Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
GIA
I think I'm going to puke.
The reception is behind the church and it is, objectively, stunning. White tents catching the evening breeze. String lights strung overhead like someone trapped the stars and put them to work. Tables with crystal and silver and flowers that probably cost more than my entire Paris apartment.
All of it is beautiful. All of it a lie dressed up in expensive fabric, exactly like everything else in my world.
People descend on us the second we step through the tent entrance.
Congratulations, Gia, welcome home, Gia, we've missed you, Gia.
Men pump Rafael's hand and look at me the way you look at a piece of real estate, calculating square footage and resale value.
Women kiss both my cheeks and wait until I've half turned away before they start talking.
I can feel every assessment. Every whispered comment. Every pair of eyes measuring me against whatever version of me they filed away five years ago. I want to tell them all to get out of my face but I smile instead because I am Salvatore De Luca's daughter and I know how to perform.
I shake hands. I accept kisses. I say thank you and yes, it's wonderful to be home and no, I haven't changed a bit.
I am dying inside.
And I cannot find Laura anywhere.
I've been scanning since we walked in. She should be easy to spot in a room full of adults and she is nowhere. Not at the tables near the back. Not by the entrance. Not with the cluster of younger women standing near the champagne.
Where is she??
"You're looking for someone."
I turn.
Rafael is beside me and I did not hear him coming, which should be impossible because the man is the size of a small building, but here we are.
He moves through crowds the way water moves through rock.
I watched him do it from across the room before I could stop myself watching.
The way people shift without realizing it to make space for him.
The way he accepted a glass of champagne from a passing waiter without breaking stride, long fingers closing around the stem with a casual ease that made my brain do something stupid and unhelpful.
Goodness, he really is pleasing to the eye.
To my eye.
He still has the glass. He's not drinking it. He's just holding it, relaxed, at his side.
I am noticing his hands again and I need to stop noticing them. They are just hands that happen to be large and scarred and I am not thinking about how they felt on my throat, absolutely not.
Stop. Immediately. Stop.
"My sister." I pull my gaze up to his face, which is not actually safer but at least feels less like a betrayal of my own dignity. "Laura. She was at the church and she's not here and I need to know where she is."
"The little one."
I narrow my eyes. “Yes. The little one. My nine-year-old sister who doesn't know a single person at this reception.
" I turn to face him, tipping my chin up because I refuse to feel small next to him even though he has several inches on me and a presence that takes up approximately three times more space than his body actually occupies. "Where is she?”
He looks at me for a moment. Actually, thinking about it, not dismissing it.
"Probably somewhere quiet," he says. "Away from all this."
He gestures at the reception around us. Men closing deals over champagne. Women moving through the crowd like information is currency and they are very, very wealthy. The whole ugly performance of our world, violence in evening wear, murder discussed between the fish course and dessert.
"She's nine," I say. "She shouldn't be here at all."
"Neither should you."
The honesty of it catches me completely off guard. I look at him, searching for the strategy underneath it, the angle, the thing he wants me to think so I'll do something useful for him.
Is that sympathy? Or is this calculated, is this him making me feel like he's on my side so I'll—
"And yet here we are," I say.
"Here we are."
He doesn't move away. Doesn't fill the silence with small talk the way men do when they're performing charm.
He just stands beside me, close enough that I catch his cologne, dark and clean and unreasonably distracting, and I am furious at the specific way my body keeps registering his proximity like it's important information I need to act on.
He is standing extremely close and he knows exactly how close he is and he is not moving and I am not going to be the one who steps back first because that would mean he wins something and I don't even know what we're competing for.
"So," he says, voice dropping just slightly, not casual at all underneath the casual. "Where have you been."
"I'm sorry?"
"Five years." He tilts his head, just slightly, and I catch the line of his jaw, the scar there, the shadow of stubble, and I drag my eyes back up to his and he has absolutely noticed me doing it.
I can tell by the way his expression doesn't change at all, which is somehow worse than if he'd smirked.
