At the Count's Bidding(25)

                “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.

                He stared at her—too hard and too long—and she saw the faintest hint of color high on those gorgeous cheeks of his. And that hectic glitter in his dark eyes that she recognized. Oh yes, she recognized it. She remembered it.