At the Count's Bidding(53)
And yet somehow, each of these ten years had crept by and he was still the only man she’d ever slept with. She’d been unable to contain the small, humming thing inside her then as that thought had kept her company on her walk. It had felt a little bit too much like a kind of silly joy she ought to have known better than to indulge.
But he’d turned up that night, his face drawn as if he’d fought a great battle with himself, and he hadn’t seemed interested in talking about whether he’d lost or won. He’d led her up her stairs, thrown her on her bed, and kept them up for another night—this time, she’d noted, with the condoms they’d failed to use before.
They hadn’t talked about that first night and its lack of birth control. Just like ten years ago, they hadn’t talked about a thing.
And that was how it had been since her arrival, Paige thought now, as they drew closer to the castello. She’d never spent much time wondering what it felt like to be a rich man’s kept woman before now. What she thought people in this part of the world might call a mistress. But she imagined it must be something like this past week.
Nothing but the pleasures of their flesh. No unpleasant topics, save the odd bout of teasing that never quite landed a hard punch. Nothing but sex and food and sex again, until she felt glutted on it. Replete. Able to know him at a touch, taste him when he wasn’t there, scent him on any breeze.
The last time she’d felt so deeply a part of her own body, her own physical space, she’d been dancing more hours of the day than she’d slept.
She didn’t tell him that, either. That she filled these golden, blue-skied days with dancing, as if the first dancing she’d done on that initial night with him had freed her. Paige hadn’t understood how lost she’d been until she found herself out in the field near her cottage, dancing in great, wide circles beneath the glorious Tuscan sky with tears running down her face and her arms stretched toward the sun. She wanted nothing more than to share that with him.
But Giancarlo drove the Jeep with the same ferocity he did everything else—except in bed, where he indulged every sense and took his sweet time—and with that same hard edge of his old dark fury beneath it.
Almost as if he, too, preferred the little fairy tale they’d been living this past week, where she existed purely to please him, and did, again and again.
Paige knew better than to ask him about it. Or to tell him the things that moved in her, sharp and sweet, in this place that felt more like home every day. This was a no-talking zone. This was a place of sun and sex and silence. It was the only possible way it could work.
Like all temporary things, all stolen moments, it could only be a secret, or it would implode.
“What have you been up to all this time?” Violet asked, peering at Paige from her position on one of the castello’s lovely couches, her iPad in her lap and her voice no more than mildly reproving. “I thought perhaps you’d been sucked into one of the olive groves, never to be seen again.”
“You should have told me you needed me!” Paige exclaimed instead of answering the question. Because she didn’t want to know what Violet would think about the help touching her son. She didn’t want to risk her relationship with either one of them. “I thought I was giving you some much-needed time and space to yourself!”
“My dear girl,” Violet said, sounding amused, “if I wanted time and space to myself, I would have chosen a different life altogether.”
Paige was too aware of Giancarlo’s dark, brooding presence on the other side of the living room then, lounging there against the massive stone fireplace, supposedly scrolling through his phone’s display. She was certain he was hanging on every word. Or did she simply want to be that important to him?