Ivy cleared her throat. “In any case, there I was, all of twenty years old at a fancy charity do and I related so much to an orphan girl half my age that I really did cry. It’s disorienting enough to lose one parent.” She shook her head. “But you must know this yourself.”
She gazed back at him then and he realized she expected him to say something about his own mother. His fierce, beautiful, highly educated mother had been raised by parents who had escaped from their homeland and had raised her to consider the France she’d been born in a foreign country that could never truly accept her.
He understood how she had seen Umberto as an escape from too many wounds that could never close. But she’d made a terrible mistake. And she’d known it.
“My mother chose her exit,” he told Ivy, gruffly.
Though he didn’t realize that he was going to tell her that until it was out of his mouth. He didn’t understand himself. He never told anyone that. It was a secret—sometimes he thought it was a secret only he knew, as he suspected that his father had done what he always did and wiped clean any memories that didn’t serve him.
Giaco expected Ivy to flinch or gasp in shock or make some other huge sort of movement that he could focus on and use to change course, but all she did was gaze back at him. Her fathomless blue eyes filled with what looked like…empathy.
God help him.
He ordered himself to stop, but instead he found his mouth opening against his will. “If you knew her, this would not surprise you in the least. She had always vowed that she would be no prisoner and when she determined that she had somehow ended up held in a situation she couldn’t escape, she did what she felt she had to do.”
No matter that it meant leaving a teenager and a six-year-old behind.
“I’m sorry,” Ivy said after a moment. “That can’t have been easy.”
“I don’t view it as a weakness on her part,” he found himself telling her, stiffly. This was something he believed, deeply. Though it had never changed the fact of being left behind, it was a kind of comfort in its own way. “I am aware that my father likes to go on about her mental illness, but I always saw it as an act of extreme clarity. She knew exactly what she was doing. She left all of her affairs in order. She made certain to do it where she would be found by strangers and while that cannot have been good for them, I believe she was attempting to spare…”
“You,” Ivy finished softly, when he didn’t. When it seemed he couldn’t. “She wanted to spareyou.”
And something about the way she said that seemed to grab him by the throat. Or maybe it was simply because he didn’t talk about this, not to anyone, because everybody thought they already knew what had happened. It had been a major news story in its time.
Though that was all it was, Giaco knew. A story.
And the story was simple, if sad. Umberto Tavian’s high-strung wife, after a long struggle with an incapacitating yet never defined mental illness, had locked herself away in a Paris hotel room and taken entirely too many pills. Deliberately. She had been discovered several days later, when housekeeping had entered the room despite the do-not-disturb sign after she had missed a raft of calls.
That was the story, though Giaco preferred his take. That it had been an act of defiance from a woman who had felt she had no other cards to play or places to go.
“I was sixteen,” Giaco told Ivy. “Enough of a man by then, particularly in my father’s house. I did not need to be spared though I do realize, in the fullness of time, that it was a gift she gave me.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”
She smiled, though it was not a practiced thing. It was soft. Real, he thought.
“Orphans,” she said quietly. “It inevitably leads to dead parents, I’m afraid.” She reached over and put her hand on his forearm, if only briefly. “I’m sorry.”
And he found he missed that touch when she took her hand back. Far more than was wise.
He sat back as their first course of food was delivered then, and he studied her as she interacted with the server. He marveled at how easily she had taken to this role she played now, when he knew it couldn’t possibly be something she was comfortable with. She had never claimed to have her mother’s ability toinhabitevery space she occupied, simply by beingherself.
Ivy was also glowing, which was a version of that, he supposed.
Having left nothing to chance, not for years now, Giaco had made certain that Ivy had every available stylist on call. Not to make her over, as she was beautiful without any help, but to carefully tailor her appearance so that over time, she looked as if she was on some kind of dimmer switch. Brighter and brighter in his presence, so that the papers would call itlove.
Tonight she seemed brighter than should have been possible from a simple application of cosmetics, but something in him reacted a little too strongly to that notion. Maybe he wanted to believe—too much—that it was something else. Something more.
The trouble with all of this is that he was far too interested in this woman when he had only ever conceived of her as a means to his own ends.
And he couldn’t lose sight of what was important now, no matter how she mightglow.
Or how his forearm felt branded by her touch, well into the evening.
He lectured himself on these things all the way through dinner and then afterward, it all promptly went to hell when he took her hand as they exited the restaurant. “I thought we would walk back home,” he told her, his voice gone gruff again.
And he could feel her immediate reaction to what he said. Not the walking part.Home.
Her reaction meant that he reacted, too. And it felt like a spark causing a flame and then a flame developing into fire in the space of a heartbeat. Or maybe it was simply that her fingers were in his, linked together, and he already knew that touching her was dangerous.
