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.The way she’d held his hand as if that connection alone would save them both from darkness, or dragons, or something far worse.Oh yes, he remembered.And he remembered the aftermath, too.After the pictures ran in all those papers.After those final, horrible moments with this woman he had loved so deeply and known not at all.After he’d done the best he could to clear his head and then made his way back to Italy.To face, at last, his elderly father.His father, who had felt denim was for commoners and had thought the only thing more tawdry than Europe’s aristocracy was the British royals, with their divorces and dirty laundry and jeans.His father, Count Alessi, who could have taught propriety and manners to whole nunneries and probably had, in his day.His father, who had been as gentle and nobly well-meaning as he was blue-blooded.Truly the last of his kind.“It is not your fault,” he’d told Giancarlo that first night in the wake of the scandal.He’d hugged his errant son and greeted him warmly, his body so frail it had moved in Giancarlo like a winter wind, a herald of the coming season he hadn’t wanted to face.Not then.Not yet.“When I married your mother I knew precisely who she was, Giancarlo.It was foolish to imagine she and I could raise a son untainted by that world.It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”Perhaps his father’s disappointment in him had cut all the deeper because it had been so matter-of-fact.Untouched by any hint of anger or vanity or sadness.There was nothing to fight against, and Giancarlo had understood that there had been no one to blame but himself for his poor judgment.His father might have been antiquated, a relic of another time, but he’d instilled his values in his only son and heir.Strive to do good no matter what, he’d told Giancarlo again and again.Never make a spectacle of oneself.And avoid the base and the dishonorable, lest one become the same by association.Giancarlo had failed on all counts.It was why he knew that the vows he’d made when he was younger were solid.Right.No marriage, because how could he ever be certain that someone wanted him? And no heirs of his own, because he’d never, ever, subject a child to the things he’d survived.He might not be able to save himself from his own father’s disappointment, he might find his life trotted out into public every time his mother starred in something new and needed to remind the world of her once upon an Italian count fairy-tale marriage, but it would end with him.Damn Nicola—Paige—for making him think otherwise, even if it had only been for two mostly naked months a lifetime ago.It was that, he thought as he broke into a run again, his pace harder and faster than before as he hurtled down the hill, that he found the most difficult to get past.He hated that she had betrayed him, yes.But far worse was this thing in him, dark and brooding, that yearned only for her surrender no matter how painful, and that he very much feared made him no different than she was.He thought he hated that most of all.CHAPTER FOURAFTER A LONG SHOWER and the application of his own hand to the part of him that least listened to reason, Giancarlo prowled through the house, his fury at a dull simmer.An improvement, he was aware.La Bellissima was the same as it ever was, as it had been throughout his life, he thought as he moved quietly through its hushed halls, gleaming with Violet’s wealth and consequence in all its details.The glorious art she’d collected from all over the planet.The specially sourced artisan touches here and there that gave little hints of the true Violet Sutherlin, who had been born under another name and raised in bohemian Berkeley, California.Old Hollywood glamor mixed with contemporary charm, the house managed to feel light and airy rather than overfed, somehow, on its own affluence.Much like Violet herself, all these years after her pouty, sex kitten beginnings in the mid-seventies.He should know, having been trotted out at key moments during her transition from kitten to lion of the industry, as a kind of proof, perhaps, that Violet could do more than wear a bikini.There was the time she’d released a selection of cards he’d written her as a small child, filled with declarations of love that the other kids at school had teased him about all the way up until his high school graduation.There was the time she’d spent five minutes of her appearance in a famous actor’s studio interview telling a long, involved anecdote about catching him and his first girlfriend in bed that had humiliated fourteen-year-old Giancarlo and made his then-girlfriend’s parents remove her to a far-off boarding school
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