At the Count's Bidding(61)

                “I saw you dancing in the garden the other night,” he said.

                There was no reason to blush. She told herself the heat she felt move over her was the sun, the leftover fire of the way he’d torn her to pieces only moments before, and nothing more.

                “I haven’t danced in a long while,” she said, and she wanted to tear her gaze away from his, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. He ran his hand through her hair, slow and sweet, and she was afraid of the things he could see in her. And so afraid of the things she wanted.

                “Why not?”

                And Paige didn’t know how to answer that. How to tell him the why of it without blundering straight into all the land mines they’d spent these weeks avoiding. That they’d managed to avoid entirely after that night she’d come back late from Lucca.

                I want a woman I can trust, he’d said, and she wanted him to trust her. She might not deserve his trust, but she wanted it.

                “I was good,” she said after a moment, because that was true enough, “but I wasn’t amazing. And there were so many other dancers who were as good as I was, but wanted it way more than I did.”

                Especially after he’d left and she hadn’t had the heart for it any longer, or anything else involving the body she’d used to betray the one man she’d ever given it to. She’d auditioned for one more gig and her agent had told her they’d said it was like watching a marionette. That had been her last audition. Her last dance, period.

                Because once she’d lost Giancarlo, she’d lost interest in the only other thing she’d had that’d ever had any meaning in her life. Her mother had descended even further into that abyss of hers and Paige had simply been lost. And when she’d run into a woman she’d met through Giancarlo on one of those Malibu weekends, who’d needed a personal assistant a few days a week and had kind of liked that Paige was a bit notorious, it had seemed like a good idea. And more, a way to escape, once and for all, the dark little world her mother lived in.

                A year later, she’d been working for a longtime television star who had no idea that competent Paige Fielding was related to that Nicola Fielding. A few years after that, she had enough experience to sign with a very exclusive agency that catered to huge stars like Violet, and when Violet’s previous assistant left her, to put herself forward as a replacement. All of those things had seemed so random back then, as they happened. But now, looking back, it seemed anything but. As if Paige’s subconscious had plotted out the only course that could bring her back to Giancarlo.

                But she didn’t want to think about that now. Or about what she’d do when she was without him again. How would she re-create herself this time? Where would she go? It occurred to her then that she’d never really planned beyond Violet. Beyond the road she’d known would bring her back to him.

                I want a partner, he’d said, and the problem was, she was a liar. A deliberate amnesiac, desperate to keep their past at bay. That wasn’t a partner. That was a problem.

                Giancarlo was still smiling, as if this was an easy conversation, and Paige wished it was. For once, just once, she wanted something to be as easy as it should have been.

                “I’m surprised,” he said, and there was something very much like affection in his gaze, transforming his face until he looked like that younger version of himself again. She told herself that it didn’t make her ache. That it didn’t make her heart twist tight. “I would have said dancing was who you were, not something you did.”

                “I was twenty years old,” she heard herself say, in a rueful sort of tone that suggested an amusement she didn’t quite feel. “I had no idea who I was.”