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At the Count's Bidding(27)

By:Caitlin Crews


                “Then how would you know?” she asked him, her voice like a stranger’s, breathy and inviting. Nothing like hurt at all. “Maybe the whore is you.”

                “Watch your mouth.” But he’d moved closer again, his shoulders filling her vision, her need expanding to swallow the whole world. Or maybe it was his need. Both of theirs, twined together and too big to fit beneath the sky.

                “Make me,” she dared him, and he muttered something in Italian.

                And then he did.

                He let go of her hands to take her face between his hard palms, holding her where he wanted her as he plundered her mouth. As he took and took and then took even more, as if there was no end and no beginning and only the madness of their mouths, slick and hot and perfect. The fire between them danced high and roared louder, and he didn’t stop her when Paige melted against him. When she wound her arms around his neck and clung to him, kissing him back as if this was the reunion   she’d always dreamed of. As if this was a solution, not another one of his clever little power games.

                And she didn’t know when it changed. When it stopped being about fury and started to taste like heat. When it started to feel like the people they’d been long ago, before everything had gone so wrong.

                He felt it, too. She felt him stiffen, and then he thrust her aside.

                And for a long moment they only stared at each other, both of them breathing too fast, too hard. Paige tried to step back and her legs wobbled, and Giancarlo scowled at her even as his hand shot out to steady her.

                “Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself. Her mouth felt marked, soft and plundered, and Giancarlo was looking at her as if she was a ghost. “That certainly taught me my place. All that punitive kissing.”

                She didn’t know what moved across his face then, but it scraped at her. It hurt far worse than any of his words had. She had to bite her own tongue to keep from making the small sound of pain that welled up in her at the sight of it.

                “It will,” he promised her, a bleakness in his voice that settled in her bones like a winter chill. Like the fate she’d been running from since the day she’d met him, loath as she was to admit it. “I can promise you that. Sooner or later, it will.”

                * * *

                Kissing her had been a terrible mistake.

                Giancarlo ran until he thought his lungs might burst and his legs might collapse beneath him, and it was useless. The Southern California sun was unforgiving, the blue sky harsh and high and cloudless, and he couldn’t get her taste out of his mouth. He couldn’t get the feel of her out of his skin.

                It was exactly as it had been a decade ago, all over again, except this time he couldn’t pretend he’d been blindsided. This time, he’d walked right into it. He’d been the one to kiss her.

                He cursed himself in two languages and at last he stopped running, bending over to prop his hands on his knees and stare down the side of the mountain toward his mother’s estate and the sprawl of the city below it in the shimmering heat of high summer. It was too hot here. It was too familiar.

                Too dangerous.

                It was much too tempting to simply forget himself, to pick up where he’d left off with her. With the woman who was no longer Nicola. As if she hadn’t engineered his ruin, deliberately, ten years ago. As if she hadn’t then tricked her way to her place at his mother’s side with a new name and God only knew what agenda.