Chapter Eight
LEONTINA WALKED INTO Ivy’s rooms in the castle the following morning without an invitation, but with a cautious sort of smile on her face. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said, softly.
Ivy wasn’t sure that she and her former stepsister and soon-to-be sister-in-law had ever had a proper heart-to-heart.
Back in the day, growing up here, everyone had kept their head down and handled their own trauma.
It wasn’t much of a bonding experience. And this time around, though Ivy had spent a good deal less time in the castle, she’d only seen Leontina when Umberto demanded that there be so-called family gatherings.
She still had the impression that the other woman deliberately kept herself to the shadows.
That she’d sought out Ivy of her own volition seemed like a significant shift. That alone would have intrigued Ivy.
But it was also Ivy’s wedding day. And she very much wanted to stop thinking about the implications of that. The same way she didn’t want to think about what had happened last night, either. Much less how it had ended, with Giaco walking away.
It had seemed prophetic.
“Of course you’re not intruding,” Ivy said, and waved Leontina to a chair near hers in the sitting room that had always abutted the rooms considered hers here.
As a girl, she’d never sat in here. It was too exposed.
There was no lock on the door. She’d always preferred to hide away in her bedroom, behind a lock and beneath the covers of her bed—but that was a long time ago.
Today she was halfway through her preparations for a wedding that had felt real last night, with Giaco’s clever mouth between her legs. Yet today, the profound fakeness of what they were doing seemed to weigh upon her like blocks of concrete hung from her shoulders.
She could have done without all these contradictory emotions altogether.
Perhaps that was why it took her longer than it should have to register that Leontina did not look the way she normally did.
On the contrary. She was wearing a dress, and not the usual sort of dress she wore, shapeless and deliberately unforgettable.
This dress was a bright magenta color that clung to her body, so that all a person looking at her could really see was her endlessly long legs in the high shoes she was wearing.
It also called attention to her dramatically lithe figure that would not have looked out of place on a runway model or a prima ballerina.
It made Ivy wonder all over again if it was, in fact, genetics that gave Giaco his outrageously beautiful form.
But she focused on the woman still standing in front of her, noticing the other major difference.
Leontina did not have her hair scraped back into her usual severe bun.
Today it was flowing all around her, thick, dark waves that fell halfway down her back.
“My God,” Ivy said, a smile taking over her mouth. “Look at you. You’re absolutely stunning. I can’t believe you hide all of this all the time.”
Leontina smiled back, and that only drew attention to the dark jade eyes she shared with her brother.
“Thank you,” Leontina said in her quiet voice, though even that seemed to hit different today.
It sounded far more intense, and measured, than Ivy remembered.
“My brother doesn’t get married every day.
I thought I ought to represent the family right, though obviously, normally, I prefer not to be noticed.
” Color dusted her cheeks and she looked away down.
“I also wanted to make you an offer. One that you can refuse, of course.”
“What kind of offer?” Ivy asked, intrigued.
If her former stepsister, soon to be sister-in-law, offered her a getaway car, she honestly didn’t know what she would do.
Instead, Leontina sat down on the chair Ivy had waved her to.
She blew out a breath. Ivy tried not to feel self-conscious.
Her hair was done and her makeup perfect, but she wore only a robe as Gabriele and the rest of the stylist battalion were doing something with her dress in the other room. She hadn’t asked what.
She also hadn’t imagined that she’d be entertaining anyone in this state, but she was too intrigued to let the small matter of being underdressed get to her.
“I wanted to offer my services as a stand-in family member,” Leontina said, smiling at Ivy with what looked like determination more than anything else.
“I know you don’t have any. And I’m not entirely sure that you like Giaco all that much, which, fair enough.
He’s a lot. But this is your wedding. So if you feel like you wish you had family of your own, well, I did used to be your stepsister.
And I always wished that things were different here.
What I mean is, I can be family for you, if you like. If that would help.”
Ivy had thought that it was a long shot that she would shed even a single tear at this wedding. Given that it was such a circus and had nothing to do with the two people getting married. And even if it had, said two people were putting on a show anyway.
But Leontina proved her wrong that easily, with her honest, earnest expression and the way she looked directly at Ivy. Ivy felt salt prickle the back of her eyes.
“I don’t want to overstep,” Leontina continued in the same quietly sincere manner.
“But last night I found myself thinking that should I get married as my father insists I will, and at his command, what I’ll miss the most is my mother.
That made me wonder if you did, too. And she can’t be here, I know. But I can.”
The prickle behind Ivy’s eyes became more of a threat.
“That is the sweetest thing anyone could possibly have said to me today,” she said.
She reached out a hand to grab Leontina’s, and it was like a new understanding bloomed between them.
A new bond. She could feel it warm her, deep inside.
Maybe this was what healing felt like. “Thank you.”
And after Leontina left, Ivy sat with that.
The offer, the warmth. The notion that somehow, she and Leontina had become the friends they always should have been this morning.
Even as Gabriele and his minions hurried her into her gown, and spent what she considered an unnecessary amount of time debating the fall of her excessively theatrical train, she kept coming back to that offer.
As if Leontina had figured out something that Ivy wasn’t sure she’d known herself.
Or maybe she had, because she’d been telling herself all along that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have anyone at this wedding. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t a real wedding. It was just a game. A show.
A show she had to perform in, and beautifully, to finally have access to her money so she could pass it on to those in far greater need than she’d ever been.
So the fact that she had no father to walk her down an aisle and no mother to hug her fiercely and make her smile didn’t matter, either.
She’d tried her best to believe it.
Because she could not quite accept that getting married to a man who she knew was only pretending to care about her—likely even when he touched her—made her feel some kind of orphaned all over again.
She told herself what mattered was what came when this particular circus show was finished. That was the only thing she should be thinking about.
But what she really felt as Gabriele ushered her down the steps of the castle, and outside toward the cleverly sophisticated altar that had been arranged in a beautiful spot overlooking the vineyards and the hills, was that she and Leontina had a lot of lost time to make up for.
That really, that was something worth feeling about.
And that when her sister-in-law got married—whether at Umberto’s command or not—Ivy would be there.
Whether she was still playing charades with Giaco or not.
As she thought that, she saw Umberto sitting in the front row of the chairs that had been set up for this wedding, loudly holding court. And the enormity of what was happening here seemed to land on her with all its weight.
It was a charade, sure enough, but it was going to hurt.
Life in this castle had been every person for themselves.
There had been no room for connection. Only survival.
She had to assume that her marriage would be more of the same.
Ivy already knew that when it ended, at the three-year mark she and Giaco had agreed to, her heart would be broken and she would have to find a way to live without the endless frustration and fascination that was Giaco.
She honestly didn’t know how she was going to manage that. Not when she had barely slept last night, too aware of the tender place between her legs that he’d claimed so intensely, so completely.
And because she’d understood, as she’d watched him walk away, that this wedding was no new beginning. Not for them. What she didn’t know was how he planned to leave her when they’d agreed to the same terms.
But when Gabriele hissed at her to look lively, Ivy headed down the aisle—on her own—and surrendered herself to one of the most over-the-top weddings and receptions she’d ever experienced in her life.
The only way to make it bearable was to remind herself that it really wasn’t about her at all. Because it wasn’t.
There were those moments when she and Giaco said their vows. There was that odd light in his dark eyes, and the way he looked at her when he slid a ring on her finger—but that was overshadowed by the spectacle that Umberto was putting on all around them.
Even Giaco seemed different, lost too firmly behind his mask today.
Ivy told herself that all she had to do was smile, look pretty, and pretend this was all happening to somebody else.