She made her way out back and found her way into a bar that opened up over the pools and the sweeping view of the Mediterranean Sea in all directions. And realized as she looked around that she wasn’t looking for Giaco.
There was some part of her that was looking for her mother.
But it didn’t make her feel sad. It felt more like a blessing. Ivy had almost forgotten that Italy and Umberto weren’t the sum total of her mother’s last years. She’d been happy here in France. She had loved coming to this part of the world, especially when the film industry gathered here, too. She had adored it when she could be among the people who understood her best because they lived the same sort of nomadic life she did, forever moving from one film set to the next.
Alana and Ivy had spent many a pleasant season right here, and yet Ivy had forgotten, somehow, that there was so much more to her mother’s life than the way it had ended. And when she stopped looking for her mother, she looked out toward the gleaming sea instead and felt the truth of that lodge inside her too, like another benediction. There had been a whole, beautiful, sometimes heartbreaking life before Umberto. She’d been there for some of it.
I’m going to make more of an effort to remember youhappy, Ivy promised her mother then, in her head and her heart.I promise.
When she finally focused on the man standing by the rail, watching her with that same intensity that she couldn’t believe no one else seemed to notice in him, she found she was filled with emotion.
That probably didn’t bode well for this date of theirs, but Ivy couldn’t regret it.
She gathered herself and walked toward him, noting that when Gabriele had spoken of a vision, he’d meant it. Giaco was dressed all in black. It was a flowing sort of black, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and loose trousers appropriate to the South of France. And yet somehow he gave the impression that he was both breathtakingly formal and charmingly informal at once. The shirt was open at the neck, showing off that gold skin of his. His hair was slicked back, but not like it had been when he’d come up out of that pool in Italy. This version gave the impression that he’d been running his hands through his hair all day.
Or, this being Giaco, someone else had been.
Ivy had expected to feel foolish, dressed up in a costume and made to look like someone who was playing the role of Ivy Amis rather than simply being herself. But as she walked toward him, that…wasn’t how she felt at all.
For a few moments, it was as if everyone else on the terrace simply faded away. Ivy knew they were there but they were little more than shadows as she moved. It was the past that was brighter now. She heard her mother’s laughter in her head, the most beautiful song imaginable and one she’d almost forgotten. She could see her father’s smile, one of the few memories she had of him. She could smell roses and lavender in this charmed place, but the only thing she could really focus on was Giaco.
On all of that dark jade, taking her in as if he’d been waiting all of his life for her to walk toward him, just like this.
She knew he was playing a role. But still, she could feel that look all over her. She could feelhim. It was shocking to realize how good he was at this. If she didn’t know better, he could have convinced her—easily—that he really was a man who had accidentally fallen in love and now had no idea what to do with it. And that he was something like a mess as he watched the agent of his destruction draw near.
Helookedlike he was made entirely of agony and hope and something far hotter, and she didn’t know how not to be affected by that.
When she reached him at the railing, he turned toward her, looking as if he meant to grab her hand—
But didn’t.
And that affected her too, because she couldfeelthat near-touch like heat between them.
It occurred to her then that this was going to be significantly harder than she’d anticipated. For a number of reasons she hadn’t thought to prepare herself to face. It was clear to her now that this was very likely going to make a mess of her, too.
And that was before she saw the pictures splashed all over the world the next day.
Chapter Five
GIACO THOUGHT ITwas all going as well as could be expected. Better than that, even.
His relationship with Ivy Amis, who the papers were already callingSaint Ivythanks to the excellence of his sales pitch and most tabloids’ desire to stay in his favor, was splashed across every possible tabloid, in paper, online, on television, and on radio, too. The speculation was at a fever pitch and only grew as the days passed, staying forever at a boil.
He was excessively good at remaining at that same simmer, day in and day out.
Their first date in Cap Ferrat had caused an orgy of speculation. They’d appeared two other times that same weekend in various places along the coast, once the next morning on a stroll along the Plage du Midi in Cannes before disappearing into a café that did not allow paparazzi. The second, Sunday afternoon, while coming in from a yachting adventure.
That the virtuous daughter of the lost and widely lamented Alana Amis had spent the weekend with the Prince of Debauchery himself, her former stepbrother, had been talked about everywhere.
They had been seen in various places all over Europe since. There were always just enough pictures to suggest a narrative without any posed photo shoots that would indicate it was all a deliberate stunt. This was one of Giaco’s specialties.
A trip to Paris to take in the museums and stroll the boulevards, the way a pair of new lovers might. A dinner in Rome, hidden away in the back of a humble local trattoria, sitting close together and talking intensely, the way a new couple would do.
The two of them were caught exiting the car together outside a charity event in London, and then firsthand accounts about their behavior leaked out from within, with universal descriptions of Giaco’s adoring behavior.
He had learned long ago that it was always better to create the story he wished the papers to run. And also that less was always more. The more it seemed that he attempted to keep his private life private, the more real people believed the things they saw were stenographers’ renditions of his actual life.
Something he found he needed to remind himself of, lest he become too caught up in his own performance.
