“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman said then, with a laugh. “He does not wish you tochoosean outfit, Signorina. He has already chosen them all. There will be a series of encounters, you see. The master is very exacting when it comes to appearances and has created astylistic journey.”
“A…stylistic journey?” Ivy echoed, sure she wasn’t hearing any of this right.
The woman nodded enthusiastically. “You will start at this rack, and work your way through to the wedding attire.”
Ivy decided she did not need to investigatewedding attireon this, the afternoon of their first, very fake date.
Her guide led Ivy over to the rack farthest to the left and pulled the first three items off. Ivy looked closer and she could see it was true. The racks were separated and color-coded, and this level of organization contradicted every single thing she had ever known about Giaco, to the point that she wasn’t sure she could actually take it all on board. She cleared her throat.
“Forgive me,” she said to the woman. “I can’t believe that he actually put all this together.”
“His assistant put it together,” the woman said with another laugh. “Don’t worry. You will meet Gabriele.”
That wasn’t a promise, Ivy discovered soon after. It was more of a threat.
Because when Gabriele swept in, he came with a cloud of stylists, barking out orders into one mobile while texting on another. He didn’t knock. He simply stormed in and found Ivy in the sitting room, having succumbed to the lure of a meal since it was clear there was no avoiding the rabbit hole. She’d been answering emails, conducting her life as if she was back home and not tucked away in some ancient Roman town house, awaiting the pleasure of the man she had to pretend to marry.
“Everything about you is wrong,” declared Gabriele in some mix of Italian and English, waving his hand in Ivy’s direction. “Meno male, you’re gorgeous!”
“Wait a minute,” Ivy began, frowning at him. “There’s nothing wrong—”
But Gabriele was already barking out orders to the stylists and Ivy couldn’t help but be dragged along. Mostly because she suspected that if she didn’t go along, she really would be dragged.
“There’s a vision we are working toward,” Gabriele told her as he hurried her out of the sitting room. “We have to highlight the contrast between you and il Padrone at this point. You understand.”
“I don’t,” Ivy replied, which was hard to do when she was surrounded by what seemed like every stylist in Rome, all of them performing various beauty treatments on her. Whether she liked it or not.
There was a lot of waxing. Her nails were buffed, clipped, and polished—and her thoughts on color schemes were not solicited. She was hurried into the shower and then out. Her hair that she quite liked was subjected to a cut—ever so little, Gabriele assured her,just to capture the shine—and was then styled to look exactly the way it had before.
Except, she had to admit when she looked in the mirror, it was notexactlythe same. There was something about it. The hint of a curl in her ponytail. The way it swooped, it somehow made her seem…
Somethingshe couldn’t put her finger on.
She didn’t really get it until they dressed her in the outfit that had already been chosen for her for tonight. It was a pastel shift dress and a pair of darling shoes, everything not only her general size but seemingly created to her precise measurements. She didn’t want to know how they’d managed that.
Or maybe it was more accurate to say she was afraid to ask.
Then, when it was all done, she got it. She stood before the mirror, hair and makeup and wardrobe done. She looked like herself, so there was that. But a different version of herself.
A very specific different version.
“I understand this now,” she said, catching Gabriele’s gaze as he stood behind her, texting furiously. “I might as well be Little Red Riding Hood setting off for the forest. And he’ll be the Big Bad Wolf everyone already thinks he is, I suppose?”
“You understand this,che delizioso,” Gabriele cried, and he even grinned. “That’s good. It’s going to be a team effort, Signorina Riding Hood. This I promise.”
Then she was once again swept away. Into the car, back onto the streets of Rome, and then back once more into a plane. This time it was an even shorter flight and when she landed, she found that she was in France. The Côte d’Azur, no less, and it was impossible not to be enchanted.
She was driven on roads that overlooked the gleaming, dancing sea, bright and blue. They drove from the private terminal in Nice along the coast until they turned right to drive into Cap Ferrat, ripe with villas and hushed elegance, and kept going until they pulled up to the Grand Hotel that had stood at the foot of the peninsula for some hundred years.
Ivy swallowed, hard. She knew this place. She had stayed here with her mother, in fact. There were pictures of her with both of her parents here, though she had only small flashes of her father in her memory, as he had died she was five. This hotel had always been about glamour. Any and every kind of glamour imaginable, as people with all kinds of power, from every corner of every industry, were drawn here.
But to Ivy, this was her childhood. The one she’d lost when her mother had packed her off to Umberto’s castle.
“Il Padrone waits for you on the terrace,” she was told, so she got out of the car and walked toward the iconic entrance of the hotel, feeling as if she was walking back through time.
She could see her mother in a convertible, Alana’s hair swept back beneath a bright silk scarf, laughing into the sun. She remembered the parties, none of which she had been old enough to attend. Ivy had stayed hidden away in her hotel room, peering out the windows at the gleaming lights on the water, and the sound of clinking glasses and gaiety from below.
As she walked through the lobby, she nodded at the staff. Who greeted her by name, she noted, because that was the kind of place this was.
