Chapter 15
GIANNA
There’s barely any sunlight left as we reach Central Park and what little there is, he seems to be sucking up with that darkness cloaking him.
He’s walking about a step behind me like a proper bodyguard, scanning our surroundings with precision that suggests he’s spent his whole life doing just that.
Correction. He’s scanning everything but me.
Never once as I turn do his eyes land on me.
“You’re gonna trip if you keep turning around,” he says in a clipped voice on one of those occasions that I do.
So he does see me?
But did I even doubt it?
Even though the sun has almost set, I’ve been feeling it warming my back this whole time. And it’s his gaze.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ve been here thousands of times,” I say, smiling over my shoulder. His eyes remain fixed on the path ahead of us.
“Worrying about you is literally my job description right now,” he says.
“Seems to me like you started on that job before you were hired,” I counter, flashing him another smile that goes completely unnoticed. “At that club, I mean.”
“A mistake,” he says and it sounds like chunk of that darkness surrounding him is speaking, not him.
I don’t want to hear that, I don’t know what to make of him saying it and I don’t know how to backtrack from it.
Joggers are passing us on the path but also mothers with toddlers, mothers with strollers, and families with the moms and dads still in their work clothes, looking tired, but happy as they chase their children around, trying to corral them to take them home and put them to bed, I’m sure.
And here I am with a guy who thinks saving my life was a mistake.
And I’m cursed to never have anything like the families around me have.
Cursed to always be alone, trailed by men who would all probably prefer to be doing something else, something more important.
I should’ve just stayed home and had a couple of drinks, watching some stupid movie that at least lets me forget all that for a while.
Instead, I spend all day fantasizing about a scene just like this one—me and Matteo taking a lovely stroll through the park at sunset. There’s nothing lovely about this walk and sunset seems to have gone straight into night, no twilight in-between. I bet that’s because he’s in such a foul mood.
“I’m sorry I said you were my servant last night,” I say. “I don’t know what came over me.”
I’ve wanted to say this to him all day, even imagined he’d accept my apology and then we could go back to how we were by his car before my father’s men dragged him away. But now the words are out and the darkness between us is just as black as it was. Maybe blacker.
“You were just calling it how it is,” he says.
We’ve reached one of the exits from the park and I take it, a last second decision, because I no longer feel safe in his presence.
The impulse makes no sense, because he is, in fact, literally here to keep me safe.
But alone with him in a dark park is not where I want to be right now.
I think I just don’t feel safe with all my fantasies of him and me together.
“Where to now, Goldie?” he asks once we reach the sidewalk, and I very nearly stumble right off it.
He gave me a nickname? And it’s not even a terrible one. That’s straight out of some rom-com. I can’t mess this up any worse than I already have.
A few horse-drawn carriages are parked along the sidewalk here and I say it before I think it. “I want to go for a carriage ride.”
When I was younger, this whole curb was lined with horse drawn carriages, but they’re not so popular anymore, having been replaced by tuk-tuks and such. I prefer the old way. In almost everything. Except the arranged marriage thing, but I’ll only put myself in a worse mood if I think about that.
Saying I want to go for a carriage ride earned me the first truly spectacular look from him. All sunshine and heat, confused more than angry, light more than dark.
“You’re not fucking serious,” he says and even though someone should teach him not to curse at me, I’m not going to do it now. I’m still riding too high on having broken through his darkness, seeing the sun I knew was hiding just beneath the surface of it.
“I’m dead serious,” I say and resist the urge to grab his hand and pull him along to the first carriage. He follows like I knew he would.
“I’d like to go for a ride please,” I tell the man holding the reins.
He smiles down at me, the wrinkles around his bright blue eyes deepening. “A lovely ride for a lovely couple?”
“Yeah, not even close,” Matteo blurts out and I’m sure he didn’t mean to say it out loud.
I choose to ignore it, because at least he’s no longer this mound of darkness beside me, if he’s letting his thoughts slip.
I’m hoping the ride will loosen him up even more, because really, who can stay in a foul mood on a carriage ride?
It’s been ages since I’ve been on one, but my dad used to take my sisters and me on them all the time when we were younger.
The driver reaches back and opens the gilded gate on the side of the carriage, and I climb on and ensconce myself in the red velvet seat, getting absolutely no help from Matteo. Not that I need it.
“Not a gentleman then?” the driver asks once Matteo follows me into the carriage. “But, ay, that’s how it is with the modern men.”
The driver himself has a heavy Scottish accent and all that’s missing from making this scene romantic-comedy-set-in-the-UK picture perfect would be soft flakes of snow falling on us. But while a lot of weird things can and do happen in NYC, it probably won’t snow in the summer.
