Chapter Five #2
He kept swimming until his arms felt numb, though it was a pity the rest of him refused to follow suit.
A few nights later, Giaco was convinced he had his wits about him again. A precious commodity, no doubt. Particularly when one was widely held to be missing a full set.
He had his people drop them at one of Rome’s most exquisite and currently sought-after restaurants, currently vying for its second Michelin star.
They were greeted at the door and then ushered to a table that was set away from the main dining room, as if—despite having managed a pap walk outside one of the hottest restaurants in the world just now—Giaco and Ivy were trying their best to stay private.
“You take your charity work very seriously,” he said, realizing as he broke the silence between them that he sounded…awkward. When he was Giaco Tavian, who had never encountered an awkward moment his entire life.
This woman made him feel like some kind of untrained adolescent. The kind of adolescent he had never been, that was for certain.
Ivy looked at him, her blue eyes as fierce and piercing as ever.
He always had the feeling she was as good as punching him straight to the chest. Every time she gazed in his direction.
What he couldn’t decide was whether she was doing something deliberately or if he was simply… feeling it like a blow.
When he had sworn off feeling long ago.
“Is this going to turn into one of your routines on my supposed canonization?” she asked coolly.
“Little saint,” he found himself murmuring, “it’s never routine. I am an endless font of new experiences.”
“Not according to the tabloids,” she retorted, a touch too quickly for his peace of mind. “They’re quite certain you’re up to your old tricks.”
“The only old tricks they are ever referring to involve sex,” he said, because he liked saying things like that in public places.
Even though it was unlikely that anyone could possibly overhear them, she always reacted.
Though he could have used a far less socially acceptable word, he could still see splashes of color on her cheeks and the hint of it on her neck.
Tonight he could see even more than usual because her hair was twisted up and out of her way, in another one of the seemingly casual yet elegant styles she wore now because they photographed so beautifully.
But her beauty wasn’t the point here. What he could not understand was how Ivy had grown up in the same castle that he had and had somehow emerged capable of shame or embarrassment of any kind.
“I do take my charity work seriously,” she said after a moment, her eyes a darker shade of blue. Clearly jumping right over the sex of it all, as usual. “When I moved back to London, I went with some friends to a charity event one evening and happened to hear a young orphan speak. She made me cry.”
“You mean following your mother’s funeral.” Again, her blue eyes were on him. This time he felt certain that there was something like reproach in them. “You must have been very young.”
Unbidden, the image of Ivy all in black, with only the searing blue of her gaze—shining bright with unshed tears as she’d stared down Umberto—came back to him.
Young, yes. But stunning all the same, though in his memory, it was now less because of the simple fact of her beauty and more about the deep fury she’d clearly been holding inside her.
It made the previous memory of her in the gallery doorway even hotter in retrospect, and if he recalled correctly, she’d been who he’d thought of anyway. His dirty little release.
“I’m still very young by any reasonable measure,” she replied, with a laugh. “I suspect you and I only feel old because every day in your father’s presence is like a decade. A long, grim decade.” She reached out and picked up her wineglass. “And, of course, you actually are old.”
That was so surprising that he laughed. “Apparently even the most holy martyr among us has claws when she needs them. Who could have imagined it?”
He thought she looked rather pleased with herself when she kept going. “My father died in a car accident when I was quite young.”
“I remember,” Giaco said. And when she looked surprised at that, he moved his shoulder in a shrug that did not feel like his usual elaborate, affected fare.
Neither did his voice as he continued. “I was a teenage boy. There were very few humans alive I admired more than Llewellyn Amis, the greatest action hero of all time.”
The way Ivy smiled at him then made him almost feel as if he’d downed the entire bottle of wine himself. It was that bright, that warm. That dizzying.
“He always felt James Bond took up too much oxygen,” she told him, leaning in closer to him, which did not help the dizziness any.
“That’s what my mother always told me. I don’t remember much about him myself, I’m sorry to say.
