At the Count's Bidding

by Caitlin Crews

  But he’d turned up that night, his face drawn as if he’d fought a great battle with himself, and he hadn’t seemed interested in talking about whether he’d lost or won. He’d led her up her stairs, thrown her on her bed, and kept them up for another night—this time, she’d noted, with the condoms they’d failed to use before.

  They hadn’t talked about that first night and its lack of birth control. Just like ten years ago, they hadn’t talked about a thing.

  And that was how it had been since her arrival, Paige thought now, as they drew closer to the castello. She’d never spent much time wondering what it felt like to be a rich man’s kept woman before now. What she thought people in this part of the world might call a mistress. But she imagined it must be something like this past week.

  Nothing but the pleasures of their flesh. No unpleasant topics, save the odd bout of teasing that never quite landed a hard punch. Nothing but sex and food and sex again, until she felt glutted on it. Replete. Able to know him at a touch, taste him when he wasn’t there, scent him on any breeze.

  The last time she’d felt so deeply a part of her own body, her own physical space, she’d been dancing more hours of the day than she’d slept.

  She didn’t tell him that, either. That she filled these golden, blue-skied days with dancing, as if the first dancing she’d done on that initial night with him had freed her. Paige hadn’t understood how lost she’d been until she found herself out in the field near her cottage, dancing in great, wide circles beneath the glorious Tuscan sky with tears running down her face and her arms stretched toward the sun. She wanted nothing more than to share that with him.

  But Giancarlo drove the Jeep with the same ferocity he did everything else—except in bed, where he indulged every sense and took his sweet time—and with that same hard edge of his old dark fury beneath it.

  Almost as if he, too, preferred the little fairy tale they’d been living this past week, where she existed purely to please him, and did, again and again.

  Paige knew better than to ask him about it. Or to tell him the things that moved in her, sharp and sweet, in this place that felt more like home every day. This was a no-talking zone. This was a place of sun and sex and silence. It was the only possible way it could work.

  Like all temporary things, all stolen moments, it could only be a secret, or it would implode.

  “What have you been up to all this time?” Violet asked, peering at Paige from her position on one of the castello’s lovely couches, her iPad in her lap and her voice no more than mildly reproving. “I thought perhaps you’d been sucked into one of the olive groves, never to be seen again.”

  “You should have told me you needed me!” Paige exclaimed instead of answering the question. Because she didn’t want to know what Violet would think about the help touching her son. She didn’t want to risk her relationship with either one of them. “I thought I was giving you some much-needed time and space to yourself!”

  “My dear girl,” Violet said, sounding amused, “if I wanted time and space to myself, I would have chosen a different life altogether.”

  Paige was too aware of Giancarlo’s dark, brooding presence on the other side of the living room then, lounging there against the massive stone fireplace, supposedly scrolling through his phone’s display. She was certain he was hanging on every word. Or did she simply want to be that important to him?

  There was no answer to that. Not one that came without a good dose of pain in its wake.

  “I’m here now,” Paige said stoutly, trying to focus on the woman who had always been good to her, without all these complications and regrets. Not that she’d give you the time of day if she knew who you really were, that rough voice that was so much like her mother’s snarled at her.

  “Then I have two questions for you,” Violet replied, snapping Paige back to the present. “Can you operate a manual transmission?”

  That hadn’t been what Paige was expecting, but that was Violet. Paige rolled with it. “I can.”

  It was, in fact, one of the few things she could say her mother had taught her. Even if it had been mostly so that Paige could drive the beat-up car she owned to pick her up, drunk and belligerent, from the rough bars down near the railroad tracks.

  “And do you want to drive me to Lucca?” Violet smiled serenely when Giancarlo made an irritated sort of noise from the fireplace across the room and kept her eyes trained on Paige. “If memory serves, it has wonderful shopping. And I’m in the mood for an adventure.”

  “An adventure with attention or without?” Paige asked without missing a beat, though she was well aware it had been a long time since Violet had gone out on one of her excursions into the public without expecting attention from the people who would see her out and about.

  “Without,” Giancarlo snapped, from much closer by, and Paige had to control a little jump. She hadn’t heard him move.

  “With, of course,” Violet said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “No one has fawned over me in a whole week, and I require attention the way plants require sunlight, you know. It’s how I maintain my youthful facade.”

  She said it as if she was joking, but in that way of hers that didn’t actually allow for any argument. Not that it was Paige’s place to argue. Her son, however, was a different story.

  “You’re one of the most famous women in the world,” Giancarlo pointed out, and the dark thing Paige heard in his voice was a different animal than the one he used when he spoke to her. More exasperated, perhaps. Or more formal. “It’s not safe for you to simply wander the streets alone.”

  “I won’t be alone. I’ll have Paige,” Violet replied.

  “And what, pray, will Paige do should you find yourself surrounded? Mobbed?” Giancarlo rolled his eyes. “Hold the crowd off with a smart remark or two?”

  “I wouldn’t underestimate the power of a smart remark,” Paige retorted, glaring at him—but his gaze was on his mother.

