Chapter Seven #3
She shook her head. The sun setting behind the villa reached out a warm glow across the rolling hills dropping away in the background, but picked Antonio out in near perfect detail.
Unconsciously, her left eye closed just to take him in, in single form, but she blinked her eyes back open when it became too much.
Noticing the flicker in her left eye, Antonio extricated himself from the car, closed the door and went to stand before her.
Boosted up by a few steps from where he stood, they were at eye level.
And he needed that. He needed to see her expressive features up close, to see behind the words she carefully chose.
Because no matter how hard Ivy tried to conceal it, her expressions made the truth as clear to him as a person’s future to a palm reader.
‘Micha found me about a year ago at the library. He introduced himself as working on behalf of your grandfather. He explained that they understood that we were married, but that it was only one of convenience. That Gio believed your point had been made, but he was still adamant that you should marry Maria.’
Antonio nodded, barely able to keep himself in check as he asked his next question. ‘Did they threaten you?’
The quick flicker of confusion and disbelief across Ivy’s face were answer enough, even before she spoke.
‘No. My dealings with Micha were…’ she shrugged ‘…cordial? I like him, actually.’
This time it was Antonio’s turn to be full of disbelief.
‘You like him? Micha?’ he demanded, unable to stem the sudden burst of jealousy that poured through him like a freshly tapped oilwell.
‘He’s arrogant and manipulative,’ he pointed out.
‘He’s mulish and disrespectful. I do not see what there is to like. ’
Ivy smirked, her eyebrow artfully disdainful of his observation, and for some reason the look was breathtaking on her.
‘Really? I found him quite similar in personality to you, actually.’
‘Take that back,’ Antonio demanded, wholly aware that he was sounding like a petulant teenager and absolutely unable to stop himself.
‘You don’t see it?’ she questioned instead, the smile on delicately pink lips playful.
And in that moment he did see it. Not the similarity between him and the man who had been, at one point, almost as close to him as Maria. What Antonio saw was Ivy’s beauty. Somewhere along the way it had wrapped around his chest and taken hold.
There, in the dusk, as the sun played off the golden shards in her eyes and the caramel embers in her chestnut locks, he realised just how beautiful she was. Heat spread through him, pushing at the anger and burning into darkness, bringing light to long-forgotten places.
‘He is disloyal,’ Antonio said, thinking of their childhood friendship and desperately holding onto the thread of their conversation rather than his body’s reaction to her proximity.
‘I…’ she narrowed her eyes in consideration ‘… I don’t think that’s true. It’s just that perhaps his loyalty is not to those you are loyal to.’
Internally, Antonio flinched. Ivy’s keen observation of the dynamics of his family surprised him. Micha owed a debt to Gio Gallo, and had done even when they were younger. But that wasn’t what Antonio was really interested in.
‘Why didn’t you say yes? Why didn’t you take the money?’ he asked. She’d been offered twice what he’d given her six years ago. She hadn’t taken that for herself, but she’d taken ninety thousand for her library? The woman had no sense at all.
Discomfort clouded her gaze and in a quiet voice she said, ‘I don’t want the money. And I made my vows to you, not to Micha or your grandfather.’
She might as well have knocked him to the floor.
‘The only person who had the right to ask me for a divorce was you,’ she continued.
‘And what if I’d never asked you for one?’ he demanded, lips numb.
For the first time, there was nothing in her gaze. Everything stilled, Ivy apparently having learned to be wary just when he wanted to see her most. Her silence was her answer.
‘Would you never have wanted a divorce for yourself? What if you met someone?’ he asked, his curiosity suddenly inflamed.
This woman was self-sacrificing to her own detriment.
She could have bought herself a home outright with half a million.
Security. She could have met someone and…
He found himself growling at the thought before he could stop himself.
‘Okay, I no longer understand what you’re mad about,’ Ivy announced. ‘That I didn’t want to divorce you? Or that I didn’t tell you they’d tried to pay me to?’
‘Both.’
‘Why?’ she demanded just as hotly as he’d replied.
‘Because you refuse to do even the most basic things to protect yourself, and this world is not kind to people like that,’ he said, unable to help himself.
‘How dare you say that?’ she hurled back, as if outraged.
‘Everything I have done for the past three years was about clawing my way back from the darkest of days. Every day, every hour, every minute fought for, battled, and won. Even if it was just an inch. Even if it was just getting out of bed in the early days. So don’t you dare tell me that I can’t protect myself, just because I chose to do it in ways you don’t recognise. ’
Her finger prodded at his sternum accusatorily, but it was the truth she spoke that struck the real blow.
Because she was right. The knife sticking in his gut and twisting was the fact that, for all his words about having to protect his loved ones, Maria and his mother, for being a better man than his father, and his grandfather…the truth was that all this time it was Ivy who had been protecting him .