She didn’t want to look around, for a thousand complicated reasons and none she’d dare admit. It made her feel scraped to the bone and weak. So very weak. So she looked at him instead, which wasn’t really any better.
“You think I don’t know why you brought me here, but of course I do.” She laughed, though it was a hollow little sound and seemed to make that scraped sensation expand inside of her. “You’re making sure I have nowhere to run. I think that counts as the most basic of torture methods, doesn’t it?”
“Correction.” He aimed a smile at her that didn’t quite reach the storm in his eyes, but made her feel edgy all the same. “I don’t care if you know. It isn’t the same thing.”
Paige pushed her way out of the Jeep, not surprised when he climbed out himself. Was this all a prologue to another one of these scenes with him—as damaging as it was irresistible? She tucked her hands into the pockets of the jeans she’d worn on the long flight and wished she felt like herself. It’s only jet lag, she assured herself. Or so she hoped. You’ve read about jet lag. Everyone says it passes or no one would ever go anywhere, would they? But she didn’t feel particularly tired. She felt stripped to the bone instead. Flayed wide-open.
And the way he looked at her didn’t help.
“How long?” she asked, her voice not quite sounding like her own. “How long do you think you can keep me here?”
Giancarlo pulled her bags from the back and carried them to the door of the cottage, shouldering it open and disappearing inside. But Paige stayed where she was, next to the Jeep with her eyes on the rolling green horizon. The sweet blue of the summer sky was packed with fluffy white clouds that looked as if they were made of meringue and were far more beautiful than all of her dreams put together, and she tried her best not to cry, because this was a prison—she knew it was—and yet she couldn’t escape the notion that it was home.
“I’ll keep you as long as I like,” he said from the doorway, his voice another rolling thing through the morning’s stillness, like a dark shadow beneath all that shine. “This is about my satisfaction, cara. Not your feelings. Or it wouldn’t be torture, would it? It would be a holiday.”
“By your account, I imagine I don’t have any feelings anyway, isn’t that right?” She hadn’t meant to say that, and certainly not in that challenging tone. She scowled at the stunning view, and reminded herself that she’d never really had a home and never would. Longing for a place like this was nothing more than masochistic, no matter how familiar it felt. “I’m nothing but a mercenary bitch who set out to destroy you once and is now, what? A delusional stalker who has insinuated herself into the middle of your family? For my own nefarious purposes, none of which have been in evidence at all over the past three years?”
“I find parasite covers all the bases.” Giancarlo drawled that out, and it was worse, somehow, here in the midst of so much prettiness. Like a creeping black thing in the center of all that green, worse than a mere shadow. “No need to succumb to theatrics when you can merely call it what it is.”
She shook her head, that same old anguish moving inside of her, making her shake deep in her gut, making her wish for things she knew better than to want. A home, at last. Love to fill it. A place to belong and a person to share it with—
Paige had always known better. Dreams were one thing. They were harmless. No one could have survived the hard, barren place where she’d grown up, first her embittered mother’s teenage mistake and then her meal ticket, without a few dreams to keep them going. Much less what had happened ten years ago. What her mother had become. What Paige had nearly had to do in a vain attempt to save her.