Chapter Six #3
‘Hid my clothes after gym practice or swimming, took pictures of me changing. Started rumours. That my father was a drug dealer in London. That I was having sex with one of the teachers. That I had STDs. I can keep going, but I think you get the picture.’
Enzo swallowed. Horrified at how cruel those children could have been.
It must have been terrible for her. He knew a little of what that was like.
The lies printed in papers for the world to see.
How they ate away at you. How you were advised to ignore it and it would all go away.
But it didn’t. If you ignored them, they just got worse.
So Enzo had forced himself to stop caring. He’d told himself it didn’t matter. He’d brazened it out and made it a joke, the way he thought that Rin would have done about the dress.
But she hadn’t.
Rin. His fiancée. His now very public fiancée. He cursed. Did she even know what she’d gotten herself into? Tangling with him like this? What on earth would make her do such a thing? He shook his head and looked out to sea.
‘You know that marrying me will draw attention? A lot of it.’
He saw the line of her jaw tense.
‘From the press. There will be articles written, photographs taken. Things that will make you look good and bad. Things will be dug up about you. They will actively put you in situations that are meant to provoke. To taunt. To do anything to incite a newsworthy response.’
When he’d been a child, the press had done everything in their power to goad him into answers about his parents, into providing his thoughts, or his feelings about their infamous arguments and public divorces.
They’d tried to bribe teachers and friends and gone through rubbish bins and hacked email accounts.
‘I know,’ she said, determinedly.
‘You’re prepared for that?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a conviction and determination he couldn’t read. A generous man would think it love. A cynical man would think it desperation.
‘Are you sure?’ Enzo no longer knew whether he was asking her or him.
‘Of course,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I cannot wait to marry you, Mr Rossetti,’ she said, her smile more game than anything.
He shook his head, disappointed. And shoving aside the thought that wondered what it could have been like if she wasn’t trying to con him and he wasn’t trying to win. And for just a moment, he gave up the fight. Wanting to give her something. Wanting to offer her some salve for her hurts.
He looked at her, gazing back at him defiantly, the moonlight lovingly picking out the curve of her cheek, the top of her ear from where the tumble of long red waves cascaded down her back, such a dark ruby red it blended with the black of his tux jacket.
‘The only reason to mock,’ he said, ‘is because they can’t bear to be mocked themselves. They lash out before they can be lashed. It doesn’t make it right, but perhaps it helps a little to understand it.’
Her eyes flared at his words.
‘No one deserves what happened to you,’ he said with vehemence. ‘And I’m sorry it happened. But what I see when I look at you is not some cowed, beaten young woman.’
‘What do you see?’ she asked, her words a whisper.
‘A powerful, determined, fierce and beautiful woman,’ he said with nothing but the absolute truth. ‘The only, the only , reason for taunting you over your hair,’ he said, picking up the end of a loose wave and rubbing the silk of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, ‘is jealousy.’
He released the tendril of hair, telling himself to back away.
That whatever it was between them—and there was something between them—was far too vulnerable that night.
But just when he would have moved away, she reached up to cup his jaw.
Her touch sent sparks across his skin, tightening and stretching things that really, he should have much better control over.
Her gaze flickered from his lips to his eyes, as if worried he might do something she wasn’t prepared for. He waited, curious despite himself, to see what she would do.
She leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his. Another chaste kiss that drove a silent cry of need through his body.
Her lips shaped his, the slightest opening taunting him, begging him to prise open her mouth with his tongue and take everything he found within.
Eyes open, he saw the minor furrow of her brow as if she were just a little frustrated, the whisper of a moan for something more on the wind between them.
He pulled back just an inch from her lips, feeling more tempted than Eve had been by the apple.
He shook his head again. ‘I told you,’ he said regretfully. ‘I would not allow you to give me pleasure before our wedding.’
She blinked. ‘That was for me,’ she confessed, her words knocking the breath from his lungs, lifting the leash from his neck.
Barely before the words had even left her mouth, had he reclaimed her lips with his.
His hands were sinking into her hair and drawing her against him, angling her to the perfect position, to where he could all but consume her whole.
A firestorm engulfed them, his heart racing as if he’d run a marathon, her breath heaving her chest against his, her hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him deeper against her, she shifted in his hold, seeking for the very same thing he was searching for.
His hands pushed away the ridiculous volume of that damn dress to try and reach her, but couldn’t seem to grasp her, breaking the moment with a frustrated laugh from Rin. And Enzo found himself both damned and saved by a mess of his own making.
‘I should go to bed,’ she said, perhaps unaware of the yearning in her tone to do the opposite.
‘Yes, you should,’ Enzo confirmed with a nod, not looking at her, half fearful that if he did, he’d do something monumentally stupid like beg her to stay.
There was a pause, where an infinite number of possibilities passed between them and in the end only one was chosen.
‘Thank you,’ Rin said.
And the thin-lipped smile was all he could muster, as he stayed back by the railing, more at sea with his thoughts than he had ever been in his entire life.
He just didn’t know anymore. Was this the real Erin, or was the truth to be found in the one conversation he’d overheard?
Was she acting? Was she that good? Or was he just so caught up in her wiles that he’d forgotten everything he’d learned from the games his parents had played?