At the Count's Bidding(32)

                And now she was finally here, and it turned out it was extraordinarily painful to visit a place that she’d once imagined might be her home and now knew never, ever would be. More than painful—but she told herself it was the jet lag that made her ache like that. Nothing a good night’s sleep on solid ground wouldn’t cure.

                Even if it was this solid ground.

                The vast estate sprawled across a part of Tuscany that had been in the Alessi family in one form or another since the Middle Ages. It was dotted with old farmhouses Giancarlo had spent the past decade painstakingly renovating for a very special class of clientele: people as wealthy as his mother and as allergic to invasions of their privacy as his father had been. As Paige supposed he must be himself now, after his too-public shaming at her own hands.

                Here at Castello Alessi and all across its hilly lands, thick with olive groves and vineyards, lavender bushes and timeless forests of oak trees—according to the splashy website Paige had accessed a hundred times before and once again from the plane when she’d accepted she was really, truly coming here at last—such privacy-minded people could relax, secure in the knowledge that the “cottages” they’d paid dearly either to rent or to buy outright and fashion to their liking were as private and remote as it was possible to get while still enjoying world-class service akin to that of the finest hotels, thanks to Giancarlo’s private, around-the-clock staff.

                But none of that applied to Paige, she was well aware.

                They’d landed on a private airstrip in a nearby valley after flying all night. It had been a bright, somehow distinctly Italian summer morning, filled with yellow flowers and too-blue skies, and a waiting driver had whisked them off to the estate some forty minutes away. It was a long, gorgeous drive, winding in and around the hills of Tuscany that looked exactly as Paige had imagined them while also being somehow so much more than she’d anticipated. Violet had been installed in the lavishly remodeled castello itself, arrayed around a welcoming stone courtyard with heart-stopping views and her own private spa with waiting staff to pamper her at once, as if she was truly the High Queen of Italy.

                Paige, on the other hand, Giancarlo ushered into a Jeep and then personally drove far out into the heart of the property, until all she could see in all directions was the gently rolling countryside and one lone house at the top of the nearest hill. All of it so gorgeous and yet so familiar, as if she’d been here before and recognized it like a homecoming, and yet, she was forced to keep telling herself, none of this was hers. Not the perfect sky, the charming lane, the pretty little houses on this or that ridge. Not hers. The man beside her least of all.

                “Are you deliberately stranding me out here as some kind of punishment?” she asked him, when it became clear that a smaller cottage down in the valley beneath that lone house was where he was headed. She was doing her best not to look at him, braced beside her in the smaller-by-the-moment front of his Jeep as they bumped along the lazy dirt road that meandered toward the little stone house, because she was afraid it might make all these raw emotions inside of her spill over into tears. Or worse. “Don’t you think that looks a little bit strange?”

                “My mother will be waited on hand and foot in the castello,” he said, his gruff voice either impatient or triumphant, and Paige couldn’t tell which. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “And if by some chance she needs you while undergoing a battalion of spa treatments, never fear, the Wi-Fi is excellent. I trust she can manage to send out an email should she require your presence.”

                “So the answer is yes,” Paige said stiffly as he pulled up in front of the cottage. He turned the key in the ignition and the sudden quiet seemed to pour in through the open windows, as terrifying as it was sweet. “This is a punishment.”

                “Yes,” he said in that low way of his that wrapped around her and made her yearn, then made her question her own sanity. “I am punishing you with Tuscany. It is a fate worse than death, obviously. Just look around.”