At the Count's Bidding(64)
Giancarlo didn’t much care for the answers that came to him then, in the quiet night, the woman he couldn’t seem to get over lying so sweetly beside him. All he knew was that he was tired of fighting this, of holding her at arm’s length when he wanted her close. He was tired of the walls he put up. He hated himself more every time he hurt her—
We all must practice what we preach if we are to achieve anything in this life, his father had told him a long time ago as they’d walked the land together, plotting out the placement of vineyards the older man hadn’t lived to see to completion. The trouble is we’re all much better at the preaching and not so good at the listening, even to ourselves.
It had to stop. He had to stop. There was no point demanding her trust if he refused to give his own.
He shifted beside her, pulling her close and burying his face in the sweet heat of her neck.
It was time to admit what he’d known for years. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, no matter what she called herself. No matter what she’d done when she was little more than a kid. And he’d never stopped loving her.
“Come sei bella,” he whispered into the dark. How beautiful you are. And, “Mi manchi.” I miss you. And then, “I love you,” in English, though he knew she couldn’t hear him.
Giancarlo understood then, in the soft darkness, Paige snuggled close in his arms as if she’d been there all along, that he always had. He always would.
He just needed to tell her when she could hear him.
* * *
Paige woke up the next morning in her usual rush when the morning light danced over her face from the skylights above. Giancarlo was next to her, his big body wrapped around her, and she thought, this is my favorite day.
She thought that every day, lately. No matter what that voice in her head had to say about it.
And she continued to think it until her stomach went funny in a sudden, hideous lurch, and she had to pull away from him and race for the toilet.
“I must have eaten something strange,” she said when she came out of the bathroom to find him frowning with concern, sitting on the side of his bed. She grimaced. “Your mother insisted we eat those weird sausages in Cinque Terre yesterday. One must not have agreed with me.”
But Violet wasn’t affected. “I have a stomach of steel, my dear girl,” she proclaimed when Paige called her to check in, “which is handy when one is living off craft service carts for weeks at a time in all the corners of the earth.” And it happened again the next morning. And then the morning after that.
And on the fourth morning, when Paige ran for the bathroom, Giancarlo came in after her and placed a package on the floor beside her as she knelt there, pale and sick and wishing for death. It took her a long moment to calm the wild, lurching beat of her heart. To force back the dizziness as that awful feeling in her stomach retreated again. To feel well enough to focus on what he’d put there in front of her.
Only to feel even more light-headed when she did.
It was a pregnancy test.
“Use it,” Giancarlo said, his voice so clipped and stern she didn’t dare look up at him to see if his expression matched. She didn’t think her stomach could take it. She knew her heart couldn’t. “Bring me the result. Then we’ll talk.”
CHAPTER EIGHT