Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  I didn’t know what Alexander thought of my disappearance, if he assumed I was dead or hated me enough for my escape that he’d forgotten me entirely, but he hadn’t come for me in the month I’d been gone. I tried not to focus on why he hadn’t and whether he just couldn’t find me or he didn’t want to.

  I’d made my decision, and I had to live with it.

  So, it was back to work for me. Sebastian was working on a film with the revered movie star Adam Meyers, so I knew a windfall was coming for us, but until then, I had Giselle to put through her remaining two years in art school, and now, Elena’s law school.

  We were too poor to even take out a loan. How does someone secure an investment when they have no equity?

  The only thing of value we had, that we’d ever had, was me.

  I tried to model, but I’d been out of the game for a year, and Landon Knox’s blackmark against me still lingered in Milan and echoed out into the rest of Italy.

  I couldn’t secure an agent, let alone a go-see or photo shoot.

  Even my beauty, it seemed, couldn’t help us now.

  My eyes stung as I blinked up into the rain, and I wondered idly if I was crying.

  I could have been, though I wasn’t a crier, but I doubted it.

  It seemed that running away from the only man I’d ever loved hadn’t ripped me open like a raw wound as I thought it might. Instead, it had calcified me. Where I was once warmth and light, I was only sinew and blood, stripped of metaphor and emotion, a human vessel without animation.

  Oh, my family still gave me comfort. I was free to FaceTime with them every night, to see the small but comfortable brownstone Mama had made a deposit on with the last of the money I’d sent her, to see the tender, excited way Elena handled her new law school textbooks for her first semester at NYU, to watch Giselle as she painted intricate works of art as easily as breathing while she gabbed to me about how much she loved Paris, and finally, most beautifully, to discover the face of my brother as he talked about the woman he had fallen in love with.

  I could have moved to any of their cities. It would have been an incredible comfort to wrap myself in their love as balm against the sucking black hole of missing and misery that lay in my chest where my heart used to be, but I didn’t.

  First, I didn’t want them to see how broken I was. They would have questions I didn’t have answers for, and they wouldn’t let things lie if it looked like I was in pain.

  I had to get a handle on myself before I could go to them.

  Secondly, I needed a job. I thought, given my previous experience in Italy, that it was the obvious place to do so.

  I’d been wrong, but I’d sent the bulk of my money to my family members, and I didn’t have enough to book a flight even if I wanted to. I was crashing on my friend Erika’s couch and that was getting old quick because she had a boyfriend who was gross enough to hit on me whenever she wasn’t home.

  So there I was, stuck in Milan with my sorrow and without a hope.

  I tilted my head back farther, letting the rain pelt me in the face. I could feel the rush of water drenching my black wrap dress, sluicing over my hair like a religious cleansing, a rebirth, or a baptism. I was lost to religion forever, but I enjoyed the metaphor. My fingers unfurled and my palms rounded so that I would feel the rain run through my fingers.

  I just stood there like a crazy person, smiling because I was free to stand there like a crazy person, and no one was going to stop me.

  I’d fought so hard for so many things that had escaped me, but this, this freedom, was something I would never ever take for granted.

  “Scusi,” a cool, slightly accented voice interrupted my reverie. “Stai bene?”

  I righted myself and took in the frankly gorgeous man before me who was nearly as waterlogged as I was. His dark copper hair dripped over his forehead, partially shielding the vivid, nearly electric blue of his eyes as he peered down at me in concern. He was tall—not as tall as Alexander or Dante, but I’d yet to meet anyone who was—and trim but fit beneath his trench coat.

  If I’d been a normal girl with a normal past, I might have blushed and flirted with such an attractive stranger.

  But I wasn’t that girl.

  In fact, the primary reason I found myself drawn in by him was because of the aloof cast to his mouth and the stern set of his features. Even though he was clearly concerned about the crazy woman happily getting drenched in the rain, he didn’t really care.

  That apathy stirred something in me, a strange combination of empathy and allure.

  I answered him in English, just guessing at his accent. “I’m fine, thank you. I enjoy the rain.”

  His lips twitched, drawing my attention to the firm, perfectly formed mouth. “I wonder if it might be better enjoyed from the café behind you, maybe over a hot caffè latte? I’m not sure if you are aware, but your teeth are chattering.”

  I froze and noticed that my teeth did not follow suit. “Oh.”

  His mouth pulled even higher in the barest hint of a smile. “Allow me?” I stared at him as he offered me his coat, putting it around my shoulders before gently leading me over to the small café beside the restaurant I’d applied at.

  “Do you normally like to play with life and death by standing out in the freezing rain?” he queried drolly as he stepped forward to grab the door for me.

  A surprised laugh bubbled up as I thought about it. “Not in this particular way, no, but you’d be surprised how often I straddle that fine line.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me, a hand hovering over the small of my back in an old-fashioned gentlemanly way as he led me into the café and over to a small table. “You look like a goddess from the underworld. I don’t find that surprising at all.”

  I beamed at him, surprising even myself with the vividness of my expression. His comparison had solidified my regard for him.

