Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Amanda
The fourth boutique is huge, and I still haven't found the dress.
I run my fingers along a rack of silk, holding each one up to the light, then putting it back. Nothing is right. Nothing fits the version of myself I want to be on Saturday night.
The saleswoman wraps the two dresses I do buy in tissue paper, and I carry the bags out into the bright Milan afternoon. The street hums with traffic and the clatter of café cups. Elio falls into step behind me, silent as a shadow, the way he's been silent all morning.
We've been to four shops. He hasn't said a single word that wasn't necessary.
I stop on the sidewalk to dig my sunglasses out of my purse. Behind me, Elio clears his throat.
"You gonna ignore me all day?" he asks.
I spin around so fast my hair whips across my face. He's standing there with his hands loose at his sides, calm as a Sunday, and something inside me snaps clean in half.
"You're here because the Sartoris sent you," I say. "Not because I wanted you here. So you can do your job. You can carry my bags and stand by doors and pretend you don’t exist. But we are not talking about anything."
His jaw tightens. "Why?"
The single word lights a fuse.
I step closer. I press one finger hard against the center of his chest.
"You were sleeping with me," I say, my voice low and shaking, "while you had a fiancée. And you never said one word. Not one."
"Amanda—"
"I hate liars." My finger digs in harder. "But you know what I hate more? There's a girl somewhere who loves you. Who thought she was the only one. And you were off—" My throat closes for half a second. "You were off doing this. Doing me. Doing whoever else."
He doesn't move. His eyes don't drop. That's almost worse.
"So the next words out of your mouth to me," I say, "will not be until I need something.”
I turn to walk away.
And I slam straight into a wall of warm cotton.
The shopping bags swing into my legs. A pair of hands catches my shoulders, and I look up.
Valentino.
His dark eyes move over my face fast. He smells like smoke and clean wool, and my heart does that skipping thing.
"What's going on?" he asks. His voice is quiet.
"Shopping," I say. I lift one of the bags like proof. "Lots of it. The economy thanks me."
He doesn't smile, but he does look past me, over my shoulder, to where Elio is standing.
I watch the change happen on his face. Valentino looks past me.
At Elio.
Nothing about his face changes, but Elio comes off the wall like he’s been called by name.
The back of my neck goes cold.
I've seen Valentino annoyed. I've seen him bored. I have never seen this.
It scares me. Not for me. For Elio.
Valentino's hands leave my shoulders. He moves past me like he has all the time in the world.
I clutch the bags to my chest and walk the other way to the black car Elio parked at the curb, and I pull open the door, then slide into the passenger seat. The door closes with a soft thunk, sealing the street's noise out into a muffled hush.
Through the tinted window, I watch them.
Valentino's back is to me. Broad shoulders, dark coat, head tipped just slightly down toward Elio, who stands stiff and still on the sidewalk. Valentino's mouth is moving. I can see it from the angle of his jaw, the small movements. But the glass swallows every word.
My heart is still going too fast.
I press a hand flat against my chest, trying to slow it down, but it doesn’t work.
I think about what I said to Elio.
God.
I sounded jealous. Bitter. Like one of those women who finds out about the fiancée and turns herself into a cautionary tale over a man who was never hers.
That’s not what this is.
That was never what this was.
I didn’t want to own him.
I wanted to know I hadn’t been stupid for believing him.
I drag my sunglasses off and let them drop into my lap. The truth is uglier and smaller than heartbreak, and I know it, and I'm not proud of it.
I slept with Elio because of the way he looked at me. He spotted me across the room at one of the Sartori events. His eyes never left me. Like he'd been waiting all night just to find me there.
It was never going to be a great love because I didn't want that. So no, I'm not a lover scorned.I'm angry about her.
I'm angry that somewhere there was a woman sitting at home, thinking she was the only one. The one he chose. The one who got his last name and his heart And the whole time he was peeling me out of my dress, looking at me like I hung the moon.
I press my knuckle against the corner of my eye before anything can spill, and I breathe in slow through my nose.
I make myself stop watching them talk and look at the dashboard instead.
But there is something my mind won't let go.The Sartoris sent Elio.
Fine. I understand that part. Elio is Vittoria's man, one of her family's soldiers, and Vittoria is the closest thing I have to a sister.
When you guard her, in some quiet way you guard me too.
We're a package deal. We've always been.
So a bodyguard, in the abstract, makes kind of sense.
But why do I need one here. In Milan. For a fashion campaign.