"You know, the Ghost Heiress. You disappeared. Now you're back. Where'd you go?"
"Away," I say.
"That's not an answer, Gia."
The way he says my name like it already belongs in his mouth. Something skitters up the back of my neck and I refuse to name it.
"It's the only one you're getting," I say.
Something moves through his expression. "You always this friendly?"
"Only with men who ask invasive questions at my own wedding reception."
"Our wedding reception."
"Semantics."
His mouth does an almost-smile that’s so sexy, it is not fair. "You've got a mouth on you."
"Is that going to be a problem?"
He looks at me. Slow. Deliberate. Starting at my eyes and dropping, just briefly, just for a fraction of a second, to my mouth. Then back up.
"I don't know yet," he says. "Depends on what you do with it."
The words land and my brain, my absolute traitor of a brain, goes somewhere it has absolutely no business going.
His mouth on mine in that church. The hand at my throat.
The way he kissed me, taking his time about it, like I was something worth taking his time about, and now he's standing here looking at me like he can see every single thought currently running through my head and finding all of them extremely interesting.
Do not think about it. Do not think about what it would feel like if he—
Heat crawls up my throat and onto my face and I feel it happening and I cannot stop it and he sees it, I watch him see it, watch something shift in those green eyes from almost-amusement to something quieter and more dangerous, something that makes it very clear he knows exactly where my mind just went.
I glare at him.
He says nothing. Just holds my gaze with that infuriating patience and the corner of his mouth moves, barely, just enough to make me want to say something extremely rude.
I hate him. I hate him and I want to put my hands on him and I hate that too and this entire situation is a disaster.
"Your father says you'll be compliant," he says, the word sitting in his mouth like something he's already decided is wrong.
"My father says a lot of things."
"So, you'll not."
"Would you prefer I was?"
"I don't know." His gaze holds mine and doesn't let go. "Would you prefer I expected it?"
The air between us does something. It's not metaphorical, it's physical, a charge that sits in the six inches of space between my body and his and makes me aware of every one of those inches in a way that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that I have not stood this close to a man who looked at me like this in four years and my body has clearly decided that four years is long enough and is now staging a full revolt against everything my brain is trying to tell it.
Stop. You are at your own wedding reception. Your father just sold you to this man. You do not get to want him. You especially do not get to want him like this, like you're already thinking about what his hands would feel like if he—
I make myself breathe normally.
"I didn't know you had a sister," he says, and the shift in subject feels almost like mercy.
"Why would you."
"I know the De Luca family tree. Your father. Vittorio." A pause. "You. Nobody mentioned a younger sister."
"Laura's been kept out of everything." I gesture at the reception, the guests, the whole machine of it. "My father prefers it that way."
"To protect her or to keep her useful later."
The question lands somewhere I wasn't prepared for and I have to work not to let it show. Because the answer is the second one and we both know it. Hearing it said out loud does something specific and ugly to my chest.
"We both know," I say.
I don't like how clearly he reads things. I don't like that he asked that question and watched my face while he did it, like he already knew what it was going to find there.
"She's nine," I say. "She doesn't need to be part of this yet."
"Yet," he repeats.
We go quiet. Around us, the reception carries on, all laughter and expensive wine pretending.
My father is across the tent talking to someone I don't recognize, already calculating his next move, already somewhere else entirely. He hasn't looked at me once since the ceremony. Delivered and received and filed away.
It should not still hurt. I am twenty-four years old and I know exactly what I am to him. I have known since I was old enough to understand what the word asset means. It should not still land like a fist every single time.
It does though.
"You didn't answer me," Rafael says quietly. "Earlier. At the altar."
"You asked if I wanted to stop the ceremony. I said no."
"That's not what I asked." His voice drops. "I asked if you wanted me to stop this. There's a difference."
"Is there."
"Yeah." He's looking out at the crowd, not at me, and somehow that makes it easier and harder simultaneously. "One's about the ceremony. The other's about everything that comes after."
My throat tightens. "And what comes after?"