Chapter 13 Megan
MEGAN
“Wh-what are you doing?”
My mind is blank. I still haven’t processed the news that Gio is engaged to be married to the beautiful woman who was here a short while ago, and now this…
I shake my head, turn around, and walk towards the elevator. And back again.
I can’t leave without Amber.
I can’t leave, period, because there’s a fucking sociopath out there watching me.
I should never have come to America. I stare at the closed elevator door, wondering who is going to step out of it next. Gio’s sister, Bianca? Someone else Gio promised to marry? Amber’s father? If it’s such a private elevator, how did Lucia get into the apartment?
I turn around and face Gio. My stomach feels as though I binged on cold semolina and it’s making me feel nauseous. Of course, Lucia got into the apartment; the concierge would’ve recognized her.
“Get up, Gio.” I don’t even recognize my own voice. It sounds flattened. Dead. Only I don’t have time to wallow in self-pity because I need to get Amber away from here.
He rises, but something in my tone stops him from coming any closer.
“I’m serious, Meggie. I want to marry you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to adopt Amber so that we can be a family.”
“Ha!” I scoff. “Aren’t you forgetting something? You’re engaged to someone else. That woman—” I throw my arm manically behind me in the direction of the elevator, loathing this side of me that he has brought to the surface “—is wearing your ring. You… You bought her a diamond!”
The implications are only now starting to hit me.
At some point, Gio visited a jeweler’s and chose a diamond for Lucia, so that he could propose to her.
Elisabetta I could forgive—they were childhood sweethearts encouraged to marry by their families—but this is different.
This was a conscious decision made by an adult.
Did he go down on one knee when he proposed to Lucia?
“I know how it sounds, Meggie, but I didn’t buy her a diamond ring. She has her mother’s engagement ring.”
“Oh, well that makes it alright then.”
Somehow, I seem to have found my mom’s voice, the one she often used before she divorced my dad. The one laced with sarcasm and bitterness and smothered with black honey.
“Why didn’t you say so sooner?” There it is again. “Maybe Lucia and I could’ve got acquainted over a coffee and a slice of cake. We could’ve compared notes on how long it took you to get into our panties.”
The tears surface like a volcano erupting.
I don’t want him to see me cry, but I can’t seem to stop them.
I’m angry with him. I want to pound his chest with my fists and make him hurt the way I’m hurting right now, but somehow, my pussy never got the same memo.
Because I know that if he ripped my clothes off me and bent me over right here in his foyer, I’d still beg him to fuck me till I can’t walk.
Warm hands grip my arms and pull me against his solid chest. Gio folds his arms around me, strokes my hair, murmurs sounds that I can’t decipher through the sobs racking my body.
I don’t know how long we stand there like this in the foyer of Gio’s apartment, me sobbing, Gio soothing.
Eventually, the tears begin to subside, and the choking sobs diminish to the occasional shoulder-jerking sniff. They leave me exhausted, numb, wrung out, but as they fade, fear sneaks back in, gripping my heart and squeezing the life out of it.
I tear myself free from Gio’s embrace. “I have to go.”
“Not like this, Meggie.”
Gio is standing between me and the rest of the apartment, and I don’t know if it’s a deliberate stance, placing himself between me and Amber, or if he’s waiting to catch me when I collapse.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how else you want me to leave it. Amber’s father is out there. He—”
“I know. Trust me, I know how you’re feeling right now, fiore.”
A twisted smile appears of its own accord, hovering at the corners of my mouth. “You have no idea how I’m feeling, Gio. I didn’t lie to you.”
He closes his eyes briefly. “I’m sorry, Meggie.
I wish I could turn back the clock and start over but just consider how you’d have reacted if I’d told you that I was engaged to be married to a woman I don’t love.
A woman I don’t even like. A woman I see a couple of times a year when our paths cross in Sicily.
” He pauses. “It wouldn’t have changed me—I’m still that same person.
But it would have altered your perception of me. ”
I swallow, and it feels like there’s a boulder lodged inside my throat.
He’s right. What would I have done? Would I have believed him and fucked him anyway, or would I have insisted that he take me and Amber straight back to LA, knowing that I’d never see him again?
The thought of walking out of here one final time makes me want to curl up into a ball and spend the rest of my life under a rock where it’s dark and damp, and all I have to worry about is stretching my legs.
I already know the answer.
