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Lily felt sick. Outside the sunlight was too bright to look into directly, but there were shadows beneath the trees and she could feel the darkness outside seeping towards her.
She had been thinking about herself.
Only it wouldn’t just be her, it would be her family, too, who would be caught in the net. That was fine for her parents. Her father had chosen his career and her mother had chosen her father knowing who he was and where his ambitions lay, but Lucas...
Picturing her brother’s face, she felt her ribs tighten.
He was the polar opposite of Trip. Shy, self-effacing, sensitive, not at all comfortable in his beautiful skin.
Not that Trip knew or cared about that. And in some ways, it was irrelevant now that their engagement was official. Trip had been the big news story for the last twenty-four hours, and the revelation that he and Lily were secretly engaged would be catnip to the press packs.
Picturing them jostling for position on the stoop outside her apartment, she shuddered. She hated being in the limelight, but Trip had made that an inevitability. So, she had a choice, if you could call it that. Stay engaged and hope the media focused on the upcoming wedding and the bridal excesses of the Upper East Side. Or break up with Trip and wait for the sky to fall on her head. Because it would. And not just her head. The impact of ending things with someone so high profile would be impossible to contain.
Being caught in the wake of the media madness that would follow her ‘dis-engagement’ would be horrendous for Lucas, but if someone pulled on one of his loose threads...
Thanks to her last doomed decision to trust someone, he was still fragile, more so even than was usual.
She couldn’t risk him unravelling again. Or worse.
There was a beat of silence, then another.
Clenching her hands so tightly that her nails dug into her palms, she lifted her chin. ‘How long would I have to do it for? Be married to you, I mean.’
There was a short, pulsing silence.
‘I hadn’t really got that far. A year, I suppose. Maybe a little longer.’ She had assumed Trip would be elated. This was, after all, his moment of triumph, but as his gaze moved from her face to her tightly closed fist, she could see a muscle working in his jaw. ‘Does it really matter?’
No, not at all, she thought, turning towards the darkness, letting it swallow her up and blot out the panic in her chest and throat. If she could survive a day, she would survive any number and she would survive. She had to.
‘What matters is that we broke the news of our engagement to suit our agenda. You see, there’s a way to do these things. Announcing it when all this other stuff about my “return” is dominating the news means that people are going to concentrate on the positives. That’s good for you too, Lily.’
Was it? She stared at him dully, not even caring that he so casually used ‘we’ and ‘our’ as if this were some carefully negotiated agreement instead of a unilateral ambush.
Because now she knew what mattered. Not her feelings. Not the trajectory of her life. But was that so surprising? She already knew there was a perceived association in most people’s minds between being attractive and being important. Although they had started before she was a teenager, the years of being mocked and being made to feel inferior because her nose had a bump on it and her hair wasn’t smooth and glossy were not some distant memory.
It hurt to have confirmation that Trip felt that way about her. To know that he had found it so easy to break up with her and just as easy to now manipulate her into this charade of a marriage.
She didn’t know how long the rest of the journey took. It felt endless. Felt as if time had stopped and she was simply reliving the same moment over and over again. Finally, the car took a little twist to the left onto a road that led onto a drive edged with cypress trees.
And then she saw it.
Framed by the Tuscan countryside, the Villa Morandi looked like an enchanted palace from a fairy tale. Her heartbeat accelerated as the driver slowed the car, then turned off the engine and walked around to open her door. Stepping out onto the driveway, she gazed up mutely at the villa, her eyes moving appreciatively over the sun-faded walls and dark green shutters.
‘What do you think?’
Trip’s voice snapped her thoughts in two and she turned to face him. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said truthfully. She had wanted to hate it, but it felt wrong to lie.
Wrong to lie? Her heart began to race again. What was wrong with her? Trip had not just lied to her, he had misled the trustees and manipulated her parents and was forcing her into a marriage of his convenience for which he had shown zero contrition. She needed to toughen up, and fast, or she was never going to survive this.
Lifting her chin, she gave the villa another cursory glance, then shrugged. ‘But if you’ve seen one Italian villa, you’ve seen them all. I mean, they all look the same. Their owners do, too. Let’s hope I don’t get you mixed up with some other self-absorbed, manipulative billionaire.’
‘That would complicate things.’ His blue eyes glinted in the sunlight and she felt his gaze sweep over her. ‘But given that we spent most of our time together naked, perhaps we should just take off all our clothes. That way there would be no confusion.’
There was no answer to that, and she turned away from the house.
Now that the shock of being there had faded a little, her senses felt as though they were being bombarded. A hot, dry breeze was caressing her skin and she could smell the earth and the grass and the cypress trees and, beyond the trees, she could hear...
Nothing.
