Chapter Six #2
He tuned out whatever Marcus was talking about and focused on what was going on further out around them.
He felt people’s gazes on him, saw the whispering behind hands, over champagne flutes as if that would hide the scathing attention they turned his way.
He should be happy, surely. So why wasn’t he?
The twinkling lights hung around the garden flashed like paparazzo cameras and he was no longer at the party here on Isola del Giglio.
Instead, he was nine years old, walking alone down the steps of the law court where his parents’ obscenely public divorce had taken on the weight of a show trial.
The public was ravenous for the airing of their dirty laundry—the affairs, the substance abuse, the alcoholism, the neglect.
In stark contrast to the near violent silence of his extended family, of the famous Gio Gallo.
No one seemed to care about the time when, aged seven, he’d been left at his boarding school over the Christmas break because each of his parents thought the other had picked him up.
The time at the age of twelve when he’d been propositioned by one of his father’s lovers.
Or when at fourteen he’d had to call an ambulance for his mother, after she had combined too much alcohol with pills.
All of that, he could have managed... Had they left him out of it.
Had they not used him as some kind of points system to make the other parent look worse.
Had their love for him been anything more than glitz and glamor, used to serve their own ends.
So no, people like them, people like Erin Carter. ..they deserved what they got.
Erin washed her hands in the basin of a bathroom dominated in so much gold baroque moulding, she worried that the ceiling might come down. She almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it, until she heard the very real laughter from the stalls behind her.
‘Oh my god, did you see her!’
A high tittering laugh pre-empted the response. ‘Jeanie, she looks horrendous. What was she thinking?’
Instinctively, Erin felt bad for whoever it was. She’d never liked the mean-girl mentality. Not after switching schools at such a difficult age.
‘Is she trying to make a statement do you think?’
‘What? That she could wear that and still marry Rossetti?’
Erin’s heart dropped.
‘No! No, he can’t be marrying her . She looks like a big bruise.’
Tears pricked the back of her eyes and she bit her lip, unable to stop herself from running her gaze over her face and skin. The dress was horrible. And she did look bad.
‘Or an advert for seasickness tablets,’ came the callous reply.
She heard the flush of toilets and launched herself from the room as quickly as she possibly could, her heart pounding and an ugly flush creeping across her skin that would only make things worse.
Heat and panic exponentially increased the flush and she rushed to get outside, pushing past people who were openly staring at her, or whispering behind their hands.
She shook her head and tried to calm herself, even though this was like a nightmare come to life. Her throat thickened and she begged herself, pleaded with herself not to cry, but her desperation just made it all worse.
She forced herself to slow down and not rush for the nearest shadowy corner to hide in. It wasn’t Erin Carter who was experiencing this, it was Rin. And Rin was strong enough to handle this. She was. She had to be.
Tears blurred the edges of her vision, but she could still see people pointing and staring.
Nausea crept upwards from her stomach and by the time she reached Enzo talking to Cynthia who simply gazed over her head as if looking for someone not beneath her notice, even Rin had been reduced to a cowering wreck.
She should never have worn the dress. She should never have been so desperate to get what she wanted, that she’d not only go against something she knew would backfire, but also.
..was this punishment? Was this deserved?
Was it karma? She was, after all, pretending that she loved a man in order to marry him, just so she could get her hands on her family’s business.
‘Rin,’ Marcus said, trying to bring her into the circle of conversation. ‘We were just saying...’
But Erin didn’t hear what they were just saying, because over Enzo’s shoulder, someone was taking a picture of her with their phone and laughing.
This wasn’t going to just stay at the party.
It was going to go viral. She felt the blood drain from her face, the way pins and needles were pricking her skin, her breath locking in her chest.
Enzo moved to stand in her line of sight, but she didn’t quite see him. She just saw people. Laughing. And camera phones.
‘Rin?’ His voice sounded muffled and she knew that she was on the verge of a panic attack, but everything was spiralling out of her control even as she hastily tried to call it all back.
Then she felt his hand on her cheek, his thumb on her pulse at her neck. She was able to focus long enough to see concern in his steady gaze, beneath the barely leashed fury.
