Or it had, anyway. Until that kiss.
A kiss she had then seen hundreds of photographs of, splattered across every tabloid. A kiss that she’d relived again and again and again, every time she saw it.
A kiss that she couldn’t help but think should have been only theirs—even though she knew that made no sense. There was noonly theirs. There was only the performance they were putting on and the kiss was a major step forward with that—no matter how many snide reporters dismissed Ivy as but one more affair for a man who’d had legions of them before her.
No one believed they would last.
Ivy herself would not have believed it, except she knew exactly where they were headed and how long they’d stay there.
She had been surprised that he wanted to talk about her work with orphans at dinner that night. She had been even more surprised when he’d actually told her things about his mother. Much less what she was fairly certain was a huge secret, because she knew she’d never heard anything to suggest that the wife before Alana was anything but deeply unwell.
No one had ever indicated that her death was anything but a tragedy brought on by mental instability, and certainly not a clear-eyed, coolheaded, deliberate decision.
It had been weeks now and Ivy still found herself going over and over it in her head. The dinner. The way Giaco had actuallysharedwith her. Then after. Back in London, she sat in the usual meetings and tried to look as if she was paying the kind of attention that she should have been. But she wasn’t.
She kept going through that night. She felt like the silly sort of schoolgirl she’d never been, because she’d never had the experience of overwhelming crushes and packs of friends to giggle about those crushes with. Her mother had not liked to be left alone and so Ivy had been taught by a succession of tutors, none of whom had ever given her much of an education.
They’d been too busy wandering around starry-eyed in the castle, whether because they were bowled over by Alana’s magic or sent into quivering joy at the sight of Umberto’s riches.
Ivy had never thought that she was worse off for it. When she talked about her childhood and her schooling, she called iteclectic. And because she was lucky enough to not have to try to find the sort of employment that cared deeply about things like schools, she got away with it. It was seen as charming. It was never held against her.
So she had to hold it against herself as she found herself drifting off in the middle of a board meeting, paying absolutely no attention to the details of her own charity because all she could think about was the way their hands had fit together. As if they’d been separated cruelly from each other at birth and had only found each other again now. As if their hands had beenmadeto clasp each other like that.
The way he tugged her with him into that alley and backed her up against the wall, so that all she could see of Rome, of the world, was the serious dark jade of his gaze.
Even thinking about that, about hiseyes, made her whole body shiver into awareness. A rich, wild heat that seemed to consume her from deep between her legs, only to roll out so that there were flames everywhere.
And that was before she even got to the carnal magic of his mouth on hers.
In case she thought she was imagining all that, there were the pictures to prove it. Did she love them? Did she hate them? She could never decide.
The truth was he wasn’t only affecting her job. He was affecting her sleep. Her breath. He was with her everywhere.
Just as the pictures of that kiss were everywhere. All over the papers. Impossible to miss online.
And she could admit—when she tried to turn off how shefeltso that she could look at the pictures analytically, and with some kind of distance—that they were unquestionably romantic photographs. That must have been why they were getting attention even in places where she would have thought neither one of them was known enough to matter.
But it was hard to be analytical when she woke up on the nights she slept at all with her entire body on fire, his taste in her mouth, and the feel of his perfect, rock-hard chest beneath her hands.
Ivy just counted herself lucky that since no one believed that she and Giaco would last, she didn’t have to worry about being hounded by packs of paparazzi the way he was. He and Gabriele had both assured her that wouldn’t last.
She told herself to enjoy it while she could.
They continued to meet after the kiss, because that was what was in the bloody itinerary and the itinerary was the boss of them all. They attended a charity event in Luxembourg, a lovely opportunity to glitter and be seen while obviously head-over-heels. Intimacy code at six. They took a weekend away with each other, or so it seemed to the breathless public, in Venice to see an opera with much hand holding andleaning, intimacy still at six because it was public.
More pictures. More black-tie functions and society photographs. More indications that they were becoming a part of each other’s worlds.
He didn’t kiss her again. It wasn’t on the itinerary.
And he only touched her when necessary, she thought. While dancing, for example. Or when ushering her with great solicitousness to a banquet table. Only in places where others could see them and marvel at thetamingof Giaco Tavian.
Only when it benefited their little performance, that was.
One night she made a great show of scrolling through her mobile in the car, until he asked her what she was doing.
“Oh,” she said, brightly. “I couldn’t decide whether or not to put on lip gloss, so I was checking the itinerary to see if there might be more kissing. I wouldn’t want to get that stickiness all over you, you understand. So tacky.”
It was worth it, she thought, because of the dark look he threw her way. Then and when she spent the rest of the evening theatrically reapplying that sticky lip gloss.
