Giaco had always loved women. He was fully aware that his reputation suggested quite the opposite and he hadn’t done much to fight that, but the truth was that he reveled in the female form. If he was an artist, it was in this. He delighted in the mysteries of a woman’s body.
It would not have said he had atype. There was not any particular form or color hair or height that drew him in. He had been lucky enough to sample everything. And he had never regretted it.
But Ivy was something else altogether.
He spent significantly more time than he would ever wish to admit torturing himself with what else might have happened on that couch in his father’s office, had he simply…followed the cues that he could read all over her body. Had he closed that last bit of space between them and set his mouth to the crook of her neck, the curve of her lips—
Giaco couldn’t count the number of times he’d had to take himself in hand since that day, hoping to dispel this hold she had on him—but it always seemed to make the memory more intense.
Shemade the memory more intense. She made everything intense, when he had always prided himself on keeping everythingeasy. Simple.
Now they walked down the streets in Rome, melting into the crowds in this busy part of the only city he had ever truly loved, and he wason fire.
When all she was doing was holding his hand.
He could not for the life of him understand why such a simple, prosaic touch should hum through him like a thousand hymns sung in Saint Peter’s Basilica, like this was something sacred.
It was nothing of the kind, of course. It was business and could never be anything else.
Giaco kept telling himself that.
When he got to a certain bit of shadowed alley that snaked between a few buildings and was set back from the street, he pulled her into the mouth of it with him, then backed her up against one stone wall. He propped himself above her, one forearm above her head, and looked down at her.
Though it was difficult to focus when her mouth wasright there.
“You got the itinerary, I assume.” He said it matter-of-factly.
She swallowed, and he watched the motion of her slender throat. “As you are no doubt aware, your assistant is nothing if not thorough.”
“That is one of Gabriele’s many strengths,” he agreed.
“Yes,” she said, sounding something like formal. She tilted her head back a bit more, and smiled up at him—though now she was back to the practiced smile of hers. He could not pretend to like it. “I read it. Did he write all that?”
“He did,” Giaco said. And he could have left it there, because he already knew how little the whole world thought of his intellect. Most assumed he had none worth mentioning. But for some reason, he couldn’t let Ivy think that. “He typed it up quite neatly as I dictated it, in fact.”
“Then it’s you, then,” she said, and she was still looking up at him like that. As if they were standing in a shadowy place only steps from the crowd, bantering the way lovers might. Meaning, he knew, that she had absolutely read the itinerary. When he only stared down at her blankly, and only partly because he didn’t know what she meant, she laughed. “I had no idea that deep beneath your indolent and cynical exterior beats the heart of a romance writer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Because it’s all so tidy, isn’t it?” Somehow, her blue eyes seemed to burn even brighter here in the dark. “It’s a perfect love story, delivered directly to the masses. Tonight our first kiss. Each outing will advance us into hints of more and more intimacy. This will inevitably lead to the perfect engagement with photos leaked to the press against our will, as if what we really want is to fly under the radar. And then, of course, we’ll perform a spectacular wedding that makes our happy-ever-after a foregone conclusion. A triumph of three-act structure, Giaco. I had no idea you were such a dedicated storyteller.”
“I am one of the greatest storytellers you will ever meet,” he told her, not sure why his voice sounded so dark. “The best story I tell is me.”
And he tried to make that come out like one of his usual, drawling little barbs that made people around him think he meant the opposite of whatever it was he said. He tried to make it over into the usual sort of verbal performance art that he was so well known for, but it didn’t work this time.
He could see it was perfectly clear to her, here in the hush of this alley while Rome swirled in all its bright noise and motion almost within reach, that it was nothing short of the stark truth.
“Giaco,” she began.
“Pucker up, little saint,” he ordered her, in that same dark voice. “It’s time to be romantic.”
And then he leaned in and took her mouth with his.
He felt her stiffen beneath him for just a moment, and then she kissed him back.
Giaco shifted and caught a glimpse of the paparazzo he’d explicitly tipped off tonight, lurking farther back in the alley. He knew all the best angles to use to give the man the proper photos. He knew how to kiss so that both he and his partner looked their best in the inevitable two-page spread.
But when she surged toward him, flattening her hands against his chest and arching into him, the kiss got deeper. Harder.
