At the Count's Bidding(40)
“I want this place to be a refuge,” he’d told her then. “It’s nearly fifteen miles to the nearest main road. Everything is private. It’s the perfect retreat for people who can’t hide anywhere else.”
Violet had tasted her wine and she’d taken her time looking at him again, and he’d still been unsure if she was pausing for dramatic effect or if that was simply how she processed emotion. She was still a mystery to him and he’d long since accepted she always would be. Or anyway, he’d been telling himself he’d accepted it. It might even have been true.
“Yes,” she’d said, “and it’s very beautiful. It’s always been beautiful. I imagine I could live here quite happily and transform myself into one of those portly, Italy-maddened expatriates who are forever writing those merry little Tuscan memoirs and waxing rhapsodic about the light.” Her brows had lifted. “But which one of us is it that feels they need a hiding place, Giancarlo? Is that meant to be you or me?”
“Never fear, Mother,” he’d replied evenly. “I have no intention of having children of my own. I won’t have any cause to hide away, the better to protect them from prying eyes and a judgmental world. Perhaps I, too, will flourish in the heat of so many spotlights.”
She’d only smiled, enigmatic as ever, seemingly not in the least bit chastised by what he’d said. Had he expected otherwise? “Privacy can be overrated, my darling boy. Particularly when it better resembles a jail.”
And now he stood in the cheerful lounge of the house he’d taken apart and put back together with his own two hands, and watched the woman he’d once loved more than any other walk through the monument—he wouldn’t call it a jail—he’d built to his own unhappiness, his lonely, broken, betrayed heart.
How had he failed to realize, until this moment, that he’d built it for her? That he’d been hiding here these past ten years—deliberately keeping himself some kind of hermit, tucked away on this property and in this very cottage? That it was as much his refuge for her as it was from her?
That notion made something like a storm howl in him, deep and long. And as if she could read his mind, Paige turned, a small smile on that distracting mouth of hers.
“I always liked your films,” she said, her voice the perfect complement to the carefully decorated great room, the furnishings a mix of masculine ease and his Italian heritage, as if he’d planned for her to stand there in its center and make it all work. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that that kind of attention to detail should spill over into all the things you do.”
“My films were laughable vanity projects at best,” he told her, that storm in his voice and clawing at the walls of his chest. “I should never have taken myself seriously, much less allowed anyone else to do the same. It’s an embarrassment.”
Paige wrinkled her nose and he thought that might kill him, because finding her adorable was far more dangerous than simply wanting her. One was about sex, which was simple. The other had consequences. Terrible consequences he refused to pay.
“I liked them.”
“Shall we talk about the things you like?” Giancarlo asked, and he sounded overbearingly brooding to his own ears. As if he was performing a role because he thought the moment needed a villain, not because he truly wanted to put her back in her place. “Your interest in photography and amateur porn, for instance?”
Some revenge, he thought darkly. Next you’ll try to cuddle her to death with your words.
But she only smiled in that enigmatic way of hers, and moved closer to one of the paintings on the wall, her hands cupped around her glass of wine and that inky black hair of hers falling in abandon down her back, and it wasn’t cuddling he thought about as he watched her move. Then bite her lower lip as she peered up at the painting. It wasn’t cuddling that made his blood heat and his mouth dry.