At the Count's Bidding(63)
Maybe he wouldn’t care if he did.
“It was for me,” she said, and her voice was too rough. Too dark. Too much emotion in it. “It always was for me, even at the end.”
She didn’t know what might happen then. What Giancarlo might say. Do. She felt spread open and hung out in all the open space around them, as if she was stretched across some tightrope high in the sky, subject to the whims of any passing wind—
His hand reached out and covered hers and he squeezed. Once.
And then he pulled on his clothes and he got to his feet and he never mentioned it again.
* * *
Giancarlo watched her sleep, and he did not require the chorus of angry voices inside of him to remind him that this was a bad idea.
He didn’t know what had woken him, only that he’d come alert in a rush and had turned to make sure she was still there beside him—the way he’d done for years after the photographs hit. He’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d dreamed it all away, dreamed she’d never betrayed him, dreamed that things had been different. He’d grown uncomfortably well used to lying there in his empty bed, glaring at the ceiling and wishing her ill even as he’d wanted her back, wherever she was.
But this time, she was right here. She was curled up beside him and sound asleep, so that she didn’t even murmur when he stretched out on his side, his front to her back, and held her there. The way he knew he wouldn’t do if she was awake, lest it give her too many ideas...
So much for your revenge plot, he chided himself, but it all seemed so absurd when she was lying beside him, her features taking on an angelic cast in the faint light that poured in from the skylight above them, the stars themselves lighting her with that special glow.
He found himself tracing the line of her cheek with his finger, the memories of ten years ago so strong he could almost have sworn that no time had passed. That the pictures and the separation had been the bad dream. Because he might be wary of her, but every day it seemed that was only because he thought he should be, not because he truly was. And every day it seemed to make less and less sense.
She had been so young.
He didn’t know how he’d forgotten that. How he’d failed to factor it in. When he’d been twenty he’d been a bona fide idiot, making an ass of himself at Stanford and enjoying every minute of it. He certainly hadn’t been performing for a living, running from this audition to that gig with no guarantee he’d ever make his rent or make some money or even get cast. When Violet had been twenty years old she’d been famously divorcing the much, much older producer who had married her and made her when she’d been only seventeen. No one had called her a mercenary bitch, at least, not to her face. She’d been lauded for her powerful choices and the control she’d taken over her career.
Maybe that was why he’d spent a decade this furious with Paige. Because he loved his mother, he truly did, but he’d wanted something else for himself. He’d wanted a girl who wouldn’t think of herself first, second, last and always. He’d wanted a girl who would put him first. Had he known Paige wouldn’t stick with dancing? Had he assumed she would gravitate toward the life she had here in Tuscany, which was more or less arranged around pleasing him?
He’d told her he wanted a partner, but nothing he’d done supported that. Back in Malibu, he’d been jealous of the time she spent practicing and really anything else that took her away from him. This time around he was jealous of her devotion to his own mother. Did he want a partner? Or did he want her to treat him like a partner while he did whatever he liked?