At the Count's Bidding(5)

                “Giancarlo—”

                “I will tell you exactly what kind.” His nostrils flared and she knew that look that flashed over his face then. She knew it far too well. It was stamped into her memories and it made her stomach heave with the same shame and regret. It made her flush with terrible heat. “You are a mercenary bitch and I believe I was perfectly clear about this ten years ago. I never, ever wanted to see your face again.”

                And Paige was running out of ways to rank which part of this was the worst part, but she couldn’t argue. Not with any of what he’d said. Yet rather than making her shrink down and curl up into the fetal position right there on the terra-cotta pavers beneath their feet, the way she’d done the last time he’d looked at her like that and called her names she’d richly deserved, it made something else shiver into being inside her. Something that made her straighten instead of shrink. Something that gave her the strength to meet his terrible glare, to lift her chin despite all of that furious, condemning gold.

                “I love her.”

                That hung there between them, stark and heavy. And, she realized belatedly, an echo of what she’d said ten years ago, when it had been much too late. When he’d believed her even less than he did now. When she’d known full well that saying it would only hurt him, and she’d done it anyway. I’m so sorry, Giancarlo. I love you.

                “What did you say?” His voice was too quiet. So soft and deliberately menacing it made her shake inside, though she didn’t give in to it. She forced her spine even straighter. “What did you dare say to me?”

                “This has nothing to do with you.” That was true, in its way. Paige wasn’t a lunatic, no matter what he might think. She’d simply understood a long time ago that she’d lost him and it was irrevocable. She’d accepted it. This wasn’t about getting him back. It was about paying a debt in the only way she could. “It never did have anything to do with you,” she continued when she was certain the shaking inside her wouldn’t bleed over into her voice. “Not the way you’re thinking. Not really.”

                He shook his head slightly, as if he was reeling, and he muttered something in a stream of silken, shaken Italian that she shouldn’t have felt like that, all over her skin. Because it wasn’t a caress. It was its opposite.

                “This is a nightmare.” He returned his furious glare to her and it was harder. Fiercer. Gold fury and that darkness inside it. “But nightmares end. You keep on, all these years later. It was two short months and too many explicit pictures. I knew better than to trust a woman like you in the first place, but this ought to be behind me.” His lips thinned. “Why won’t you go away, Nicola?”

                “Paige.” She couldn’t tolerate that name. Never again. It was the emblem of all the things she’d lost, all the terrible choices she’d been forced to make, all the sacrifices she’d made for someone so unworthy it made her mouth taste acrid now, like ash and regret. “I’d rather you call me nothing but mercenary bitch instead of that.”

                “I don’t care what you call yourself.” Not quite a shout. Not quite. But his voice thudded into her like a hail of bullets anyway, and she couldn’t disguise the way she winced. “I want you gone. I want this poison of yours out of my life, away from my mother. It disgusts me that you’ve been here all this time without my knowing it. Like a malignant cancer hiding in plain sight.”

                And she should go. Paige knew she should. This was twisted and wrong and sick besides, no matter the purity of her intentions. All her rationalizations, all her excuses, what did any of them matter when she was standing here causing more pain to this man? He’d never deserved it. She really was a cancer, she thought. Her own mother had always thought so, too.