Chapter Eight #2
The reception was a whirl. Gabriele collected Ivy’s train and bustled her dress so she could walk around, though she didn’t see the point to it.
She didn’t know anyone here. She didn’t care to know them.
They weren’t even the sorts of people that she would normally reach out to for donations to her charity.
These were powerbrokers on a different scale.
They weren’t here to talk about donations.
They were trafficking in far higher stakes.
This meant that Ivy could excuse herself from having to do anything at all but observe.
She watched the vultures circle, particularly the women who clearly felt that they ought to have been Giaco’s bride.
Not content to simply throw dirty looks at her from across the bit of field near the vineyards that had been turned into a luxurious, tented reception area, they liked to come up and introduce themselves. So she could see their talons up close.
Ivy smiled and greeted each and every one of them as if they were long-lost friends. She wondered if this would hurt her more if she and Giaco actually had true feelings for each other. Or, at least, if they’d started that way. If it hadn’t been an ice-cold business arrangement from the start.
Though as Ivy nursed her drink, because somehow she didn’t think a fuzzy head would help with anything, she had to question her own characterization of the start of this whole marriage thing. Her memories of that day were not ice cold at all.
It was all Giaco naked. Then Giaco lounging on that couch. And then the pictures that he’d taken, that she sometimes remembered as if they were the truth of what had really happened. As if the story they told was what had gone on between them when she knew it hadn’t.
Or not then, anyway.
Her body clenched around the memory of his fingers. His mouth.
No, ice cold was not how she would describe this marriage at all. Nor was it all that businesslike—not according to any definition of that word she’d ever known.
This wedding, on the other hand, was both of those things.
After one too many rounds with the society women who went out of their way to let her know that they had sampled her husband—or wanted to, it was hard to tell the difference—Ivy retreated.
She found a place to sit at one of the tables almost out of the tent entirely, where she could smile enigmatically the way her mother always had, looking both unapproachable and at her ease.
Truly, she thought, one of the greatest gifts her mother had ever given her. All the guests continued to look at her but they didn’t come near her and for the first time since she’d woken up this morning, she felt like she could breathe.
She watched Umberto fawn all over a much younger man who looked to be about Giaco’s age and who, unlike everyone else at the castle today, seemed completely unmoved by the Tavian influence. If anything, he looked stern and forbidding, as if he was the one taking the measure of Umberto.
This could only mean that he was the famous Pau Calixto, the morally upright Spaniard billionaire who was the reason Ivy was in a wedding dress today.
Even more interesting, to her mind, was the fact that Giaco seemed to dislike him.
He was busy charming everyone else at the party, but when it came to Pau Calixto, he looked…
as if his famous magnetism was unavailable to him.
And here Ivy had always thought that Giaco could make it look as if he was intimate with anyone and everyone. No matter who they were.
When Giaco finally came to find his bride at her solitary table, he had done two full circuits of every last guest at this reception.
“You really do know how to work a crowd,” Ivy murmured. “It’s really quite impressive.”
“I would have thought you’d be doing the same thing,” he said as he came to stand beside her, then bonelessly slid into the chair next to hers.
The moment he was sitting, he was lounging.
And he already looked rumpled, the way he always did.
It was something she thought only outrageously beautiful men could get away with.
Everyone else here was in formalwear, and they were adhering to all the rules of that kind of dress, but none of them shined bright the way Giaco did.
If any of them had lost their tie or opened their collar or looked a bit as if they might have rolled around somewhere, they’d probably be so embarrassed that they would be going to the castle to change.
Giaco, by contrast, looked better than he had standing so properly at the altar. And he had looked pretty phenomenal up there, Ivy could admit. That was just a fact.
“This is not the crowd to hit up for donations to an orphans’ charity,” Ivy said with a shrug.
“The women are feral and all want a taste of you. They are unlikely to support my endeavors. The men are too busy jostling for position around your father. They have no time to spare for the insignificant needs of the sorts of human beings I’m certain they find disposable. ”
“How astute,” he replied in that low voice of his. “And you didn’t even have to circle your way through the crowd to read them all so well.”
