“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Paige said, so softly that it took him a moment to realize she’d spoken. She swiveled back to look at him, framed there like a snapshot, the woman who had destroyed him before the great, bright canvas that stretched high behind her, all shapes and emotion and a swirl of color, that he hadn’t understood until tonight had reminded him of her.
Giancarlo told himself it was a sour realization, but his sex felt heavy and the air between them tasted thick. Like desire. Like need.
Like fate.
“It seems as if you’ve achieved what you set out to do,” she continued as if she couldn’t feel the thickness, though he knew, somehow, that she could. “You’ve separated me from Violet without seeming to do so deliberately, which I’m assuming was your purpose from the start. But why bring me all the way here? Why not leave me in California and spirit Violet away? And having made me come all the way here,” Paige continued, something he couldn’t identify making her eyes gleam green in the mellow light, “why not simply leave me to rot in my little cottage? It’s pretty as prison cells go, I grant you. Very pretty. It might take me weeks to realize I’m well and truly trapped there.”
He let his gaze roam over her the way his hands itched to do. “You’ve forgotten the most important part.”
“The sex, yes,” Paige supplied, and she didn’t sound particularly cowed by the idea, or even as outraged as she’d been back in Los Angeles. Her tone was bland. Perhaps too bland. “On command.”
“I was going to say obedience,” he said, and he didn’t feel as if he was playing a game any longer. He was too busy letting his eyes trace over her curves, letting his hands relish the tactile memory of her face between them as if she’d burned her way into his flesh. He could still taste her, damn it. And he wanted more.
“Obedience,” she repeated, as if testing each syllable of the word as she said it. “Does that include feeding me a gourmet dinner in this perfect little mansion only a count would call a cottage? Are you entirely sure you know what obedience involves?”
Giancarlo smiled, or anyway, his mouth moved. “That’s the point. It involves whatever I say it involves.”
He took a sip of his wine as he walked over to the open glass doors that led out to the loggia, nodding for her to join him outside. Stiffly, carefully—as if she was more shaken by their encounter than she appeared, and God help him, he wanted that to be true—she did.
Because the truth was so pathetic, wasn’t it? He still so badly wanted her to be real. To have meant some part of the things that had happened between them. All these years later, he still wanted that. Giancarlo despaired of himself.
A table waited out in the soft night air, bright with candles and laden with local produce and delicacies prepared on-site, while a rolling cart sat next to it with even more tempting dishes beneath silver covers. It was achingly romantic, precisely as he’d ordered. The hills and valleys of the estate rolled out beneath the stars, with lights winking here and there in the distance, making their isolation high up on this terrace at a remove from all the world seem profound.
That, too, was the point.
He moved to pull her chair out for her like the parody of the perfect gentleman he had never quite been and waited as she settled in, taking a moment to inhale her scent. Tonight she smelled of the high-end bath products he had his staff stock in the cottages, vanilla and apricots, and that hint of pure woman beneath.
“This house was a ruin when I started working on it,” he told her, still standing behind her, because he didn’t know what his face might show and he didn’t want her to see it. To see him. He succumbed to a whim and ran his fingers through her hair, reveling in the heavy weight of the dark strands even as he remembered all the other times she’d wrapped him in the heat and sweetness of it. When she’d crawled over him in that wide bed in Malibu and let her hair slip and tumble all over his skin as she tortured him with that sweet mouth of hers, driving them both wild. Giancarlo hardened, remembering it, and her hair was thick silk in his hands. “It sits on its original foundation, but everything else is changed. Perhaps the walls still stand, but everything inside is new, reclaimed, or altered entirely. It might look the same from a distance, but it isn’t.”