ANNIKA DIDN’T RECALL agreeing to anything.
She knew full well she hadn’t.
But her actual, verbal agreement was unnecessary, apparently. Because Ranieri took control. He looked as if he meant to laugh at her, there in that conference room where she’d so foolishly believed for a giddy moment that she might have the upper hand.
When, as far she knew when it involved this man, no one ever had the upper hand. There was a reason he was feared and loathed and revered and admired wherever he went.
“You might consider putting your shoes back on,” he told her in that icy way of his, perfectly calibrated to make her feel as ashamed of herself as she had when she was a teenage girl besieged by her own hormones. What an unpleasant reminder of those dark years. “Unless, of course, it is your goal to impress upon the entirety of this law firm that you are, at heart, distressingly bohemian unto your embarrassing soul.”
His expression suggested that if she took that route, she might find herself in even less of a good position concerning her father’s final wishes.
She could have argued about that. But it felt like she was aiming for nothing but a Pyrrhic victory and she wasn’t in the mood for self-immolation on such a tough day. Annika bit her tongue and kept her protestations to herself. She slid her feet back into her shoes, tried to pretend they weren’t the torture devices she knew they were, and then limped out after Ranieri. He merely stalked to the conference room door in his obviously handcrafted Italian shoes—likely made for him personally, with love, by teams of rapturous artisans—flung it open, and somehow summoned the entire team of lawyers to his side. Simply by appearing, she had to think. Because she would have heard him if he’d yelled, snapped his fingers, or did whatever it was he did to make them all dance to his tune.
He exists, a voice in her said glumly. That’s the beginning and the end of everything, including you.
Annika was not a glum person, generally speaking. That was why she was good at what she did, getting people to donate money to keep the museum running smoothly with an eye toward a Schuyler-less future one day, keeping the staff happy, and making sure it remained a desirable destination in a city with museums for every mood.
Yet her father’s will and his demands had her feeling pretty distinctly glum, all the same.
Ranieri barked out commands, the lawyers scuttled about taking notes and aggressively agreeing to everything he said—big surprise—and the next thing she knew, Annika was seated in the back of a gleaming limo, gliding through Manhattan traffic as if even the usual Midtown snarls did not dare keep this man waiting.
Annika didn’t ask where they were going. Because she had the distinct impression that he wanted her to ask. Likely so he could have the pleasure of telling her, which would make it even more clear that he was in control of what was happening here.
She refused to play along. And she decided there and then that she did not have it in her to cater to this man’s pleasures.
And then had to sit there, contemplating his pleasures, such as they were, as she thought about what that might mean for a man like him. A man who looked so physical in clothes that made a great many other men look like they were playing dress-up or trying to do a James Bond impression.
Ranieri looked as if he was the man all James Bonds had tried, and failed, to emulate.
More she had to wonder what his pleasures might mean for her, the woman who hadn’t actually agreed to marry him...but was marrying him anyway.
Surely he was only talking about sex and passion in general terms, because he planned to put on this act of his. Surely he had no intention of...experimenting with such things. With Annika.
She fought, hard, to keep her expression as impassive as humanly possible. Even while her entire body seemed to burn, like she’d immolated herself after all.
Still, it was impossible not to show some hint of surprise when he stopped...at a bank.
How prosaic.
“Are you planning to fling money at the people who dare to question this unholy alliance?” she asked. “That will really get you in all the papers.”
Entertaining that image in her head was a lot more amusing than the other one. The one involving pleasure and sex and passion.
Ranieri only slanted a dark gaze her way. Just a glance, and yet it fairly seethed with reproof. “Wait here.”
His driver opened his door and he exited the back of the car without any heaving around or fighting for purchase on the back of the seat in front of him. Not Ranieri. He merely rose from within, as if he was inevitable. As if he had more power and flexibility in one toe than most mortals held in the whole of their bodies.
And there she was again, thinking about bodies.
His body, to be precise.
Alone in the back seat, she allowed herself a little breather. A little chance to check in with herself. Nothing this morning had gone as she had intended it to go. So now, by herself, she could finally accept that really, she was just a mess of too many feelings.
The very thing her father had always despaired of most in her.
Emotion is a trap, my girl, Bennett had liked to rumble at her. Be better than that, and if you can’t, do please refrain from chewing your legs off in public.
She found herself smiling at that, even now. Even here. Because that had been her dad to a T. Gruff. Blunt. Funny.
Annika missed him dreadfully. At least while he’d been in his coma, she’d still been able to see him. To sit by his bed and tell him about her life. To hold his hand and love him.
