But her heart wasn’t with her in the colorful city. It was back in the hills with the man she’d left there, with that look on his face and too much dark grief in his gaze.
And the longer Violet lingered—going in and out of every shop, pausing for cell phone photos every time she was recognized, settling in for a long dinner in a restaurant where the chef came racing out to serenade her and she was complimented theatrically for her few Italian phrases, all while Paige looked on and/or assisted—the more Paige wondered if the other woman was doing it deliberately. As if she knew what was going on between her son and her assistant.
But that was impossible, Paige kept telling herself.
This is called guilt, that caustic voice inside her snapped as Violet flirted outrageously with the chef. This is why you’re here. Why you work for his mother. Why you accept how he treats you. You deserve it. You earned it.
More than that, she missed him. One afternoon knowing Giancarlo wasn’t within reach, that there was no chance he’d simply appear and tumble her down onto the nearest flat surface, the way he’d done only yesterday with no advance warning, and she was a mess. If this was a preview of what her life was going to be like after this all ended, Paige thought as she handled Violet’s bill and called for the car, she was screwed.
“Like that’s anything new,” she muttered under her breath as she climbed into the car behind Violet, nearly closing the heavy door on the still-grasping hands of the little crowd that had gathered outside the restaurant to adore her.
“Pardon?” Violet asked.
Paige summoned her smile. Her professional demeanor, which she thought she’d last seen weeks ago in Los Angeles. “Did that do? Scratch the attention itch?”
“It did.” Violet sat across from her in the dark, her gaze out the window as the car started out of the city. “Giancarlo is a solitary soul. He doesn’t understand that some people recharge their batteries in different ways than he does. Not everyone can storm about a lonely field and feel recharged.”
Said the woman who had never passed a crowd she couldn’t turn into a fan base with a few sentences and a smile. Paige blinked, amazed at her churlishness even in her own head, and found Violet’s calm gaze on hers.
“You’re an extrovert.” Paige said evenly. “I’m sure he knows that by now. Just as he likely knows that therefore, his own needs are different from yours.”
“One would think,” Violet agreed in her serene, untroubled way, which shouldn’t have sent a little shiver of warning down Paige’s back. “But then, the most interesting men are not always in touch with what they need, are they?”
Violet didn’t speak much after that, yet Paige didn’t feel as if she could breathe normally until the car pulled off the country road and started along the winding drive into the estate. And she was impatient—the most impatient she’d ever been in Violet’s presence, though she tried valiantly to disguise it—as she helped the older woman into the castello and oversaw the staff as they sorted out her purchases.
And only when she was finally in the car again and headed toward her cottage did Paige understand what had been beating at her all day, clutching at her chest and her throat and making her want to scream in the middle of ancient Italian piazzas. Guilt, yes, but that was a heavy thing, a spiked weight that hung on her. The rest of it was panic.
Because any opportunity Giancarlo had to reflect on what was happening between them—not revenge, not the comeuppance he’d obviously planned—was the beginning of the end. She knew it, deep inside. She’d seen it in his eyes this morning.