Vittoria wouldn't send someone across an ocean to protect me on a whim. Whatever Bruno asked her to look into worried her. And now Valentino Conti is here.
I'm not stupid. He's here for a reason. And I can't stop wondering if it's part of something bigger. Something very bad. But I already know what asking will get me.
Valentino
"What the fuck was that," I say.
Elio's jaw works, a small motion like he's tasting the answer before he gives it to me.
"It was nothing," he says.
A muscle ticks behind my ear. I shift my weight slowly, the way I do when I want a man to feel the shift more than see it, making him question if it even happened at all.
"Elio." I pause, allowing the hesitation crawl under his skin. "I'm going to ask one more time. And you're going to answer me. Because if you make me ask twice, we're going to have a different conversation, and you won't like where it ends."
His throat moves. He's not a coward. His eyes don't drop, and his hands have curled into loose fists at his sides.
"What. The fuck. Was that."
The breath leaves him in a thin stream I can almost see in the chill.
"Mrs. White and I," he says, "we have history. It's done. It's been done for months."
A hot and ugly thing opens up in my chest. Fast like a struck match. My knuckles ache with the urge to hit him. I want to put my fist through his face and feel the give of bone. I have done worse for less.
I won't do it, but the war inside of me, the desire to see his blood pour, and the knowledge that I can't risk unnecessary conflict, is making my teeth ache.
Because she's right behind us. If I beat a man bloody on the sidewalk while she watches, she will see what I am.
And some piece of me doesn't want her to think of me as a monster..
So I breathe. I let the fire burn down, then step in close. Close enough that he has to tip his head back a fraction to meet my eyes.
"Listen to me," I say, my voice dropping lower, softer, almost gentle.
"You do your job. You keep her breathing.
" I pause. Let him hear his own heartbeat in the quiet.
"And if you so much as think about putting a hand on her again, they will find you in pieces, Elio.
Small ones. Spread across two provinces.
Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
He nods.
I hold his eyes a second longer and then I hold out my hand.
"Keys."
He blinks. "What?"
"The car keys. Give them to me."
He digs into his coat and drops them into my palm.
"Grab a cab," I tell him. "Go to Casa Aurelia. You sit on the street and you watch. When I bring her, you make yourself useful and invisible at the same time. Think you can manage that?"
His jaw flexes again. He wants to say something. Some part of him still thinks he's owed something here.
I know that hunger. The wanting of a person you have no right to.
"Yes," he says finally. Tight. Controlled. "I can manage that."
"Good."
I turn and head to the car. I'm three steps away when the rain starts, distorting her face behind the glass.
She's been watching me.I keep my face expressionless as I open the door and climb in.
The car door shuts behind me, sealing out the rain, and the quiet inside is sudden and close.
I drop the keys into the cupholder and reach for the ignition.
"Where's Elio?"
I don't answer right away. I start the engine, and it wakes under us with a low growl. Rain taps the windshield, at first a drizzle, then faster, blurring the gray street outside into smears of light.
"He's meeting us there," I say.
"Meeting us where?"
"Casa Aurelia."
I feel her shift in the seat beside me. The fabric of her coat whispers against the leather.
"You sent him away."
"I gave him a job."
The hotel is twelve minutes from here. What I should do is put my eyes on the road and my hands at ten and two and keep them there.
Instead I turn and look at her.
A mistake. She's caught in the gray light coming through the wet windshield, and it softens her face making her look younger and more real than the polished version she carries around like armor.
Her hair has come loose at one side, a pale wave falling across her cheek.
She glares at me, and it undoes me, because her eyes aren't soft at all.
They're blue-green and bright and furious, lit from the inside.
I know how to make a woman feel watched without ever giving her the satisfaction of being looked at, but I can't do it now. My eyes are only on her.
"You're not going to tell me," she says. Her voice has dropped, lost some of its edge. "Are you?"
"No."
"Of course not." She laughs, but it's thin, no joy in it. "God forbid anyone tell me anything. I'm just supposed to smile and not ask."
"Amanda."
"What did you say to him?"
"Nothing he didn't earn."
She makes a small sound and turns to face me fully, her knee bumping the gearshift, while the rain hammers the roof. "You scared me," she says. "Out there. The way you walked toward him. I've never—" She stops. Swallows. "You looked like you were going to kill him."
I don't tell her how close she is to right.
"He's fine," I say.
She's so close now. Her lips are parted, like there's a word stuck there, and she's deciding whether to let out.
I should fucking not be this close to her.
But I lean in anyway.