At the Count's Bidding

Sitting in her usual place at the elegant French secretary on the far side of the room, her laptop open before her and all of Violet’s cell phones in a row on the glossy wood surface in case any of them should ring, Paige frowned and named the very famous director they’d just been discussing.

“You think he’s lonely?” she asked, startled.

Violet let out that trademark throaty laugh of hers that had been wowing audiences and bringing whole rooms to a standstill since she’d appeared in her first film in the seventies.

“No doubt he is,” she said after a moment, “despite the parade of ever-younger starlets who he clearly doesn’t realize make him look that much older and more decrepit, but I meant Giancarlo.”

Of course she did.

“Is he?” Paige affected a vague tone. The sort of tone any employee would use when discussing the boss’s son.

“He was a very lonely child,” Violet said, in the same sort of curious, faraway voice she used when she was puzzling out a new character. “It is my single regret. His father and I loved each other wildly and often quite badly, and there was little room for anyone else.”

Everyone knew the story, of course. The doomed love affair with its separations and heartbreaks. The tempestuous, often short-lived reunions. The fact they’d lived separately for years at a time with many rumored affairs, but had never divorced. Violet’s bent head and flowing tears at the old count’s funeral, her refusal to speak of him publicly afterward.

Possibly, Paige thought ruefully as she turned every last part of the story over in her head, she had studied that Hollywood fairy tale with a little more focus and attention than most.

“He doesn’t seem particularly lonely,” Paige said when she felt Violet’s expectant gaze on her. She sat very still in her chair, aware that while a great movie star might seem to be too narcissistic to notice anyone but herself, the truth was that Violet was an excellent judge of character. She had to be, to inhabit so many. She read people the way others read street signs. Fidgeting would tell her much, much more than Paige wanted her to know. “He seems as if he’s the sort of man who’s used to being in complete and possibly ruthless control. Of everything.”

The other woman’s smile then seemed sad. “I agree. And I can’t think of anything more lonely,” she said softly. “Can you?”

And perhaps that conversation was how Paige found herself touching up what she could only call defensive eyeliner in the mirror in the small foyer of her cozy little cottage when she heard a heavy hand at her door at precisely eight o’clock that night.

She didn’t bother to ask who it was. The cartwheels her stomach turned at the sound were identification enough.

Paige swung open the door and he was there, larger than life and infinitely more dangerous, looking aristocratic and lethal in one of the suits he favored that made him seem a far cry indeed from the more casual man she’d known before. This man looked as if he’d sooner spit nails than partake of the Californian pastime of surfing, much less lounge about like an affluent Malibu beach bum in torn jeans and no shirt. This man looked as forbidding and unreachable and haughtily blue-blooded as the Italian count he was.

Giancarlo stood on the path that led to her door and let his dark eyes sweep over her, from the high ponytail she’d fashioned to the heavy eye makeup she’d used because it was the only mask she thought he’d allow her to wear. His sensual mouth crooked slightly at that, as if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking when she’d lined her eyes so dramatically, and then moved lower. To the dress that hugged her breasts tight, with only delicate straps above, then cascaded all the way to the floor in a loose, flowing style that suggested the kind of casual elegance she’d imagined he’d require no matter where he planned to take her.

“Very good, cara,” he said, and that wasn’t quite approval she heard in his voice. It was much closer to satisfaction, and that distinction made her pulse short-circuit, then start to drum wildly. Erratically. “It appears you are capable of following simple instructions, when it suits you.”

“Everyone can follow instructions when it suits them,” she retorted despite the fact she’d spent hours cautioning herself not to engage with him, not to give him any further ammunition. Especially not when he called her that name—cara—he’d once told her he reserved for the many indistinguishable women who flung themselves at him. Better that than “Nicola,” she thought fiercely. “It’s called survival.”

“I can think of other things to call it,” he murmured in that dark, silken way of his that hurt more for its insinuations than any directness would have. “But why start the night off with name-calling?” That crook of his mouth became harder, deadlier. “You’ll need your strength, I suspect. Best to conserve it while you can.”

He’s only messing with you, she cautioned herself as she stepped through the door and delivered herself into his clutches, the way she’d promised him she would. He wants to see if you’ll really go through with this.

So did she, she could admit, as she made a show of locking the front door, mostly to hide her nerves from that coolly assessing dark gaze of his. But it was done too fast, and then Giancarlo was urging her into a walk with that hand of his at the small of her back, and their history seemed particularly alive then in the velvety night that was still edged with deep blues as the summer evening took hold around them.