“Once around the park?” the driver asks, winking at me.
“Make it the full ride,” I say and I’m pretty sure I just heard Matteo groan.
“Oh, come on, what’s the last time you were in a carriage? It’ll be an adventure.”
“I’ve never been in a carriage,” he says, gripping the railing while the driver tuts at the horse to start moving and the whole carriage rattles as we leave the curb.
“Oh, you’re missing out,” I say, settling back into the swaying. “It’s even better than riding a horse.”
He shoots me another dark look.
“Oh, don’t tell me, you’ve never ridden a horse either,” I say. “Who are you and where did you come from?”
I hope that question sounded light and breezy, because the truth is, I really want to know and I kind of forced it.
Clearly not light and breezy, that’s what his dark eyes are saying to me now. How can green eyes look so dark, anyway?
“LA,” he says. “And yeah, I have ridden horses, but it was so long ago, I barely remember it.”
“You don’t look old enough to have memories you can’t remember anymore,” I blurt out and am rewarded by yet more pure darkness shooting from his eyes.
“I have a lot of memories I’d rather forget,” he says, casting his gaze forward, past the carriage driver and the horses, at the night. And that’s what’s in his voice too. Night. The endless, nightmare-filled kind.
“You have a story,” I blurt out.
“Not something you wanna know anything about.”
He’s right about that. I’m already getting the chills from this story, and I have no idea what it’s actually about.
I look to the side, at the trees and people walking by, try to think of something to say that won’t make the darkness between us blacker. I imagine all those people I see have no problems, at least none as dire as mine. Or as his, it would seem.
“Why’d you leave LA?” I ask.
“That’s none of your business,” he says.
I glance at him, then focus back on the world passing us by, slowly, like all my days pass me by. He’s the first bit of excitement that’s come into my life all year. And he’s more exciting that anything that’s happened to me in all the years before that.
“Really sucks that you have to work for me when you so clearly hate me,” I say, with no idea what made me say it.
The driver twitches slightly. He’s clearly been listening to our whole conversation. But I don’t care about that. Basically, I only care about what Matteo will say next. And that’s really desperate and sad and just downright undignified.
“Working for your family wasn’t my first choice, no,” he says. And there’s such a rush of something unable to break free behind his calm words, I feel like a lash of fire just licked me. An angry, rageful fire. That’s what he keeps locked up inside.
“You didn’t get a choice?” I ask. His hostility is starting to make more sense now. “I can talk to my dad…”
He looks at me, once again lashing me with that barely contained rage.
“I think you’ve done me enough favors for now, Princess,” he says, the words favors and Princess rolling out of his mouth like they’ve made him physically sick. I like the other nickname—Goldie—much better.
And I know something else now too. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. He doesn’t want me like I want him. He doesn’t want to know me at all.
This isn’t a fairytale ride in a romantic movie. This isn’t two fated souls getting to know each other. It’s a ride I forced him on, because I’m delusional. And I want it to end.
So I end it, paying the driver and hopping off the carriage as soon as it stops, then rushing back towards my home as fast as my platform heels will let me.
“Slow down,” he says at one point as I stumble. “You’ll break your leg.”
“Like you’d care,” I mutter back and keep walking even faster.
“Maybe I would. You don’t know anything about me.”
I try to stop, turn, and glare at him at the same time, and it goes badly.
I’d have fallen right off the sidewalk and into the path of a yellow cab if he hadn’t caught me.
And the feel of his arms around me is even more destabilizing that the adrenaline rushing through me at the near miss death experience.
It’s like a force all its own. Like wind. Like rushing water. Like pouring rain.
“I told you to be careful,” he says, holding me just a little longer to make sure I’m steady again.
On my feet maybe I am. But not in my mind.
A moment ago, I was sure I was done with him.
Now I don’t know anything anymore. Except that I only just barely managed not to say, “Yes, sir” to him.
Which would be crazy. But I’m thinking that if I just do as he says and follow his lead, everything will be perfect. More perfect than it’s ever been.
“You all right?” he asks, his eyes not so dark anymore.
“Not really,” I answer truthfully. “But I will be.”
Then I turn and continue walking. Because I’m not figuring any of this out while gazing into his sun fire eyes. Or standing so close his scent fills more than just my nose. Or anywhere where his arms are so close yet so far from holding me as they are when he’s near.
I might be losing my mind.
But I want him like I’ve never wanted a man before. And I don’t trust myself not to take what I want.