At the Count's Bidding(79)

                He picked up her hand with its sparkling diamond and carried it to his lips. “Wear this and we’ll work on it,” he murmured, his eyes on her and the words seeming to thud straight into her heart, her flesh, her bones. “Every day. I promise I won’t rest until you’re happy enough to burst.”

                “Until we both are,” she corrected him.

                And then he leaned in close, and he wrapped himself around her and he kissed her. Again and again. Until she was dizzy with longing and love. Until neither one of them could breathe.

                And Giancarlo gave her a detailed demonstration of his commitment to the cause, right there on one of the sofas in that bright, big room.





                                      CHAPTER TEN

                SHE MADE HIM work for it. And she made him wait.

                And Giancarlo had no one to blame but himself for either.

                “How do I know that you want to marry me and not simply to claim the baby in some appalling display of machismo?” she had asked him that first night, naked and astride him, when his intentions toward her, personally, could not have been more obvious.

                “Set me any test,” he’d told her then. “I’ll pass it.”

                She’d considered him for a long moment, her inky hair in that tangle he loved and her eyes that brilliant green. And the way she fit him. God, the fit.

                “Don’t ask me again,” she said, her tone very serious, her green gaze alight. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

                “Take your time,” he’d told her with all the patience of a desperate man. “I want you to trust me.”

                “I want to trust you, too,” she’d whispered in return.

                But the truth was they learned to trust each other.

                He flew back and forth from Italy as needed, and didn’t argue when sometimes, she refused to go with him. He shared her tiny studio apartment with her in her snowy New England town, a hundred miles or more from anywhere, and he didn’t complain. He shoveled snow. He salted paths. He made certain her car was well-maintained and he never pressured her to move.

                She told him more about her childhood with that terrible woman. He told her about his childhood with a woman less terrible perhaps, but deeply complicated all the same. And they held each other. They soothed each other.

                They came to know each other in all the ways they hadn’t had time to get to know each other ten years ago. Layer on top of layer.

                Until he came back from another trip to Italy one snowy March weekend and Paige said that maybe, if he had a better place in mind for them to live, she’d consider it.

                “I don’t know anything about homes,” she told him, her attention perhaps too focused on the book she held in her lap. “But you seem to have quite a few.”

                “You make every house I have a home, il mio amore,” he told her. “Without you, they are but adventures in architecture.”

                And he had them back in his house in Malibu by the following afternoon, as if they’d never left it ten years ago. The sea in front of him, the mountains behind him and his woman at his side.

                Giancarlo had never been happier. Except for one small thing.