He neither looked nor sounded the slightest bit inspired.
“I found myself orphaned five years ago, when I was twenty, and it was shockingly disorienting,” Ivy began calmly, as this was a story she had told many times before. “It made me wonder how much worse it must be for those who do not have my advantages, or my—”
“I’ve heard these little speeches,” Umberto interrupted her, sounding bored. “It’s why I brought you here. No one is more astonished than me, given the path I expected you would take when you left here, but you have made yourself a reputation for moral fortitude. And as it happens, I need it.”
For a moment, the way he looked at her, Ivy had a creeping,horrifyingnotion take her over. Umberto was forever marrying trophies. Surely he didn’t think hermoral fortitude, whatever the hell that was, qualified? She would climb to the top of his castle and fling herself off it first.
Instead, Umberto reached over and rang the bell beside him, then nodded when one of his servants opened the door. “Bring him in,” he said, a crisp order.
And moments later, Giaco himself ambled in. He was not dressed. He had covered himself with a silk robe, but that was his only nod to civility.
Ivy could not bear to look at him any more than she already had today, especially not when his gaze found hers as he entered and lit up at once with that unholy amusement of his. Instead, she watched Umberto and found herself nothing short of delighted to see that Giaco got to him, too. The old man was fairly bristling.
She had always enjoyed how easily riled he was. This man who fancied himself the king above all kings could not tolerate the faintest poke in his direction, and Ivy dearly wished that she was in a place where she could deliver a few such pokes.
It was almost better, however, that it was Giaco. Since his existence, for all intents and purposes, was the greatest and most effective poke at Umberto possible.
“Is there some reason you are not dressed?” Umberto growled at his son and heir.
“I prefer not to dress at all,” Giaco replied, in that lazy drawl of his. No matter what language he was speaking, he always sounded as if vocabulary itself made him sleepy. As if he needed to taste every word as it came out of his mouth, and that required all his energy. “I’m happy to remove this robe, father. Would you like that?”
Umberto made a growling sound. If Ivy didn’t dislike Giaco so much herself, she might have applauded.
Then it was impossible not to watch as Giaco took his time sauntering over to the couch that stretched between her chair and Umberto’s and flung himself down upon it. With no particular attention paid to whether or not his robe would cover him.
That it did was a miracle.
But even as Ivy thought that, she found him watching her, the dark jade of gaze mocking. Because he knew—somehow heknew—that she was thinking of exactly what he had beneath the fabric of his robe. He probably knew that she had committed it all to memory, damn him.
She felt herselfheatand hated him. Hard. Then tried to focus on his loathsome father instead.
Umberto threw back the remains of his drink. “In order to close this deal, and I am determined to close it, I am afraid that the tawdry legend of Giaco Tavian, heralded cocksman, must come to an ignominious end.”
“Must it?” Giaco asked, sounding bored. “But I am so popular and beloved as is. Ask anyone.”
“This is what will happen,” Umberto said curtly. “The two of you will engage upon a relationship. It will be widely photographed. A worldwide love affair, focusing on Ivy’s rather impressive virtue and not the fact that she was once a stepsister. Finally, they all will declare, a woman who tames the savage beast—and whatever other maudlin story the papers choose to tell. You will see to it.”
Ivy could not comprehend anything the demented old man was saying. She could not make any of those words make sense, much lesstogether.
Giaco sighed, sounding even more bored and now amused besides. “And why would I do that?”
“Because if you do not, I will cut you off entirely,” Umberto told him. “And I doubt very much that you have any skills outside your preferred bedsport, Giaco. Given that you have never exhibited the slightest inclination toward anything else.”
Giaco shrugged, lying there on his back on the sofa as if about to drop off into a nap at any moment. “Fair point.”
“There will be an engagement. The world will go wild. It will seem inevitable—fated, even—that the only woman capable of civilizing such a beast is the one who grew up in this house and thus learned the secrets of Giaco’s benighted soul, whatever they might be. Again, the press will be encouraged to pursue thevirtue. Theromance. There will be no scandal. There will be nodark intimationsabout what you got up to with her when she was an adolescent.”
“Father,” Giaco said then, in mock astonishment. “I had no idea that you cared what anyone got up to, as an adolescent or otherwise. Or that such a romantic has lurked within you all this time.”
Ivy found this significantly less amusing than Giaco seemed to. Yet she still couldn’t bring herself to speak.
“And then, the coup de grâce,” Umberto said, with deep satisfaction and what looked a lot like actual malice, to Ivy’s eye. “You will marry. It goes without saying that during the period of this whirlwind romance and into your marriage, which will last for at least three years, there will be absolutely nothing but squeaky-clean behavior. More virtue. So much virtue that canonization will seem inevitable. Your transformation, Giaco, will be a thing of epic beauty or you will pay for it. Meanwhile, my dealwillgo through and itwillsurvive its probationary period. Then I will wash my hands of the both of you and happily pay to never think of either one of you again.”
Ivy couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know where to look. It was bad enough that she’d seenallof Giaco today. Now she was supposed to… Date him? Pretend to fall in love with him? She was not an actress. She was only related to a late, legendary one and had not inherited the faintest shred of Alana’s talent. How would any of this work?
She found herself drawn to look at him again, telling herself it was the horror of this that was making her seek him out for some kind of confirmation that he was hearing the same things she was.
But all she saw was that too-dark jade, so mocking, and currently filled with what looked like some kind of glee.
