It reminded him of that night in the study when she’d looked at him, all heat and desire. Like then, he’d thought she had never been more glorious. Except this time he could taste her in his mouth.
They studied each other for what felt like an eternity.
“Tell me,” she said, in a voice that was little more than a rasp after all that pleasure, while her blue gaze moved all over his face and made him feel as exposed as if she flayed him open, “why does this feel like a goodbye?”
Giaco made himself smile, though it sat on his face wrong. He could feel it. “I can’t imagine,” he said. This should have come easily to him. This was what he was good at. Blowing smoke. Flashing mirrors. “We marry in the morning. This is the very opposite of goodbye, Ivy.”
But later, after he’d walked away and left her there—after he forced himself not to look back—he knew that they were both perfectly aware that he was lying.
Yet again.
Chapter Eight
LEONTINA WALKED INTOIvy’s rooms in the castle the following morning without an invitation, but with a cautious sort of smile on her face. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said, softly.
Ivy wasn’t sure that she and her former stepsister and soon-to-be sister-in-law had ever had a proper heart-to-heart. Back in the day, growing up here, everyone had kept their head down and handled their own trauma. It wasn’t much of a bonding experience. And this time around, though Ivy had spent a good deal less time in the castle, she’d only seen Leontina when Umberto demanded that there be so-called family gatherings. She still had the impression that the other woman deliberately kept herself to the shadows.
That she’d sought out Ivy of her own volition seemed like a significant shift. That alone would have intrigued Ivy.
But it was also Ivy’s wedding day. And she very much wanted to stop thinking about the implications of that. The same way she didn’t want to think about what had happened last night, either. Much less how it had ended, with Giaco walking away.
It had seemed prophetic.
“Of course you’re not intruding,” Ivy said, and waved Leontina to a chair near hers in the sitting room that had always abutted the rooms considered hers here. As a girl, she’d never sat in here. It was too exposed. There was no lock on the door. She’d always preferred to hide away in her bedroom, behind a lock and beneath the covers of her bed—but that was a long time ago.
Today she was halfway through her preparations for a wedding that had felt real last night, with Giaco’s clever mouth between her legs. Yet today, the profound fakeness of what they were doing seemed to weigh upon her like blocks of concrete hung from her shoulders.
She could have done without all these contradictory emotions altogether.
Perhaps that was why it took her longer than it should have to register that Leontina did not look the way she normally did. On the contrary. She was wearing a dress, and not the usual sort of dress she wore, shapeless and deliberately unforgettable. This dress was a bright magenta color that clung to her body, so that all a person looking at her could really see was her endlessly long legs in the high shoes she was wearing. It also called attention to her dramatically lithe figure that would not have looked out of place on a runway model or a prima ballerina.
It made Ivy wonder all over again if it was, in fact, genetics that gave Giaco his outrageously beautiful form. But she focused on the woman still standing in front of her, noticing the other major difference. Leontina did not have her hair scraped back into her usual severe bun. Today it was flowing all around her, thick, dark waves that fell halfway down her back.
“My God,” Ivy said, a smile taking over her mouth. “Look at you. You’re absolutely stunning. I can’t believe you hide all of this all the time.”
Leontina smiled back, and that only drew attention to the dark jade eyes she shared with her brother. “Thank you,” Leontina said in her quiet voice, though even that seemed to hit different today. It sounded far more intense, and measured, than Ivy remembered. “My brother doesn’t get married every day. I thought I ought to represent the family right, though obviously, normally, I prefer not to be noticed.” Color dusted her cheeks and she looked away down. “I also wanted to make you an offer. One that you can refuse, of course.”
“What kind of offer?” Ivy asked, intrigued.
If her former stepsister, soon to be sister-in-law, offered her a getaway car, she honestly didn’t know what she would do.
Instead, Leontina sat down on the chair Ivy had waved her to. She blew out a breath. Ivy tried not to feel self-conscious. Her hair was done and her makeup perfect, but she wore only a robe as Gabriele and the rest of the stylist battalion were doing something with her dress in the other room. She hadn’t asked what.
She also hadn’t imagined that she’d be entertaining anyone in this state, but she was too intrigued to let the small matter of being underdressed get to her.
“I wanted to offer my services as a stand-in family member,” Leontina said, smiling at Ivy with what looked like determination more than anything else. “I know you don’t have any. And I’m not entirely sure that youlikeGiaco all that much, which, fair enough. He’s a lot. But this is your wedding. So if you feel like you wish you had family of your own, well, I did used to be your stepsister. And I always wished that things were different here. What I mean is, I can be family for you, if you like. If that would help.”
Ivy had thought that it was a long shot that she would shed even a single tear at this wedding. Given that it was such a circus and had nothing to do with the two people getting married. And even if it had, said two people were putting on a show anyway.
But Leontina proved her wrong that easily, with her honest, earnest expression and the way she looked directly at Ivy. Ivy felt salt prickle the back of her eyes.
“I don’t want to overstep,” Leontina continued in the same quietly sincere manner. “But last night I found myself thinking that should I get married as my father insists I will, and at his command, what I’ll miss the most is my mother. That made me wonder if you did, too. And she can’t be here, I know. But I can.”
The prickle behind Ivy’s eyes became more of a threat. “That is the sweetest thing anyone could possibly have said to me today,” she said. She reached out a hand to grab Leontina’s, and it was like a new understanding bloomed between them. A new bond. She could feel it warm her, deep inside. Maybe this was what healing felt like. “Thank you.”
And after Leontina left, Ivy sat with that. The offer, the warmth. The notion that somehow, she and Leontina had become the friends they always should have been this morning. Even as Gabriele and his minions hurried her into her gown, and spent what she considered an unnecessary amount of time debating the fall of her excessively theatrical train, she kept coming back to that offer.
As if Leontina had figured out something that Ivy wasn’t sure she’d known herself.
