At the Count's Bidding(73)

                “Go away, Giancarlo,” she said, but it was a whisper. Just a whisper with none of that fury behind it, and a hint of the kind of sadness he’d become all too familiar with these past few months. And he wanted nothing more than to protect her, even if it was from himself.

                Perhaps especially then.

                “I can do that,” he said gruffly. “Tonight. But I’ll keep coming back, Paige. Every day until you talk to me. I can be remarkably persuasive.”

                “Is that a threat?” She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and he thought she looked tired again, but not threatened. “This isn’t your land in Italy. I’m not a prisoner here.”

                “I don’t want to keep you prisoner,” he said, which was not entirely true. He reminded himself he was a civilized man. Or the son of one anyway, little as he might have lived up to his father’s standards lately. “I want to have dinner with you.”

                She eyed him, and he could see the uncertainty on her pretty face. “That’s all?”

                “Do you want me to lie to you?” he asked quietly. “It’s a start. Just give me a start.”

                She shook her head, but her eyes seemed less gray now and more that changeable blue-green he recognized, and Giancarlo couldn’t help but consider that progress.

                “What if I don’t want a start?” she asked after a moment. “Any start? We’ve had two separate starts marked by ten years of agony and now this. It’s not fun.”

                He smiled. “Then it’s dinner. Everyone needs to eat dinner. Especially pregnant women, I understand.”

                “But not with you,” Paige said, and there was something different in her voice then. Some kind of resolve. “Not again. It’s not worth it.”

                She turned away again and headed toward the door he could see in the back, and this time, he could tell, she was really going to leave.

                And Giancarlo knew he should let her go. He knew he’d done more than enough already. The practical side of him pointed out that six months was a reasonable amount of time to win a person over, to say nothing of the following lifetime of the child they’d made. Their daughter. He had all the time in the world.

                He’d spent three months trying to find her—what was another night? He knew he should forfeit this battle, the better to win the war. But he couldn’t do it.

                Giancarlo couldn’t watch her walk away again.





                                      CHAPTER NINE

                LATER, PAIGE THOUGHT, she would hate herself for how difficult it was to march across the studio floor toward the door, her car beyond, and the brand-new life she was in the middle of crafting.

                Later, she would despair of the kind of person she must be, that her heart had somersaulted nearly out of her chest when Giancarlo had stormed in, startling her so profoundly it had taken her a long moment to remember why that instant sense of relief she’d felt was more than a little sick. Later, she would beat herself up about how little she wanted to walk away from him, even now.

                But first she had to really do it. Walk away. Mean what she said. Leave him standing—

                Her first clue that he’d moved at all was a rush of air over her shoulder and then his hands were on her, gentle and implacable at once. He turned her, lifted her, and in a single smooth shift she was in his arms. Held high against his chest, so she was surrounded. By his scent. By his strength.