Chapter Six #3
“That was yesterday,” Giaco said curtly.
“Now you are engaged to one of the most famous men in the world. You no longer live in the same world you did when you went to sleep last night. And the level of interest in you, particularly this kind of tabloid interest, will no doubt make your high-profile neighbors nervous, which I’m certain they’ll make clear to you soon enough. ”
She wanted to argue with him. But her doorbell kept ringing and ringing and ringing. So did her landline. Ivy was beginning to feel a headache developing in her temples. She had the strangest sensation that a barrier had been crossed here. A boundary, maybe.
That there would be no going back from this, no matter what happened.
And she wasn’t sure how she’d ever imagined that she wouldn’t end up here.
Still, she found it surprising. Upsetting.
Or maybe she didn’t really mean to use either one of those words.
What she felt was…too much. She wanted to cry.
She wanted to run downstairs, fling open her door, and shout at everyone who was standing there, forming a scrum outside, possibly already rooting through her rubbish in the back.
She wanted to rewind back to that meeting at Umberto’s office, and tell him to go to hell.
She wanted to live forever in that kiss, which paradoxically enough still felt to her as if it was only theirs.
When it wasn’t, of course. None of this was real. None of this was hers. None of this mattered outside of this production they were putting on.
The kiss that still haunted her had been published just like these pictures were. It was part of the body of work that they were giving the world so that everyone who wished could tear it apart. Dig into it. Make it theirs.
She would do well to remember that.
Just as she would do well to remember the orphans who were the reason she was subjecting herself to all this in the first place.
Ivy rubbed at her temples and then closed the screen of her laptop with a decisive click. She closed her eyes. “What do you suggest we do next?” she asked, and was proud of herself for sounding nothing at all but businesslike.
When she felt anything but.
His team descended upon her house within the hour, indicating to her that Giaco had anticipated this response.
They cleared out the paparazzi and whisked Ivy away.
She read the prepared statement from Giaco’s representative—Gabriele, she assumed—who expressed horror and disgust at the violation of their privacy and the revolting response that had made his new fiancée feel as if she was under attack during what should have been a happy time in their lives.
It was a terrific statement, Ivy could see. Public sentiment swung hard toward Giaco and Ivy almost immediately, with commenters across all platforms decrying the intrusion and the publication of what was surely meant to be a completely private moment.
And that was how, with very little discussion, in the course of a few days she found herself not only engaged to Giaco Tavian but completely moved into his house in Rome.
Not into his bedroom, of course. That would be taking things too far. That would be real, and whatever else happened, she knew that wasn’t allowed. Maybe you should ask yourself why you’re thinking so much about his bed, a small voice inside her kept asking.
She found herself sitting in his pretty, private courtyard one evening, still not certain she was adjusted at all to this new life.
She couldn’t go to work. She could conduct video calls with her charity, but she didn’t feel it was the same.
She thought that every call seemed to get caught up somehow in all the questions these people she’d worked with for years didn’t dare ask her directly.
Ivy grew tired of the courtyard, for all that it was pretty and soothing. She grew tired of staring at a water feature, wondering what else in her life was going to change. Wondering why she hadn’t anticipated any of this when everyone else clearly had.
She walked back into the house, wondering why it was Giaco had known that she would end up here. Probably from before their first date, or he wouldn’t have installed her itinerary-friendly wardrobe in her suite. She was tempted to think he’d planned all this.
But even as she thought that, she didn’t think that was entirely fair. Planning suggested a whole different level of machinations. What he’d been—and what she had not been, clearly—was prepared.
She had to get a new mobile. Ivy had thought that she was used to a certain level of notoriety and celebrity, because she certainly traded off that in London. In all the circles she moved in, for that matter. Everybody knew who her parents had been.
This was something completely different. It was on a whole new level.
She understood in a brand-new way why Giaco lived the way he did.
It only occurred to her now that he had chosen this house because it was built like a medieval fortress.
The public could camp out at the outer entryway all they liked, but there was no access to the house itself.
They couldn’t peer in his windows or bang on his doors.
Not to mention, she began to realize that half the staff that he employed here were, in fact, his security force.
Meaning he was not quite as lazy and feckless as he appeared.
She came upon him while she was still feeling out of sorts and glared when she found him lounging in one of his outrageously comfortable armchairs in what she was fairly certain was his library, though he called it a study.
As if to distance himself from what it might say about him if he had an actual library.
Though the shelves upon shelves of books told a different story.
“Why didn’t I know how difficult your life is?” she demanded.
Giaco did not look up from the book he was reading.
She filed that away to come back to later.
The fact that he was reading a book at all.
The fact that the book he was reading looked big and thick and dense, and he appeared to be in the middle of it.
Yet more evidence that he was not who he played in the press.
And in private much of the time.
“I’m delighted that someone has finally noticed the great burden that I bear,” he said without looking up. “It is amazing how few seem to care about my many travails. But I’m telling you, Ivy, long have I struggled with all of this beauty and wit. It is a curse.”
“I meant your lack of privacy,” she snapped at him.
“That is a feature, not a bug,” Giaco told her, finally lifting his gaze from his book. “I determined long ago that it was not fair to the world to conceal the glory that is me from the public. They have so little, do you not agree?”
Ivy did not agree. She stood there, staring at him.
She took in the state of him, lounging here in the privacy of his own home yet still dressed as if he expected a photographer to happen by at any moment.
One of those buttoned-up shirts of his that he never managed to button to the top.
Those loose trousers made her think of islands in the sea.
He liked his feet bare in the house, she noticed, and she wondered at the contrast between the outrageously debonair figure he could cut when he chose to, all black-tie sophistication and urbane grace.
This was a far more casual version of him.
“None of this is real, is it?” she heard herself ask.
Something changed. She watched it move over his face and then his gaze was different, too. Almost…cannier, perhaps.
“Are you talking about our relationship?” he asked quietly. “The one that has currently captured the attention of the entire planet? No, my little saint. It is not real. Have you become confused?”
“I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about you,” she said. “When I first saw this house I thought that it seemed so authentic. A real home that someone lived in. That someone is you, but you don’t live anywhere, do you? You merely…exist between photo ops. Isn’t that right?”
It was possible that she was being too harsh.
But this was some strange amalgamation of all of these unwieldy feelings that she’d been combating since the start of this.
Maybe it was the ring. Maybe it was that damned kiss.
Maybe it was the fact that she felt as if she’d been hunted out of her own home, like a hapless fox.
Maybe it was just that she didn’t like feeling hapless or hunted.
Also, she thought it was true.
“How astute,” he said, in that cutting way of his.
He set his heavy book aside. And then he was rising up with more of that impossible effortlessness of his. All of that athletic grace. It set her teeth on edge.
It did more than that. It made her remember the taste of him, and the way that perfect, cruel mouth of his had coaxed so much sensation out of her. Perhaps he’d even licked it into her. It was too much.
He was too much.
“You’re putting on an act so no one can see who you really are,” she managed to say, though his gaze was trained on her now and he was heading her way. “Aren’t you?”
“Thank you,” he drawled, drawing closer. “Without this incisive psychiatric breakdown of my innermost self, how could I possibly go on?”
“Obviously everybody plays certain roles as they go about their lives,” she said, frowning up at him as he came upon her. “But not the way you do. You literally have a director on staff. You have an entire production team. Do you think that’s normal?”
She didn’t realize that he’d backed her up across the whole study until she had to stop because there was something in her way. A glance behind her told her she was standing at the back of the sofa that faced the currently unlit fireplace.
But if he noticed that he’d pinned her, he certainly didn’t seem to care.