Buch lesen: «At the Count's Bidding»

Contents

Cover

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

“I MUST BE HALLUCINATING. And may God have mercy on you if I am not.”

Paige Fielding hadn’t heard that voice in ten years. It wrapped around her even as it sliced through her, making the breezy Southern California afternoon fade away. Making the email she’d been writing disappear from her mind in full. Making her forget what year it was, what day it was. Rocketing her right back into the murky, painful past.

That voice. His voice.

Uncompromisingly male. As imperious as it was incredulous. The faint hint of sex and Italy in his voice even with all that temper besides, and it rolled over Paige like a flattening heat. It pressed into her from behind, making her want to squirm in her seat. Or simply melt where she sat. Or come apart—easily and instantly—the way she always had at the sound of it.

She swiveled around in her chair in instant, unconscious obedience, knowing exactly who she’d see in the archway that led into the sprawling Bel Air mansion high in the Hollywood Hills called La Bellissima in honor of its famous owner, the screen legend Violet Sutherlin. She knew who it was, and still, something like a premonition washed over her and made her skin prickle in the scant seconds before her gaze found him there in the arched, open door, scowling at her with what looked like a healthy mix of contempt and pure, electric hatred.

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.

But she couldn’t seem to do anything but stare. As if the past decade had been one long slide of gray and here he was again, all of him in bold color and bright lights. So glaring and hot she could hardly bear to look at him. But she did. She couldn’t help herself.

He stood as if he was used to accolades, or simply commanding the full and rapt attention of every room he entered. It was partly the clothes he wore, the fabrics fitting him so perfectly, almost reverently, in a manner Paige knew came only at astronomical expense. But it was more than that. His body was lean and powerful, a symphony of whipcord strength tightly leashed, the crackle of his temper and that blazing sensuality that felt like a touch from ten feet away, carnal and wild. Even though she knew he’d never willingly touch her again. He’d made that clear.

Giancarlo was still so beautiful, yes, but there was something so male about him, so rampantly masculine, that it made Paige’s throat go dry. It was worse now, ten years later. Much worse. He stood in the open doorway in a pair of dark trousers, boots, and the kind of jacket Paige associated with sexy Ducati motorcycles and mystical places a girl like her from a ramshackle desert town in Nowhere, Arizona, only fantasized about, like the Amalfi Coast. Yet somehow he looked as effortlessly refined as if he could walk straight into a black-tie gala as he was—or climb into a bed for a long, hot, blisteringly feral weekend of no-holds-barred sex.

But it did her no good to remember that kind of thing. For her body to ready itself for his possession as if it had been ten minutes since they’d last touched instead of ten years. As if it knew him, recognized him, wanted him—as deeply and irrevocably as she always had. As if wanting him was some kind of virus that had only ever been in remission, for which there was no cure.

The kind of virus that made her breasts heavy and her belly too taut and shivery at once. The kind of virus that made her wish she still danced the way she had in high school and those few years after, obsessively and constantly, as if that kind of extended, heedless movement might be the only way to survive it. Him. His marvelous mouth tightened as the silence dragged on and she sent up a prayer of thanks that he hadn’t thought to remove his mirrored sunglasses yet. She didn’t want to know what his dark gaze would feel like when she could actually see his eyes again. She didn’t want to know what that would do to her now. She still remembered what it had been like that last time, that short and harsh conversation on the doorstep of her apartment building that final morning, where he’d confronted her with those pictures and had truly understood what she’d done to him. When he’d looked at her as if he’d only then, in that moment, seen her true face—and it had been evil.

Pull yourself together, she ordered herself fiercely. There was no going back. There were no do-overs. She knew that too well.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to get out before he cut her off again. Before she melted into the tears she knew she’d cry later, in private. Before the loss and grief she’d pretended she was over for years now swamped her. “Giancarlo, I’m so sorry.”

He went so rigid it was as if she’d slapped him, and yet she felt slapped. She hurt everywhere.

