At the Count's Bidding(57)

                And when she got to her cottage and found not only it but the house above it dark, it confirmed her fears.

                Paige stood there in the dark outside her cottage long after the driver’s car disappeared into the night, staring up the hill, willing this shadow or that to separate from the rest and become Giancarlo. She was too afraid to think about what might happen if this was it. If that kiss he’d delivered in the garden was their last.

                Too soon, she thought desperately, or perhaps that was the first prayer she’d dared make in years. It’s too soon.

                She stared up the side of the hill as if that would call him to her, somehow. But the only thing around her was the soft summer night, pretty and quiet. Still and empty, for miles around.

                When she grew too cold and he still didn’t appear, she made her way inside, feeling more punished by his absence than by anything else that had happened between them. Paige entertained visions of marching up the hill and taking what she wanted, or at least finding him and seeing for herself what had happened in her absence today, but the truth was, she didn’t dare. She was still so uncertain of her welcome.

                Would he throw back the covers and yank her into his arms if she appeared at his bedside? Or would he send her right back out into the night again, with a cruel word or two as her reward? Paige found she was too unsure of the answer to test it.

                There were red flags everywhere, she acknowledged as she got ready for bed and crawled beneath her sheets. Red flags and dark corners, and nothing safe. But maybe what mattered was that she knew that, this time. She’d known the moment she’d decided to apply for that job with Violet. She’d always known.

                She would have to learn to live with that, too.

                * * *

                Later that night, Paige woke with a sudden start when a lean male form crawled into her bed, hauling her into his arms.

                Giancarlo. Of course.

                But her heart was already crashing against her ribs as he rolled so she was beneath him. Excitement. Relief. The usual searing hunger, sharper than usual this time.

                “Why didn’t you come to me?” he gritted at her, temper and need and too many other dark and hungry things in his voice. Then the scrape of his teeth against the tender flesh of her neck, making her shudder.

                Paige didn’t want to think about the contours of her fears now, her certainty he’d finished with this. With her. Not now, while he was braced above her, his body so familiar and hot against hers, making the night blaze with the wild need that was never far beneath the surface. Never far at all.

                Not even when she thought she’d lost him again.

                “I thought you’d gone to bed already.” I didn’t know if you’d want me to come find you, she thought, but wisely kept to herself. “All of your lights were out.”

                She thought she saw a certain self-knowledge move over his face then, but it was gone so quickly she was sure she must have imagined it.

                “Did you have a lovely day out with my mother?” he asked in a tone she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine was friendly, his dark eyes glittering in the faint light from the rising moon outside her windows. “Filled with her admirers, exactly as she wished?”

                “Of course.” Paige ran her hands from his hard jaw to the steel column of his neck, as if trying to imprint the shape of him on her palms. Trying to make certain that if this was the last time, she’d remember it. That it couldn’t be snatched from her, not entirely. “When Violet decrees we are to have fun, that is precisely what we have. No mere crowd would dare defy the crown jewel of the Hollywood establishment.”