At the Count's Bidding(62)

                You’re his toy, Nicola, her mother had screamed at her in those final, dark days, when Paige had believed she’d somehow navigate her way through it all unscathed—that she’d manage to keep Giancarlo, please her mother and her mother’s terrible friends, and pay off all of that debt besides. He’ll play with you until he’s done and then he’ll leave you broken and useless when he moves on to the next dumb whore. Don’t be so naive!

                Giancarlo’s face changed then, and his hand froze in her hair. “I think I always forget you were so young,” he said after a moment, as if remembering her age shocked him. “What the hell was I doing? You were a kid.”

                She laughed then. She couldn’t help it.

                “My life wasn’t exactly pampered and easy before I came to Hollywood,” she told him, knowing as she said it that she’d never talked about that part of her life. He had been so bright, so beautiful—why would she talk about dark, grim things? “And I did that about ten minutes after I graduated from high school. My mom had the car packed and waiting on the last day of classes.” She shook her head at him as her laughter faded. “I was never really much of a kid.”

                She hadn’t had the opportunity to be a kid, which wasn’t quite the same thing, but she didn’t tell him that. Even though she had the strangest idea that his childhood hadn’t been that different from hers, really. The trappings couldn’t have been more opposite, but she’d spent her whole life tiptoeing around, trying to predict what mood her mother would be in, how much she might have drunk, and how bad she could expect it to get of an evening. She wasn’t sure that was all that different from trying to gauge one of Violet’s moods.

                It had never occurred to her that she’d traded one demanding mother for another, far classier one—and she wasn’t sure she liked the comparison. At least Violet cares for you in return, she told herself then. Which is more than Arleen ever did.

                “I’m not sure that excuses me,” Giancarlo was saying, but then he laughed, and everything else shot straight out of her head and disappeared into that happy sound. “But then, I never had any control where you were concerned.”

                “Neither did I,” she said, smiling at him, and they both stilled then. Perhaps aware in the same instant that they were straying too close to the very things they couldn’t let themselves talk about.

                Or the words they couldn’t say. Words he’d told her he wouldn’t believe if she did dare speak them out loud.

                But that didn’t keep her from feeling them. Nothing could.

                He studied her face for a long moment, until she began to feel the breeze too keenly on her exposed skin. Or maybe that was her vulnerability. Having sex was much easier, for all it stripped her bare and seemed to involve every last cell in her body. It required only feeling and action. Doing. It was this talking that was killing her, making her want too much, making her imagine too many happy endings when, God help her, she knew better.

                Paige pushed away from him, not willing to ruin this with a conversation that could only lead to more hurt. Or worse, something good that would be that much harder to leave behind when the time came. She sat up and gathered her clothes to her, pulling the flirty little sundress over her head as if the light material was armor. But she only wished it was.

                “Was it ever real?” he asked quietly.

                Paige didn’t ask him what he meant. She froze, her eyes on the rolling hills that spread out before her in the afternoon light, the glistening lake in the valley below. That stunning Tuscan sky studded with chubby white clouds, the vineyards and the flowers, and she didn’t think he understood that he was holding her heart between his palms and squeezing tight. Too tight.