“If I had a home like this, I don’t think I’d mind doing whatever it took to keep it,” Paige said then. She remembered herself. “I don’t think anyone would.”
She thought Giancarlo smiled, though his face was obscured in the falling dark and then she knew she must have imagined it, because this wasn’t that kind of evening no matter how lovely it was. He wasn’t that kind of man. Not anymore. Not for her.
“Come,” he said. He reached out his hand and held it there in the last gasp of golden light, and Paige knew, somehow, that everything would be divided into before and after she took it. The world. Her life. This thing that was still between them. And that precarious, wildly beating creature inside her chest that was the battered ruins of her heart.
His mouth crooked slightly as the moment stretched out. She made no move; she was frozen into place and wasn’t sure she could do anything about it, but he didn’t drop his hand.
“Did you make me dinner?” she asked, her voice shockingly light when there was nothing but heaviness and their history and her treacherous heart inside of her, and she thought neither one of them was fooled. “Because food poisoning really would be a punishment, all joking aside.”
“I am Italian,” he said, with a note of amused outrage in his voice, which reminded her too strongly of all that laughter they’d shared a lifetime ago. As if the only things that had mattered in the whole world had been there in his smile. She’d thought so then. She thought maybe she still did, for all the good that would do her here. “Of course I can cook.” He paused, as if noticing how friendly he sounded and remembering how inappropriate that was tonight. As if he, too, was finding it hard to recall the battle lines he’d drawn. “But even if I couldn’t, the estate has a fleet of chefs on call. Meals are always gourmet here, no matter who prepares them.”
“Careful,” she said softly, more to her memories and her silly heart than the man who stood there before her, still reaching out to her, still her greatest temptation made flesh. Still the perfect embodiment of all the things she’d always wanted and couldn’t have. “I might forget to be suitably intimidated and start enjoying myself. And then what would happen?”
He definitely smiled that time, and Paige felt it like a deep, golden fire, lighting her up from the inside out. Making her shiver.
“Surrender takes many forms,” he replied into the indigo twilight that cloaked them both, now that the sun had finally sunk beneath the furthest hill. “I want yours every way I can get it.”
“I can surrender to la dolce vita,” she said, as airily as possible, as if her tone of voice might make it so. “I understand that’s the point of Italy.”
He still stood there, his hand out, as if he could stand like that forever. “That’s as good a place to start as any.”
And there was no real decision, in the end. There had been so many choices along the way, hadn’t there? Paige could have got a different job three years ago. She could have left Violet’s house and employ the moment Giancarlo had appeared, or anytime since. She could have declined the offer of that “date” that night, she could have stayed standing up instead of sinking to her knees by the side of that road, she could have shown him nothing in Violet’s closet that day but her back as she walked away from him. She could have refused to board his plane, refused to leave her cottage tonight, locked herself inside rather than climb this hill to stand before him like this.
He hadn’t happened to her, like the weather. She’d chosen this, every step of the way, and even here, even stranded in the countryside with this man who thought so ill of her, she felt more at home than she had in years. Maybe ever. She supposed that meant she’d made her decision a long time ago.