Caitlin Crews: At the Count's Bidding

Giancarlo Alessi. The only man she’d ever loved with every inch of her doomed and naive heart, however little good that had done either one of them. The only man who’d made her scream and sob and beg for more, until she was hoarse and mute with longing. The only man who still haunted her, and who she suspected always would, despite everything.

Because he was also the only man she’d ever betrayed. Thoroughly. Indisputably. Her stomach twisted hard, reminding her of what she’d done with a sick lurch. As if she’d forgotten. As if she ever could.

She hadn’t thought she’d had a choice. But she doubted he’d appreciate that any more now than he had then.

“I can explain,” she said. Too quickly, too nervously. She didn’t remember pushing back from the table where she’d been sitting, doing her work out in the pretty sunshine as was her custom during the lazy afternoons, but she was standing then, somehow, feeling as unsteady on her own legs as she had in the chair. As lost in his dark, furious gaze as she’d been ten years ago.

“You can explain to security,” he grated at her, each word a crisp slap. She felt red and obvious. Marked. As if he could see straight through her to that squalid past of hers that had ruined them both. “I don’t care what you’re doing here, Nicola. I want you gone.”

She winced at that name. That hated name she hadn’t used since the day she’d lost him. Hearing it again, after all this time and in that voice of his was physically upsetting. Deeply repellant. Her stomach twisted again, harder, and then knotted.

“I don’t—” Paige didn’t know what to say, how to say it. How to explain what had happened since that awful day ten years ago when she’d sold him out and destroyed them both. What was there to say? She’d never told him the whole truth, when she could have. She’d never been able to bear the thought of him knowing how polluted she was or the kind of place, the kind of people, she’d come from. And they’d fallen in love so fast, their physical connection a white-hot explosion that had consumed them for those two short months they’d been together—there hadn’t seemed to be any time to get to know each other. Not really. “I don’t go by Nicola anymore.”

He froze solid in the doorway, a kind of furious astonishment rolling over him and then out from him like a thunderclap, deafening and wild, echoing inside of her like a shout.

It hurt. It all hurt.

“I never—” This was terrible. Worse than she’d imagined, and she’d imagined it often. She felt an awful heat at the back of her eyes and a warning sort of ache between her breasts, as if a sob was gathering force and threatening to spill over, and she knew better than to let it out. She knew he wouldn’t react well. She was lucky he was speaking to her at all now instead of having Violet’s security guards toss her bodily from the estate without so much as a word. But she kept talking anyway, as if that might help. “It’s my middle name, actually. It was a—my name is Paige.”

“Curiously, Paige is also the name of my mother’s personal assistant.”

But she could tell by the way his voice grew ominously quiet that he knew. That he wasn’t confused or asking her to explain herself. That he’d figured it out the moment he’d seen her—that she’d been the name on all those emails from his mother over the past few years.

And she could also tell exactly how he felt about that revelation. It was written into every stiffly furious line of his athletic form.

“Who cannot be you.” He shifted and her breath caught, as if the movement of his perfect body was a blow. “Assure me, please, that you are no more than an unpleasant apparition from the darkest hour of my past. That you have not insinuated yourself into my family. Do it now and I might let you walk out of here without calling the police.”

Ten years ago she’d have thought he was bluffing. That Giancarlo would no more have called the police on her than he would have thrown himself off the nearest bridge. But this was a different man. This was the Giancarlo she’d made, and she had no one to blame for that but herself.

Well. Almost no one. But there was no point bringing her mother into this, Paige knew. It was his he was concerned about—and besides, Paige hadn’t spoken to her own in a decade.

“Yes,” she said, and she felt shaky and vulnerable, as if it had only just occurred to her that her presence here was questionable, at best. “I’ve been working for Violet for almost three years now, but Giancarlo, you have to believe that I never—”

“Stai zitto.”

And Paige didn’t have to speak Italian to understand that harsh command, or the way he slashed his hand through the air, gruffly ordering her silence. She obeyed. What else could she do? And she watched him warily as if, at any moment, he might bare his fangs and sink them in her neck.

She’d deserve that, too.

Paige had always known this day would come. That this quiet new life she’d crafted for herself almost by accident was built on the shakiest of foundations and that all it would take was this man’s reappearance to upend the whole of it. Giancarlo was Violet’s son, her only child. The product of her fabled second marriage to an Italian count that the entire world had viewed as its own, personal, real-life fairy tale. Had Paige imagined this would end in any other manner? She’d been living on borrowed time from the moment she’d taken that interview and answered all the questions Violet’s managers had asked in the way she’d known—thanks to her insider’s take on Violet’s actual life away from the cameras, courtesy of her brief, brilliant affair with Giancarlo all those years ago—would get her the job.

Some people might view that harshly, she was aware. Particularly Giancarlo himself. But she’d had good intentions. Surely that counted for something? You know perfectly well that it doesn’t, the harsh voice in her head that was her last link to her mother grated at her. You know exactly what intentions are worth.

And it had been so long. She’d started to believe that this might never happen. That Giancarlo might stay in Europe forever, hidden away in the hills of Tuscany building his überprivate luxury hotel and associated cottages the way he had for the past decade, ever since she’d set him up and those sordid, intimate photographs had been splashed across every tabloid imaginable. She’d lulled herself into a false sense of security.

Because he was here now, and nothing was safe any longer, and yet all she wanted to do was lose herself in looking at him. Reacquainting herself with him. Reminding herself what she’d given up. What she’d ruined.

She’d seen pictures of him all over this house in the years she’d worked here. Always dark and forbiddingly elegant in his particularly sleek way, it took no more than a glance to understand Giancarlo was decidedly not American. Even ten years ago and despite having spent so much time in Los Angeles, he’d had that air. That thing about him that whispered that he was the product of long centuries of European blue bloods. It was something in the way he held himself, distant and disapproving, the hint of ancient places and old gods stamped into his aristocratic bones and lurking behind his cool dark gaze.

Paige had expected Giancarlo would still be attractive, of course, should she ever encounter him again. What she hadn’t expected—or what she’d allowed herself to forget—was that he was so raw. Seeing him was like a hard, stunning blow to the side of her head, leaving her ears ringing and her heart thumping erratically inside her chest. As if he knew it, his head canted to one side as he regarded her, as if daring her to keep talking when he’d ordered her to stop.