“It’s too late, Gio.”
“Don’t say that.” He shakes his head and holds onto my hands like he can’t bear to let me go. “It’s never too late.”
“That’s just a motivational quote used by people trying to sell online courses.”
Gio smiles, and my heart rips open a little bit more.
“You don’t believe that, Meggie. You’re not that cynical person. You’re all that’s right in the world. You’re light and love and laughter.”
He’s saying all the right words, and I so desperately want to believe him. It would be so easy to stand on tiptoes, kiss his perfect lips, and tell him that I love him, but something inside me hardened when Lucia stepped out of the elevator and said the words, “I’m Lucia, Giovanni’s fiancée.”
If he could lie to me about something so important, what else has he lied about?
“I don’t feel like I’m any of those things, Gio.”
“I’m so sorry, Meggie. This is all my fault. Please let me make it up to you.”
“By proposing to me?”
“Actions speak louder than words.” He watches me with such innocent, na?ve hope in his eyes that I almost forgive him.
Almost.
It’s too fresh, too raw, and right now, my skull feels too small for all the problems I need to resolve.
“I love you, Meggie. I’ll never stop loving you, and I’ll never stop trying to prove it to you. Ever.”
His phone rings, and I see the debate playing out behind his eyes. He’s obviously expecting an important call, but he’s in the middle of a declaration of love. Should he decide to answer the call, the moment will be ruined.
I make it easy for him. “You should get that.”
He drags his eyes away from me as he slides his cell phone from his pocket.
He doesn’t speak. He turns his back and crosses the room to peer out of the window at the city below where life is carrying on as normal.
Regular people with regular problems like what to have for dinner, or what to wear on a first date, or how to stop a leaky faucet from dripping.
When he comes back, I know that it isn’t good news by the stormy flecks in his deep-brown eyes.
“Amber’s father flew into New York yesterday. My men have tracked him on the airport CCTV. He used a different name, fake ID, traveled economy class with a woman claiming to be his wife.”
It’s hard to breathe. The note flashes in front of my eyes.
I’M WATCHING YOU.
“Where is he now?”
He releases a deep sigh. “We don’t know.”
“I’m leaving.”
I walk from the foyer to the guest room, head down, so that I don’t see the fish drifting leisurely around the aquarium, the cupcakes in a container on the breakfast island counter, Amber’s sneakers where she left them in the hallway.
I open the bedroom door and spot the soft toys lined up beneath the comforter, heads on the pillows, where Amber left them this morning.
In the dressing room, I pick up the clothes Amber and I were wearing when we traveled to New York on Gio’s private jet, and stuff them inside a tote bag that Gio bought at Central Park Zoo. There’s a picture of a sea lion on the front standing on a rock.
“I’ll send you the money for the bag.” I face Gio who is watching me from the doorway.
He crosses the room in a few strides and stands in front of me. “Meggie, you know I can’t let you go.”
“You have no choice.”
I stare at him, willing him to move out of my way before I crack and beg him to take us away from here.
It’s me and Amber now, the way it has always been.
We were safe in London. Small and safe and inconsequential.
Gio is too big for us. Because of him, Amber’s father knows exactly where to find us.
“You promised that we would be safe here.” It’s like listening to someone else speaking to the man I love, but this is the only way. I have to pretend that he means nothing to me, or I won’t be strong enough to walk away. “But we’re not safe. Are we, Gio?”
“I…”
His lips form words that don’t materialize, and in this moment, I realize that he isn’t the demi-god I created in my head when I first set eyes on him. He’s mortal just like me.
“I’m not angry with you, Gio.”
Somehow, the realization in his eyes that there are some things that even he cannot control, has given me the strength to pick myself up and do what I’ve always done.
Protect Amber. I never thought this would happen, but I feel more powerful than Giovanni Sabatelli, the man with a limitless bank account at his disposal and a team of bodyguards watching his back.
I’ve always been Megan Walsh, the girl who lost her mom and gained a sister to take care of. Whereas Gio is only just discovering that he has his limits. That he isn’t invincible.
I know exactly where this leaves me: back to where I started.
“Then let me help you.” He moves closer. “Come with me to Sicily. I have contacts there. The instant he sets foot on the island they’ll deal with him.”
“Deal with him?”
He licks his lips like he’s treading dangerously close to a line that he doesn’t want to cross. “He won’t get anywhere near you or Amber.”
