Chapter Nine
GIACO HARDLY KNEW HIMSELF.
They stayed in bed that first night. The villa had been stocked for their arrival and he knew that he could summon staff if he wished. But the idea of having people in the villa with them did not sit right with him.
Not when his most unexpected wife—his wife, a role he’d expected would be filled by some dullish sort of nun who he would have to work hard to pretend to fall in love with, but fate had given him Ivy instead—had shocked him with her innocence.
He felt…humbled. Altered in ways he was afraid to entirely examine.
Simultaneously unworthy to be in her presence, and yet certain that there was nowhere else he wished to go, nor would go.
A week into their honeymoon—that Giaco had decided to have in a place like Capri because it would lend itself to so many “accidental” photographs as they walked about the charming village and explored the island—they still hadn’t left the house.
What they had done was explore—lazily, urgently—the menu that he had mentioned.
They rose only to shower, or sit in the bath, or find their way out to the infinity pool, where it seemed as if they could float on the horizon forever as long as they were touching.
As long as they were always, always touching.
They were insatiable.
Something about Ivy’s wide-eyed wonder and heated delight made everything seem new to Giaco, too. Every time he touched her, it got harder and harder to recall if he’d ever touched another. He was creative, but she—
Well. She was a legend. And she was his wife.
In his experience, intensity depreciated at a rapid rate. Intensity required mystery, and once mysteries were solved, boredom set in. He had experienced this cycle more times than he—or anyone else—could count.
But there was nothing boring about Ivy.
Ten days into their honeymoon, they lay in their bed rumpled and panting. She shifted, then smiled down from where she lay stretched out on top of him. “There’s a beautiful island out there,” she said, pausing to kiss him. “I think we ought to explore it.”
Giaco had the lowering thought that perhaps she was bored. That perhaps this wasn’t about him at all.
He wasn’t sure he knew what to do with that notion.
She smiled wickedly. “I want to see if we can take a walk like civilized people. Or if we really are the wild animals we seem to have turned into here.”
And he laughed, because he laughed a great deal in her presence, it turned out. He wasn’t sure he had ever laughed so much in all his life—not real laughter, anyway. It was one more reason why Ivy wasn’t boring.
He tried, repeatedly, to demystify her. It never worked.
Giaco was fascinated by the way she breathed. The small noises she made while she slept. He was captivated by the difference in the way her collarbone tasted when compared with that sweet spot at her navel.
He could not seem to solve any of these mysteries. If anything, they only deepened the more time he spent with her.
So ten days in, they finally dressed. This took longer than it should have, because Giaco insisted on choosing her clothes and that led to him taking them off again, and so it was much later when they finally emerged from the villa and wandered their way down from the villa into the famous Piazzetta to take in the beating heart of Capri at last.
Giaco told himself that he needed to be on alert, making certain that they were seen. Reported upon. Made into myth and wonder for the consumption of the world.
But how could he remember something so tedious when Ivy walked with her arm around him, holding on to him as if she couldn’t bear to let go? How could he concern himself with the grimy business of selling himself to the tabloids when every step they took felt so precious?
It took him another ten days to understand what was happening.
That she had worked some kind of magic on him, he could admit.
That she had wrecked him when all along he’d been so certain he had the upper hand, he could grudgingly accept.
That she had somehow turned him inside out and found her way beneath his skin when he least expected it—all of that he could come to terms with.
But there was only one word that really fit all the things he felt in her presence, and it was not a word he’d ever thought he’d have any sort of passing acquaintance with. Not about himself and his feelings.
Hell, Giaco had made it his life’s work to pretend he’d never had a feeling at all.
He told himself that the reason this intensity did not fade away was simply because he knew it couldn’t last. Because it wouldn’t.
It couldn’t. She’d asked him if he was saying a kind of goodbye the night before their wedding and he had been, because he’d understood that their wedding was the start of a countdown that would end all of these games and schemes.
