Chapter One #3
Young Ivy had felt smothered and claustrophobic and had dealt with that by lashing out, which had garnered her precisely nothing. But she’d learned from that.
Today she simply walked in, kept smiling at him no matter what he said or what tone he used, and took a seat in the chair opposite his.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” she said, politely.
She’d learned that, too. The clever art of conversation with unpleasant people.
She’d spent years figuring out how to use her status as a well-known nepo baby to get done the kinds of things that needed doing, in her view.
She’d spent years learning how to shine brightly for men like this, because that was the only way to get them to part with their money.
And Ivy loved nothing more than a man who could be flattered into giving large donations to her charity. The orphans didn’t care how she got that money. They only benefited when she had it. It was her job to make sure she had as much as possible at all times.
“Yes, yes,” Umberto was saying. He swirled his drink in its tumbler. “You are here for your little fortune, I know.”
One of the interesting things about the way she’d spent the last five years of life was that Ivy knew a whole lot more people now.
Many of them from entirely different walks of life than the one she’d grown up in.
Her little fortune, as Umberto called it, was easily millions of pounds.
Part of it was the money that her mother had inherited upon Ivy’s father’s death.
He too had been an actor—but before that, he’d been born into the English aristocracy.
Add to that the numerous fortunes her mother had made as a screen legend and no reasonable person would call her inheritance a little fortune.
But of course, to a man like this, it was nothing.
Ivy swallowed back her fury, the rest of the emotions this place and this awful man stirred up in her, and everything else she felt but did not wish to feel while she was subjecting herself to this game of his.
Even the walls themselves were unsafe in Umberto’s private castle.
No doubt plastered over a hundred times with the indifference this man had shown every person he’d ever brought here. Her mother included.
Her mother was the reason she was here. Her mother and what her help from beyond the grave could do for innumerable children in need.
“The funds my mother left me, yes,” she agreed, still with a polite smile. She had practiced and practiced, knowing that it would be difficult not to snarl at this man. It turned out it was even harder than anticipated.
Umberto nodded as if she was a small, precocious child who’d learned a big word. “I will help you with this, my dear.”
Ivy had to fight not to vomit. My dear. What a vile man he was. He knew she hated him. Got off on it, if she had to guess.
But, “Thank you,” was all she said, as if she thought he was sincere.
Because what else was there to say? Her mother had made Umberto the executor of Ivy’s inheritance.
Ivy had some theories about how that had come to pass, most of them having to do with Umberto’s controlling tendencies, but that didn’t change the fact that she could not access that money without him signing off on it.
She had decided years ago that she would rather turn her back on her inheritance than subject herself to the kind of performative obeisance with too many strings to count that she knew Umberto would demand.
But times had changed. More importantly, her needs had changed.
If this had been just about her, she never would have come back here.
She would rather prostitute herself on the streets of London than demean herself for this man’s amusement.
It had been clear from the moment he’d accepted her call that Umberto would make her jump through hoops once she’d come crawling back and that she would hate every moment of it.
Lucky, then, that this wasn’t about how she felt.
“I’m an old man,” Umberto told her, with a smug look on his face, because men like him didn’t really believe they were old.
Not the way other men were old. Men like Umberto didn’t believe that being old made them weak the way it did others.
They were so sure their wealth and consequence made them better.
“My only joys in this life come from my business dealings and I have on the table a particularly exciting deal. I won’t bore you with the details.
Pretty girls have much better things to think about, I’m sure. ”
Ivy gritted her teeth, kept her smile on her face, and wondered—not for the first time—what it was like to be poor Leontina, Umberto’s usually wholly ignored daughter.
She remembered her former stepsister as little more than a shadow in the corner, which had always struck her as odd when the two of them weren’t far apart in age.
But then, she supposed that was an answer in and of itself.
“But in order for this deal to go through, I’m afraid there is a challenge that I must overcome,” Umberto continued. “There’s a moral stipulation, you understand.”
Ivy did not understand. She also didn’t care. So she nodded, trying to look as if she was actively listening to this.
Umberto smiled. Always chilling. “As you are no doubt aware, moral is not a word that has ever been applied to my son.”
That got her attention. Or rather, the sight of Giaco rising from the steaming water came back to her like a punch to the gut. She coughed into her fist, cleared her throat, and nodded. “I can’t say I’ve kept up with him in all these years,” she lied.
Well. It wasn’t really a lie, was it? She hadn’t kept up with him in the sense that she hadn’t privately considered him at all.
But he was inescapable. The legend of Giaco Tavian was an international preoccupation.
His collections of lovers. Their breathless tales of his prowess.
The not-so-subtle hints of his sexual deviance, his penchant for bedroom games, his wholly indiscriminate selection processes, and the high-octane, jet-setting, partying lifestyle that went along with all of that.
Umberto didn’t seem to care if she was prepared to admit the omnipresence of his son’s sins or not.
“When you called I realized that there was a simple, elegant solution. I’ve watched what you’ve done with yourself over the years, Ivy.
It’s hard to imagine that such a spoiled, petulant girl could turn into the toast of London, but you’ve managed it. ”
The Lizard King never blinked when he was busy handing out insults, and this was no exception. He watched her, clearly expecting her to react to his characterization of her adolescent behavior while trapped in his clutches.
Instead, she smiled and said, “I’ve been lucky enough to make great friends in London. I suppose we all have the places where we truly shine, don’t we?”
Umberto made a scoffing noise. “I don’t know about shining,” he said.
“But most people in your situation, considered celebrities thanks to having been adjacent to the fame of others, follow a different trajectory. Yet you, by all accounts, are a living saint. Lady Bountiful herself, friend to orphan children, bestowing her kindness as best she can. Truly, a heartwarming tale to inspire the most cynical heart.”
