Chapter Four
TWO WEEKS LATER, Ivy was back in London, happily immersed in the life she’d built, and convinced that she’d allowed the simple fact that she’d been back in that castle to mess with her perceptions. To make her imagine things that weren’t there.
Because she didn’t like any other explanation for what had happened with Giaco. What she had felt while it happened.
In the first couple of days after all that—fleeing Italy as soon as she could make herself get up from that couch and managing to get home the same afternoon she’d left—she had jumped every time her phone indicated there was a new message.
But as the days passed, she thought her nervous system was actually settling back into place.
The more time elapsed between that day and now, the better she was. The stronger she felt.
The less delusional she was about what was or wasn’t lurking behind the mask Giaco Tavian clearly preferred to wear.
The simple answer was that it didn’t matter.
Her job was to sell a story to the outside world to get her hands on what her mother had left her, not to start an excavation project into a man who exulted daily in his supposedly charming disinterest in anything but the pursuit of his own pleasure.
She could get her head around work. Work made sense.
Work was what had saved her when she’d come stumbling back to London, twenty years old with no skills and a sporadic education.
Work was the lifeline she’d found to get her out of Umberto’s castle of sick games and gaslighting that she’d been trapped in for too long.
She’d found herself as she’d clung to it.
Why should this be any different?
Ivy thought the bracing British rain helped, too. Nothing like walking down London streets while it was bucketing down rain to make her forget all about molten gold or anything else remotely warming.
By the end of those two weeks, she’d decided that she’d embellished that morning in the castle.
It had been nothing special. Just the Tavians up to their usual tricks, but she’d been in and out quickly and while she didn’t have her inheritance yet, well.
There was a path toward getting it. That mattered.
All the rest was just…the usual nonsense that could be chalked up to life in that family, in that place, in that desperate world that Umberto liked to marinate in.
She had better things to do than to focus on that kind of billionaire black-box theater.
When her phone buzzed one night as she was settling into bed after smiling so much during a fundraising event that her cheeks still hurt, she didn’t react.
She didn’t even race to pick it up. She debated looking at her screen at all.
And when she finally reached out for her mobile, she froze when she saw that the text was from him.
Tomorrow night, Giaco had texted. Rome.
She stared at that text for a good two minutes and while she did, she took stock of all the reactions she was having—none of which she liked. The elevated heart rate. The sudden flash of heat to accompany it. The fact that she was holding her breath. Again.
Ivy blew it out and ordered herself to breathe, for God’s sake. I’m going to need more information than that.
And she realized that she expected him to flirt with her in text, or make some of his suggestive comments at the very least, when he didn’t. Be at the airfield at 11 a.m. Don’t worry about wardrobe.
She frowned down at that message for some time, trying to tease out all the variables. She wanted to ask him what he meant. Did he intend to dress her?
Ivy had to get very stern with herself when certain images flew at her then. She wasn’t sure she wished to have a man sort out her wardrobe. Especially not when the entire conceit of what they were doing was that she was some everyday version of normal next to him.
Then again, she also knew that Giaco Tavian liked to play games.
Against her will, she swiped over to her photo app and pulled up the pictures he’d taken that day in the castle.
She’d been so unsettled—that was definitely the right word, she assured herself—by what happened, by his fingers against her skin, that she hadn’t even thought to look at them until she was on the plane and in the air on her way back to England.
Once she looked, she’d wished she hadn’t. She’d felt as if her stomach dropped down out of her body and plummeted some 35,000 feet to slam itself into the Alps.
Because if she hadn’t been fully present in the moments he’d captured on her camera as they were happening—if she hadn’t literally been there herself—there was no way Ivy would ever have believed that the people involved weren’t engaged in an affair.
An extremely carnal affair at that.
Ivy didn’t understand how he’d done it. There were three pictures and each one of them told its own story.
In one, he was staring hungrily at her mouth while she looked utterly blissed out, her lips parted as if they had already kissed.
