At the Count's Bidding(69)

                He stopped there, frozen on the porch with his hand on the doorknob, because he heard her voice. For the first time since that last, ugly morning in his Tuscan cottage. Counting off the beat.

                Wedging its way into his heart like one of the vicious icicles that hung from the roof above him.

                He wrenched the door open and walked inside, and then she was right there in front of him after all this time. Right there.

                She took his breath away.

                Giancarlo’s heart thundered in his chest and he forced himself to take stock of his surroundings. The ground floor of this house was its dance studio, an open space with only a few pillars and a class in session. And the woman he’d accused of a thousand different scams was not lounging about being fed bonbons she’d bought with his mother’s money or her own infamy, she was teaching the class. To what looked like a pack of very pink-faced, very uncoordinated young girls.

                He was standing in what passed for the small studio’s lobby and if the glares from the women sitting in the couches and chairs along the wall were anything to go by, he’d disrupted the class with his loud entrance.

                Not that Giancarlo cared about them in the slightest.

                Paige, he noted as he forced himself to breathe again and not do anything rash, did not look at him at all, which was a feat indeed, given the mirrors on every available wall. She merely carried on teaching as if he was nothing to her.

                But he refused to accept that. Particularly if it were true.

                The class continued. And Giancarlo studied her as she moved in front of the small collection of preadolescents, calling out instructions and corrections and encouragement in equal measure. She looked as if she hadn’t slept much, but only when he studied her closely. Her hair was still that inky black, darker now than he remembered, and he wondered if it was the sun that brought out its auburn hints. She moved the way she did in all his dreams, all of that grace and ease, as if she flowed rather than walked.

                And she was still slim, with only the faintest thickening at her belly to tell him what he hadn’t known until now, what he’d been afraid to wonder about until he’d finally tracked her down in what had to be, literally, one of the farthest places she could go in the opposite direction of Bel Air. And him.

                That she was keeping the baby. His baby.

                Giancarlo didn’t know what that was inside of him then. Relief. Fury. A new surge of determination. All the rest of the dark things he’d always felt for this woman, turned inside out. All mixed together until it felt new. Until he did.

                She was keeping their baby.

                He would have loved her anyway. He did. But he couldn’t help but view her continuing pregnancy as a sign. As hope.

                As far more than he deserved.

                It seemed like twenty lifetimes before the class ended, and the women in the chairs collected their young. He paid them no attention as they herded their charges past him out into the already-pitch-black night; he simply waited, arms crossed and his brooding gaze on Paige.

                And eventually, the last stranger left and slammed the door shut behind her small town curiosity, and it was only the two of them in the glossy, bright room. Paige and him and all their history, and she still didn’t look at him.

                “You decided to keep it.” He didn’t know why he said it like that, fierce and low, and he watched her stiffen, but it was too late to call it back.