side of the room, her laptop open before her and all of Violet’s cell phones in a row on the glossy wood surface in case any of them should ring, Paige frowned and named the very famous director they’d just been discussing.

                “You think he’s lonely?” she asked, startled.

                Violet let out that trademark throaty laugh of hers that had been wowing audiences and bringing whole rooms to a standstill since she’d appeared in her first film in the seventies.

                “No doubt he is,” she said after a moment, “despite the parade of ever-younger starlets who he clearly doesn’t realize make him look that much older and more decrepit, but I meant Giancarlo.”

                Of course she did.

                “Is he?” Paige affected a vague tone. The sort of tone any employee would use when discussing the boss’s son.

                “He was a very lonely child,” Violet said, in the same sort of curious, faraway voice she used when she was puzzling out a new character. “It is my single regret. His father and I loved each other wildly and often quite badly, and there was little room for anyone else.”

                Everyone knew the story, of course. The doomed love affair with its separations and heartbreaks. The tempestuous, often short-lived reunion  s. The fact they’d lived separately for years at a time with many rumored affairs, but had never divorced. Violet’s bent head and flowing tears at the old count’s funeral, her refusal to speak of him publicly afterward.