“I don’t care why you’re here.” His voice was rough. A scrape that tore her open, ripping her right down her middle. “I don’t care what game you’re playing this time. You have five minutes to leave the premises.”

But all Paige could hear was what swirled there beneath his words. Rage. Betrayal, as if it was new. Hot and furious, like a fire that still burned bright between them. And she was sick, she understood, because instead of being as frightened of that as she should have been, something in her rejoiced that he wasn’t indifferent. After all this time.

“If you do not do this of your own accord,” Giancarlo continued with a certain vicious deliberation, and she knew he wanted that to hurt her, “I will take great pleasure in dumping you on the other side of the gates myself.”

“Giancarlo—” she began, trying to sound calm, though her hands nervously smoothed at the soft blouse and the pencil skirt she wore. And even though she couldn’t see his eyes, she felt them there, tracing the curve of her hips and her legs beneath, as if she’d deliberately directed his gaze to parts of her body he’d once claimed he worshipped. Had she meant to do that? How could she not know?

But he interrupted her again.

“You may call me Count Alessi in the remaining four minutes before I kick you out of here,” he told her harshly. “But if you know what’s good for you, whatever name you’re using and whatever con you’re running today and have been running for years, I’d suggest you stay silent.”

“I’m not running a con. I’m not—” Paige cut herself off, because this was all too complicated and she should have planned for this, shouldn’t she? She should have figured out what to say to someone who had no reason on earth to listen to her. And who wouldn’t believe a word she said even if he did. Why hadn’t she prepared herself? “I know you don’t want to hear a single thing I have to say, but none of this is what you think. It wasn’t back then, either. Not really.”

He seemed to expand then, like a great wave. As if the force of his temper soared out from him and crashed over the whole of the grand terrace, the sloping lawn, the canyons all around, the complicated mess of Los Angeles stretched out below. It crackled as it cascaded over her, making every hair on her body seem to stand on end. That mouth of his flattened and he swept his sunglasses from his face at last—which was not an improvement. Because his eyes were dark and hot and gleamed a commanding sort of gold, and as he fastened them on her he made no attempt at all to hide the blistering light of his fury.

It made her want to sit down, hard, before she fell. It made her worry her legs might give out. It made her want to cry the way she had ten years ago, so hard and so long she’d made herself sick, for all the good that had done. She felt dangerously, dizzyingly hollow.

“Enlighten me,” he suggested, all silken threat and that humming sort of violence right there beneath his elegant surface. Or maybe not really beneath it, she thought, now that she could see his beautiful, terrible face in all its furious perfection. “Which part was not what I thought? The fact that you arranged to have photographs taken of us while we were having sex, though I am certain I told you how much I hated public exposure after a lifetime in the glare of my mother’s spotlight? Or the fact that you sold those photos to the tabloids?” He took a step toward her; his hands were in fists at his side, and she didn’t understand how she could simultaneously want to run for her life and run toward him. He was a suicide waiting to happen. She should know that better than anyone. “Or perhaps I am misunderstanding the fact that you have now infiltrated my mother’s house to further prey on my family?” He shook his head. “What kind of monster are you?”

“Giancarlo—”

“I will tell you exactly what kind.” His nostrils flared and she knew that look that flashed over his face then. She knew it far too well. It was stamped into her memories and it made her stomach heave with the same shame and regret. It made her flush with terrible heat. “You are a mercenary bitch and I believe I was perfectly clear about this ten years ago. I never, ever wanted to see your face again.”

And Paige was running out of ways to rank which part of this was the worst part, but she couldn’t argue. Not with any of what he’d said. Yet rather than making her shrink down and curl up into the fetal position right there on the terra-cotta pavers beneath their feet, the way she’d done the last time he’d looked at her like that and called her names she’d richly deserved, it made something else shiver into being inside her. Something that made her straighten instead of shrink. Something that gave her the strength to meet his terrible glare, to lift her chin despite all of that furious, condemning gold.

“I love her.”

