Then, while she was still more or less gaping at him, he rose from his lounging position—taking that hand of his with him—and wandered back out of his father’s office without so much as a backward glance.
Leaving Ivy behind to try to find her breath again—and pick up the pieces of her she hadn’t even known could break apart like that, into all of thatgolden heat.
Then try to piece them back together as well as she could now that she knew that Giaco Tavian wasn’t a joke. He wasn’t a tabloid construction. He wasexactlyas lethally sensual as he appeared in every story ever written about him.
And Ivy was going to have to figure out how to handle him if she wanted her inheritance, like it or not.
Chapter Four
TWO WEEKS LATER,Ivy was back in London, happily immersed in the life she’d built, and convinced that she’d allowed the simple fact that she’d been back in that castle to mess with her perceptions. To make her imagine things that weren’t there.
Because she didn’t like any other explanation for what had happened with Giaco. What she hadfeltwhile it happened.
In the first couple of days after all that—fleeing Italy as soon as she could make herself get up from that couch and managing to get home the same afternoon she’d left—she had jumped every time her phone indicated there was a new message. But as the days passed, she thought her nervous system was actually settling back into place. The more time elapsed between that day and now, the better she was. The stronger she felt.
The less delusional she was about what was or wasn’t lurking behind the mask Giaco Tavian clearly preferred to wear. The simple answer was that it didn’t matter. Her job was to sell a story to the outside world to get her hands on what her mother had left her, not to start an excavation project into a man who exulted daily in his supposedly charming disinterest in anything but the pursuit of his own pleasure.
She could get her head around work.Workmade sense. Work was what had saved her when she’d come stumbling back to London, twenty years old with no skills and a sporadic education. Work was the lifeline she’d found to get her out of Umberto’s castle of sick games and gaslighting that she’d been trapped in for too long. She’d found herself as she’d clung to it.
Why should this be any different?
Ivy thought the bracing British rain helped, too. Nothing like walking down London streets while it was bucketing down rain to make her forget all aboutmolten goldor anything else remotely warming.
By the end of those two weeks, she’d decided that she’d embellished that morning in the castle. It had been nothing special. Just the Tavians up to their usual tricks, but she’d been in and out quickly and while she didn’t have her inheritance yet, well. There was a path toward getting it. That mattered.
All the rest was just…the usual nonsense that could be chalked up to life in that family, in that place, in that desperate world that Umberto liked to marinate in.
Shehad better things to do than to focus on that kind of billionaire black-box theater.
When her phone buzzed one night as she was settling into bed after smiling so much during a fundraising event that her cheeks still hurt, she didn’t react. She didn’t even race to pick it up. She debated looking at her screen at all. And when she finally reached out for her mobile, she froze when she saw that the text was from him.
Tomorrow night, Giaco had texted.Rome.
She stared at that text for a good two minutes and while she did, she took stock of all the reactions she was having—none of which she liked. The elevated heart rate. The sudden flash of heat to accompany it. The fact that she was holding her breath. Again.
Ivy blew it out and ordered herself tobreathe, for God’s sake.I’m going to need more information than that.
And she realized that she expected him to flirt with her in text, or make some of his suggestive comments at the very least, when he didn’t.Be at the airfield at 11 a.m. Don’t worry about wardrobe.
She frowned down at that message for some time, trying to tease out all the variables. She wanted to ask him what he meant. Didheintend to dress her?
Ivy had to get very stern with herself when certain images flew at her then. She wasn’t sure she wished to have a man sort out her wardrobe. Especially not when the entire conceit of what they were doing was that she was some everyday version of normal next to him.
Then again, she also knew that Giaco Tavian liked to play games.
Against her will, she swiped over to her photo app and pulled up the pictures he’d taken that day in the castle. She’d been sounsettled—that was definitely the right word, she assured herself—by what happened, by his fingers against her skin, that she hadn’t even thought to look at them until she was on the plane and in the air on her way back to England.
Once she looked, she’d wished she hadn’t. She’d felt as if her stomach dropped down out of her body and plummeted some 35,000 feet to slam itself into the Alps.
Because if she hadn’t been fully present in the moments he’d captured on her camera as they were happening—if she hadn’t literally been there herself—there was no way Ivy would ever have believed that the people involved weren’t engaged in an affair.
Anextremely carnalaffair at that.
Ivy didn’t understand how he’d done it. There were three pictures and each one of them told its own story. In one, he was staring hungrily at her mouth while she looked utterly blissed out, her lips parted as if they had already kissed. In another, he was smiling at her—that twist in his lips—but this time there was no smirk in it. It was sex. It washunger.
The final one was the worst. She didn’t remember him moving back in to get closer to her, but it looked as if he was scant seconds away from pulling her onto his lap when she knew he hadn’t been doing anything like that. Ivy-in-the-photograph looked as if she was on another planet, and he was its only sun, and she couldn’t really parse how she felt about that. But Giaco…
Giaco lookedconsumedby her. His own lips were parted, as if he was breathing heavily, and it looked as if he was only inches away from taking her mouth with his.
