Chapter Four #2
It was obvious, once she accepted the possibility that a person like Giaco Tavian could actually have a home that he poured this kind of energy into.
There was no connecting or overarching theme between rooms. There was no aesthetic.
If she had walked into this house with no knowledge of who might live here, she would have assumed that the owner was eccentric, had unlimited funds, cared deeply about comfort, and had a wicked sense of humor.
She wasn’t sure which part of that shocked her more.
Her staff guide took her into a set of rooms that were clearly a guest suite. The woman looked askance at the small tote that was all Ivy had brought with her, but indicated that she should place it on one of the tables in the outer sitting room.
“The master has prepared a selection of items for you,” she told Ivy. “The stylists will arrive at 3:00 p.m. But first, there are the looks, if you wish to take a peek.”
She didn’t wait for Ivy to respond, she simply walked into the next room, where Ivy found herself confronted by racks of clothing.
Ivy was no poor country mouse, overwhelmed by the sight of high fashion.
By most standards, she lived a flash life.
She went out of her way to appear to live even more bright and beautiful than she actually was.
One thing she knew from her mother was that rich people loved nothing more than to give money to people who already had it.
The more that Ivy presented herself as an it girl who happened to have a passion for charity, the more likely she was to get the donations she needed.
Any hint of need or desperation and she’d get nothing.
She had a very nice wardrobe and she knew how to dress the part, but she was still surprised by everything that waited for her here. Outfits upon outfits, all of them extraordinarily beautiful—even the simplest pieces.
“This is much too much,” she found herself saying, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin to choose something.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman said then, with a laugh. “He does not wish you to choose an outfit, Signorina. He has already chosen them all. There will be a series of encounters, you see. The master is very exacting when it comes to appearances and has created a stylistic journey.”
“A…stylistic journey?” Ivy echoed, sure she wasn’t hearing any of this right.
The woman nodded enthusiastically. “You will start at this rack, and work your way through to the wedding attire.”
Ivy decided she did not need to investigate wedding attire on this, the afternoon of their first, very fake date.
Her guide led Ivy over to the rack farthest to the left and pulled the first three items off.
Ivy looked closer and she could see it was true.
The racks were separated and color-coded, and this level of organization contradicted every single thing she had ever known about Giaco, to the point that she wasn’t sure she could actually take it all on board. She cleared her throat.
“Forgive me,” she said to the woman. “I can’t believe that he actually put all this together.”
“His assistant put it together,” the woman said with another laugh. “Don’t worry. You will meet Gabriele.”
That wasn’t a promise, Ivy discovered soon after. It was more of a threat.
Because when Gabriele swept in, he came with a cloud of stylists, barking out orders into one mobile while texting on another.
He didn’t knock. He simply stormed in and found Ivy in the sitting room, having succumbed to the lure of a meal since it was clear there was no avoiding the rabbit hole.
She’d been answering emails, conducting her life as if she was back home and not tucked away in some ancient Roman town house, awaiting the pleasure of the man she had to pretend to marry.
“Everything about you is wrong,” declared Gabriele in some mix of Italian and English, waving his hand in Ivy’s direction. “Meno male, you’re gorgeous!”
“Wait a minute,” Ivy began, frowning at him. “There’s nothing wrong—”
But Gabriele was already barking out orders to the stylists and Ivy couldn’t help but be dragged along. Mostly because she suspected that if she didn’t go along, she really would be dragged.
“There’s a vision we are working toward,” Gabriele told her as he hurried her out of the sitting room. “We have to highlight the contrast between you and il Padrone at this point. You understand.”
“I don’t,” Ivy replied, which was hard to do when she was surrounded by what seemed like every stylist in Rome, all of them performing various beauty treatments on her. Whether she liked it or not.
There was a lot of waxing. Her nails were buffed, clipped, and polished—and her thoughts on color schemes were not solicited.
She was hurried into the shower and then out.
Her hair that she quite liked was subjected to a cut—ever so little, Gabriele assured her, just to capture the shine—and was then styled to look exactly the way it had before.
Except, she had to admit when she looked in the mirror, it was not exactly the same. There was something about it. The hint of a curl in her ponytail. The way it swooped, it somehow made her seem…
Something she couldn’t put her finger on.
She didn’t really get it until they dressed her in the outfit that had already been chosen for her for tonight.
It was a pastel shift dress and a pair of darling shoes, everything not only her general size but seemingly created to her precise measurements.
She didn’t want to know how they’d managed that.
Or maybe it was more accurate to say she was afraid to ask.
Then, when it was all done, she got it. She stood before the mirror, hair and makeup and wardrobe done. She looked like herself, so there was that. But a different version of herself.
A very specific different version.
“I understand this now,” she said, catching Gabriele’s gaze as he stood behind her, texting furiously. “I might as well be Little Red Riding Hood setting off for the forest. And he’ll be the Big Bad Wolf everyone already thinks he is, I suppose?”