“Deal with him how, Gio?”
Because it’s all beginning to slot into place. The bodyguards, the holster Ric wears, the Sicilian connections.
“Don’t make me spell it out, Meggie.”
“Are you part of—”
Before I can finish, his phone rings again.
This time, Gio doesn’t hesitate. The device is raised to his ear, and he’s facing away from me in a blink.
His shoulders are tense, and I wish that I could take off his shirt and massage his back.
I can already picture the angel wings tattoo beneath my lips, my hands snaking around him and tweaking his nipples, traveling south to the bulge inside his boxers…
“You have to let me help you, Meggie.”
Lost in my reverie, I didn’t even realize that he’d ended the call.
“What’s happened?” My voice has shrunk. It already knows what’s coming.
“A body has been discovered in LA.”
“A body?” I clamp both hands over my mouth while my mind instinctively tosses an image of Nikki’s naked body, bloody and broken, into the mix. “Nikki?”
“No, fiore.”
Gio wraps his arms around me, and I don’t fight it. My breathing is shallow, my brain playing catchup with the word no.
“A member of my security team at the film studio.” He doesn’t elaborate.
I hear his heart going thud-thud-thud through his shirt. I’ve no idea how well he knew the victim, but this has become personal now. We both know who’s responsible.
“I can’t let you go back to the UK, Meggie. You can’t go back home.”
I don’t hug him back. My time with him has an end date, and just for a short while, I want to remember how it feels to be loved by Giovanni Sabatelli.
Finally, I take a deep breath and stand back. “I can’t go with you to Sicily, Gio. He’ll find us there. He knows who you are.”
He must know. It’s the only explanation. How else would he have followed us from LA to New York and then tracked us down to a Central Park playground.
What scares me most is knowing that my fears were justified.
Any estranged father who cared about their child would follow the legal process to arrange contact.
They’d be patient. They’d prove that they had their offspring’s best interests at heart.
But that isn’t the case with Amber’s father. He wants me to be afraid.
And it’s working.
“We’ll go somewhere else.” I can see the thought process behind Gio’s eyes. “Europe. Asia. India. Wherever you want to go, but I’m coming with you. I’m not letting you do this alone.”
I don’t want to do this alone, but I have no choice. “You have to, Gio.”
Reality sinks in slowly, and the energy seems to drain from him when he realizes that what I’m saying makes sense. But he doesn’t stay down for long. I guess this is one of the benefits of being a billionaire.
“I have a private cabin in Vermont. You and Amber can stay there for as long as you want, Meggie. Ric will travel with you, and I’ll send the rest of my team ahead of your arrival.
” He looks at me, and I can see the glimmer of hope back in his eyes when I don’t refuse.
“I can’t let you take my private jet, but I’ll arrange for you to use a friend’s aircraft. ”
He must have reason to believe that Amber’s father is tracking his private jet.
“What about you? Where will you go?”
“Don’t worry about me. I have a plan.”
He figures out the details as he talks.
He’ll get someone else disguised as me to leave the apartment with him, Amber, and his security team, making sure that people notice them in the hotel lobby.
Fake-me will board his private jet and travel to Europe with a couple of stopovers in different countries to lose anyone potentially trailing her, while Gio vanishes with Amber.
Meanwhile, I’ll sneak into the car in the basement lot with Ric and hide in the footwell.
We’ll reconvene in a secret location—he won’t even tell me where it is—and his team will travel onward to Vermont with me and Amber.
I’ve read books set during WW2 where people were smuggled across borders in the trunks of vehicles. Gio’s absolute conviction that his plan will work has gotten under my skin, and that glimmer of hope in his eyes has become something contagious.
I must believe that we’ll be safe in Vermont, or what’s the point?
“Should we hide in the trunk?”
“If hiding in the trunk will make you feel safe, then sure.”
“What about you, Gio? What if he follows you?”
He smiles. “He’ll wish that he’d never been born, fiore. No one threatens the people I love and gets away with it.”
There’s an edge to his voice that I’ve never heard before. It’s sinister, menacing, and a shudder runs down my spine and raises goosebumps on my arms.
But when he pulls me into his arms and kisses me on the lips, I don’t resist.
He’s doing this for me. And Amber.
Maybe, when this is all over, I’ll be able to forgive him for lying to me.