He neither looked nor sounded the slightest bit inspired.
“I found myself orphaned five years ago, when I was twenty, and it was shockingly disorienting,” Ivy began calmly, as this was a story she had told many times before. “It made me wonder how much worse it must be for those who do not have my advantages, or my—”
“I’ve heard these little speeches,” Umberto interrupted her, sounding bored. “It’s why I brought you here. No one is more astonished than me, given the path I expected you would take when you left here, but you have made yourself a reputation for moral fortitude. And as it happens, I need it.”
For a moment, the way he looked at her, Ivy had a creeping, horrifying notion take her over. Umberto was forever marrying trophies. Surely he didn’t think her moral fortitude, whatever the hell that was, qualified? She would climb to the top of his castle and fling herself off it first.
Instead, Umberto reached over and rang the bell beside him, then nodded when one of his servants opened the door. “Bring him in,” he said, a crisp order.
And moments later, Giaco himself ambled in. He was not dressed. He had covered himself with a silk robe, but that was his only nod to civility.
Ivy could not bear to look at him any more than she already had today, especially not when his gaze found hers as he entered and lit up at once with that unholy amusement of his.
Instead, she watched Umberto and found herself nothing short of delighted to see that Giaco got to him, too. The old man was fairly bristling.
She had always enjoyed how easily riled he was. This man who fancied himself the king above all kings could not tolerate the faintest poke in his direction, and Ivy dearly wished that she was in a place where she could deliver a few such pokes.
It was almost better, however, that it was Giaco. Since his existence, for all intents and purposes, was the greatest and most effective poke at Umberto possible.
“Is there some reason you are not dressed?” Umberto growled at his son and heir.
“I prefer not to dress at all,” Giaco replied, in that lazy drawl of his.
No matter what language he was speaking, he always sounded as if vocabulary itself made him sleepy.
As if he needed to taste every word as it came out of his mouth, and that required all his energy.
“I’m happy to remove this robe, father. Would you like that? ”
Umberto made a growling sound. If Ivy didn’t dislike Giaco so much herself, she might have applauded.
Then it was impossible not to watch as Giaco took his time sauntering over to the couch that stretched between her chair and Umberto’s and flung himself down upon it. With no particular attention paid to whether or not his robe would cover him.
That it did was a miracle.
But even as Ivy thought that, she found him watching her, the dark jade of gaze mocking. Because he knew—somehow he knew—that she was thinking of exactly what he had beneath the fabric of his robe. He probably knew that she had committed it all to memory, damn him.
She felt herself heat and hated him. Hard. Then tried to focus on his loathsome father instead.
Umberto threw back the remains of his drink. “In order to close this deal, and I am determined to close it, I am afraid that the tawdry legend of Giaco Tavian, heralded cocksman, must come to an ignominious end.”
“Must it?” Giaco asked, sounding bored. “But I am so popular and beloved as is. Ask anyone.”
“This is what will happen,” Umberto said curtly.
“The two of you will engage upon a relationship. It will be widely photographed. A worldwide love affair, focusing on Ivy’s rather impressive virtue and not the fact that she was once a stepsister.
Finally, they all will declare, a woman who tames the savage beast—and whatever other maudlin story the papers choose to tell. You will see to it.”
Ivy could not comprehend anything the demented old man was saying. She could not make any of those words make sense, much less together.
Giaco sighed, sounding even more bored and now amused besides. “And why would I do that?”
“Because if you do not, I will cut you off entirely,” Umberto told him. “And I doubt very much that you have any skills outside your preferred bedsport, Giaco. Given that you have never exhibited the slightest inclination toward anything else.”
Giaco shrugged, lying there on his back on the sofa as if about to drop off into a nap at any moment. “Fair point.”
“There will be an engagement. The world will go wild. It will seem inevitable—fated, even—that the only woman capable of civilizing such a beast is the one who grew up in this house and thus learned the secrets of Giaco’s benighted soul, whatever they might be.
Again, the press will be encouraged to pursue the virtue.
The romance. There will be no scandal. There will be no dark intimations about what you got up to with her when she was an adolescent. ”
“Father,” Giaco said then, in mock astonishment. “I had no idea that you cared what anyone got up to, as an adolescent or otherwise. Or that such a romantic has lurked within you all this time.”
Ivy found this significantly less amusing than Giaco seemed to. Yet she still couldn’t bring herself to speak.
“And then, the coup de grace,” Umberto said, with deep satisfaction and what looked a lot like actual malice, to Ivy’s eye.
“You will marry. It goes without saying that during the period of this whirlwind romance and into your marriage, which will last for at least three years, there will be absolutely nothing but squeaky-clean behavior. More virtue. So much virtue that canonization will seem inevitable. Your transformation, Giaco, will be a thing of epic beauty or you will pay for it. Meanwhile, my deal will go through and it will survive its probationary period. Then I will wash my hands of the both of you and happily pay to never think of either one of you again.”
Ivy couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know where to look.
It was bad enough that she’d seen all of Giaco today.
Now she was supposed to… Date him? Pretend to fall in love with him?
She was not an actress. She was only related to a late, legendary one and had not inherited the faintest shred of Alana’s talent. How would any of this work?
She found herself drawn to look at him again, telling herself it was the horror of this that was making her seek him out for some kind of confirmation that he was hearing the same things she was.
But all she saw was that too-dark jade, so mocking, and currently filled with what looked like some kind of glee.
“For you, Father, anything—if it affects my bank accounts. I’m sure that sweet, virtuous, stepsister Ivy and I can work it out,” Giaco said, though that gaze of his was fastened to Ivy, and there was nothing about it that suggested he saw her as sweet or virtuous in any way.
“As long as you’re aware, my soon-to-be beloved and bride, that I require a not inconsiderable amount of fucking. Daily. Can you handle that?”