“You understand this, che delizioso,” Gabriele cried, and he even grinned. “That’s good. It’s going to be a team effort, Signorina Riding Hood. This I promise.”
Then she was once again swept away. Into the car, back onto the streets of Rome, and then back once more into a plane. This time it was an even shorter flight and when she landed, she found that she was in France. The C?te d’Azur, no less, and it was impossible not to be enchanted.
She was driven on roads that overlooked the gleaming, dancing sea, bright and blue.
They drove from the private terminal in Nice along the coast until they turned right to drive into Cap Ferrat, ripe with villas and hushed elegance, and kept going until they pulled up to the Grand Hotel that had stood at the foot of the peninsula for some hundred years.
Ivy swallowed, hard. She knew this place.
She had stayed here with her mother, in fact.
There were pictures of her with both of her parents here, though she had only small flashes of her father in her memory, as he had died she was five.
This hotel had always been about glamour.
Any and every kind of glamour imaginable, as people with all kinds of power, from every corner of every industry, were drawn here.
But to Ivy, this was her childhood. The one she’d lost when her mother had packed her off to Umberto’s castle.
“Il Padrone waits for you on the terrace,” she was told, so she got out of the car and walked toward the iconic entrance of the hotel, feeling as if she was walking back through time.
She could see her mother in a convertible, Alana’s hair swept back beneath a bright silk scarf, laughing into the sun.
She remembered the parties, none of which she had been old enough to attend.
Ivy had stayed hidden away in her hotel room, peering out the windows at the gleaming lights on the water, and the sound of clinking glasses and gaiety from below.
As she walked through the lobby, she nodded at the staff. Who greeted her by name, she noted, because that was the kind of place this was.
She made her way out back and found her way into a bar that opened up over the pools and the sweeping view of the Mediterranean Sea in all directions. And realized as she looked around that she wasn’t looking for Giaco.
There was some part of her that was looking for her mother.
But it didn’t make her feel sad. It felt more like a blessing.
Ivy had almost forgotten that Italy and Umberto weren’t the sum total of her mother’s last years.
She’d been happy here in France. She had loved coming to this part of the world, especially when the film industry gathered here, too.
She had adored it when she could be among the people who understood her best because they lived the same sort of nomadic life she did, forever moving from one film set to the next.
Alana and Ivy had spent many a pleasant season right here, and yet Ivy had forgotten, somehow, that there was so much more to her mother’s life than the way it had ended.
And when she stopped looking for her mother, she looked out toward the gleaming sea instead and felt the truth of that lodge inside her too, like another benediction.
There had been a whole, beautiful, sometimes heartbreaking life before Umberto. She’d been there for some of it.
I’m going to make more of an effort to remember you happy, Ivy promised her mother then, in her head and her heart. I promise.
When she finally focused on the man standing by the rail, watching her with that same intensity that she couldn’t believe no one else seemed to notice in him, she found she was filled with emotion.
That probably didn’t bode well for this date of theirs, but Ivy couldn’t regret it.
She gathered herself and walked toward him, noting that when Gabriele had spoken of a vision, he’d meant it.
Giaco was dressed all in black. It was a flowing sort of black, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and loose trousers appropriate to the South of France.
And yet somehow he gave the impression that he was both breathtakingly formal and charmingly informal at once.
The shirt was open at the neck, showing off that gold skin of his.
His hair was slicked back, but not like it had been when he’d come up out of that pool in Italy.
This version gave the impression that he’d been running his hands through his hair all day.
Or, this being Giaco, someone else had been.
Ivy had expected to feel foolish, dressed up in a costume and made to look like someone who was playing the role of Ivy Amis rather than simply being herself. But as she walked toward him, that…wasn’t how she felt at all.
For a few moments, it was as if everyone else on the terrace simply faded away.
Ivy knew they were there but they were little more than shadows as she moved.
It was the past that was brighter now. She heard her mother’s laughter in her head, the most beautiful song imaginable and one she’d almost forgotten.
She could see her father’s smile, one of the few memories she had of him.
She could smell roses and lavender in this charmed place, but the only thing she could really focus on was Giaco.
On all of that dark jade, taking her in as if he’d been waiting all of his life for her to walk toward him, just like this.
She knew he was playing a role. But still, she could feel that look all over her.
She could feel him. It was shocking to realize how good he was at this.
If she didn’t know better, he could have convinced her—easily—that he really was a man who had accidentally fallen in love and now had no idea what to do with it.
And that he was something like a mess as he watched the agent of his destruction draw near.
He looked like he was made entirely of agony and hope and something far hotter, and she didn’t know how not to be affected by that.
When she reached him at the railing, he turned toward her, looking as if he meant to grab her hand—
But didn’t.
And that affected her too, because she could feel that near-touch like heat between them.
It occurred to her then that this was going to be significantly harder than she’d anticipated. For a number of reasons she hadn’t thought to prepare herself to face. It was clear to her now that this was very likely going to make a mess of her, too.
And that was before she saw the pictures splashed all over the world the next day.