Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Valentino
Idon't sweep the room. That would be a mistake. Men like the ones here notice when a man is looking too hard, who counts exits with his eyes. So I move slow and casual. A guest among guests. I let my gaze drift, bored and unimpressed.
I'm looking for Elio.
I had the invitation pulled for him this afternoon. One of Renzo's favors, a name that means nothing on a guest list this long. The only thing left is to confirm he's actually inside, that he's where he should be.
We drift toward a tall table near the edge of the floor. A waiter appears almost at once. A young man with a tray and a practiced smile.
"Something to drink?" he asks.
"Wine," I say. Amanda nods, and he hands us each a glass of red, dark as garnet in the chandelier glow. I curl my fingers around the stem and turn my body so I'm half facing her, half facing the room. From here I can see most of the floor without seeming to look at any of it.
"Talk to me," I say, low, my mouth close to her ear so the words don't carry. "About anything. Just keep talking."
She tilts her head, and for a second I think she's going to ask why. She doesn't. She has learned over the past few days when not to ask questions. That bothers me more than it should.
"Okay," she says, and her voice slips into an easy, bright rhythm, the performance turning on like a light.
"So tonight is basically the reason I'm in Milan.
The people in this room—I mean, not all of them, some of them just came for the free champagne—but the ones who matter?
They decide whether the spring rollout lives or dies. "
"Mm." I let my eyes wander past her shoulder. A cluster of older men near the far columns. Buyers I don't know. Nobody I need.
"Francesca Renaud is somewhere in here." Amanda lifts her glass, sips, lowers it.
Her hand is steady, but I can hear the nerves underneath the polish, the speed in her words.
"She controls placement in the flagship stores.
If she likes the campaign, we're golden.
If she doesn't, two years of my life turn into a very expensive learning experience. "
"And does she like it?" I ask, because I need her to keep going, and because some part of me wants to hear the answer.
"She hasn't decided." Amanda laughs, soft and quick. "Which is worse than no. At least no is an answer. Maybe just makes you crazy."
I almost smile at that.
My gaze moves on. Past the bar. Past a group of women in black. Past the wide arch that leads deeper into the palazzo—
Elio steps out from a corner near the second bar, a glass in his hand he isn't drinking from. For a half second I tense, ready to find a reason to be irritated, because that is the easy thing to feel about Elio Mancini. Then I see what he's doing, and the irritation has nowhere to go but inward.
He's talking to three older men. Suits, gray at the temples, the comfortable bulk of men who've sat at tables longer than they've stood.
He's nodding at something one of them says.
His weight is easy. His shoulders are loose.
He looks, for all the world, like a younger associate of theirs, a man who came up through somebody's company and earned his way into this space.
It's good. It's better than I expected. A man alone in a corner gets noticed. A man laughing with three others is expected. He's exactly where he should be, doing exactly what he should be doing, and the cold knot of worry in my chest loosens a fraction.
I hold my glass to my mouth without drinking and find his eyes for one beat over the rim. He doesn't react. He just lets his gaze pass over mine and keeps it moving, back to the men, back to the conversation. He's not as useless as I might want to believe. I'm not sure how to feel about that.
"—and the lighting director wanted to scrap the whole second setup, which, fine, except we'd already booked the studio—" Amanda is still going, her voice a warm current beside me, but I realize I've stopped paying attention.
I turn back to her.
That's a mistake too, in its own way. Because when her eyes find mine, I can't stop looking at that strange blue-green that always seems lit from somewhere behind, and whatever was left of the tension in my body drains out of me.
I don't understand it. I've stood in rooms with men who would have killed me without losing a breath or night of sleep, and my pulse never changed.
I've watched for threats in a hundred crowds and felt nothing but the clean, cold focus of work.
And here, in a room full of nothing more dangerous than money and ego, one civilian woman looks at me and something in my heart stops.
"You're not listening," she says. There's no hurt in it. Just amusement, the corner of her mouth lifting.
"I am," I say.
"What did I just say?"
"Something about a lighting director and a studio you'd already booked."
Her eyebrows climb. "Okay. Fine. Points for the bodyguard."
"I'm not your bodyguard."
"No?" She turns her glass slowly by the stem, watching me over it. "Then what are you, Conti?"