That hung there between them, stark and heavy. And, she realized belatedly, an echo of what she’d said ten years ago, when it had been much too late. When he’d believed her even less than he did now. When she’d known full well that saying it would only hurt him, and she’d done it anyway. I’m so sorry, Giancarlo. I love you.

“What did you say?” His voice was too quiet. So soft and deliberately menacing it made her shake inside, though she didn’t give in to it. She forced her spine even straighter. “What did you dare say to me?”

“This has nothing to do with you.” That was true, in its way. Paige wasn’t a lunatic, no matter what he might think. She’d simply understood a long time ago that she’d lost him and it was irrevocable. She’d accepted it. This wasn’t about getting him back. It was about paying a debt in the only way she could. “It never did have anything to do with you,” she continued when she was certain the shaking inside her wouldn’t bleed over into her voice. “Not the way you’re thinking. Not really.”

He shook his head slightly, as if he was reeling, and he muttered something in a stream of silken, shaken Italian that she shouldn’t have felt like that, all over her skin. Because it wasn’t a caress. It was its opposite.

“This is a nightmare.” He returned his furious glare to her and it was harder. Fiercer. Gold fury and that darkness inside it. “But nightmares end. You keep on, all these years later. It was two short months and too many explicit pictures. I knew better than to trust a woman like you in the first place, but this ought to be behind me.” His lips thinned. “Why won’t you go away, Nicola?”

“Paige.” She couldn’t tolerate that name. Never again. It was the emblem of all the things she’d lost, all the terrible choices she’d been forced to make, all the sacrifices she’d made for someone so unworthy it made her mouth taste acrid now, like ash and regret. “I’d rather you call me nothing but mercenary bitch instead of that.”

“I don’t care what you call yourself.” Not quite a shout. Not quite. But his voice thudded into her like a hail of bullets anyway, and she couldn’t disguise the way she winced. “I want you gone. I want this poison of yours out of my life, away from my mother. It disgusts me that you’ve been here all this time without my knowing it. Like a malignant cancer hiding in plain sight.”

And she should go. Paige knew she should. This was twisted and wrong and sick besides, no matter the purity of her intentions. All her rationalizations, all her excuses, what did any of them matter when she was standing here causing more pain to this man? He’d never deserved it. She really was a cancer, she thought. Her own mother had always thought so, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said, yet again, and she heard the bleakness in her own voice that went far beyond an apology. And his dark, hot eyes were on hers. Demanding. Furious. Still broken, and she knew she’d done that. It stirred up sensations inside of her that felt too much like ghosts, an ache and a fire at once. But Paige held his gaze. “More than you’ll ever know. But I can’t leave Violet. I promised her.”

Giancarlo’s dark gaze blazed into a brilliant fury then, and it took every bit of backbone and bravado Paige had not to fall a step back when he advanced on her. Or to turn tail and start running the way she’d wanted to do since she’d heard his voice, down the expansive lawn, through the garden and out into the wild canyon below, as far as she could get from this man. She wanted to flee. She wanted to run and never stop running. The urge to do it beat in her blood.

But she hadn’t done it ten years ago, when she should have, and from far scarier people than Giancarlo Alessi. She wouldn’t do it now. No matter how hard her heart catapulted itself against her chest. No matter how great and painful the sobs she refused to let loose from inside.

“You seem to be under the impression I am playing a game with you,” Giancarlo said softly, so very softly, the menace in it like his hand around her throat. What was the matter with her that the notion moved in her like a dark thrill instead of a threat? “I am not.”

“I understand that this is difficult for you, and that it’s unlikely you’ll believe that was never my intention.” Paige tried to sound conciliatory. She did. But she thought it came out sounding a whole lot more like panic, and panic was as useless as regret. She had no space for either. This was the life she’d made. This was what she’d sown. “But I’m afraid my loyalty is to your mother, not to you.”

“I apologize.” It was a snide snap, not an apology. “But the irony rendered me temporarily deaf. Did you—you—just utter the word loyalty?”

Paige gritted her teeth. She didn’t bow her head. “You didn’t hire me. She did.”

