Annie West - The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance

Soon, he assured himself as his body reacted to that image with predictable enthusiasm. Soon enough.

“Again,” Paige said tightly, taking a healthy gulp of her wine, “it seems to me that there are more effective forms of payback than a romantic dinner for two, served beneath the starry night sky on what might be the most intimate terrace on the entire planet.” She looked out at the view as the heavens sparkled back at her, as if they were performing for her pleasure. “I suspect you might be doing it wrong.”

“Ah, Paige,” Giancarlo said softly. “You lack imagination.” Her eyes swung back to his and he smiled again, wider, pleased when that seemed to alarm her. “The romantic setting will only make it more poignant, will it not, when I order you to strip and sit there naked as we eat. Or when I demand that you please me with your mouth while I soak in the view. Or when I bend you over the serving table and make you scream out my name until I’m done.” He let his smile deepen as her eyes went very green, and very round. “The more civilized the setting, the more debauched the act,” he said mildly. “I find there is very little more effective.”

She looked stunned, and then something like wistful, and he almost broke and hauled her into his arms—but somehow, somehow , he reined himself in. Just a little bit longer, he promised himself. She blinked, then coughed, and then she folded her hands together in her lap with such precision that Giancarlo knew she was torturing herself with all those images he’d put in her head.

Va bene.

“You say that as if this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.” Her voice was his own little victory, so raspy was it then, with that stunned heat in her gaze and that band of color high on her cheeks. “Do you spend a lot of time enacting complicated revenge fantasies, Giancarlo? Is that another one of your heretofore hidden talents—like architecture and interior design, apparently?”

“I went to architecture school after university,” he said, and something about the fact she didn’t know that bothered him. Had he never told her his own story? Had he been as guilty of wearing a false persona ten years ago as she had been? Had it simply been the rush, the need that had kept them in bed and focused on other things? Had it been by her design—or had it been his own selfishness at play? He shoved that disconcerting thought aside. “But when I was finished, I decided I wanted to leverage my position as Violet’s son, instead. That didn’t work out very well for either one of us, did it?” He reached over and removed the silver cover from the plate of antipasti in front of her, then from his own, and smiled at her when she looked confused. “The salsicce di cinghiale is particularly good,” he told her. “And you should be certain to eat well. We have a very long night ahead of us.”

He expected her to do as she was told. It took a moment or two for him to realize that she hadn’t moved. That she appeared to have frozen solid where she sat and was staring at him with a stricken sort of expression on her face.

Giancarlo lifted a brow. “Was I unclear?”

“I appreciate all the tension and drama,” Paige said after a moment. “I don’t think I realized how very much you take after your mother until now. That’s a compliment,” she added in a hurry when he frowned at her. “But I’ll pass.”

“That is not an option you have.” He shrugged. “You persist in thinking what you want comes into play here. It doesn’t.”

“What will you do?” she asked softly, so softly it took a moment for him to hear the challenge beneath the words, and then to see it there in her chameleon eyes. “Make me scream for people who won’t hear me? Make me walk for days in search of a road that’s still hours from anywhere? Force me to stay in that gorgeous little cottage down the hill like a bird in a cage?”

“Or, alternatively, merely call my mother and tell her exactly who you are,” he suggested. “A fate you felt was worse than death and far more terrible than anything I might do a week ago.”

But tonight she only shook her head and she didn’t avert her gaze, reminding him of that moment in his mother’s closet across the world. Reminding him he’d never controlled this woman, not even when she’d agreed to let him.

“I think if you were going to do that, Giancarlo, you would have. You wouldn’t have dragged me across the planet and then presented me with wine and a four-course meal.”

He laughed, a smoky little sound against the night. It did nothing to ease the mounting tension. “Do you really want to test that theory?”

She leaned forward, holding his gaze, and his laughter dried up as if it had never been. He was aware of everything at once. The stars above them, the faint breeze that teased him with the intoxicating scent of her. The rich food before them, the dancing candlelight. The way she sat now, the wide neck of her brightly patterned tunic falling open as she leaned toward him, hinting at the soft curves beneath.

And all that fire, as bright as it had ever been, burning them both where they sat.

Her gaze was like a touch on his, and he felt it everywhere. “I have a different theory.”

“I’m all ears, of course. Every inmate is innocent, every killer was merely misunderstood, every con man an artist in his soul, et cetera. Tell me your sob story, cara. ” He felt his mouth crook. “I knew you would, sooner or later.”

But Paige only smiled, and her eyes were so green tonight they rivaled his own lush fields. It moved in him like summer, an exultation of all that boundless heat that spiked the air between them.

“You don’t want revenge. Not really. You want sex.”

Her smile deepened when he only stared back at her, that mouth of hers still an utter distraction, still his undoing. Her gaze proud and unwavering and he had no defense against that, either.

“You don’t want to admit it, given what happened the last time we had sex, but look where we are.” She lifted a shoulder, somehow encompassing the whole of the estate in that simple little gesture. “You’ve made sure there couldn’t possibly be a camera here. You’ve cut us off from the rest of the world. And you’re calling it revenge because you’re furious that you still want me.”

“Or because wanting you is only part of it,” he replied, stiffer than he should have sounded, because it was that or let loose the wild thing in him that wanted nothing but her however he could have her. That didn’t give a toss about the rest of it as long as he got his hands on her one more time. Just one more time. “And not mutually exclusive with revenge, I assure you.”

Her smile seemed to pierce straight through him then, heat and fire and danger, and it sank straight to his sex.

Making him nothing at all but that wildness within.

“Call it whatever you want,” she suggested in that rough voice of hers that hinted at her own dark excitement, that called to him like a song the way it always had. That sang in him still, no matter how he tried to deny it. “Call it hate sex . I don’t care, Giancarlo.” She shrugged. “Whatever it is, whatever you need to call it to feel better about it, I want it, too.”

* * *

“I beg your pardon?” Giancarlo’s voice was a rough whisper that somehow sounded in Paige like a bellow.

It was the wine, Paige told herself as she stared back at him, her own words seeming to cavort between them on the heavily laden tabletop, making it impossible to see or hear much of anything else. Of course it was the wine—though she’d only had a few sips—and the lingering jet lag besides, though she didn’t feel anything like tired at the moment.