Chapter One
IVY AMIS HAD once declared—after having to put up with entirely too many self-congratulatory speeches from those who should have chosen respectful silence on the occasion of her mother’s funeral—that returning to her former stepfather’s ostentatious Italian castle would occur only if she first crawled the length of England on hands and knees. Over broken glass. Twice.
In fairness, that was how it felt now that she was actually doing it five years later.
Even the ancient rolling hills of Tuscany, with so many cypress trees dressed in pockets of mist in formation along the edges of old, lush vineyards, failed to mask the sensation of too many sharp edges pressing into her flesh.
Her typical reaction to anything having to do with the Tavian family.
Made worse now that she was actually back in their vicinity.
It had taken exactly one phone call to be thrown back into the worst memories of her teenage years.
Umberto’s oily, patronizing voice. That knowing chuckle, as if he’d expected this call all along—which he probably had.
As if all the work she’d done to turn her back on this place and these people had been nothing but an exercise in futility.
A silly girl’s attempt to escape reality.
She’d nearly told him where he could go right then. It had hurt her jaw to keep it clenched so tight.
But she told herself to shake it off and shape up, sitting there in the back seat of one of Umberto’s fleet of shiny, obnoxious Range Rovers.
He had insisted that he send his plane to come pick her up.
That she not lift a single finger to get herself to Tuscany—something that a person who didn’t know Umberto might consider a kindness.
Ivy, sadly, knew her former stepfather—the man who had made her lovely mother so desperately miserable—entirely too well.
There wasn’t a single thing the creepy old man did that wasn’t about control.
Especially the things he dressed up in solicitous disguises.
She looked out the window and reminded herself that she was no longer the awkward girl she’d been when she’d first been dragged here against her will, forced to leave her home behind to follow this whim of her mother’s.
On the contrary. These days Ivy was what this place had made her. There was a strength in that.
Besides, she was here for a purpose.
This wasn’t her starry-eyed mother making up fairy tales in her head.
This wasn’t the notably romantic screen legend Alana Amis allowing a powerful and mysterious Italian to sweep her off her feet—and then sweeping up her daughter along with her because Alana had been lovely in so many ways but had never been one for boundaries.
Ivy smiled, remembering what her mother had said on that topic. Darling, I am an actor. My life is about expanding past boundaries, not collapsing into them. Something Alana had taken seriously.
This time Ivy had decided to come here of her own volition. This time, Ivy had decided that she would play Umberto’s game and beat him.
Assuming that was possible given Umberto had been running his power plays since long before Ivy was born.
The Range Rover purred its way up the drive and then stopped at the imposing front door of the ancient castle that was habitually featured in architectural magazines.
The sort of publications that liked to fawn over each and every one of Umberto’s choices and suggesting his discernment in financial matters made him keenly situated in the lexicon of style.
As if a corporate titan like Umberto—who had never polluted his business bona fides with an actual day of leisure in all the time Ivy had been forced to live with him—actually sat about poring over the incidental details of the many investment properties he owned.
Much less the details of this castle that had been called the quiet bedrock of the Tavian brand, because, yes, the man considered his family a marketing tool and used them that way, too.
Obviously, he had his staff hire more staff to handle all such details and yet more staff to disseminate the myth of his greatness in all things to the wider world in the form of the odd puff piece.
The actual bedrock of the Tavian brand was Umberto’s bottomless greed.
Once the car was parked, the usual phalanx of indistinguishable staff members poured out to greet Ivy.
They took the small bag she’d brought with her and ushered her inside, pretending to ask after her needs and desires when any guest to this place must know that what really mattered was the way Umberto had decreed they ought to be treated.
Ivy was slightly shocked that she wasn’t marched off to the dungeons.
She’d always been convinced that there were dungeons here somewhere. Actual cells, not simply all the mind games that were played here the way some families played a bit of cribbage of an evening.
