Chapter Eight #3
“I actually wonder if that’s why.” She held his gaze.
And even as he moved the two of them across the floor, with all of that elegant grace that seemed so effortless from such a powerful body, he looked very much as if he didn’t see anything but her, either.
“I saw all of you, and so it was impossible to see less.”
“I hate to be indelicate on the day of our most blessed union,” he said, his voice that dark blade that told her he was being deliberate. And likely provocative. “But seeing me naked is not exactly unique.”
“I wonder,” she replied. She tilted her head back and gazed at him.
“You take such pride in showing yourself off but I’m beginning to think it’s just a little bit of sleight of hand.
If everyone is so busy looking at everything you show off and too busy concentrating on your antics, then they’ll miss what you’re really doing, won’t they? ”
She expected him to laugh at that, but there was something too sharp in his gaze.
Then he twirled her around instead, which was no kind of reply.
He twirled her out and then brought her in again, then dipped her low.
And when he stood her up again, Ivy was dizzy and flushed and Giaco had that usual mocking curve in the corner of his mouth.
“What a fascinating line of interrogation that was,” he said, as if he was devastated it had ended. “Alas, I do believe our duty calls.”
There were more pictures, because of course there were more pictures.
Elaborately staged affairs to make the most of the opulent elegance on display here.
No doubt fodder for another puff piece that would make it seem as if Umberto Tavian himself had personally put together his own son’s wedding ceremony and reception out of the goodness of his loving heart.
No one who had ever met the man could possibly believe he had a heart. But then, rich men did not have to be kind. They only had to stay rich and no one would care what they were or to whom.
Ivy couldn’t wait to read about her own wedding in a glossy magazine, with pictures of herself that would look like a stranger.
Happily, soon enough, a helicopter landed out in the field and the staff loaded it up with bags they’d packed on their own with no input from Ivy about what she might need on a honeymoon.
She was getting used to that now. Once the helicopter was packed, she and Giaco were helped on board.
Where they could wave out at the crowd as they flew away.
It felt a lot like an escape.
The flight wasn’t long and after what felt like a short while they were circling into a landing on one of the prettiest islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea and touching down on a landing pad where a sleek convertible with a stretching cat ornament on its hood waited for them.
This time, the driver was Giaco. Thanks to the itinerary, Ivy knew that Giaco had a small estate here on the island of Capri.
When they got to his villa, Ivy was charmed despite herself.
Most of it was windows, so that at every opportunity, its inhabitants could gaze at the sea.
And more, down the hill at the village of Capri that clustered into the hillside.
Inside the main room, she turned her back on the view and stared at her husband. Her husband, something inside her whispered, as if that term had only now landed in her.
She folded her arms. “Do you know what I’ve been doing to pass the time today?”
His gaze seemed hot and dark at once. “I shudder to think.”
“I’ve been counting up all the times I know you’ve lied to me, and it’s quite a few.
They keep coming and coming.” Ivy considered him.
“What I can’t decide is if you’re so busy wearing masks you can’t tell the difference between a truth and a lie any longer.
Or if you mean it. Every single lie you tell. ”
He stood there across the length of the room from her, and he didn’t come any closer. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think that you do. And I think you might have miscalculated.”
There was a flash of his smile. “Impossible. I never miscalculate.”
“Everything we’ve done has been a group project,” she pointed out. “Your house in Rome is filled with all of your people, all of the time. Your father’s castle is even worse. We go on dates but we only pretend that they’re private. We conduct ourselves in the glare of publicity at all times.”
“That is because our affairs are publicity,” he said, in that silken way of his.
“But now we are all alone. No staff. No intrusive family members. No paparazzi.” She shook her head, almost as if she felt sorry for him. “You must be terrified. When your masks drop this time, you must know I’ll see it.”
To her shock, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t make one of his typically off-color remarks. He didn’t slink toward her, brandishing his sexuality like a club.
He stared at her, and she noticed his hands flexing at his sides.
“On the other hand,” she said quietly, “I happen to know a bit about masks myself. I don’t think that if you chose to go without yours here it would be the end of the world.”
He moved toward her then, but without all of that grace of his. He looked…jerky. Uncoordinated.
Something kicked deep in her belly, but she didn’t move. It didn’t occur to her to move. He kept coming until he was standing right there before her, staring down at her.
“There is not one true thing stitched into me,” he told her. “I am a patchwork tapestry of lies, so many that I cannot keep track. I could not untangle them all, even if I wanted to.”
She could hear a loud noise and only belatedly realized it was her own heart in her chest. Pounding out a rhythm all its own. Slamming into her ribs. The closer he came, the louder it got.
“You don’t have to untangle them all,” she whispered. And this, then, felt the way she thought their vows should have. “Tell me one true thing, Giaco. Just one.”
He moved even closer then, a look of such powerful intensity on his face that it made her heart stutter in her chest. Then he reached out and slid his hands over her cheeks, to hold her hair. To touch her.
