“I meant your lack of privacy,” she snapped at him.
“That is a feature, not a bug,” Giaco told her, finally lifting his gaze from his book. “I determined long ago that it was not fair to the world to conceal the glory that is me from the public. They have so little, do you not agree?”
Ivy did not agree. She stood there, staring at him. She took in the state of him, lounging here in the privacy of his own home yet still dressed as if he expected a photographer to happen by at any moment. One of those buttoned-up shirts of his that he never managed to button to the top. Those loose trousers made her think of islands in the sea. He liked his feet bare in the house, she noticed, and she wondered at the contrast between the outrageously debonair figure he could cut when he chose to, all black-tie sophistication and urbane grace. This was a far more casual version of him.
“None of this is real, is it?” she heard herself ask.
Something changed. She watched it move over his face and then his gaze was different, too. Almost…cannier, perhaps.
“Are you talking about our relationship?” he asked quietly. “The one that has currently captured the attention of the entire planet? No, my little saint. It is not real. Have you become confused?”
“I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about you,” she said. “When I first saw this house I thought that it seemed so authentic. A real home that someone lived in. That someone is you, but you don’t live anywhere, do you? You merely…exist between photo ops. Isn’t that right?”
It was possible that she was being too harsh. But this was some strange amalgamation of all of these unwieldy feelings that she’d been combating since the start of this. Maybe it was the ring. Maybe it was that damned kiss. Maybe it was the fact that she felt as if she’d been hunted out of her own home, like a hapless fox.
Maybe it was just that she didn’t like feeling haplessorhunted.
Also, she thought it was true.
“How astute,” he said, in that cutting way of his.
He set his heavy book aside. And then he was rising up with more of that impossible effortlessness of his. All of that athletic grace. It set her teeth on edge.
It did more than that. It made her remember the taste of him, and the way that perfect, cruel mouth of his had coaxed so much sensation out of her. Perhaps he’d even licked itintoher. It was too much.
Hewas too much.
“You’re putting on an act so no one can see who you really are,” she managed to say, though his gaze was trained on her now and he was heading her way. “Aren’t you?”
“Thank you,” he drawled, drawing closer. “Without this incisive psychiatric breakdown of my innermost self, how could I possibly go on?”
“Obviously everybody plays certain roles as they go about their lives,” she said, frowning up at him as he came upon her. “But not the way you do. You literally have a director on staff. You have an entire production team. Do you think that’s normal?”
She didn’t realize that he’d backed her up across the whole study until she had to stop because there was something in her way. A glance behind her told her she was standing at the back of the sofa that faced the currently unlit fireplace.
But if he noticed that he’d pinned her, he certainly didn’t seem to care.
“Everybody lies,” Giaco said in that same quietly dark way. “If you don’t think that someone is putting on a performance for you, you’re not looking closely enough. Let’s talk about your performances, shall we? Lady Bountiful. Saint Ivy of the Orphans, casting her goodness all about her like palm fronds. Who are you when you’re at home, I wonder?”
“I suppose we’ll never know,” she retorted, “as I was chased out of my home by the demon horde you have on speed dial.”
“What I cannot understand is this act,” he replied, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “You were raised in celebrity. It has touched every aspect of your life. Yet you act as if no one ever told you that it was a game, and I cannot account for that. You’re damn right thatIplay it, and well.”
“Do you play it?” she asked, leaning closer to him. “Or at this point, is it just playing you?”
Giaco leaned in, his hands gripping the back of the sofa on either side of her body, caging her there. “I don’t care,” he murmured.
And then his mouth was on hers again.
It was as if sheer exultation was a tap that he could turn on and off, because it flooded her. And it occurred to her only now, only with his mouth on hers, only when she could arch forward and wrap her arms around his neck and press her body to his, that this was exactly what she wanted.
That maybe all those feelings she couldn’t quite name were this.
A deep yearning forthis. For him.
For the way his hands seemed to know her body so well, so easily. They moved over her, stirring up a restless hunger everywhere he touched her. One moved over her hair, caught back in a loose, messy braid. Another moved down her back, then tested the curve of her butt.
It had been a warm day in Rome and she was wearing a loose pair of shorts that she sometimes slept in, too. And a tiny little tank top because she’d been sitting out in the courtyard, encouraging the sun to dust her skin something more than its usual pale white.