It's a casual question, thrown out lightly. The honest answer—a man who keeps finding reasons to be near you—is the one I will never say out loud, not to her, not to anyone. Not even in the darkness of my own room.
"Tonight," I say, "I'm a man who needs you to keep talking."
She studies me for a moment. The act vanished. Just for a second. But in that heartbeat, the bright mask slips and something underneath looks straight at me, searching. Then she lifts her chin, and her performance begins again.
"Lucky for you," she says, "talking is my one God-given talents."
Across the room, Elio laughs at something one of the men says, and the men laugh with him. Natural. Easy. Just as it should be.
Everything is where it should be.
So I have no idea why, when Amanda leans an inch closer to tell me about Francesca Renaud's terrible taste in shoes, my hand itches to move. To touch her. Wanting to find the small of her back, toward the bare warmth of her skin.
I take a deep breath and a sip of wine, stopping myself before I do something foolish.
Amanda
Valentino stands beside me like a wall someone propped against the marble column. He's barely moved in ten minutes. His eyes do the moving. Across the room, over the doors, back to me, away again.
"So," I say, because the silence is starting to itch. "Are you going to tell me what you're actually doing in Milan?"
"Business," he says.
"Right. Business." I take a sip, just to do something. The wine is dry and a little sour, and it does nothing to settle the buzzing under my skin. "You said that the other day. And the day before. I'm starting to think 'business' is an excuse for when you don't want to answer me."
His jaw shifts. Not a smile. Just movement.
"It's accurate," he says.
"It's a non-answer dressed up as an answer." I turn to face him properly, tilting my head. "Are you this chatty all the time, or am I getting the special treatment?"
He looks at me then. Fully. Those dark eyes trace my face. The attention lands somewhere low in my stomach and settles there.
"Have you ever seen me be talkative?" he asks.
I open my mouth to fire something back, and then I actually think about it.
"No," I admit. "I haven't."
"No." He shifts his weight, his shoulder almost brushing mine. I can feel the warmth of him radiating, reaching my bare skin before he ever does. "If I need something, I ask. If I have something to say, I say it. But I don't like talking much."
"Well." I laugh, and it comes out a little too high. "Good to know. Maybe I should stop, then. Save us both the trouble. God knows I've never met a silence I didn't want to fill."
I expect him to agree. To grunt, or nod, or go back to scanning the room and ignoring me, which is honestly what I deserve for talking this much to a man who clearly considers conversation a tactical inconvenience.
"No," he says.
I blink. "No?"
"I like hearing you talk."
He says it plainly, like he's reporting the weather, his accent rolling under the words and roughening them at the edges.
He's not looking at me when he says it. He's looking at the doors.
Which somehow makes it worse, because it means he didn't say it to get a reaction. He just said it because it's true.
And there it is. My stomach filling with warmth and butterflies, stupid and impossible to ignore. It feels too much like hope because that fifteen-year-old girl always dreamt of hearing something like that.
I have to get away from him.
"You're terrible at parties," I tell him, and my voice sounds almost normal. "Has anyone told you that?"
"Many people."
"They were right." I set the glass of wine on a passing tray and smooth my hands down the front of my dress, Something I do when I need to dispel nervous energy.
I have a job to do tonight. One that has nothing to do with the man standing next to me.
I would do well to remember that. "I need to find Francesca.
That's what I'm here for. So. I'm going to go charm the people I'm here to charm.
You can go stand against a column or something and look ominous. "
"I'll stay close."
"I figured." I don't look at him when I say it. If I look at him, I'll feel it again.
I have spent years building a career on being the kind of woman who walks into a room and owns it. Coming undone in a room full of two hundred people by a broody Sicilian is unacceptable.
I walk into the crowd, smiling at strangers. Sharing polite hellos with people I don't know.
I can work a room like no other. Even when my mind is somewhere else.
Like muscle memory. My spine straightens.
My chin lifts. The smile arrives before I decide it's needed, easy and warm and ready.
The same one that's gotten me through a thousand cocktail parties and product launches and dinners where nobody could remember my last name.
A touch of an elbow here. A laugh at a joke there.
I am exactly who everyone expects me to be.