In another, he was smiling at her—that twist in his lips—but this time there was no smirk in it. It was sex. It was hunger.
The final one was the worst. She didn’t remember him moving back in to get closer to her, but it looked as if he was scant seconds away from pulling her onto his lap when she knew he hadn’t been doing anything like that.
Ivy-in-the-photograph looked as if she was on another planet, and he was its only sun, and she couldn’t really parse how she felt about that. But Giaco…
Giaco looked consumed by her. His own lips were parted, as if he was breathing heavily, and it looked as if he was only inches away from taking her mouth with his.
She had deleted them all immediately.
But they had stayed in the recently deleted file, so since she was looking at them again—and not for the first time since she’d landed on British soil—she moved them back out. She told herself that it was forensic evidence, nothing more. It was a learning guide.
It was the way she was going to teach herself how to do what needed to be done.
Though it seemed that the answer was to simply let Giaco take the lead, no matter what it did to her nervous system. What these pictures taught her was that it didn’t matter what she felt. It mattered how he made it look.
A thought that made her think about the discoveries she’d made in the castle that day.
The ones that led her to be certain that his whole act was one big charade.
Because if he could make things look anyway he wanted them to look, what did that say about all those splashy tabloid exposés that everyone took as the truth of him?
What was he hiding, she wondered, that he would do it in such a blinding spotlight?
“You will not get your inheritance or help a single orphan if you focus on the mysteries of one of the richest and most spoiled men alive in the world,” she muttered at herself and set her mobile aside again.
But since Giaco was so good at these games and clearly loved to play them at all times, Ivy decided that the better part of valor was to not respond to his text at all. Let him wonder about something for change.
Assuming he ever did something so pedestrian as wonder.
The next day, she presented herself at the same airfield outside London where she’d caught Umberto’s plane two weeks before.
And once again, she was greeted by exquisitely polite staff who ushered her on board.
She refused the offers of food and drink and told herself it was because she was preparing herself for whatever battles awaited her.
It was more truthful, if silly, to admit that there was some part of her that worried if she ate and drank something Giaco provided for her—however indirectly—she would be dragged straight down the rabbit hole and actually turn into that girl she’d seen in the photos he’d taken.
That girl she still had trouble believing was her.
Once in bright, sunbaked Rome, a waiting car whisked her into the ancient city and brought her to what she at first thought was a hotel, then realized it was a private house in a tony neighborhood, not far from one of the most famous squares in Italy.
She supposed it stood to reason that Giaco would live in a place like this, an eternal disaster in the eternal city, surrounded by untold centuries of the remains of creatures who looked just like him.
Perhaps he was his own pantheon here, she thought as the car slid into a private courtyard that somehow managed to make it seem as if they were not in a busy city at all.
She climbed out, not surprised to find a different set of staff waiting for her. Though she was slightly surprised to find them standing just so, as if posing with the blooming wisteria canopy overhead—
You are confusing his staff with him, she lectured herself. Not everything is a photo opportunity.
“Bongiorno, Signorina Amis,” said one of the women waiting for her. She stepped aside, making it clear that the old, thick vine marked the entrance to the house. “If you will come with me.”
Ivy nodded and followed, expecting to be led into yet another sterile museum of a house, created entirely for clout and having nothing to do with the way that anyone actually lived.
This house was nothing like that.
It turned out that the beautiful wisteria was a hint that Giaco did not treat his house the way his father did.
This house of his was eclectic. Surprising and interesting.
The rooms were bright and filled with a haphazard sort of collection of things, from whimsical rugs to art that was clearly not there as investments, but because its owner liked it.
Or perhaps that was what he wanted her to think, she corrected herself.
It was not until they’d walked up a flight of stairs and into an open gallery that looked over a different courtyard below, this one green and lush with a water feature in the center, that Ivy realized this was actually a home. His home.