  Anyone who likened me to Persephone, I decided, had an unerring sense of character.

  “And you the miraculous Hermes who could cross into the underworld unscathed to rescue me and take me back to my mother?” I asked him, testing him because only someone well versed in mythology would know the details of Hades and his Queen’s story.

  His eyes twinkled even though his lips stayed flat. I took him for a man who didn’t smile often and wondered what I would have to do to change that.

  It was a surprising thought, but I let myself have it because I’d been obsessing over the wrong man for so long, it felt good to care even momentarily about a good one.

  “Unfortunately, I think I am the messenger who will be forced to take you back to my mother,” he explained as the small bell above the café door sounded and a beautiful dark-skinned woman swept into the room.

  I recognized her immediately and not only because she was fairly well known in the fashion world. I knew the perfectly coiffed head of caramel highlighted waves and the gorgeous slant of her cheekbones because I had met her before.

  Willa Percy had been a judge at the St. Aubyn panel when I’d auditioned what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  And she had not been very kind.

  I pursued my lips in a mirror image of hers as we took each other in.

  “Cosima Lombardi,” she said slowly, dredging up my name from the depths of her memory. “Intimissimi campaign, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “You’re not.”

  She eyed me, then her son, though clearly not biologically as he was red haired and only lightly tanned. “If you are attempting to sleep with my son to get me to patron you, you’ll be sadly mistaken.”

  “Willa,” my new friend protested, partially standing to glower at her. “Sit down and be silent if you don’t have anything kind to say. I ran into this…I ran into Cosima.” He tasted the name, rolling it properly the way Italians do and then did his lip twitch smile before continuing. “She was outside in the rain, and I offered her a coffee to warm up. Neither of us had any idea of our ties to you, and frankly, I still doubt either of us c
are. Really, Mom, you think too much of yourself sometimes.”

  My mouth gaped a little at his strong tone and audacity, but surprisingly, Willa sat down on the chair he pulled out for her and accepted his kiss on the cheek with only a mild sniff.

  “Go get us those coffees, will you?” she asked him, patting his cheek and inciting a grimace from him.

  A little giggle escaped at seeing them interact. This man was older than me, strong and sure in his movements and actions in a way that spoke of inherent confidence and unflappability.

  He reminded me, in small ways, of Alexander.

  And those small ways were both just not enough and enough to make me feel comfortable around him.

  “Now, what’s a girl like you doing out in the rain looking like a drowned rat?” Willa asked me pointedly as she unwound her Hermes scarf and opened her sleek designer raincoat.

  “Enjoying my freedom,” I told her honestly because I didn’t know her, and I had nothing to lose.

  Not anymore.

  “Is freedom a euphemism for unemployment?” she asked me pointedly, scraping her scathing brown gaze over my seated form. “I haven’t seen or heard of you in any circles in months.”

  “I was living abroad for a while,” I hedged.

  “Modelling?”

  I shook my head but didn’t explain even when she shot me a frustrated look to continue.

  “Career suicide to be gone so long. Models age quicker than dogs, my dear. You’re what now, twenty?”

  “Nineteen,” I told her as her son returned with three lattes.

  He frowned at me as he handed over the small warm mug. “Jesus, you are young.”

  “How old are you?”

  Willa pinned me with a glare. “I thought you were not trying to sleep with him?”

  I shrugged one shoulder indolently, completely unnerved by her rudeness.

  “Stop it, already. The mama bear act was old when I was seventeen,” he told her.

  Willa pressed her lips together.

  He shot her a fond, slightly exasperated look and then turned to face me as he pushed back his rapidly drying hair. “I am nearly as rude as my mother. My name is Daniel Sinclair, but please call me Sinclair. It’s lovely to meet you, Cosima.”

  “French?” I asked, identifying his accent much more easily when he spoke English.

  He inclined his head slightly. “Mais, bien sûr.”

  “I don’t speak French, but I do understand that. How many languages do you speak?” I asked.

  “Four fluently,” his mother said proudly. “He also has an MBA from Columbia and owns an up-and-coming real estate development company in New York City. Perhaps now you can see why I’m protective?”

  “I can,” I agreed, fiddling with the handle of my cup, imagining what it would have been like to have a mother who had gone to bat for me. “And I can’t blame you for it. I wish I had a protector like that.”

  I looked up at them after a beat of silence and found them watching me, twin expressions of reluctant tenderness on their faces.

  “I’m not to be pitied,” I told them as I wrung out the ends of my drenched hair onto the tile floor beside me. “You don’t know my story. You aren’t to know if it’s a tragic one.”

  “No nineteen-year-old girl should have so much sadness in her eyes,” Sinclair said, his beautiful blue gaze cool and serene as twin lakes. “I don’t need to know your story to know that.”

  “Ah, and we hit on the real reason you offered to buy me coffee,” I said with a self-deprecating quirk of my lips.

  “No,” he said slowly, locking eyes with his mother who shook her head slightly and sighed. “I bought you a coffee because you are a beautiful woman who looked like she could use a kind word. I’m offering to be your friend and maybe, to protect you the way my mother protects me because of those sad golden eyes.”