  “That was a long time ago,” Violet said softly. With a wealth of compassion that made Paige stiffen in surprise and Giancarlo jerk back as if she’d slapped him. “I was a very foolish young woman. I underestimated the kind of interest there would be—not only in me, but in you. Your father was livid.” She studied her son for a moment and then rose to her feet, smiling faintly at Paige. “We were in the south of France and I thought it would be a marvelous idea to go out and poke around the shops by myself. Giancarlo was four. And when the crowds surrounded us, he was terrified.”

  “The police were called,” he said, furiously, Paige thought, though his voice was cold. “You had to be rescued by armed officials and you never went out without security again—and neither did I. I hope you haven’t spent your life telling this story as if I was an overimaginative child who caused a fuss. It wasn’t a monster in my closet. It was a pack of shouting cameramen and a mob of fans.”

  “The point is, my darling, you were four,” Violet said quietly. “You are not four any longer. And while I flatter myself that I remain relevant, I am an old woman who has not commanded the attention of packs of paparazzi in a very long time. I’m perfectly capable of enjoying an afternoon with my assistant and, if you insist, one driver.”

  “And you wonder why I refuse to have children,” he growled at her, and it took every shred of self-preservation Paige had to keep from reacting to that. To Giancarlo and the pain she could hear beneath the steel in his voice. “Why I would die before I’d subject another innocent to this absurd world of yours.”

  “I didn’t wonder,” Violet replied. “I knew. But I hoped you’d outgrow it.”

  “Mother—”

  “I don’t like being locked away in Italian castles, Giancarlo,” she said, and there was steel in the way she said it, despite the smile she used. It was the famous star issuing a command, not a mother. “If you cast your memory back, you’ll remembe
r that I never have.”

  There was a strange tension in the room then. And though she knew better, though it would no doubt raise the suspicions of the woman who could read anyone, standing right there beside her, Paige found herself looking to Giancarlo as if she could soothe him somehow. As if he’d let her—

  And she found that great darkness blazing in his eyes as he slowly, slowly turned his attention from Violet to her.

  As if this was something she’d done, too.

  Because, of course, she had. When he’d been far older than four. And what she’d done to him hadn’t been an accident.

  The truth of that almost knocked her sideways, and she would never know how she remained standing. She wanted to tell him everything, and who cared what Violet thought? She wanted to explain about her mother’s downward spiral. The money owed, the threats from the horrible Denny, the fear and panic that she’d thought were just the way life was. Because that was how it had always been. Paige wanted him to understand—at last—that she never, ever would have sacrificed him if she hadn’t believed she had no other choice. If she hadn’t been trapped and terrified herself, with only hideous options on all sides.

  But this wasn’t the place and she knew—she knew—he wouldn’t want to hear it anyway. He didn’t want to know why. He only wanted her to pay.

  He didn’t realize that she had. That she still did. Every moment since.

  And so she stood there, she said nothing the way she’d always said nothing and somehow she managed not to fall to her knees. Somehow Paige managed not to break into pieces. Somehow, she stared back at him as if she’d never broken his heart and she wished, hard and fierce and utterly pointless, that it were true.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly, as if he was answering his mother. All of that darkness in his gaze. All of the betrayal, the loss. The terrible grief. It made Paige’s chest ache, so acutely that she forgot to worry that Violet would be able to sense it from a few feet away. So sharp and so deep she thought it might have been a mortal blow, and how could anyone hide that? “I remember everything.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LUCCA WAS A walled city, an old fortress turned prosperous market town, and it was enchanting. Paige dutifully followed Violet through the bustle of tiled red roofs, sloped streets and the sheer tumult of such an ancient place, and told herself there was no reason at all she should feel so unequal to the task she’d done so well and well-nigh automatically for years.

  But her heart wasn’t with her in the colorful city. It was back in the hills with the man she’d left there, with that look on his face and too much dark grief in his gaze.

  And the longer Violet lingered—going in and out of every shop, pausing for cell phone photos every time she was recognized, settling in for a long dinner in a restaurant where the chef came racing out to serenade her and she was complimented theatrically for her few Italian phrases, all while Paige looked on and/or assisted—the more Paige wondered if the other woman was doing it deliberately. As if she knew what was going on between her son and her assistant.

  But that was impossible, Paige kept telling herself.

  This is called guilt, that caustic voice inside her snapped as Violet flirted outrageously with the chef. This is why you’re here. Why you work for his mother. Why you accept how he treats you. You deserve it. You earned it.

  More than that, she missed him. One afternoon knowing Giancarlo wasn’t within reach, that there was no chance he’d simply appear and tumble her down onto the nearest flat surface, the way he’d done only yesterday with no advance warning, and she was a mess. If this was a preview of what her life was going to be like after this all ended, Paige thought as she handled Violet’s bill and called for the car, she was screwed.

  “Like that’s anything new,” she muttered under her breath as she climbed into the car behind Violet, nearly closing the heavy door on the still-grasping hands of the little crowd that had gathered outside the restaurant to adore her.