Fury? Why was he angry?
‘We’re leaving. Now.’
All she could do was nod, as he led her away from the people talking and whispering and laughing.
Oh, she was sure that not everyone was talking about her, but it was too much.
Too similar to the bullying that she’d experienced at school in Falmouth.
The laughter, the jokes, the pranks. The humiliation .
And the way she’d been told just to ignore it. To just get over it. Keep your head down and it’ll all be over soon. They’ll get bored eventually and move on.
But they’d been so damn wrong. Because they hadn’t got bored. And because it hadn’t ended. Oh, she might not have seen the bullies that made her life so terrible. But that didn’t mean that the impact they’d had on her life was over.
Her body was vibrating, a million tremors a second, shivering across oversensitive skin. Enzo shucked off the black tuxedo jacket as they emerged back out into the long garden.
The speedboat was waiting at the jetty, the pilot immediately jumping to attention, surprised at seeing them so soon. Enzo ushered Erin onto the boat, where thankfully the power of the engines masked the power of her body’s shock.
This is stupid. Stop it. Stop it or he’ll get suspicious.
She laughed bitterly at herself, as if he hadn’t already seen enough.
Rin wouldn’t have been so affected by this.
Rin would never have been bullied. She was sophisticated and worldly and everyone would have liked Rin.
No one would ever have bullied her . She bit her lip hard , hoping to shut off the spiralling thoughts.
She had to pull herself out now or her panic would crash over her like a tsunami and pull her under.
By the time they got to the yacht Erin had stopped shivering and Enzo was a seething mass of helpless anger and fury. He didn’t know what had happened, but it was obvious that it was because of the dress and the way that people had reacted.
He’d thought that she would be embarrassed, that a few people would laugh and point, maybe a comment or two.
It had been worse than that, and he should have known that.
But Rin’s response had been the exact opposite of what he’d expected.
He’d thought that she’d laugh it off and ride it out, brazenly owning it rather than. .. this .
Her entire demeanour had changed. It was as if she had folded in on herself and was physically beaten down. And there was nothing remotely artificial about it.
She turned to head towards the suites.
‘Rin?’
She didn’t stop. He wasn’t sure whether he’d heard her or not, so he called her name at the same time as touching her shoulder. She didn’t flinch exactly, but he couldn’t let her go off alone, not now, not like this.
‘I’m sorry. I’m tired,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘I think I’m going to—’
‘I won’t keep you for long,’ he promised.
He guided her towards the back of the yacht, the staff giving them whatever space they needed. He leaned against the safety rail, the evening warm enough despite not wearing the jacket he’d given to Rin. The yacht was anchored so the only breeze was the one that came off the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Guilt twisted in his gut. A perverse part of him had wanted to punish her, to give her a little taste of vengeance, but not like this. Nothing like this. If this was how she reacted to the dress...then what would happen at the altar?
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, turning to face her, the moonlight making her glow. ‘I should never have suggested you wear that dress.’
She shook her head, not blaming him, but also not realising that she should have.
‘It’s not about the dress.’
‘Well, it is —’ he insisted before she cut him off.
‘It’s not ,’ she said definitively, with a little more of the strength he associated with Rin Carter. ‘Someone else could have worn that dress and laughed it off,’ she admitted with a helpless shrug.
‘But not you?’ he asked, wanting to know why. Wanting to know more .
Her fingers stroked the black silk lapels of his jacket where she’d drawn it around herself.
‘When I was younger...’ she started, hesitantly, ‘at school, a few children spent a significant amount of time making me the butt of their jokes,’ she said, her head angled out to sea, the line of her profile as stark as her words. ‘And it hurt. And it still hurts,’ she admitted with a shrug.
‘You were bullied?’ he asked in surprise. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘Because I was different? Because I was tall? Because I sounded different? Because I have red hair? Because they thought we had money when they didn’t? We didn’t either. But that didn’t matter. I’d had money, and that was enough.’
‘What did they do?’ he asked, despite himself. This, he knew, instinctively, was the real Erin Carter, and it wasn’t just some sob story either.