  “Why in the world would you do that?” I asked, instantly suspicious of his altruism.

  If my time at Pearl Hall had taught me anything, it was that no one did anything without getting something in return.

  The world was a hellhole masquerading as a field of dreams, and I wasn’t a naïve girl frolicking through the flowers anymore. I was a warrior with a blade, and I’d cut down anyone who tried to drag me farther into that hell again.

  “We’re a family who takes in strays,” Willa surprised me by responding, throwing down a few bills to pay for our drained coffees.

  “Especially beautiful ones,” Sinclair said with such an audacious wink that it made me laugh.

  “You better come with us,” Willa said with a dramatic sigh. “I’ll have to do something about your hair if we want to get you back to work.”

  “I’m not cutting it,” I snapped, my hands flying to the thick, inky wet mass of it.

  My hair was my security blanket, my crown when I would otherwise be without one. Even Alexander hadn’t tried to take it from me, and I didn’t know what I would have done if he’d tried.

  Willa rolled her eyes as she ushered us all out into the rain straight into a waiting car, the driver holding the door open for us.

  “Darling girl, I would never. Your hair will be your signature when I catapult you to stardom.”

  “It will be her eyes,” Sinclair argued as he helped me into the clean leather interior. “I have a feeling her money eyes have taken her places before, and that won’t stop now.”

  Alexander

  The sight of her hit me with the force of a nuclear wave.

  My back slammed into the plush leather car seat as my chest decompressed, my heart swollen and beating against the confinement.

  She was achingly beautiful.

  It was the only way to describe the acute sensation her beauty stirred in the beholder, the breath-stealing, blood warming impact one had at the sight of her.

  My muscles locked against the urge to throw the door to the Bugatti open and stalk over to her where she stood looking lost and unforgivably alone of the street corner outside the Piazza Mercanti in Milan.

  I’d spent hundreds of pounds directing resources to find her. Finally, after five weeks of searching, they found Cosima in Milan because she’d sent the bulk of her savings to her mother in New York City and the transaction had pinged on our radar. From there, it was easy. She was living in a cramped apartment with a fellow model and her lecherous boyfriend. No one in Milan’s varied and thriving fashion circle would work with her thanks to the damage Landon Knox had done to her before she’d become mine. She was broke and broken, all because of me.

  But I’d put into action events that would help her, even if I decided not to get out of the cold car and catch her up in my arms like a captured water nymph.

  Sherwood was a gormless arsehole if he thought for one minute I would follow his directives like a good little lamb and let the best thing that had ever happened to me slip through my fingers.

  Cosima was mine.

  She could exist across the world. Hell, she could be transported to another fucking planet, and she would still be owned wholly by me.

  Contractually, spiritually, physically, and fucking emotionally.

  Every drop of blood in her body was tainted by my dark, seething obsession with her, and she didn’t even know.

  I hadn’t had a chance to tell her.

  We’d been playing a game too dangerous to take for granted.

  I’d fought hard, in the only way I knew how, to silently, swiftly move my pieces across the board when the odds were stacked heavily in the Order’s favour.

  For a brief shining moment­­­­—when Salvatore was lying shot through the chest in a hotel room in Rome, and I was about to wed the woman I knew in my bones was my reward for a life of painful servitude to my father and his demons—I thought I might have even done it.

  Outsmarted them.

  The shrewdest, wealthiest, most corrupt group of men in Britain.

  Of course, I hadn’t.

  My hamartia had always been pride.

&n
bsp; I believed in myself enough to try to eliminate the problem, but in the end, my failing had come from exactly that pride blinding me with arrogance.

  The magic Cosima had brought to my life was just that, an illusion created by the cruel hands of the puppeteers and masterminds who ruled us both.

  I stayed seated in my car and watched her through the mirrored streaks of rain obscuring the windshield. She had her chin tipped up as water peppered over her face, lips parted and eyes closed as if she was preparing for a baptism.

  I knew differently, though.

  She might have been homeless and alone, sodden on some street corner like a forgotten whore, but my topolina wasn’t focused on any of that.

  She was glorying in her freedom.

  I could tell by the sad but awed tip of her lips and the reverent way she opened her hands to the sky to collect the drops in her palms.

  That last time I’d seen her in the rain, I’d fucked her in the mud in a field of poppies my mother had planted behind Pearl Hall.

  Seeing her like that again, wet and ruined, made me want to do it again.

  Then again, any time I looked at Cosima, no matter the inappropriateness of our surroundings, I wanted her.

  I’d never wanted for anything in my entire life yet, I’d never wanted anything the way I wanted her. I felt her absence from my life like a limb lost in war, blasted away by a bomb, the shards of shrapnel still digging and twisting painfully deeper into the salvaged tissues.

  At that moment, after days without contact, I was frankly mesmerised by the sight of her.

  She was more alive in the tableau of bittersweet misery and joy than I had been in any moment of my life before and without her.

  It was intoxicating enough for me to risk everything for her.