  “Pardon?” Violet asked.

  Paige summoned her smile. Her professional demeanor, which she thought she’d last seen weeks ago in Los Angeles. “Did that do? Scratch the attention itch?”

  “It did.” Violet sat across from her in the dark, her gaze out the window as the car started out of the city. “Giancarlo is a solitary soul. He doesn’t understand that some people recharge their batteries in different ways than he does. Not everyone can storm about a lonely field and feel recharged.”

  Said the woman who had never passed a crowd she couldn’t turn into a fan base with a few sentences and a smile. Paige blinked, amazed at her churlishness even in her own head, and found Violet’s calm gaze on hers.

  “You’re an extrovert.” Paige said evenly. “I’m sure he knows that by now. Just as he likely knows that therefore, his own needs are different from yours.”

  “One would think,” Violet agreed in her serene, untroubled way, which shouldn’t have sent a little shiver of warning down Paige’s back. “But then, the most interesting men are not always in touch with what they need, are they?”

  Violet didn’t speak much after that, yet Paige didn’t feel as if she could breathe normally until the car pulled off the country road and started along the winding drive into the estate. And she was impatient—the most impatient she’d ever been in Violet’s presence, though she tried valiantly to disguise it—as she helped the older woman into the castello and oversaw the staff as they sorted out her purchases.

  And only when she was finally in the car again and headed toward her cottage did Paige understand what had been beating at her all day, clutching at her chest and her throat and making her want to scream in the middle of ancient Italian piazzas. Guilt, yes, but that was a heavy thing, a spiked weight that hung on her. The rest of it was panic.

  Because any opportunity Giancarlo had to reflect on what was happening between them—not revenge, not the comeuppance he’d obviously planned—was the beginning of the end. She knew it, deep inside. She’d seen it in his eyes this morning.

  And when she got to her cottage and found not only it but the house above it dark, it confirmed her fears.

  Paige stood there in the dark outside her cottage long after the driver’s car disappeared into the night, staring up the hill, willing this shadow or that to separate from the rest and become Giancarlo. She was too afraid to think about what might happen if this was it. If that kiss he’d delivered in the garden was their last.

  Too soon, she thought desperately, or perhaps that was the first prayer she’d dared make in years. It’s too soon.

  She stared up the side of the hill as if that would call him to her, somehow. But the only thing around her was the soft summer night, pretty and quiet. Still and empty, for miles around.

  When she grew too cold and he still didn’t appear, she made her way inside, feeling more punished by his absence than by anything else that had happened between them. Paige entertained visions of marching up the hill and taking what she wanted, or at least finding him and seeing for herself what had happened in her absence today, but the truth was, she didn’t dare. She was still so uncertain of her welcome.

  Would he throw back the covers and yank her into his arms if she appeared at his bedside? Or would he send her right back out into the night again, with a cruel word or two as her reward? Paige found she was too unsure of the answer to test it.

  There were red flags everywhere, she acknowledged as she got ready for bed and crawled beneath her sheets. Red flags and dark corners, and nothing safe. But maybe what mattered was that she knew that, this time. She’d known the moment she’d decided to apply for that job with Violet. She’d always known.

  She would have to learn to live with that, too.

  * * *

  Later that night, Paige woke with a sudden start when a lean male form crawled into her bed, hauling
her into his arms.

  Giancarlo. Of course.

  But her heart was already crashing against her ribs as he rolled so she was beneath him. Excitement. Relief. The usual searing hunger, sharper than usual this time.

  “Why didn’t you come to me?” he gritted at her, temper and need and too many other dark and hungry things in his voice. Then the scrape of his teeth against the tender flesh of her neck, making her shudder.

  Paige didn’t want to think about the contours of her fears now, her certainty he’d finished with this. With her. Not now, while he was braced above her, his body so familiar and hot against hers, making the night blaze with the wild need that was never far beneath the surface. Never far at all.

  Not even when she thought she’d lost him again.

  “I thought you’d gone to bed already.” I didn’t know if you’d want me to come find you, she thought, but wisely kept to herself. “All of your lights were out.”

  She thought she saw a certain self-knowledge move over his face then, but it was gone so quickly she was sure she must have imagined it.

  “Did you have a lovely day out with my mother?” he asked in a tone she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine was friendly, his dark eyes glittering in the faint light from the rising moon outside her windows. “Filled with her admirers, exactly as she wished?”

  “Of course.” Paige ran her hands from his hard jaw to the steel column of his neck, as if trying to imprint the shape of him on her palms. Trying to make certain that if this was the last time, she’d remember it. That it couldn’t be snatched from her, not entirely. “When Violet decrees we are to have fun, that is precisely what we have. No mere crowd would dare defy the crown jewel of the Hollywood establishment.”

  Giancarlo didn’t laugh. He shifted his body so he was hard against her and she melted the way she always did, ready to welcome him no matter his mood or hers, no matter the strange energy that crackled from him tonight, no matter the darkness that seemed wrapped around him even as he wound himself around her.