And then she left the table, so that it was only Giaco and this woman he would marry the following day. This woman who he should never have turned around and seen through that window. This woman that he should never have touched.
She stared back at him for a moment that quickly became uncomfortable. Then she rose from her seat and made her way over to the windows. It was early summer in Tuscany now. The hills were covered in wildflowers. Everything was lush and green. Outside, the sun was still busying itself with setting and the sky was orange, melting into the dark hills and making them glow.
But he had long since ceased to find anything more beautiful than Ivy.
“Imagine when we’ll be gone from this place again and that man won’t matter anymore,” she said quietly.
And that hit Giaco harder than it should have. Harder than expected, anyway. He would have said that there wasn’t much that anyone could say about his family that would bother him any longer. None of it could be worse than the things he said himself. Certainly not when it came to his father.
There was something about this moment. This woman on this night.
Because there was something aboutherwanting to be done with this, even though he felt the same way. There was something about her wanting to be done with this terrible castle, with his family, too.
With him, was what he meant.
He didn’t like how very much she wanted to be done withhim.
But, “I can’t wait to find out,” he replied as he followed her to the window.
When she looked up at him, he had a sudden, spectacular vision of who she could be for him, if this was real. What kind of partner and ally she would be, if things were different. If they were what they seemed. What a glorious thing indeed it could be to be married to this woman.
But reality came in on the heels of that vision, hard.
Because Giaco couldn’t have that, could he?
Because she wasn’t wrong about him. He was made of lies. He couldn’t be honest with her or anyone else. Not after so many years of waiting for this very moment.
That was not a possibility. And it meant that no matter how much he wanted her—and he was beginning to realize that wanting her had become the cornerstone of his existence—he couldn’t really have her.
Because this game they were playing was one thing. But the woman he’d come to know while they played it would not accept anything less than honesty from a man who was herrealpartner. He didn’t have to ask. He knew.
And all of this sat in him like lead. It was a sour taste in his mouth.
He hated it.
Giaco didn’t think. He kissed her, taking her mouth with a kind of urgency he couldn’t fully explain to himself, because he didn’t wish to know himself quite that well. Not when there was so little he could do to change.
He kissed her instead, because she tasted like wonder. Like hope.
She tasted clean, like truth.
And more than that, she had somehow managed to insinuate herself so deeply beneath his skin that some days he thought that he had nothing at all in his mind but her.
Ivy was dressed as if she was a bride already, in exquisite cream from head to toe, and he couldn’t bear it. He turned her around and sat her down on the window ledge, then knelt down at her feet. He looked up the length of her lush, lithe body to see all that wild heat in her blue eyes.
Giaco slid his hands up her legs, pulling up the hem of her skirt as he went. He stroked his fingers beneath the panties she wore, pulling them to one side to find that glistening heat that he knew waited for him there.
And then he leaned in and buried his head between her legs.
She made the most beautiful noise he’d ever heard. Her hips jolted, and then rocked against him as he licked his way deep inside her, and then ate his fill.
He lost track of the number of times she shook against him. The way her fingers dug in hard to grip his hair, leaving pricks of pain that he hoped he would feel later.
He lost track of the screams she stopped bothering to muffle, and he half hoped the whole castle heard.
If he could have broadcast to the world that everything between them was real, just like this, he would have.
When he finished, he tucked her swollen, sweet center away again, covering her with the scrap of lace he tugged back into place. He smoothed her skirt back down her legs and when he sat back to look up at her, she looked…disheveled.
