A scant breath away from that cruel mouth, that sensual mouth.
Much too close to everything she wanted, so desperately, to forget.
“Put me down.”
Her voice was so quiet it was hardly a breath of sound—but she knew, somehow, what that dark gold fury in his gaze was now. It was a warning that this situation could get out of control quickly, with a single kiss, and Paige rather doubted she’d be able to maintain any kind of moral high ground if she let him deep inside her again.
Especially because she wanted him there. Even now.
“First of all,” Giancarlo said, in that low and lethal way that still moved over her like a seduction, making her very bones feel weak, “I do not hate you. I have never hated you. I have spent years trying to convince myself that I hated you only to fail miserably at it, again and again.”
“Then you only act as if you hate me,” she grated at him, refusing to put her arm over his shoulders, holding herself tight and unyielding against him as if that might save her. From herself. “That’s much better.”
He stopped next to the line of old armchairs and love seats that sat against the wall and set her down in the biggest one, then shocked her to the core by kneeling down in front of her. She froze, which was why it took her a moment to notice that he’d caged her in, his hands gripping the back of the chair behind her, putting his face about as close as it could get to hers without actually touching her.
“Why did you sell those photographs?” he asked. Quietly, his dark gaze trained on her face. So there was no chance at all he didn’t see the heat that flashed over her, making her cheeks warm.
“What can that possibly matter now?”
“I think you’re right about a lot of things,” he said, sounding somewhere between grim and determined. And something else she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard before. “But especially this. I should have asked. I’m asking now.”
And the trouble was, she loved him. She’d always loved him. And she’d waited a decade for him to ask. If he’d asked in Italy, she might have sugarcoated it, but things were different now. She was different now.
She owed it to the life inside of her to be the kind of woman she wanted her daughter to become. That strong. That unafraid. That unflinching when necessary.
“My mother was a drunk,” Paige said flatly. “Her dreams of riches and fame and escape from our awful little hometown came to a screeching halt when she got pregnant with me in high school, so it worked out well that I could dance. The minute I was done with high school she took me to Los Angeles. She made me use my middle name as a stage name because she thought it was fancy, and everyone knew you had to be fancy to be famous. She decided she made an excellent stage mother, if your definition of a stage mother is that she took all the money and then yelled at me to get out there and make more.”
“That is the common Hollywood definition, yes,” Giancarlo said drily, but she couldn’t stop now. Not even to laugh.
“A drunk Arleen was one thing,” Paige told him. “But a little while before I met you, my mother met a meth dealer. His name was Denny, and let me tell you, he was so nice to us. A new best friend.” Her mouth twisted. “A month later, she was thousands of dollars in the hole and he was a little less friendly. Two months later, she was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to him, there was no possible way she could get out of it and he stopped pretending. He laid it out for me.” She met Giancarlo’s gaze and held it. Unflinching, she told herself. No matter that she’d never wanted him to know the kind of dirt that clung to her. Not when his whole life was so clean, so pretty, so bathed in light. “I could work it off on my back, or I could watch him kill her. Or—and this was an afterthought—I could make some money off my rich new boyfriend instead.”