At the Count's Bidding(34)
But wishes were nothing but borrowed trouble. And she supposed, looking back, that had been the issue from the start—being with Giancarlo had made her imagine she could dare to want things she knew, she knew, could never be hers. Never.
You won’t make that mistake again in a hurry, her mother’s caustic voice jeered at her.
Paige risked a look at Giancarlo then, despairing at the way her heart squeezed tight at the sight of him the way it always had, at that dark look on his face that was half hunger and half dislike, at the way she had always loved him and understood she always would, and to what end? He would have his revenge and she would endure it and somehow, somehow, she would survive him, too.
It hurts a little bit more today than it usually does because you’re here and you’re tired, she tried to tell herself. But you’re fine. You’re always fine. Or you will be.
“I know you don’t want to believe me,” she said, because she had always been such an idiot where this man was concerned. She had never had the slightest idea how to protect herself. Giancarlo had been the kind of man who had blistering affairs the way other people had dinner plans, but she had fallen head over heels in love with him at first glance and destroyed them both in the process. And now she wanted, so desperately, for him to see her, just for a moment. The real her. “But I would do anything for your mother. For a hundred different reasons. Chief among them that she’s been better to me than my own mother ever was.”
“And here I thought you emerged fully grown from a bed of lies,” he said silkily. He paused, his dark eyes on her, as if recognizing how rare it was that Paige mentioned her own mother—but she watched him shrug it off instead of pursuing it and told herself it was for the best. “I was avoiding the city my mother lived in all these years and the kind of people who lived in it, not my mother. A crucial distinction, because believe me, Paige, I would also do anything for my mother. And I will.”
There was a threat in the last three words. A promise. And there was no particular reason it should thud into her so hard, as if it might have taken her from her feet if she hadn’t already been braced against all of this. The pretty place, the sense of homecoming, the knowledge he was even more lost to her when he stood in front of her than he had been in all their years apart.
“I loved my mother, too, Giancarlo,” Paige said, and she understood it was that scraped raw feeling that made her say such a thing. Giancarlo would never understand the kind of broken, terrible excuse for love that was the only kind Paige had ever known, before him. The sharp, scarring toll it exacted. How it festered inside and taught a person how to see the world only through the lens of it, no matter how blurred or cracked or deeply twisted. “And that never got me anything but bruises and a broken heart.” And then had taken the only things that had ever mattered to her. She swallowed. “I know the difference.”
He moved out of the doorway of the cottage then, closing the distance between them with a few sure steps, and Paige couldn’t tell if that was worse or better. Everything seemed too mixed up and impossible and somehow right, too; the gentle green trees and the soft, lavender-scented breeze, and his dark gold eyes in the center of the world, making her heart beat loud and slow inside her chest.
Stop it, she ordered herself. This is not your home. Neither is he.
“Is this an appeal to my better nature?” Giancarlo asked softly. Dangerously. “I keep telling you, that man is dead. Killed by your own hand. Surely you must realize this by now.”
“I know.” She tilted up her chin and hoped he couldn’t see how lost she felt. How utterly out of place. How hideously dislocated if it seemed that he was the only steady thing here, this man who detested her. “And here I am. Isolated and at your beck and call. Just think of all the ways you can make me pay for your untimely death.”