LITMIR.BIZ

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yourself as one of those celebrities for no apparent reason, not with Violet’s grandchild in your clutches. To say nothing of the Alessi estate. You must know by now I’d never keep my heritage from my own child.” He was nearly white with fury. “Which are only a few of the reasons I never wanted one.”

      “Giancarlo—”

      But he straightened, his expression changed, and it was as if he disappeared, right there in front of her. As if the man she knew was simply...gone.

      “If you decide to have the baby, inform my lawyers,” he told her with a hideous finality that shuddered through her like an earthquake. There was none of that bright gold fury in his eyes any longer when he looked at her. There was only emptiness. A dark, cold nothing that made everything inside her twist into blackness. “I will pay whatever child support you deem necessary, and I will pay more if you honor my wish for privacy and keep my name to yourself. But I don’t expect that’s in your nature, is it? How can you leverage my privacy to your best advantage?”

      “Please,” she said, pleading with him now, unable to stop the sobs that poured out of her, worse, perhaps, because she’d always known this was coming. But not today. Not like this. She still wasn’t ready. “You can’t—”

      “Do not attempt to contact my mother again.” His voice got dangerous then. Flint and fury, and still, he was a stranger. “I will have you arrested and thrown in jail and no judge in any country would ever grant a woman with mental problems and a prison record custody of a child over me. I want you to remember that. You so much as text Violet and you’ll never see that child again.”

      “Stop,” she threw at him, in a terrible whisper. “You can’t think—”

      “A driver will pick you up in an hour,” he told her, and he was merciless. Pitiless. As if he was made of marble and was that soft, that bendable. “I want you gone. And I never, ever want to see you again. Not in ten minutes. Not in another ten years. Is that clear?”

      Paige couldn’t reply. She was shaking so hard she was afraid she’d fall over, the tears were hot and endless, and he looked at her as if she was a stranger. As if he was. Crafted of marble, but far crueler. Marble might crush her. But he’d torn her into pieces first.

      “Do you understand?” he asked, even harsher than before.

      “Yes,” Paige managed to say. “I understand.” She scrubbed her hands over her face and sucked in a breath and tried one last time. “Giancarlo—”

      But he was already gone.

      It was over.

      * * *

      The slippery December roads were treacherous but the wind outside was even worse, rattling his SUV and shaking the skeletons of the trees on either side of the New England country roads.

      And inside him, Giancarlo knew, it was colder and darker still.

      He had not been in a good mood to begin with when he’d left Logan International Airport in Boston more than two hours earlier on this latest quest to find Paige. It was fair to say he’d been in a black mood for the past three months.

      The tiny, lonely little Maine town a hundred miles from anywhere sat under a fresh coat of snow, lights twinkling as the December evening fell sudden and fast in the middle of what other places might still consider the afternoon, and he felt the stirrings of adrenaline as he navigated through the very few streets that comprised the village to the small, white clapboard house that was his destination.

      He’d hired detectives. He’d scoured half of the West Coast and a good part of the East Coast himself. This was the last place on earth he’d have thought to look for her—which was, he could admit, why it had no doubt made such a perfect hiding place.

      This time, he knew she was here. He’d seen the photo on his mobile when he’d landed in Boston from Italy, taken this very morning. But he wouldn’t believe it until he saw her with his own eyes.

      He could admit the place held a certain desolate charm, Giancarlo thought grimly as he climbed from the car, the boots he only ever wore at ski resorts in places like Vail or St. Moritz crunching into the snow beneath him. The drive from Boston into the remote state of Maine had reminded him of the books he’d had to read while in his American high school. Lonely barns in barren fields and the low winter sky pressing down, gray and sullen. Here and there a hint of the wild, rocky Atlantic coast, lighthouses the only bit of faint cheer against the coming dark.

      It felt like living inside his own bleak soul, in the great mess he’d made.

      Giancarlo navigated his way over the salted sidewalk and up the old front steps to the clapboard house’s front door, able to hear the faint sound of piano music from inside. DANCE LESSONS, read the sign on the door, making his chest feel tight.

      He stopped there, frozen on the porch with his hand on the doorknob, because he heard her voice. For the first time since that last, ugly morning in his Tuscan cottage. Counting off the beat.

      Wedging its way into his heart like one of the vicious icicles that hung from the roof above him.

      He wrenched the door open and walked inside, and then she was right there in front of him after all this time. Right there.

      She took his breath away.

      Giancarlo’s heart thundered in his chest and he forced himself to take stock of his surroundings. The ground floor of this house was its dance studio, an open space with only a few pillars and a class in session. And the woman he’d accused of a thousand different scams was not lounging about being fed bonbons she’d bought with his mother’s money or her own infamy, she was teaching the class. To what looked like a pack of very pink-faced, very uncoordinated young girls.

      He was standing in what passed for the small studio’s lobby and if the glares from the women sitting in the couches and chairs along the wall were anything to go by, he’d disrupted the class with his loud entrance.

      Not that Giancarlo cared about them in the slightest.

      Paige, he noted as he forced himself to breathe again and not do anything rash, did not look at him at all, which was a feat indeed, given the mirrors on every available wall. She merely carried on teaching as if he was nothing to her.

      But he refused to accept that. Particularly if it were true.

      The class continued. And Giancarlo studied her as she moved in front of the small collection of preadolescents, calling out instructions and corrections and encouragement in equal measure. She looked as if she hadn’t slept much, but only when he studied her closely. Her hair was still that inky black, darker now than he remembered, and he wondered if it was the sun that brought out its auburn hints. She moved the way she did in all his dreams, all of that grace and ease, as if she flowed rather than walked.

      And she was still slim, with only the faintest thickening at her belly to tell him what he hadn’t known until now, what he’d been afraid to wonder about until he’d finally tracked her down in what had to be, literally, one of the farthest places she could go in the opposite direction of Bel Air. And him.

      That she was keeping the baby. His baby.

      Giancarlo didn’t know what that was inside of him then. Relief. Fury. A new surge of determination. All the rest of the dark things he’d always felt for this woman, turned inside out. All mixed together until it felt new. Until he did.

       She was keeping their baby.

      He would have loved her anyway. He did. But he couldn’t help but view her continuing pregnancy as a sign. As hope.

      As far more than he deserved.

      It seemed like twenty lifetimes before the class ended, and the women in the chairs collected their young. He paid them no attention as they herded their charges past him out into the already-pitch-black night; he simply waited, arms crossed and his brooding gaze on Paige.

      And eventually, the last stranger left and slammed the door

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