This was only a little bit of interstitial space as he waited for the phone call that would change everything. The phone call he’d been working toward his whole adult life.
This was a breath in between. It could never be anything else.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that it felt like more.
“You seem so pensive,” Ivy said one night.
They had ventured out again and if pictures of them had made it off the island, he wouldn’t know, because he’d set his mobile to block every number save one.
They sat at a restaurant that was right there on the pretty bay in the marina.
They were both sun-kissed and bright, and he had spent the better part of an afternoon teaching her how to go down on him while he returned the favor on her.
This seems inefficient, she had complained.
It’s an exercise in patience and restraint, he had replied.
An inefficient and tedious lesson, she’d retorted. Did you know that you were this Catholic, Giaco?
He had laughed, because she always made him laugh, and then made certain that she had better things to do with her mouth.
Now he reached over and took her hand across the small table, playing with the rings he’d put on her finger.
It was an enduring shock to find how much he liked them there.
The rings themselves and the very idea of this woman wearing his mark—this claim he’d put on her.
He liked it more than he’d ever imagined he could like such a thing.
His mother had not raised him to think highly of the institution of marriage.
He had taken her around the island over these days that bled one into the next.
They had explored the Roman ruins. They had driven through the rural splendor of Anacapri.
They had climbed in the hills, lain out on the beaches, and found ways to have sex in a variety of public places like they were a pair of teenagers.
Though he couldn’t recall having quite as much fun when he’d actually been one.
Normally, if someone accused him of something like being pensive, he would drawl something impertinent, change the subject, and have them wondering why they’d imagine him capable of such a thing.
But this was Ivy. “I don’t feel pensive,” he said. “Or not unduly so.”
She leaned closer and propped her chin on her hand.
“Do you think it’s Capri that has changed us?” she asked, with that directness and simplicity that killed him every time. “Or do you think we’re not changed and this is simply a fun holiday, and when we go back we will simply…act as if this never happened?”
He found that his ribs hurt and he could not account for it. “I think that learning how to live in the moment, since it’s the only thing we really have, is always wise,” he told her.
Yet Ivy, rather than taking his sage counsel, rolled her eyes. “I love when you say things like that.” Though her tone suggested that she did not, in fact, love it. “Because, of course, you like to make it seem as if you’ve lived only in the moment your whole life. But I know better.”
“Ask anyone,” he dared her, but not in his usual joking, careless tone. There was something else inside him tonight. It felt almost like a kind of grief. “I am reckless, untrustworthy, undependable, and impossible to pin down. I will run through your hands like water and leave no trace behind.”
She shrugged. “That’s not my experience.”
He blinked, not sure if he was taken aback by what she’d said or that brisk tone she’d used. As if it was so obvious that she wasn’t sure why she was even saying it out loud.
“I mean it,” she said when all he could manage to do was stare at her.
“You tried, back at the castle. You did your best, but that version of you that everyone seems to know is not at all believable once a person spends time with you.” She tilted her head slightly to one side then and he had the strangest urge to pull his hand away from hers.
That he didn’t felt heroic. “But it seems as if you believe it.”
And there were so many things he couldn’t tell her. Secrets he had agreed to keep—secrets that had never been any hardship to keep. This had all been too long coming. It had taken years.
He wanted to tell her, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her—it was the simple truth that he didn’t trust himself.
Giaco had kept his secret for so long that it had become a kind of superstition. He worried that if he shared it with anyone, for any reason, that would make certain that it all fell apart. That he would fail when he was so close to the end.
He didn’t dare risk it.
He couldn’t risk it.
But he also couldn’t play his usual role with her any longer.
Not after the weeks they’d spent on this island, wrapped up in each other.
Not only would she not believe it, but for the first time in as long as he could recall, he couldn’t.
He didn’t have it in him. Not now. Not when they’d learned so many truths about each other while they’d been here.
Everything on the island of Capri was bright. The sun, the sea. The colors of the buildings, the smiles of all the people.
