At the Count's Bidding(49)

                “Your wish is my command, my count,” she teased him, her voice a husky little dream, and then she did something complicated with her hips and the world turned to flames all around them.

                When he finally exploded, a bright rush of fire turned some kind of comet, rocketing over the edge of the night, he heard her call out his name.

                And then follow him into bliss.

                * * *

                Giancarlo did not welcome reality when it reasserted itself.

                Paige lay slumped over him, her face buried in his neck, while he was still deep inside of her. He opted not to think about how easy it was to hold her, or how she still seemed to have been crafted especially to fit in his arms, exactly this way. It took him much longer than it should have to get his breathing under control again. He held her the way a lover might, the way he always had before, and stared out over the top of her head at the faint lights on distant hills and the smear of starlight above.

                He wished he didn’t care about the past. More than that, he wished he could trust her the way he had once. He wished so many things, and yet all of the stars were fixed tonight, staring down at him from their cold positions, and he knew better.

                Paige was an accident waiting to happen. He’d been caught up in that accident once—he wouldn’t subject himself to it again. Even he wasn’t foolish enough to walk into the same trap twice. No matter that it felt like glory made flesh to touch her again, like coming home after too long away.

                He would learn to live without that, too. He had before.

                She shifted against him, and he felt the brush of her lips over his skin and told himself it was calculated. That everything about her was calculated. There was no use remembering the afternoons they’d spent curled around each other in his huge bed surrounded by the Malibu sea. When she’d tasted him everywhere with her eyes closed, as if she couldn’t help herself, as if her affection was as elemental as the ocean beyond his windows or the sky above and she had no choice but to sink into it with all of her senses.

                That had been an act. This was an act. He needed to remember it.

                But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the show.

                “You’ve obviously been practicing,” he said, to be horrible. To remind them both that this was here and now, not ten years back. “Quite a lot, I’d say, were I to hazard a guess.”

                He felt her tense against him, but almost thought he’d imagined it when she sat up a moment later, displaying her typical offhanded grace. And then she smiled slightly as she looked down at him.

                “I was about to compliment you on the same thing,” she said, a brittle sort of mischief and something else lighting up her gaze. “You must have slept with a thousand women to do that so well! My congratulations. Especially as I would have said there weren’t ten women you could sleep with in a hundred miles, much less a thousand. The privileges of wealth, I presume?”

                “You’re hilarious.” But he couldn’t help the crook of his mouth. “I have them flown in from Rome, of course.”

                “Of course.” She wrinkled her nose at him, and it was as dangerous as it had been earlier. It made him want things he knew he couldn’t have. He couldn’t have them, and more to the point, she couldn’t give them. Hadn’t he learned anything? “You realize, Giancarlo, that people might get the wrong idea. They might begin to think you’re a playboy whore.”

                “They won’t.”