Chapter Six #2
Ivy opened her mouth to ask him a question, but thought better of it. There was no need to ask, was there? Gabriele had been here long before she was. For years, one of the other staff members had told her. Since university, another had said. They had been inseparable ever since.
If it weren’t for the fact that Gabriele had been married to his husband for the bulk of this time, Ivy might have been tempted to assume that all of the staging was to disguise Gabriele’s relationship with Giaco himself. Before the kiss, that was.
The kiss had been clarifying in a multitude of ways.
Whatever it was that Giaco was hiding, it wasn’t a love affair with Gabriele.
“What do you do when you’re not plotting out these elaborate set pieces?” she asked now, her gaze on the sea in the distance.
“Haven’t you heard?” Giaco asked her, and it took everything she had not to turn and look at him.
Because she was certain that she could feel all of that wild, dark jade beating into her.
“All the world’s a stage, little saint. I decided long ago that if that was the case, I might as well play out my part to my own satisfaction. ”
She did turn then. She couldn’t help herself. “Is that how you’d describe yourself, Giaco? Satisfied?”
It was moments like this when she thought she saw so much…more there. That glittering dark gaze of his. The ghosts she was sure she could see move through his eyes. The way his face changed, as if he really was wearing a mask.
“I will be,” he told her in a voice that matched his simmering gaze. “I can promise you that.”
When he walked away, she felt as if he took part of her with him, though she couldn’t have said what. Or why she found herself pressing her palm to her chest, right over her heart, as if that might get it back.
And a few days later she was back in gray and drizzly London, tucked up in her little house in Kensington, when all the pictures hit the media.
She knew they hit because her doorbell started ringing, loudly and repeatedly.
It shocked her so much that she almost threw the door open to see if a neighbor needed medical assistance or perhaps a fire had broken out—but some shred of self-preservation intruded at the last moment.
She paused and looked through the peephole instead.
And there they were. Paparazzi on her front door. Packs of them.
Because she was the woman who had finally claimed the eternal bachelor. She was the only one who had managed to do the thing no other woman had. She had the ring on her hand to prove it—and now the papers had the evidence.
Her time as a relatively private citizen was up.
Ivy backed away from the door and heard the old landline she’d forgotten about ringing.
She didn’t answer it. Instead she found herself running up the stairs to her bedroom, her heart pounding as if she was under attack, only to find her mobile under the same assault.
So many messages. So many calls. But she was afraid to pick it up in case she accidentally answered the wrong person. The very idea made her feel panicky
She pulled out her laptop, ignored her inbox, and typed in her name at the top of her browser. And there they were.
Gabriele had put them through their paces. He had taken care of everything. It had been a beautiful day and had become a lovely evening—likely because Gabriele had decreed the weather needed to be perfect and it, too, had obeyed.
Staring down at the photographs, Ivy tried to make her memories match what she was looking at on her screen.
She remembered walking down the path toward the cliff-top gazebo, the way lit by lanterns.
Giaco had been waiting there for her. The photographs showed the two of them smiling at each other, sitting down, and enjoying a beautiful dinner overlooking the sea.
In the pictures, she saw a couple lit up with each other. Consumed with each other.
And the truth was, she had felt that way while it was happening. But that was the thing about spending time with Giaco. She could feel whatever she liked, and she did, but no matter how sincere he seemed, no matter how intense it felt to her, she always knew that he was acting.
He sold it. There was no denying it.
All of the dinner pictures showed him entranced. Enchanted. He held her hand as they ate. He leaned in, as if every word that dripped from her lips was some nectar he wanted to taste.
And then, after their breathtakingly romantic dinner, were the money shots. The point of the whole thing. Giaco Tavian getting down on one knee and gazing up at Ivy, clearly proposing, a small jeweler’s box in his palm.
She had to hand it to Gabriele, Ivy thought now.
She didn’t know if he’d summoned that breeze with the force of his will, but it made the flowing dress that she’d worn that night even more beautiful.
The breeze caught it and played with it, and her hair blew back too, and it looked so intimate, so achingly romantic, that she felt something like teary as she stared at the photo now.
