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At the Count's Bidding(59)

By:Caitlin Crews


                Paige tried to imagine Giancarlo as a small boy, all stubborn chin and fathomless eyes, and ached for him, though that didn’t explain her nervousness. It was something in the way he held himself apart from her, a certain danger rippling down the length of his body, as hard and as steel-hewn as he was. It was the way he watched her, too still, too focused.

                “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wanted to say so much more. She didn’t dare. Just like before, when she’d stood outside and wanted him and had known better than to go and find him, she was too uncertain. “That can’t have been easy.”

                “Is that sympathy for me, cara? Don’t bother.”

                He wasn’t quite scoffing at her. Not quite, though his face went fierce in the darkness, edging toward cruel the way he’d been in the beginning, and she found she was bracing herself—unable to open her mouth and stop him. Unable to defend herself at all. Whatever he’s about to say, that hard voice reminded her, like another slap, you deserve.

                “Here is what I learned from my mother, the great actress,” Giancarlo said. “That she is a mystery, unknowable even to herself. That she prefers it that way. That intimacy is anathema to her because it cannot be controlled, it cannot be directed, it cannot cut to print when she is satisfied with her performance. It is one long take with no rehearsal and no do-overs, and she goes to great lengths indeed to avoid it.”

                Paige wasn’t sure why she felt so stricken then, so stripped raw when he wasn’t talking about her—but then he moved again, dropping his weight against her to whisper in her ear, hot and close and dark. So very dark.

                You deserve this, she told herself. Whatever it is.

                “I want a woman I can trust, Paige,” he said with a ruthless inevitability. And it didn’t even hurt. It was like a deep slice of a sharp blade. She knew he’d cut her and now there was only the wait for blood. For the pain that would surely follow. And he wasn’t finished. “A woman I can know inside and out. A woman who carries no secrets, who does not hide herself away from me or from the world, who never plays a role. A woman who wants a partner, not an audience.”

                “Giancarlo.” She felt torn apart even though he was holding her close. Wrecked as surely as if he’d thrown her from the roof of the towering castello. “Please.”

                But the worst part was, he knew what he was doing. She’d seen it in the cast of his sensual mouth. She’d felt it in the way he’d very nearly trembled as he’d held himself above her.

                He knew he was hurting her. And he kept going.

                “I want a woman I can believe when she tells me she loves me,” he said, raw and fierce and she knew she deserved that, she knew she did, even though it felt a little bit like dying. And then he lifted his head to look her straight in the eyes, making it that much worse. “And that can never be you, can it? It never was. It never will be.”

                Later, she thought she might take that apart and live awhile in the misery he’d packed into those last two sentences. Later, she thought she might cry for days and check herself for scars, the way she’d done ten years ago. But that was later.

                Tonight Paige thought the pain in him was far greater than the hurt he’d caused—that she deserved, that voice kept telling her, and she agreed no matter how it cut her up—and she couldn’t bear it.

                She didn’t care if he still hated her, even now, after another week in his bed when he’d tasted every part of her and had to have recognized the sheer honesty in her response to him. She told herself she didn’t care about that at all and some part of her believed it.