Paige frowned as she slipped her feet into a pair of thonged flat sandals. When was the last time she’d laughed like that? About anything?
What a sad creature you’ve become, she scolded herself as she dug out her smartphone from her bag and scrolled through her messages. But the truth was, she had always been a fairly sad thing, when she looked back at the progression of her life. Sad and studious or determined and stubborn, from the start. It had been the only way to survive the chaos that had been her mother. There had only been one two-month stretch of laughter in her life, gleaming and overflowing and dizzy with joy, and she’d ruined it ten years ago.
“My goodness,” Violet said in her grand way when she picked up her private line, after Paige apologized for disappearing and then sleeping for hours, “this is Italia, Paige. One must soak in la dolce vita, especially when jet-lagged. I plan to spend the night in my lovely little castle, getting fat on all the marvelous local cuisine! I suggest you do the same.”
And Paige would have loved to do the same, she thought when she finally stepped out of her cottage into the cool evening, the Tuscan sky turning to gold above her. But she had a date with her sins instead.
Sins that felt like wishes granted, and what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to tell the difference between the two?
She took her time and yet the walk was still too short. Much too short.
And Giancarlo waited there at the crest of the hill, his eyes as hard as his body appeared loose and relaxed, in linen trousers and the sort of camel-colored sport coat that made her think of his aristocratic roots and her lack of them. And Paige was suddenly as wide-awake as if she’d drowned herself in a vat of espresso.
He looked like something more than a man as he waited there, at first a shadow next to the bold upright thrust of a thick cypress tree, then, as she drew closer, very distinctly himself. He’d clearly watched her come all the way up the side of his hill, and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen him from afar without realizing it or if it was that odd magnetic pull inside of her that had done it, pointing her toward him as unerringly as if she’d been headed straight to him all along.
Home, that thing in her whispered, and she didn’t have the strength to pretend she didn’t feel it when she did. Not tonight.
She stopped when she was still some distance away and looked back the way she’d come, unable to keep the small sigh of pleasure from escaping her lips. There was the hint of mist in the valley the lower the sun inched toward the hills, adding an elegant sort of haunting to the shadows that danced between them, and far off in the distance the castello stood tall and proud, lights blazing against the coming night. It was so quiet and perfect and deeply satisfying in a way Paige hadn’t known anything could be. Gooseflesh prickled up and down her arms and she felt it all like a heavy sob in her chest, rolling through her, threatening her very foundations.
Or maybe that was him. Maybe it had always been him.
“It’s gorgeous here,” she said, which felt deeply inadequate. “It doesn’t seem real.”
“My father believed that the land is our bones,” Giancarlo said. “Protect it, and we strengthen ourselves. Conserve it and care for it, and we become greater in its glory. Sometimes I think he was a madman, a farmer hiding in an aristocrat’s body.” His gaze moved over her face, then beyond her, toward the setting sun. “And then another sunset reminds me that he was right. Beauty is always worth it. It feeds the soul.”
“He sounds like some kind of poet.”
“Not my father. Poets and artists were to be championed, as one must always support art and culture for the same reason one tends the land, but Alessis had a higher calling.” He shook his head. “Endless debt and responsibility, apparently. I might have been better off as an artist, come to that.”