At the Count's Bidding(2)
It hurt. It all hurt.
“I never—” This was terrible. Worse than she’d imagined, and she’d imagined it often. She felt an awful heat at the back of her eyes and a warning sort of ache between her breasts, as if a sob was gathering force and threatening to spill over, and she knew better than to let it out. She knew he wouldn’t react well. She was lucky he was speaking to her at all now instead of having Violet’s security guards toss her bodily from the estate without so much as a word. But she kept talking anyway, as if that might help. “It’s my middle name, actually. It was a—my name is Paige.”
“Curiously, Paige is also the name of my mother’s personal assistant.”
But she could tell by the way his voice grew ominously quiet that he knew. That he wasn’t confused or asking her to explain herself. That he’d figured it out the moment he’d seen her—that she’d been the name on all those emails from his mother over the past few years.
And she could also tell exactly how he felt about that revelation. It was written into every stiffly furious line of his athletic form.
“Who cannot be you.” He shifted and her breath caught, as if the movement of his perfect body was a blow. “Assure me, please, that you are no more than an unpleasant apparition from the darkest hour of my past. That you have not insinuated yourself into my family. Do it now and I might let you walk out of here without calling the police.”
Ten years ago she’d have thought he was bluffing. That Giancarlo would no more have called the police on her than he would have thrown himself off the nearest bridge. But this was a different man. This was the Giancarlo she’d made, and she had no one to blame for that but herself.
Well. Almost no one. But there was no point bringing her mother into this, Paige knew. It was his he was concerned about—and besides, Paige hadn’t spoken to her own in a decade.
“Yes,” she said, and she felt shaky and vulnerable, as if it had only just occurred to her that her presence here was questionable, at best. “I’ve been working for Violet for almost three years now, but Giancarlo, you have to believe that I never—”
“Stai zitto.”
And Paige didn’t have to speak Italian to understand that harsh command, or the way he slashed his hand through the air, gruffly ordering her silence. She obeyed. What else could she do? And she watched him warily as if, at any moment, he might bare his fangs and sink them in her neck.
She’d deserve that, too.
Paige had always known this day would come. That this quiet new life she’d crafted for herself almost by accident was built on the shakiest of foundations and that all it would take was this man’s reappearance to upend the whole of it. Giancarlo was Violet’s son, her only child. The product of her fabled second marriage to an Italian count that the entire world had viewed as its own, personal, real-life fairy tale. Had Paige imagined this would end in any other manner? She’d been living on borrowed time from the moment she’d taken that interview and answered all the questions Violet’s managers had asked in the way she’d known—thanks to her insider’s take on Violet’s actual life away from the cameras, courtesy of her brief, brilliant affair with Giancarlo all those years ago—would get her the job.
Some people might view that harshly, she was aware. Particularly Giancarlo himself. But she’d had good intentions. Surely that counted for something? You know perfectly well that it doesn’t, the harsh voice in her head that was her last link to her mother grated at her. You know exactly what intentions are worth.
And it had been so long. She’d started to believe that this might never happen. That Giancarlo might stay in Europe forever, hidden away in the hills of Tuscany building his überprivate luxury hotel and associated cottages the way he had for the past decade, ever since she’d set him up and those sordid, intimate photographs had been splashed across every tabloid imaginable. She’d lulled herself into a false sense of security.