I looked down at the engagement ring still on my finger from our ruse at the airport. “But… you said you stole it.”
“Actually we didn’t. You asked, and we said you didn’t want to know.”
“Wait…” I looked at the ring. “You had this made?”
“We wouldn’t give you a stolen ring,” Jagger said. “And we wouldn’t give you a ring someone else could buy from a store either.”
My mouth hung open as I searched for words.
But it turned out, there was no time to talk about the ring.
“There’s Hawk,” Jagger said.
I followed his gaze and saw Hawk standing near one of the open sets of terrace doors, wrists crossed in front of him.
And honestly, if I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed he was just another member of someone’s security detail, one of the many black-suited men who drifted through the crowd on the heels of their clients.
He didn’t even look at us.
“Where’s Vigo?” I asked.
“Around,” Jagger said. “Let’s look for Alina.”
We meandered through the villa’s first floor (we passed more than one set of stairs leading to the second floor, but they were all cordoned off with green velvet rope), gazing with admiration at the jewelry whenever one of the men with trays stopped to offer a glimpse, scanning the crowd for signs of Alina.
But in the end, it wasn’t her face that got our attention.
It was her laugh.
It rang through the room like a bell, bright and unabashed.
I followed the sound of it and spotted Alina, a sheath of white satin draped over her lithe body, hair falling in a sleek blonde sheet down her slender back.
She stood near a table of canapés, a glass of champagne in one hand, her phone raised in the other as she took a selfie with a young, good-looking dark-haired guy with a rakish smile.
She looked carefree in a way I’d never been, just a rich girl doing rich girl things.
A rich girl who was Dimitri Kaprolov’s daughter.
One who had no idea we’d tracked her from Dimitri’s plane to Capri to the gala.
No idea we were here just for her.
46
VIGO
The so-calledgala was boring as fuck. Seriously, who wanted to mill around like sheep with a bunch of rich people, looking at fancy jewelry you couldn’t wear anywhere fun, waiting for the fireworks show that was slated to end the evening (which I only knew about because I’d overheard one of the guards talking abut it), the one and only fun thing in the whole night?
Rich people, am I right?
Why not just cut to the fun stuff?
It was something I didn’t understand about most people: the way they forced themselves through a grinder to get to a good thing, like they had to do penance for having fucking fun.
No, thanks.
Who needed penance when you could just have the fun part?
