LITMIR.BIZ

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      There was no reason to blush. She told herself the heat she felt move over her was the sun, the leftover fire of the way he’d torn her to pieces only moments before, and nothing more.

      “I haven’t danced in a long while,” she said, and she wanted to tear her gaze away from his, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. He ran his hand through her hair, slow and sweet, and she was afraid of the things he could see in her. And so afraid of the things she wanted.

      “Why not?”

      And Paige didn’t know how to answer that. How to tell him the why of it without blundering straight into all the land mines they’d spent these weeks avoiding. That they’d managed to avoid entirely after that night she’d come back late from Lucca.

      I want a woman I can trust, he’d said, and she wanted him to trust her. She might not deserve his trust, but she wanted it.

      “I was good,” she said after a moment, because that was true enough, “but I wasn’t amazing. And there were so many other dancers who were as good as I was, but wanted it way more than I did.”

      Especially after he’d left and she hadn’t had the heart for it any longer, or anything else involving the body she’d used to betray the one man she’d ever given it to. She’d auditioned for one more gig and her agent had told her they’d said it was like watching a marionette. That had been her last audition. Her last dance, period.

      Because once she’d lost Giancarlo, she’d lost interest in the only other thing she’d had that’d ever had any meaning in her life. Her mother had descended even further into that abyss of hers and Paige had simply been lost. And when she’d run into a woman she’d met through Giancarlo on one of those Malibu weekends, who’d needed a personal assistant a few days a week and had kind of liked that Paige was a bit notorious, it had seemed like a good idea. And more, a way to escape, once and for all, the dark little world her mother lived in.

      A year later, she’d been working for a longtime television star who had no idea that competent Paige Fielding was related to that Nicola Fielding. A few years after that, she had enough experience to sign with a very exclusive agency that catered to huge stars like Violet, and when Violet’s previous assistant left her, to put herself forward as a replacement. All of those things had seemed so random back then, as they happened. But now, looking back, it seemed anything but. As if Paige’s subconscious had plotted out the only course that could bring her back to Giancarlo.

      But she didn’t want to think about that now. Or about what she’d do when she was without him again. How would she re-create herself this time? Where would she go? It occurred to her then that she’d never really planned beyond Violet. Beyond the road she’d known would bring her back to him.

      I want a partner, he’d said, and the problem was, she was a liar. A deliberate amnesiac, desperate to keep their past at bay. That wasn’t a partner. That was a problem.

      Giancarlo was still smiling, as if this was an easy conversation, and Paige wished it was. For once, just once, she wanted something to be as easy as it should have been.

      “I’m surprised,” he said, and there was something very much like affection in his gaze, transforming his face until he looked like that younger version of himself again. She told herself that it didn’t make her ache. That it didn’t make her heart twist tight. “I would have said dancing was who you were, not something you did.”

      “I was twenty years old,” she heard herself say, in a rueful sort of tone that suggested an amusement she didn’t quite feel. “I had no idea who I was.”

      You’re his toy, Nicola, her mother had screamed at her in those final, dark days, when Paige had believed she’d somehow navigate her way through it all unscathed—that she’d manage to keep Giancarlo, please her mother and her mother’s terrible friends, and pay off all of that debt besides. He’ll play with you until he’s done and then he’ll leave you broken and useless when he moves on to the next dumb whore. Don’t be so naive!

      Giancarlo’s face changed then, and his hand froze in her hair. “I think I always forget you were so young,” he said after a moment, as if remembering her age shocked him. “What the hell was I doing? You were a kid.”

      She laughed then. She couldn’t help it.

      “My life wasn’t exactly pampered and easy before I came to Hollywood,” she told him, knowing as she said it that she’d never talked about that part of her life. He had been so bright, so beautiful—why would she talk about dark, grim things? “And I did that about ten minutes after I graduated from high school. My mom had the car packed and waiting on the last day of classes.” She shook her head at him as her laughter faded. “I was never really much of a kid.”

      She hadn’t had the opportunity to be a kid, which wasn’t quite the same thing, but she didn’t tell him that. Even though she had the strangest idea that his childhood hadn’t been that different from hers, really. The trappings couldn’t have been more opposite, but she’d spent her whole life tiptoeing around, trying to predict what mood her mother would be in, how much she might have drunk, and how bad she could expect it to get of an evening. She wasn’t sure that was all that different from trying to gauge one of Violet’s moods.

      It had never occurred to her that she’d traded one demanding mother for another, far classier one—and she wasn’t sure she liked the comparison. At least Violet cares for you in return, she told herself then. Which is more than Arleen ever did.

      “I’m not sure that excuses me,” Giancarlo was saying, but then he laughed, and everything else shot straight out of her head and disappeared into that happy sound. “But then, I never had any control where you were concerned.”

      “Neither did I,” she said, smiling at him, and they both stilled then. Perhaps aware in the same instant that they were straying too close to the very things they couldn’t let themselves talk about.

      Or the words they couldn’t say. Words he’d told her he wouldn’t believe if she did dare speak them out loud.

      But that didn’t keep her from feeling them. Nothing could.

      He studied her face for a long moment, until she began to feel the breeze too keenly on her exposed skin. Or maybe that was her vulnerability. Having sex was much easier, for all it stripped her bare and seemed to involve every last cell in her body. It required only feeling and action. Doing. It was this talking that was killing her, making her want too much, making her imagine too many happy endings when, God help her, she knew better.

      Paige pushed away from him, not willing to ruin this with a conversation that could only lead to more hurt. Or worse, something good that would be that much harder to leave behind when the time came. She sat up and gathered her clothes to her, pulling the flirty little sundress over her head as if the light material was armor. But she only wished it was.

      “Was it ever real?” he asked quietly.

      Paige didn’t ask him what he meant. She froze, her eyes on the rolling hills that spread out before her in the afternoon light, the glistening lake in the valley below. That stunning Tuscan sky studded with chubby white clouds, the vineyards and the flowers, and she didn’t think he understood that he was holding her heart between his palms and squeezing tight. Too tight.

      Maybe he wouldn’t care if he did.

      “It was for me,” she said, and her voice was too rough. Too dark. Too much emotion in it. “It always was for me, even at the end.”

      She didn’t know what might happen then. What Giancarlo might say. Do. She felt spread open and hung out in all the open space around them, as if she was stretched across some tightrope high in the sky, subject to the whims of any passing wind—

      His hand reached out and covered hers and he squeezed. Once.

      And then he pulled on his clothes and he got to his feet and he never mentioned it again.

      *

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