Everything felt perilous. Even her own breath.

He didn’t speak. He handed her into the kind of low-slung sports car she should have expected he’d drive, and as he rounded the hood to lower himself into the driver’s seat she could still feel his hand on that spot on her back, the heat of it pulsing into her skin like a brand, making the finest of tremors snake over her skin.

Paige didn’t know what she expected as he got in and started to drive, guiding them out of Violet’s high gates and higher into the hills. A restaurant so he could humiliate her in public? One of the dive motels that rented by the hour in the sketchier neighborhoods so he could treat her like the whore he believed she was? But it certainly wasn’t the sharp turn he eventually took off the winding road that traced the top of the Santa Monica Mountains bisecting Los Angeles, bringing the powerful car to a stop in a shower of dirt right at the edge of a cliff. There was an old wooden railing, she noted in a sudden panic. But still.

“Get out,” he said.

“I, uh, really don’t want to,” she said, and she heard the sheer terror in her own voice. He must have heard it too, because while his grim expression didn’t alter, she thought she saw amusement in the dark eyes he fixed on her.

“I’m not going to throw you off the side of the mountain, however appealing the notion,” he told her. “That would kill you almost instantly.”

“It’s the ‘almost’ part I’m worried about,” she pointed out, sounding as nervous as she felt suddenly. “It encompasses a lot of screaming and sharp rocks.”

“I want you to suffer, Paige,” he said softly, still with that emphasis on her name, as if it was another lie. “Remember that.”

It told her all manner of things about herself she’d have preferred not knowing that she found that some kind of comfort. She could have walked away, ten years ago or three days ago, and she hadn’t. He’d been the one to leave. He’d hurled his accusations at her, she’d told him she loved him and he’d walked away—from her and from his entire life here. This was the bed she’d made, wasn’t it?

So she climbed from the car when he did, and then followed him over to that rail, wary and worried. Giancarlo didn’t look at her. He stared out at the ferocious sparkle, the chaos of light that was this city. It was dark where they stood, no streetlamps to relieve the night sky and almost supernaturally quiet so high in the hills, but she could see the intent look on his face in the reflected sheen of the mad city below, and it made her shake down deep inside.

“Come here.”

She didn’t want to do that either, but she’d promised to obey him, so Paige trusted that this was about shaming her, not hurting her—at least not physically—and drifted closer. She shuddered when he looped an arm around her neck and pulled her hard against the rock-hard wall of his chest. The world seemed to spin and lights flashed, but that was only the beaming headlights of a passing car.

Giancarlo stroked his fingers down the side of her face, then traced the seam of her lips.

Everything was hot. Too hot. He was still as hard and male as she remembered, and his torso was like a brand beside her, the arm over her shoulders deliciously heavy, and she felt that same old fire explode inside of her again, as if this was new. As if this was the first time he’d touched her.

He didn’t order her to open her mouth but she did anyway at the insistent movement, and then he thrust his thumb inside. It was hotter than it should have been, sexy and strange at once, and his dark eyes glittered as they met hers with all of Los Angeles at their feet.

“Remind me how exactly it was I lost my head over you,” he told her, all that fury and vengeance in his voice, challenging her to defy him. “Use your tongue.”

Paige didn’t know what demon it was that rose in her then, some painful mixture of long lost hopes and current regrets, not to mention that anger she tried to hide because it was unlikely to help her here, but she did as she was told. She grabbed his invading hand with both of hers and she worshipped his thumb as if it were another part of his anatomy entirely, and she didn’t break away from him while she did it.

She didn’t know how long it went on.

His eyes were darker than the night around them, and the same hectic gold lit them, even as it burned within her. She felt molten and wild, reckless and lost, and none of that mattered, because she could taste him. He might hate her, he might want nothing more than to hurt her, but Paige had never thought she’d taste him again. She’d never dreamed this could happen.

She told herself it didn’t matter, those things she felt deep inside her that she didn’t want to acknowledge. Only that this was a gift. It didn’t matter what else it was.

He pulled his thumb out then and shifted her so they were facing each other, and the space between them seemed dense. Electric.

“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your touch,” he said, and though his tone was cruel his voice was rougher than it had been, and she told herself that meant something. It meant the same thing her breathlessness did, or that manic tightening deep in her belly, that restlessness she’d only ever felt with him and knew only he could cure.

He smiled, and it was so beautiful it made her throat feel tight, and she should have known better. Because he wasn’t finished.

“Get on your knees, Paige,” he ordered her. “And do it right.”