Annie West - The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

Almost as if she was comfortable here. As if she belonged. She’d felt that way in only one other place in her whole life, and had been as wrong. Giancarlo’s Malibu home, all wood and glass, angled to best let the sea in, had only been a pretty house. This was a pretty place.

And when you leave here, she told herself harshly, you will never come back. The same as that house in Malibu. Everyone feels at home in affluent places. That’s what they’re built to do.

Paige dressed slowly and carefully, her nerves prickling into a new awareness as she rifled through her suitcase. Should she wear the sort of thing she would wear if this was a vacation in Italy she happened to be taking by herself? Or should she wear something she suspected Giancarlo would prefer, so he could better enact his revenge? On the one hand, jeans and a slouchy sweatshirt, all comfort and very little style. On the other, a flirty little dress he could get his hands under, like before. She didn’t have the slightest idea which way to go.

“What do you want?” she asked her sleepy-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, her voice throaty from all that sleep.

But that was the trouble. She still wanted the same things she’d always wanted. She could admit that, here and now, with Giancarlo’s Italy pressing in on her from all sides. The difference was that this time, she knew better than to imagine she’d get it.

Paige dried her hair slowly, her mind oddly empty even as the rest of her felt tight with all the things she didn’t want to think about directly. Taut and on edge. She pulled on a pair of soft white trousers and a loose sort of tunic on top, a compromise between the jeans she’d have preferred and what she assumed Giancarlo would likely want to see her wear, given the circumstances.

“What he’d really like is me, as naked as the day I was born and crawling up that hillside on my hands and knees,” she muttered out loud and then laughed at the image, the sound creaky and strange in the quiet of the cottage. She kept laughing until a wet heat pricked at the back of her eyes and she had to pull in a ragged breath to keep the tears from pouring over. Then another.

Paige frowned as she slipped her feet into a pair of thonged flat sandals. When was the last time she’d laughed like that? About anything?

What a sad creature you’ve become, she scolded herself as she dug out her smartphone from her bag and scrolled through her messages. But the truth was, she had always been a fairly sad thing, when she looked back at the progression of her life. Sad and studious or determined and stubborn, from the start. It had been the only way to survive the chaos that had been her mother. There had only been one two-month stretch of laughter in her life, gleaming and overflowing and dizzy with joy, and she’d ruined it ten years ago.

“My goodness,” Violet said in her grand way when she picked up her private line, after Paige apologized for disappearing and then sleeping for hours, “this is Italia, Paige. One must soak in la dolce vita , especially when jet-lagged. I plan to spend the night in my lovely little castle, getting fat on all the marvelous local cuisine! I suggest you do the same.”

And Paige would have loved to do the same, she thought when she finally stepped out of her cottage into the cool evening, the Tuscan sky turning to gold above her. But she had a date with her sins instead.

Sins that felt like wishes granted, and what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to tell the difference between the two?

She took her time and yet the walk was still too short. Much too short.

And Giancarlo waited there at the crest of the hill, his eyes as hard as his body appeared loose and relaxed, in linen trousers and the sort of camel-colored sport coat that made her think of his aristocratic roots and her lack of them. And Paige was suddenly as wide-awake as if she’d drowned herself in a vat of espresso.

He looked like something more than a man as he waited there, at first a shadow next to the bold upright thrust of a thick cypress tree, then, as she drew closer, very distinctly himself. He’d clearly watched her come all the way up the side of his hill, and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen him from afar without realizing it or if it was that odd magnetic pull inside of her that had done it, pointing her toward him as unerringly as if she’d been headed straight to him all along.

Home, that thing in her whispered, and she didn’t have the strength to pretend she didn’t feel it when she did. Not tonight.

She stopped when she was still some distance away and looked back the way she’d come, unable to keep the small sigh of pleasure from escaping her lips. There was the hint of mist in the valley the lower the sun inched toward the hills, adding an elegant sort of haunting to the shadows that danced between them, and far off in the distance the castello stood tall and proud, lights blazing against the coming night. It was so quiet and perfect and deeply satisfying in a way Paige hadn’t known anything could be. Gooseflesh prickled up and down her arms and she felt it all like a heavy sob in her chest, rolling through her, threatening her very foundations.

Or maybe that was him. Maybe it had always been him.

“It’s gorgeous here,” she said, which felt deeply inadequate. “It doesn’t seem real.”

“My father believed that the land is our bones,” Giancarlo said. “Protect it, and we strengthen ourselves. Conserve it and care for it, and we become greater in its glory. Sometimes I think he was a madman, a farmer hiding in an aristocrat’s body.” His gaze moved over her face, then beyond her, toward the setting sun. “And then another sunset reminds me that he was right. Beauty is always worth it. It feeds the soul.”

“He sounds like some kind of poet.”

“Not my father. Poets and artists were to be championed, as one must always support art and culture for the same reason one tends the land, but Alessis had a higher calling.” He shook his head. “Endless debt and responsibility, apparently. I might have been better off as an artist, come to that.”

“If I had a home like this, I don’t think I’d mind doing whatever it took to keep it,” Paige said then. She remembered herself. “I don’t think anyone would.”

She thought Giancarlo smiled, though his face was obscured in the falling dark and then she knew she must have imagined it, because this wasn’t that kind of evening no matter how lovely it was. He wasn’t that kind of man. Not anymore. Not for her.

“Come,” he said. He reached out his hand and held it there in the last gasp of golden light, and Paige knew, somehow, that everything would be divided into before and after she took it. The world. Her life. This thing that was still between them. And that precarious, wildly beating creature inside her chest that was the battered ruins of her heart.

His mouth crooked slightly as the moment stretched out. She made no move; she was frozen into place and wasn’t sure she could do anything about it, but he didn’t drop his hand.

“Did you make me dinner?” she asked, her voice shockingly light when there was nothing but heaviness and their history and her treacherous heart inside of her, and she thought neither one of them was fooled. “Because food poisoning really would be a punishment, all joking aside.”

“I am Italian,” he said, with a note of amused outrage in his voice, which reminded her too strongly of all that laughter they’d shared a lifetime ago. As if the only things that had mattered in the whole world had been there in his smile. She’d thought so then. She thought maybe she still did, for all the good that would do her here. “Of course I can cook.” He paused, as if noticing how friendly he sounded and remembering how inappropriate that was tonight. As if he, too, was finding it hard to recall the battle lines he’d drawn. “But even if I couldn’t, the estate has a fleet of chefs on call. Meals are always gourmet here, no matter who prepares them.”