“It’s very simple,” he told her. “Though perhaps less so for the officiously virtuous. When a man and a woman like each other, sometimes they pull off all of their clothes and roll around together—”
Her blue gaze was withering. “Your father seems to think that you can mount a publicity campaign with a snap of your fingers. Is that true?”
“It is less a snap of my fingers and more a few well-placed texts,” he acknowledged. “But it is true that the papers and I have a kind of symbiotic relationship.”
“Right.” She looked at him, as if studying his face for flaws. He knew that there were none. Yet, oddly enough, he found himself sitting just the slightest bit straighter all the same. He watched her as she clearly came to a decision. “I’ll go along with this because I think the ends justify the means. I’m still not clear why you would do the same, though. As far as I know, you’ve never done a single thing your father ever asked of you.”
“I have dedicated myself to disappointing him, it is true,” Giaco agreed with a sigh. “But into every man’s life a shadow must fall. I’m afraid that I have no option but to obey him in this.”
She did not look convinced. Giaco took that as something of a compliment.
“Obey?” she asked after a moment. “This is something you do?”
He smiled. “Only if it benefits me.”
Giaco stretched out one arm over the back of the sofa and lounged there, fully aware—almost too aware, to his mind—of the way her gaze kept lowering to his bare torso. She would look down, then her gaze would flick up again. More than once. And all the while, the color on her cheeks intensified.
Interesting.
“Forgive me,” she said with a smile. A practiced smile, he thought. He knew one when he saw it. “I don’t pretend to know you. That’s never been of the slightest interest to me, or to you, I’m sure. Yet I can’t help thinking that you have ulterior motives here.”
“But surely that is impossible,” he drawled. “I’m empty-headed. Merely a dissipated, pleasure-seeking fool, forever at the mercy of my constantly changing passions. An ulterior motive sounds like work.”
“And yet I need to be assured that if I start down this road with you, it won’t blow up in my face.” She eyed him with a little too much of that practicality and efficiency then. “I don’t care what you do with your life, Giaco. What I do care about is mine.”
He waved a hand. “Did you run out of your money already? It happens to the best of us.”
“I have plenty of money,” she retorted. “But the orphan’s charity that I run does not.”
He threw his head back at that and her prim, outraged expression, and laughed. “I didn’t realize I was in the presence of anactualsaint. I do not typically run into such virtue, you understand. To me it merely looks like self-flagellation.”
“Charity seems like self-flagellation?” She let out her own laugh at that, though hers was more brittle. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I don’t believe in charity,” he said, mostly so that he could see her bristle. “Unless you mean in a sexual sense.”
She blinked. “I…absolutely do not mean it in that sense. I don’t think I want to know what that means to you. Really.”
“I would be happy to tell you, Ivy.Stepsister.You need only ask.”
“What I’d like you to tell me, person with no relationship to me at all, is how you intend to make this thing work to your father’s satisfaction. All the rest of it? All of these games you like to play?” She shook her head, her gaze cool. “I don’t want any part of that. I find the way that you slink about as if you might spontaneously burst into an orgasm repulsive in the extreme.”
He threw back his head and laughed at that, too. Then sobered as he watched her look down the length of him, then up, then flush again. “I don’t think that you do.”
“I fear that says more about your powers of observation than anything else.”
“This puts us in a bind,” he said, heaving a sigh and making it sound sorrowful. Vaguely. “Because if you and I cannot work up some believable chemistry, I’m afraid you’ll have to go back, hair shirt and penitent cross in hand as I assume one so holy does, to apologize to your poor orphans for failing them.”
She looked…mutinous. Possibly enraged, though he doubted she would unbend enough to betrulyangry. Certainly not in public.
She folded her arms and glared at him. “I don’t think chemistry is the issue.”
“Chemistry is almost always the issue,” he assured her. “But indulge me. What doyouthink the issue is?”
“You,” she replied flatly. “No one will ever believe that any woman could possibly settle you down.”
“You need to believe in yourself more,” he suggested. “I think there are meditation retreats for that. A whole lot of heaving about, concerned with breathing and unattractive yogic poses. At the end you’ll come back a new woman. All you have to do is pay an obscene amount of money to sleep on the floor and eat plain, uninspiring food and perhaps scrub a few floors and windows, all in the company of bored socialites just like you.”
She blinked. “What sort of meditation retreats have you attended? That sounds like a work camp. Were you perhaps incarcerated without your realizing it?”
