Chapter Seven #2
That had been his primary role in this family for as long as he could remember.
He poked. He prodded. Whatever thunderous, scathing thing his father might like to say or do, Giaco would ruin it in advance.
He would steal all the thunder out of the room before it had a chance to start the faintest bit of rumbling.
And he knew why he did it, too.
But his mother would not thank him for continuing to pander to this man, even if it was only make-believed and peppered with a good deal of provocation, too.
Not after she’d affected her own escape the moment she’d thought Giaco was old enough to do without her.
Not after she’d decided that she no longer wished to worry about any pandering herself when what she could do instead was be done with it.
The trouble was that Giaco couldn’t access that version of him any longer. He could picture that version of himself in his own mind. He could see the sorts of things that he would have said in a situation like this. It wasn’t even hard. It was all right there, on the tip of his tongue.
Yet he also understood that it was what Umberto wanted. It was why he’d forced them all to sit down to this unpleasant dinner in the first place. He wanted reasons to shout, to be furious with his son. To have more reasons to threaten Giaco.
That Giaco was not giving it to him fit with Giaco’s supposed acquiescence to his father’s demands.
It was all part of the plan. What had never occurred to Giaco, in all his plotting, was that not acting out, not indulging in a battle of wits with the father he found ill-equipped, would feel like amputating his own limbs.
Umberto probably wouldn’t have minded if Leontina got mouthy instead.
Or at least if she drew a bit of fire, as hard as that was to imagine.
That would give Umberto an opportunity to berate her for the quiet, forever-hiding-in-plain-sight personality she’d cultivated to deal with him, because Umberto took pleasure in making the people around him feel small.
Giaco could see exactly how to start poking at everyone to make Umberto huff away again tonight, muttering threats at his only son as he went. He’d done it a thousand times before. He’d protected his sister this way. He’d even protected his mother, back in the day.
It was satisfying to draw fire from Umberto, because all Giaco did was laugh at the old man. Which, predictably, drove the narcissistic asshole up a wall.
But despite the fact that everything in him wanted to do it, and he felt somehow misshapen because he was playing the part of the dutiful son he wasn’t, the real truth was that he didn’t seem to have it in him anymore.
Giaco stared across the table at Ivy, whose fault this was. He might not know what was happening to him, not really. He wanted to say that it had started that night in his library, but he knew better. It had started before that.
It had started the moment he’d looked up from that damned hot pool to find her watching him from the window.
The supreme unfairness of this happening now, when he could least afford a misstep, wasn’t lost on him. He was just lucky that he’d intended this little show of meekness. That this wasn’t throwing the whole plan into disarray.
“Well,” Umberto said, glowering at the rest of them as he stood abruptly from his chair. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a meal more tedious. I expect all of you to be on exemplary behavior tomorrow. Or there will be consequences. Dire consequences.”
Then he stormed from the room after all, no poking or prodding required.
Ivy blinked. “He does realize it’s not his wedding, doesn’t he?”
“It’s all his,” Leontina said then, looking up from her lap briefly. Her eyes widened as she looked from Ivy to Giaco. “You must have noticed already. It’s his world. We live in it only because he allows us to.”
“You don’t actually believe that,” Giaco said, frowning at his younger sister. His much younger sister who, as far as he knew, had always believed that their mother—who’d had Leontina as a last-ditch effort to fix her unfixable marriage, only she had not come out a boy—had not died on purpose.
He had made certain she’d never thought that. He’d gone out of his way to make sure she thought their mother hadn’t had a choice about whether or not to leave her. It only seemed right.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” his little sister told him, her gaze grave. “It only matters what he believes. I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.”
And then she left the table, so that it was only Giaco and this woman he would marry the following day. This woman who he should never have turned around and seen through that window. This woman that he should never have touched.
She stared back at him for a moment that quickly became uncomfortable.
Then she rose from her seat and made her way over to the windows.
It was early summer in Tuscany now. The hills were covered in wildflowers.