“This,” he said, sounding gruff and unlike himself. Or possibly more like himself, at last. “The only true thing I know is this. You.”
And when he kissed her it felt like all the vows they’d made, writ large. It was as if she could feel them, now.
It was as if the kiss made them real.
He kissed her over and over and then he lifted her up in his arms and carried her through the sprawling, airy villa, stopping time and again to get his mouth on her. Until finally, everything spun around and they were both on a bed.
For a moment, they only stared at each other, and she knew that this was going to be different.
That this time there would be no holding back.
That everything had been building to this bright afternoon with the sun streaming in the windows and all that blue in the distance, but nothing but dark jade intensity here.
She felt her whole body shudder at that, while the heat of it all washed over her.
“You’re my wife,” he said, gritting out those words as if his life depended on them. “And you’re wearing entirely too many clothes.”
Wife, she thought. It sounded different when he said it like that. It sounded real, not like a charade at all.
It felt different when he pulled back, but only so he could pull her with him and stand her on her feet next to the bed. And she was absurdly grateful for every woman he’d ever touched, because it had taken a team to put her into this dress but Giaco had her out of it in a flash.
He stripped her down and stopped, gazing at the lingerie she’d put on in what seemed like a different life, back at the castle. It had been handed to her with the rest of the things she was meant to wear today and she tried to read the expression on his face as he stared at it.
“I assume you picked this out yourself,” she managed to say, though her voice sounded insubstantial. Breathy. “A groom’s gift you already knew you would like.”
He took his time dragging his gaze back to hers. “There is not one thing I don’t like about pretty, flimsy silken things on a woman’s body, but I was not expecting…this. You.”
And then he showed her what he meant. First he shrugged out of his own clothes, and Ivy thought that having seen him naked before should have prepared her for the impact of it again, but it didn’t. He took her breath away. Again.
Then again as once more, he knelt down before her and proceeded to worship her body as if he had never seen a woman before in his life.
There was no place his mouth didn’t touch. No place his hands did not move, roaming all over her, making her glow with heat and longing.
When he slipped his fingers between her legs, he found her molten hot and wild. For him.
“Too pretty,” he murmured. And then his fingers were thrusting inside her, making her breath hitch and her hips move to meet him, and it happened so fast. Giaco’s fingers were a magic spell and her undoing at once, and she fell apart so quickly that it almost made her laugh.
Maybe she was laughing. She couldn’t quite tell.
Then he was pushing her back on the bed and crawling up the mattress with her until they were rolling all around. She wanted to put her mouth on him at last. She wanted him with a ferocity she couldn’t explain.
Maybe it didn’t need explaining. It was simply who they were, wrapped up in the heat of this. They were wearing nothing at all save the rings they’d exchanged and something about that made her feel…calamitous.
But the calamity felt like joy.
Ivy explored that chest of his, at last. She traced her way over all of those ridges and flat planes of muscle. She followed the sprinkling of dark hair all the way down to that giant cock that had been imprinted in her mind since she’d seen him come out of the water like something mythical.
And he was much bigger now.
But when she went to put him in her mouth, he stopped her.
“Not today,” he told her.
“But I want—”
“Don’t worry,” he said gruffly. “We have a vast menu to work our way through. But today I thought we’d keep it strictly traditional.”
A breath seemed to escape of its own volition. “Traditional,” she repeated. “There’s not one single thing about you that’s traditional.”
“It’s the missionary position that’s traditional, little saint,” he said, as he moved up her body and settled himself between her thighs. “But not usually the way I do it. Yet I haven’t been married before, either. It feels rather ceremonial, doesn’t it?”
And she could feel the head of his cock as he worked himself into all of her soft heat.
It felt so good, just like that, that she was shivering already.
Her body was filled with sensation, so bright and hot she hardly knew what to do with it, and before she could say anything at all, he simply thrust deep inside her.
There was a shock of pain. A hot, deep tear.
Giaco froze. She froze, too.
There was nothing save the thunder of her heart and that overly taut feeling deep inside her. The sense of him there, filling her. Changing her. Her body forced to shift to accommodate him, and it did.
That thought made it better. She experimented, moving her hips, and that was better still.
“Ivy,” he said, thickly. With a kind of sorrow. “Ivy, it never occurred to me—”
“Giaco,” she whispered fiercely. “Do something.”
So he did.
He started slow, a slick, deep slide. So slow that she was the one who got impatient as all of that heat grew inside her. She was the one who wrapped herself around him, crossing her ankles in the back and gripping him as tight as she could.
Until, eventually, he propped himself up on his hands so he could look down at her as he pistoned in and out of her body.
She loved it. She met every thrust. She lifted her hips to take more of him and it was like a wild flame, everywhere. Tightening. Tightening more.
Until, at last, he came down and gathered her close to him. Then he slid one hand between them and pressed down.
Hard.
And then there was nothing at all but stars. All of the cosmos, every constellation, and all of it somehow contained between them and in the two gold bands that marked them as married.
As husband, as wife.
As one, at last.