At the look on Giaco’s face as he gazed up at her.
At the look on her own face as she put her hands on him.
She couldn’t help thinking this was a scene that should never have been photographed.
In her house in London, with the phone still ringing and the doorbell sounding and hammering at her door, she sat back and rubbed her eyes.
“It isn’t real,” she reminded herself. Sternly. “None of that is real. No one is intruding on anything, because it didn’t really happen.”
They were engaged. That part was real enough. He had actually proposed, after a fashion, though what he’d actually said while down there one knee had not been romantic in the least.
Are you ready to take the next step? he’d asked. It’s probably going to make things difficult.
Ivy had laughed. More difficult than they already are?
I’ve been with lot of women, he’d told her, as if she might have forgotten. As if anyone could possibly have forgotten. The scrutiny on you will increase a hundredfold.
I’m aware of who you are, she’d replied, through a smile that had felt stiff on her mouth.
Then so be it, he’d said, rather darkly.
Not exactly love’s young dream, Ivy thought now, but it certainly looked that way in the pictures. She looked down at her hand and felt that same jolting sort of reaction that she’d felt that night, too.
She’d had no doubt that Giaco would produce something beautiful.
Every item of clothing that she’d been given to wear as part of her official wardrobe had been exquisite.
She would be hard-pressed to think of a single objection she had to any of it.
She even liked most of the pictures she’d seen of herself at these events.
He’d staged romantic moments, took her to marvelous restaurants, and while their relationship might have been fake, the food was always divine.
She’d assumed the engagement upgrade, as noted in the itinerary, would be the same sort of thing.
In terms of the ring Giaco would choose to sell their engagement to the world, she expected something extravagant, but elegant. Instead he’d gone sentimental, and she still didn’t know how she felt about that. The ring was a collection of opals and moonstones, clustered around a diamond.
I love moonstones, she had whispered, out there in the soft breeze on a Mediterranean cliff top. My mother loved opals.
I know, Giaco had said, all dark jade and that mouth set to something near enough to stern. You forget, Ivy. I did actually know your mother. And you.
The photographer had kept snapping pictures from his perch on the roof that the public would confuse for a drone, and so she could see the exact moment she’d looked down at the ring, that intense look on her face.
What it looked like to anyone who was seeing this photo now—and she assumed the world had seen it already—was that she’d been fighting back tears.
When what she’d actually been fighting back was a sense of disorientation. No, she had told him, the ring gleaning between them. You don’t know me. You certainly didn’t know me back then.
I know you like moonstones, Giaco had replied. A bit stiffly. As if she’d offended him.
She hadn’t seen any reason to push at that assertion, even if she’d wanted to.
Even if it had been like a burning thing in her throat, the need to correct him.
Now, hidden in London these last few days in preparation for this photo drop, now with a baying mob outside her door, she huddled in her bed and stared at that ring on her hand.
The ring he’d put there when she’d stopped arguing about whether or not Giaco Tavian knew her.
It was, bar none, not only the most beautiful ring she’d ever seen, but it was also essentially what she would have designed for herself if she could have. And that made her feel…
Well. She didn’t know what she felt. Not about the ring, anyway. Or maybe she didn’t really want to know how she felt, because—
Her mobile rang again and she looked over out of habit, then picked up only because it was Giaco’s number.
“I take it you’ve seen the pictures,” he said without preamble.
“I think the entirety of the British gutter press is kept out of my doorstep.” She laughed, though it came out a bit…wild. “They clued me in.”
“I thought that might happen.” He sounded odd, she thought.
Or perhaps he didn’t sound lazy and mocking and unbothered by it all.
“We’ll issue a statement from here. But this is what I meant by things getting difficult.
I don’t think this is the kind of furor that’s going to die down, Ivy. You’re too exposed in London.”
“I wouldn’t call myself exposed,” she argued, though she certainly felt exposed. She kept looking over at the window as if she expected the mob to levitate up from the street. “There are any number of people in this neighborhood who command more attention than me—”