I knew my mother much better, and for longer.
And I know all the stories she told about him. By heart.”
She seemed to remember herself then, because she sat back. Or maybe, like Giaco, she was having trouble remembering the boundaries here, the lines between a good act and an actual conversation. Much less a real moment.
He had to swallow then, though his throat felt unduly rough.
Ivy cleared her throat. “In any case, there I was, all of twenty years old at a fancy charity do and I related so much to an orphan girl half my age that I really did cry. It’s disorienting enough to lose one parent.” She shook her head. “But you must know this yourself.”
She gazed back at him then and he realized she expected him to say something about his own mother.
His fierce, beautiful, highly educated mother had been raised by parents who had escaped from their homeland and had raised her to consider the France she’d been born in a foreign country that could never truly accept her.
He understood how she had seen Umberto as an escape from too many wounds that could never close. But she’d made a terrible mistake. And she’d known it.
“My mother chose her exit,” he told Ivy, gruffly.
Though he didn’t realize that he was going to tell her that until it was out of his mouth.
He didn’t understand himself. He never told anyone that.
It was a secret—sometimes he thought it was a secret only he knew, as he suspected that his father had done what he always did and wiped clean any memories that didn’t serve him.
Giaco expected Ivy to flinch or gasp in shock or make some other huge sort of movement that he could focus on and use to change course, but all she did was gaze back at him. Her fathomless blue eyes filled with what looked like…empathy.
God help him.
He ordered himself to stop, but instead he found his mouth opening against his will.
“If you knew her, this would not surprise you in the least. She had always vowed that she would be no prisoner and when she determined that she had somehow ended up held in a situation she couldn’t escape, she did what she felt she had to do. ”
No matter that it meant leaving a teenager and a six-year-old behind.
“I’m sorry,” Ivy said after a moment. “That can’t have been easy.”
“I don’t view it as a weakness on her part,” he found himself telling her, stiffly.
This was something he believed, deeply. Though it had never changed the fact of being left behind, it was a kind of comfort in its own way.
“I am aware that my father likes to go on about her mental illness, but I always saw it as an act of extreme clarity. She knew exactly what she was doing. She left all of her affairs in order. She made certain to do it where she would be found by strangers and while that cannot have been good for them, I believe she was attempting to spare…”
“You,” Ivy finished softly, when he didn’t. When it seemed he couldn’t. “She wanted to spare you.”
And something about the way she said that seemed to grab him by the throat. Or maybe it was simply because he didn’t talk about this, not to anyone, because everybody thought they already knew what had happened. It had been a major news story in its time.
Though that was all it was, Giaco knew. A story.
And the story was simple, if sad. Umberto Tavian’s high-strung wife, after a long struggle with an incapacitating yet never defined mental illness, had locked herself away in a Paris hotel room and taken entirely too many pills.
Deliberately. She had been discovered several days later, when housekeeping had entered the room despite the do-not-disturb sign after she had missed a raft of calls.
That was the story, though Giaco preferred his take. That it had been an act of defiance from a woman who had felt she had no other cards to play or places to go.
“I was sixteen,” Giaco told Ivy. “Enough of a man by then, particularly in my father’s house. I did not need to be spared though I do realize, in the fullness of time, that it was a gift she gave me.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”
She smiled, though it was not a practiced thing. It was soft. Real, he thought.
“Orphans,” she said quietly. “It inevitably leads to dead parents, I’m afraid.” She reached over and put her hand on his forearm, if only briefly. “I’m sorry.”
And he found he missed that touch when she took her hand back. Far more than was wise.
He sat back as their first course of food was delivered then, and he studied her as she interacted with the server.
He marveled at how easily she had taken to this role she played now, when he knew it couldn’t possibly be something she was comfortable with.
She had never claimed to have her mother’s ability to inhabit every space she occupied, simply by being herself.
Ivy was also glowing, which was a version of that, he supposed.