The two of them were, too.
Sometimes he was certain that Ivy knew as well as he did that they could only stay safe if they kept away from the shadows.
“I know exactly who I am,” he told her, and that was true. He played with her hand in his, moving her rings on her finger. “You asked me for no masks and I’m not wearing one. Maybe I am pensive, little saint. Maybe this is who I am when no one’s looking.”
“I’m looking,” she whispered.
“But you are like the moon over the sea,” he told her, not sure where the words were coming from—only that they needed to be said.
That he had to say them, like they were coming from a part of him Giaco barely knew.
“Not a spotlight or flashbulb. And don’t you know?
Everyone looks better in the moonlight.”
She shook her head at him, and then leaned across the table to kiss him. It was sweet. It was perfect. It was only a kiss, and they were in public, so there could be no deepening it.
Not that the public part mattered as much as the kind of public this was. A restaurant was not a hiking trail. It was not a grotto off the beaten path where it was worth the risk.
That was not the sort of press Giaco wished to make.
So she kissed him, and they held hands over the table, and it was so simple.
It was so easy to be here, sipping Capri spritzes beneath the stars while gentle music played.
They ate food fresh from the sea and simple, perfect Caprese salads and talked of absolutely nothing at all—yet hung on each other’s words.
And that was when Giaco knew.
Not in the storm of sex or the intensity of desire. Not that those things were absent in this moment. He knew they were never far.
But right now, in the sea air, it was as simple as the ringing of a bell tower calling out the hour.
It wasn’t a feeling. It was a fact.
For the first time in his entire life, the most infamous despoiler of women in Europe was in love.
Head over heels, impossibly, and probably irreversibly in love.
That fact settled in him, and he let it.
When they finished their meal and headed back down the ancient streets toward his car, he took her hand and guided her into the moonlight, away from the shadows.
They were there another week before the call came.
Another week of shadowless, impossible joy.
Then his mobile buzzed early one morning. Giaco almost pretended he didn’t hear it—and that told him things he wasn’t sure he wanted to know about himself. How much these weeks had changed him. How much she had changed him.
But the only way out was through. He had always known that. Really, that had been the point. Giaco had never anticipated meeting someone who would make him regret all these choices he’d made and committed to, long ago.
Or, if not regret them, understand that once he went through with this thing that he had been working toward for so long, it would change them, too.
He could not see how it could not. For one thing, it would fundamentally disrupt the agreement that he and Ivy had made.
He hadn’t considered that a factor when he’d agreed to their marriage. He hadn’t expected to care.
And little as he wanted to risk this now, he knew there was no choice.
He’d made this decision long ago.
It defined him.
Giaco rolled out of bed and he took his mobile outside, out onto one of the terraces that looked down at the sea that seemed to have become part of him now. Much like this island that didn’t feel to him like a means to an end. Not any longer.
Nothing felt that way, and that was a problem, because the end was nigh.
He picked up the call and asked one question. “Is it ready?”
The voice on the other end of the call sounded as dark as Giaco felt. “It is.”
Giaco rang off and stayed where he was, his hands braced on the rail before him.
He could see the hint of dawn, those bright summer colors streaking over the horizon, as if he was watching a painting in real time.
Behind him, he knew that Ivy, his wife—his wife, and that mattered more than it should—was warm in their bed, that lush body of hers always willing, always ready, always somehow new.
But he had always known that this would end. He had always known that this day would come.
So he went back inside and he scribbled a note to her, then left it by the bed. When he was done he leaned over and smoothed her hair back from her face. She murmured something in her sleep, and then quieted when he kissed her on one flushed cheek.
Then he walked away, made a few terse phone calls to make arrangements, and drove away from the villa before the sun fully made it over the horizon.
Even when he was in the helicopter, flying high on his way back to the mainland, he was fully aware that he had left his heart behind.
Giaco would have sworn he didn’t have one.
And now it didn’t matter, because it was hers.