At the Count's Bidding(6)

                “I’m sorry,” she said, yet again, and she heard the bleakness in her own voice that went far beyond an apology. And his dark, hot eyes were on hers. Demanding. Furious. Still broken, and she knew she’d done that. It stirred up sensations inside of her that felt too much like ghosts, an ache and a fire at once. But Paige held his gaze. “More than you’ll ever know. But I can’t leave Violet. I promised her.”

                Giancarlo’s dark gaze blazed into a brilliant fury then, and it took every bit of backbone and bravado Paige had not to fall a step back when he advanced on her. Or to turn tail and start running the way she’d wanted to do since she’d heard his voice, down the expansive lawn, through the garden and out into the wild canyon below, as far as she could get from this man. She wanted to flee. She wanted to run and never stop running. The urge to do it beat in her blood.

                But she hadn’t done it ten years ago, when she should have, and from far scarier people than Giancarlo Alessi. She wouldn’t do it now. No matter how hard her heart catapulted itself against her chest. No matter how great and painful the sobs she refused to let loose from inside.

                “You seem to be under the impression I am playing a game with you,” Giancarlo said softly, so very softly, the menace in it like his hand around her throat. What was the matter with her that the notion moved in her like a dark thrill instead of a threat? “I am not.”

                “I understand that this is difficult for you, and that it’s unlikely you’ll believe that was never my intention.” Paige tried to sound conciliatory. She did. But she thought it came out sounding a whole lot more like panic, and panic was as useless as regret. She had no space for either. This was the life she’d made. This was what she’d sown. “But I’m afraid my loyalty is to your mother, not to you.”

                “I apologize.” It was a snide snap, not an apology. “But the irony rendered me temporarily deaf. Did you—you—just utter the word loyalty?”

                Paige gritted her teeth. She didn’t bow her head. “You didn’t hire me. She did.”

                “A point that will be moot if I kill you with my bare hands,” he snarled at her, and she should have been afraid of him, but she wasn’t. She had no doubt that he’d throw her off the estate, that if he could tear her to shreds with his words he would, and gladly, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically. Not Giancarlo.

                Maybe that was the last remnant of the girl she’d been, she thought then. That foolish, unbearably naive girl, who’d imagined that a bright and brand-new love could fix anything. That it was the only thing that mattered. She knew better now; she’d learned her lessons well and truly and in the harshest of ways, but she still believed Giancarlo was a good man. No matter what her betrayal had done to him.

                “Yes,” she said, and her voice was rough with all the emotion she knew she couldn’t show him. He’d only hate her more. “But you won’t.”

                “Please,” he all but whispered, and she saw too much on his face then, the agony and the fury and the darkness between, “do not tell me you are so delusional as to imagine I wouldn’t rip you apart if I could.”

                “Of course,” she agreed, and it was hard to tell what hurt when everything did. When she was sure she would leave this encounter with visible bruises. “If you could. But that’s not who you are.”

                “The man you thought you knew is dead, Nicola,” he said, that hated name a deliberate blow, and Paige finally did step back then, it was so brutal. “He died ten years ago and there will be no breathing him back to life with your sad tales of loyalty and your pretty little lies. There will be no resurrection. I might look like the man you knew, for two profoundly stupid months a lifetime ago, but mark my words. He is gone as if he never was.”