“You may wait here,” a serene-faced woman told Ivy as she led her into a room on the ground floor of the castle, away from the far grander reception rooms and a ballroom as famous for who wasn’t invited inside as who was—Umberto did love to make a Hunger Game all his own whenever possible.
The woman even bowed her head as she retreated.
None of the staff had looked familiar to Ivy, which didn’t surprise her.
It wasn’t easy to have a personal relationship with an angry, despotic old man who thought he was smarter than anyone he’d ever encountered simply because he was richer.
Having to work for him had to be nothing short of torturous.
Ivy looked around the room they’d left her in.
It was one of the castle’s numerous salon-type places because, apparently, outrageously wealthy people got too easily bored with only one place to sit.
She drifted farther into the room, noting in an almost clinical fashion the pedigreed art on the walls.
The sort of antiques that would make a Christie’s auctioneer weep.
Carefully arranged objects were stacked here and tossed there—because the suggestion that the occupants might really come and read all of these books, or might have collected these pieces on some sentimental journey instead of simply buying them because they were sought after by others, was the real truth about what was considered fashionable in houses like this.
But staring at yet another example of Umberto’s collection of things quickly lost its appeal.
She drifted over to a series of glass doors that took the place of any outside wall in this room and looked out, expecting to see more bucolic fields brimming with flowers, each competing to be brighter and more riotous than the next.
Instead, she stopped dead.
Because this particular room did not face the vineyards or the fields or the gardens, as expected.
This one looked out over a half-shaded terrace that boasted a set of pools.
If memory served, each one was set to a different temperature and they were all arranged so that a person could float in any one of them and look out at the landscape as if they were part of it.
Though what she was looking at right this particular moment was not a part of the landscape, for all that it was…primeval.
A man was rising up out of the hot pool, the vapor rising up from the water’s surface with him and making it seem as if he, himself, was generating the kind of heat that steamed up a spring morning.
Ivy felt herself freeze. As if her muscles themselves betrayed her, unable to make sense of what she was seeing.
But she couldn’t look away.
He rose slowly, climbing up the ladder at the side of the pool with a kind of careless athletic grace that made her head go light.
She was half convinced that she’d lapsed off into sleep on one of the self-referential settees inside, suffering from heretofore unknown effects of jet lag from a simple ninety-minute flight from London down into Italy.
Because otherwise, she couldn’t account for this.
His back was toward her. And yet her mouth went dry as she found her gaze moving over the impossible, powerful shifts of lean muscle beneath golden skin as he lifted himself from the water.
He moved up another step and she blinked, because she could suddenly see what had to be the most perfect, bare-naked ass not currently cast in marble and tucked away in a museum that she’d ever beheld.
Still he rose, some kind of ancient god brought to life, as if the old Roman deities had never really disappeared at all. As if he had been here all along, Neptune himself, carved from wonder and sex, water and desire.
He stood at the top of the ladder now and she watched as he speared a powerful hand into his dark hair, currently slicked to shape his skull. A normal, everyday movement that this man—if he was a man and not a figment of her imagination—made into poetry.
Ivy was still frozen solid as if her bones had locked her in place while inside, everything that could soften, melted. And ran hot. She felt as if she was boiling, as if her body couldn’t handle this, because what mortal could?
He turned and she saw the rest of him, like the slow dawning of the sun.
The wide shoulders, the chest a hagiography of male musculature, more golden skin dusted with dark hair, and all of it arrowing to a narrow waist. And below, a large and heavy cock that did not appear to be reacting to what she imagined were the cooler temperatures outside that hot tub.
Or then again, more worryingly, perhaps this was his reaction. Maybe that enormous appendage was, in fact, his shrinkage.
The idea made her entire body break out into goose bumps.
Yet she kept looking. His thighs were powerful, suggesting levels of performance and dedication that she found staggering. But not as staggering as the clear evidence that he did not have a single hint of a tan line. Anywhere.
It was as if he had been created out of Roman gold, dancing sunshine, and pure lust.