She looked over at him, certain that she would see that mocking glint in his dark eyes, but felt a kind of shuddering inside her when there wasn’t.
He wasn’t even looking back at her—he was looking down at her hand.
Then he reached over and picked it up, playing with her finger that now sported two rings.
That beautiful engagement ring he’d given her.
And the platinum band beside it, its simplicity somehow as arresting as the stones.
He wore a platinum band on his finger, too. It was flatter and wider and equally absent any adornment.
Ivy hadn’t felt much of anything up at that altar that the staff had made beautiful, beneath a pergola bright with summer flowers in bloom. It had all been rote recitation and a fervent wish that she did not have to do this while being stared at by so many people who quite actively wished her ill.
But this, here in a moment that was only theirs, felt hushed.
She felt something chime deep inside her, like there was a power in the rings themselves. As if there was a magic here she hadn’t understood.
Ivy could have sworn he felt it, too.
But they were still at this reception. Being watched on all sides. She swallowed, hard. “You don’t like your father’s business partner,” she said, to change the subject.
Giaco looked at her sharply, and she thought she saw something like surprise cross his face.
“Whatever do you mean?” he asked. “I make it a point of personal pride to have no awareness whatsoever of my father’s business affairs.”
“He’s right over there,” Ivy said, and she searched the crowd until she found Pau Calixto once more, standing in the corner talking to…
Well. That looked like Leontina, though she was certain she was mistaken.
She’d never seen Leontina talk to anyone.
She pointed him out anyway. “There, by the fountain.”
“Yes, yes,” Giaco murmured, with only a quick glance that way. “I don’t know him. I don’t like his type. Prudish. Forever on the verge of a lecture. Deeply and surpassingly boring, at a guess.”
She turned to look at him, because none of that sounded like him. He almost sounded as if he was parroting himself. Ivy shook her head. “That’s a lie.”
Those jade green eyes widened, and he looked at her in astonishment. Astonishment laced through with arrogance, that was. “You cannot believe that I would lower myself to lie about the tedious corporate shills my father surrounds himself with,” Giaco said, sounding deeply offended.
“As far as I can tell,” she retorted, “you will lie about anything. Everything. Is that not so?”
But the stare he leveled on her was interrupted when they were beckoned out onto the dance floor. Ordered, more like.
“I danced with your mother at her wedding to Umberto,” he told her, almost abruptly. His eyes darkened when hers widened. “She was beautiful, of course, but also unnecessarily kind to a feral young man who wanted badly to hate her when it was, in fact, his father he loathed.”
“My mother was always kind,” Ivy managed to say, though there was a lump in her throat. She remembered the wedding too, though Umberto had thankfully ignored her. She smiled at Giaco. “Never unnecessarily.”
More beckoning from the dance floor interrupted the moment. Ivy’s heart was tripping in her chest and she had to wonder if, perhaps, that was best.
Because this wasn’t in the itinerary, this memory of Alana. This wasn’t part of the show.
In a show of obedience, Giaco rose. He led her out into the middle of the floor, took her hand, and drew her into his arms. And Ivy knew she ought to have been listening to the music or paying attention to the steps they were meant to be doing as they danced, but she didn’t care about any of that. She was too busy studying his face.
His beautiful, impossible face.
“I don’t understand how it is that you fool so many people,” she told him, because it was that or weep over the gift of a story about her mother that she’d never heard before.
“I don’t fool anyone,” he replied, though she was holding on to him and she could feel the almost imperceptible way he stiffened. “What you see is what you get when it comes to me.”
“That’s not even a good line. It was obvious to me the moment I saw you again.”
“Though perhaps not from the very first moment,” he replied, his voice a silken bit of darkness.
Ivy wasn’t immune to the way that curled around her. How it sank deep into her and curled around and around until she was nothing but the heat he’d made.
But that wasn’t the point.