Everything was lush and green. Outside, the sun was still busying itself with setting and the sky was orange, melting into the dark hills and making them glow.
But he had long since ceased to find anything more beautiful than Ivy.
“Imagine when we’ll be gone from this place again and that man won’t matter anymore,” she said quietly.
And that hit Giaco harder than it should have. Harder than expected, anyway. He would have said that there wasn’t much that anyone could say about his family that would bother him any longer. None of it could be worse than the things he said himself. Certainly not when it came to his father.
There was something about this moment. This woman on this night.
Because there was something about her wanting to be done with this, even though he felt the same way. There was something about her wanting to be done with this terrible castle, with his family, too.
With him, was what he meant.
He didn’t like how very much she wanted to be done with him.
But, “I can’t wait to find out,” he replied as he followed her to the window.
When she looked up at him, he had a sudden, spectacular vision of who she could be for him, if this was real. What kind of partner and ally she would be, if things were different. If they were what they seemed. What a glorious thing indeed it could be to be married to this woman.
But reality came in on the heels of that vision, hard.
Because Giaco couldn’t have that, could he?
Because she wasn’t wrong about him. He was made of lies. He couldn’t be honest with her or anyone else. Not after so many years of waiting for this very moment.
That was not a possibility. And it meant that no matter how much he wanted her—and he was beginning to realize that wanting her had become the cornerstone of his existence—he couldn’t really have her.
Because this game they were playing was one thing. But the woman he’d come to know while they played it would not accept anything less than honesty from a man who was her real partner. He didn’t have to ask. He knew.
And all of this sat in him like lead. It was a sour taste in his mouth.
He hated it.
Giaco didn’t think. He kissed her, taking her mouth with a kind of urgency he couldn’t fully explain to himself, because he didn’t wish to know himself quite that well. Not when there was so little he could do to change.
He kissed her instead, because she tasted like wonder. Like hope.
She tasted clean, like truth.
And more than that, she had somehow managed to insinuate herself so deeply beneath his skin that some days he thought that he had nothing at all in his mind but her.
Ivy was dressed as if she was a bride already, in exquisite cream from head to toe, and he couldn’t bear it. He turned her around and sat her down on the window ledge, then knelt down at her feet. He looked up the length of her lush, lithe body to see all that wild heat in her blue eyes.
Giaco slid his hands up her legs, pulling up the hem of her skirt as he went. He stroked his fingers beneath the panties she wore, pulling them to one side to find that glistening heat that he knew waited for him there.
And then he leaned in and buried his head between her legs.
She made the most beautiful noise he’d ever heard. Her hips jolted, and then rocked against him as he licked his way deep inside her, and then ate his fill.
He lost track of the number of times she shook against him. The way her fingers dug in hard to grip his hair, leaving pricks of pain that he hoped he would feel later.
He lost track of the screams she stopped bothering to muffle, and he half hoped the whole castle heard.
If he could have broadcast to the world that everything between them was real, just like this, he would have.
When he finished, he tucked her swollen, sweet center away again, covering her with the scrap of lace he tugged back into place. He smoothed her skirt back down her legs and when he sat back to look up at her, she looked…disheveled.
It reminded him of that night in the study when she’d looked at him, all heat and desire. Like then, he’d thought she had never been more glorious. Except this time he could taste her in his mouth.
They studied each other for what felt like an eternity.
“Tell me,” she said, in a voice that was little more than a rasp after all that pleasure, while her blue gaze moved all over his face and made him feel as exposed as if she flayed him open, “why does this feel like a goodbye?”
Giaco made himself smile, though it sat on his face wrong. He could feel it. “I can’t imagine,” he said. This should have come easily to him. This was what he was good at. Blowing smoke. Flashing mirrors. “We marry in the morning. This is the very opposite of goodbye, Ivy.”
But later, after he’d walked away and left her there—after he forced himself not to look back—he knew that they were both perfectly aware that he was lying.
Yet again.