Ivy couldn’t even have said what it was he was challenging her to do. Not if her life depended on it—and she was dismayed to discover it felt as if it did.
But somehow she managed to wrench herself away, turning back around and retreating from those glass doors as quickly as she could without giving him the satisfaction of seeing her run.
Once she was all the way on the other side of the room, she found that her knees were weak. She had no choice but to lower herself down onto the nearest overtly fussy chair and then had to take a deeply embarrassing inventory of all the ways she was trembling. Shaking.Goose-bumpingall over. Her heart was pounding so hard it made her feel slightly sick.
And she was slick and hot between her legs, a humiliation from which she was not certain she would ever recover.
She was wrecked, in other words, and she could not understand how any of this was possible.
Because that man was no Roman god. There was nothing the slightest bit holy about him and if there had been at some point he had systematically removed it thanks to his lifelong pursuit of the deepest, darkest depths of any and every vice available.
He was Giaco Tavian.TheGiaco Tavian.
Once her stepbrother. Always the bane of her existence.
But he was a whole lot more than that, sadly. It was impossible to walk past a single tabloid magazine without seeing his shockingly beautiful face. Not to mention most of that internationally renowned body of his, particularly since he did enjoy spending as much time as possible parading it about. Some years it seemed as if all the yachts in the Mediterranean would sink as one if he were not personally there to keep them afloat with his exploits.
There were a lot of words to describe a man like Giaco.Lothario. Romeo. Casanova.
The more modern and less poeticfuck boy.
If he was a woman, they simply would have called him a whore.
From a distractingly young age, Giaco Tavian had distinguished himself by being faithless and immoral in every possible respect. His father’s only son, and therefore the heir to Umberto’s vast empire because Umberto thought his younger daughter was good only for potential gains via marriage, Giaco had used his wealth, privilege, and astonishing good looks to make himself the very embodiment of sin.
In some countries they called him the devil. But that only increased the general appetite for him.
To this day, Giaco remained possibly the most debaucherous creature who had ever swanned his way in and out of the bedrooms of Europe, which he did with such regularity that some theorized—without hyperbole—that he might possibly haveactuallyslept witheverybody. He was a scandal in a distractingly beautiful male form that she had now experienced personally.
Even though she had previously been gloriously immune.
Ivy didn’t understand how this was possible, and no matter that she could still feel her own body’s betrayal. She had always loathed Giaco. His smoldering about. His utter disregard for the feelings of absolutely everything and everyone he encountered. His obvious pleasure in making as many people around him as uncomfortable as possible. He made alley cats seem like monks. He was pathologically boneless, confronting, and deeply comfortable with the outrage that followed him around like his baying packs of adoring would-be lovers.
He was a very particular kind of fantasy made flesh, there was no denying it. Yet how he could possibly have emerged from the loins of his father, who Ivy had always thought of—without a shred of affection—as the Lizard King, she could not imagine.
It was likely a gift from his Persian mother, another renowned beauty who had been lost too soon—no doubt to the same neglect that had destroyed Ivy’s mother. Because one thing about Umberto was that he did like to collect beautiful women and then destroy them. If he had a leisure activity, it was that.
Ivy blew out a breath, happy to feel that her heart was slowing down a bit. That she was getting back to normal. She needed the reminder she wasn’t here for…whatever that was that had just happened. Giaco was nothing if not a distraction. She was fairly certain that was his entire purpose in life. But his nonsense had nothing to do with her.
She made her breath even and tried to make herself relax. She hadn’t expected to see her former stepbrother today. She certainly hadn’t expected to seeso muchof him. But the more she thought about it, the more she decided it was like diving straight off the high dive into deep water, and probably good for her.
It could only benefit her to remember who she was dealing with and why.
Ivy thought of her own mother then. The world-renowned Alana Amis, who had been so beautiful that men had fallen over in the street at the sight of her, yet had carried around an insecurity that far outstripped her looks or her accomplishments or the simple, joyful person she could be when no one was looking. Her lovely and wildly talented mother, who was so luminous on-screen that a single tear from her could make audiences sob for days and who, despite all her fame and her enduring legend, had wanted only the simplest of things in the end.
To be loved. To be taken care of. To matter to someone.
Ivy would never forgive her stepfather for failing Alana on each and every point.
The door opened. Her eyes snapped open, her heart kicked at her again, and she was certain that she was about to see even more of Giaco Tavian. But instead, it was another member of the staff. He beckoned for her to follow him and then led her farther into the castle, to deliver her to what she knew was Umberto’s private office.
She walked inside and found the stepfather she had never intended to see again looking as if he was relaxing—a sure sign that this was going to be a bit of blood sport on his end. Nothing about Umberto Tavian was leisurely, and yet today he was sitting in a chair in one of the seating areas that dotted the large room with a drink in his hand and his usual heavy-lidded, contemptuous look in his eyes.
“What a marvelous surprise,” he said, speaking English as if he thought Ivy was perhaps not fluent in it. Or, more likely, as if he assumed she was simply dimwitted. See: the silly, foolish, idiotic girl he thought she was. “You were so certain that you would never return to the fold, Ivy. And yet here you are. Just as I knew you would be, one day.”
The Ivy she’d been when she’d left this place five years ago, having just buried her mother and vowing never to return, would have told him where he could shove that. With malice and pleasure.
But she’d gotten smarter, these past years. More strategic. There were things that mattered a whole lot more to her than attempting to land a blow on a man like Umberto when she knew perfectly well that he felt nothing. She supposed he was amply insulated not only by the rich food he preferred and the indulgent, debaucherous lifestyle he exulted in, but by all the money he’d extracted from every business enterprise he’d ever touched.