“A point that will be moot if I kill you with my bare hands,” he snarled at her, and she should have been afraid of him, but she wasn’t. She had no doubt that he’d throw her off the estate, that if he could tear her to shreds with his words he would, and gladly, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically. Not Giancarlo.

Maybe that was the last remnant of the girl she’d been, she thought then. That foolish, unbearably naive girl, who’d imagined that a bright and brand-new love could fix anything. That it was the only thing that mattered. She knew better now; she’d learned her lessons well and truly and in the harshest of ways, but she still believed Giancarlo was a good man. No matter what her betrayal had done to him.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was rough with all the emotion she knew she couldn’t show him. He’d only hate her more. “But you won’t.”

“Please,” he all but whispered, and she saw too much on his face then, the agony and the fury and the darkness between, “do not tell me you are so delusional as to imagine I wouldn’t rip you apart if I could.”

“Of course,” she agreed, and it was hard to tell what hurt when everything did. When she was sure she would leave this encounter with visible bruises. “If you could. But that’s not who you are.”

“The man you thought you knew is dead, Nicola,” he said, that hated name a deliberate blow, and Paige finally did step back then, it was so brutal. “He died ten years ago and there will be no breathing him back to life with your sad tales of loyalty and your pretty little lies. There will be no resurrection. I might look like the man you knew, for two profoundly stupid months a lifetime ago, but mark my words. He is gone as if he never was.”

It shouldn’t be so sad, when it was nothing more than a simple truth. Not a surprise. Not a slap, even, despite his harsh tone. There was absolutely no reason she should feel swollen anew with all that useless, unwieldy, impossible grief, as if it had never faded, never so much as shifted an inch, in all this time. As if it had only been waiting to flatten her all over again.

“I accept both responsibility and blame for what happened ten years ago,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could, and he would never know how hard that was. How exposed she felt, how off balance. Just as he would never know that those two months she’d lost herself in him had been the best of her life, worth whatever had come after. Worth anything, even this. “I can’t do anything else. But I promised Violet I wouldn’t leave her. Punish me if you have to, Giancarlo. Don’t punish her.”

* * *

Giancarlo Alessi was a man made almost entirely of faults, a fact he was all too familiar with after the bleakness of the past decade and the price he’d paid for his own foolishness, but he loved his mother. His complicated, grandiose, larger-than-life idol of a mother, who he knew adored him in her own, particular way. It didn’t matter how many times Violet had sold him out for her own purposes—to combat tales of her crumbling marriage, to give the tabloids something to talk about other than her romantic life, to serve this or that career purpose over the years.

He’d come to accept that having one’s private moments exposed to the public was par for the course when one was related to a Hollywood star of Violet’s magnitude—which was why he had vowed never, ever to have children that she could use for her own ends. No happy grandchildren to grace magazine articles about her surprising depths. No babies she could coo over in front of carefully selected cameras to shore up her image when necessary. He’d never condemn a child of his to that life, no matter how much he might love Violet himself. He’d pass on his Italian title to a distant cousin of his father’s and let the sharp brutality of all that Hollywood attention end with him.

He forgave his mother. It was who she was. It was this woman he wanted to hurt, not Violet.

This woman who could call herself any name she wanted, but who was still Nicola to him. The architect of his downfall. The agent of his deepest shame.

The too-pretty dancer he’d lost his head over like a thousand shameful clichés, staining his ancient title, his relationship with his late father, and himself in the process. The grasping, conniving creature who had led him around by his groin and made him a stranger to himself in the process. The woman who had made him complicit in the very thing he hated above all others: his presence in the damned tabloids, his most private life on parade.

He’d yet to forgive himself. He’d never planned on forgiving her.

Standing here in this house he’d vowed he’d never enter again, the woman he’d been determined he’d cut from his memory if it killed him within his reach once more, he told himself the edgy thing that surged in him, making him feel something like drunk—dangerously unsteady, a little too close to dizzy—was a cold, clear, measured hatred. No more and no less than she deserved.