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It had taken a long time to forget the terror and misery of that night. But sometimes even now if they heard a police siren she would see Lucas’ hands shake and his face stiffen with panic and she would want to cry. He had always been highly strung and shy and struggled with debilitating anxiety, but now he was reclusive.
As for her...
Over the years, all the sneering remarks about her appearance had left her cautious around people in general, and men in particular, but she had thought Cameron was different. That he had seen her inner beauty whereas, in fact, with one cool, assessing glance he had spotted the lonely girl who lived inside her who wanted someone to notice her. Talk to her. Think she was special.
The interior of the car shuddered in and out of focus as if she were sitting inside a snow globe and someone were shaking it. Her face felt hot with shame.
Which was why sleeping with Trip had been such a crazy thing to do. At least the risks she’d taken had not impacted anyone else. And nobody had been there to see how easy he’d found it to abandon her. As she remembered his haste to be gone, her breath felt ragged.
She felt his gaze on her face.
‘And I don’t have any problems,’ she lied. ‘Except you,’ she added. ‘You’re my problem.’
‘That’s progress,’ he said softly. ‘Yesterday I wasn’t your anything.’
He shifted against the leather upholstery and every single nerve ending in her body twitched in unison and it was so intense that she had to stop herself from pulling off her seat belt, throwing open the car door and leaping onto the road as they did in the movies.
She turned her face towards the window, seeing nothing, body taut with frustration, furious with herself for telling him what she was going to do and thereby giving him an opportunity to set this ‘plan’ in motion.
When he’d broken up with her, she had thought he was self-centred, arrogant and entitled, but this was a whole new level of impossible to process behaviour. He had lied to her parents, lied to her, tricked her into thinking she was on her way to London when all the time he was bringing her here.
Her gaze fixed on the distant hills with their patchwork fields of green and gold.
‘Exactly where are you taking me?’ she demanded, turning towards him.
‘Villa Morandi. My father’s villa. Mine now, I guess.’ He seemed almost surprised, as if that thought had only just occurred to him, and there was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.
She had met Henry on a handful of occasions. Outwardly, Trip resembled his father in the broadest strokes. The height, the fine, straight nose and the blue eyes. But their personalities could not be more different. Henry had been all about planning and projections. He had been autocratic, disciplined and focused on the prize. Whereas Trip brought the energy and excitement into any room. He took chances—or risks, depending on your perspective.
But Trip was still his son, and for many boys, their father was a guide into manhood. Was that why he was acting like this? Because he had lost his polestar? She wanted to ask, to reach out and smooth that rigidity from his shoulders, but that would mean having to touch him and it would be beyond stupid of her to do that.
‘And what would he think about you doing this?’ She made her voice neutral, in the way she’d learned from watching her own father deal with political opponents and critics. ‘I spent time with your father. He didn’t act on impulses. He thought things through, and he left you in charge of his business so I’m guessing he wanted you to step up. To grow up and be a worthy successor. I’m certain he didn’t expect you to marry someone against their will.’
He was watching her blandly, but now the light in his gaze sharpened in a way that made her breath go shallow and she knew she had landed a blow.
‘Fine, so break up with me. Here, you can use my phone.’ He tossed it across the seat. ‘Make it official. Call your father. I should warn you, though, there’s a fair amount of blood in the water, so the sharks are already circling. You tip in some chum, and it’ll turn into a feeding frenzy real fast. Because it isn’t just my image that’s going to be affected by our splitting up.’
She stared at him, her heart beating out a drumroll of panic against her ribcage.
He was right. Headlines involving words like ‘senator’s daughter’ and ‘break-up’ would make people sit up and take notice. Add in a photo of Trip looking louche and sexy stepping off a plane after his miraculous return from the dead and the story could run for days, weeks, months in the summer’s slow news cycle.
It would be the ultimate clickbait.
Despite her attempts to stop it, a shiver ran down her spine as she imagined the trolling that would start the minute the story broke.
What fun they would have. Imagine, they would say, that Lily Dempsey thought she could enchant a man like Trip Winslow. Because it wouldn’t matter what statement they put out, everyone would assume she’d been dumped. All the old pictures would be rolled out. The ones that made her want to curl into a ball beneath her duvet. No place had been beyond the intrusive reach of their lenses. No topic was taboo. Not her hair or dress sense. Not even her weight or the straightness of her teeth.
But she could cope with that, had been coping with it since she was nine years old and her father’s career had apparently made her public property.
‘But hey, you know that though, don’t you?’ Trip said then. ‘You and your family know all about managing reputation and image. Why else would the world think your brother was learning musical composition at the Conservatoire in Paris three years ago, when in fact he was in Switzerland?’
Lily’s eyes flew to his and everything inside her lurched as if the car had hit a pothole in the road. She knew she had gone white. Could feel the blood draining away. Nobody outside the family knew about Lucas’ time in the clinic. Their father had driven him there himself.
‘You don’t know anything—’
He made an impatient sound. ‘No, I don’t. And neither do those photographers and reporters who are currently sleeping in their cars outside my apartment. But knowing things that other people don’t know is how they make their living. Once they find a loose thread, they keep pulling on it until it unravels. Or snaps.’
There was a different note to his voice now. A kind of quiet firmness. Like a door closing that couldn’t be opened from the inside.