Maybe the real truth was that despite everything she’d been told by every single doctor who had spoken to her at length about her father’s condition, she had still believed that somehow, he would beat this. That despite everything, he would rise up again, take his rightful place, and these past five years would be washed away as if they’d never been.
Maybe she still hadn’t quite accepted that he was really, truly dead.
The funeral hadn’t helped. It had been packed full of all the sorts of people her father had enjoyed but who she always found so overwhelming. Mostly because they spent all their time speaking out of both sides of their faces at once. One side to express their condolences, and the other to sneer down their noses at her. Even in her grief, she had been keenly aware that she did not live up to expectations.
That poor, sad creature, she’d heard one of her father’s friends murmur. It’s hard to imagine a less likely heir to Bennett.
Maybe he died to escape the shame, the friend’s snide female companion had tittered.
Though Annika almost laughed, sitting there in the back seat of a limousine waiting for Ranieri to return, as she imagined all the snooty people she knew and the reactions they were going to have when this got out. When Ranieri told the world he was actually marrying the hopeless, sad, shameful Annika Schuyler.
For sex, no less.
That really did make her laugh, no matter how she tried to put her hands over her mouth and muffle the sound. And the more she tried to muffle herself, because even she knew it wasn’t good manners to snort with laughter when the driver could hear her, the louder she got. The more hysterical.
Then, after she’d laughed a bit, it turned into something a little closer to sobbing, and she understood that. She understood that grief was physical in a thousand ways and much like the flu, it would come as it chose. Stay as long as it liked. And leave when it was ready, not a moment before.
Yet when Ranieri swung back into the car, she spent a few moments congratulating herself on having stopped the sobbing before his return. Then questioned herself. Why hadn’t she run off? It was the principle of the thing. It wasn’t as if she could run away from what was happening. She knew that. But it would have been nice to not simply...surrender to this man. And so easily.
Annika was certain that was what everyone did. She was certain he expected no less, in fact. He was the sort of man who expected that everywhere he went, mass genuflections should follow. Really, she should have walked off for the sheer joy of interrupting his arrogance for a few moments.
The way he’d reappeared had been a shock. Or maybe that was simply him. The door had opened and there was the usual assault of a New York City street. The noise, the smells, the rush of people.
But then Ranieri was in the middle of all that, somehow rougher and rawer than anything around him. Somehow more intense than the rush and whirl of Manhattan itself.
“Did they not give you your bags of money?” she asked him, because he certainly wasn’t carrying any. She blew out a dramatic sort of breath. “Don’t they know who you are?”
He ignored that. He thumped his hand on the roof of the car, clearly an order to his driver because sure enough, the car pulled out into traffic again.
“I’m having my people prepare the appropriate statement,” he told her coolly. Maybe she ought to have been grateful that he seemed to be so focused on keeping this businesslike. Then again, that was just his personality, as long as she’d known him. All business. All power games. That was the Ranieri Furlan promise. “It will be delivered to media outlets within the hour.”
“Dare I ask which statement that is?” Annika felt that uncontrollable laughter well up inside her again and did her best to stuff it back down, because she doubted he would react well to it. “Is it the one where you’re the boss of me?”
He turned then, shifting his body so that he could face her across the back seat. His golden gaze slammed into her, so hard that if she hadn’t been looking at him, and perfectly aware where his hands were, she might have thought that he’d pushed her back against the seat with one of them. That was how it felt.
“I hope you’re enjoying these witticisms of yours,” he said in that soft way of his that really wasn’t soft at all. “Someone should. I will suggest to you that it would be better if you got them out of your system here in private. I doubt they will play as well on the national stage.”
“Goodness,” she said weakly. “Will there be a stage?”
“Our engagement will be news, Annika. I am news. And so, I suppose, are you. In your way.”
“That almost feels like it was supposed to be a compliment.” She shook her head at him. “And yet you couldn’t quite commit to it, could you?”
He looked at her in that manner of his that she’d experienced entirely too many times over the past five years when he’d been the guardian she neither wanted nor needed. As if he found being in her presence required so much patience, so much, that it nearly wrecked him as he struggled to provide it. As if even gazing at her required a level of forbearance most men could not possibly achieve.
There were times she found it amusing. Today was not one of those times.
“My grandmother, like most of the women in my family, had an innate elegance and exquisite style.” He bit off those words as if they were bullets, but not necessarily aimed at her. “She consulted the finest jewelers in Paris for this ring, which I bestow upon you in the hope that you will rise to meet it, and it is not so much...”
Something in her curled around and around, a little too much like the sort of shame ruthlessly curated women at funerals thought she ought to feel. The kind of shame that made her angry, because it wasn’t hers. She liked herself. Annika clung to that anger, that red-hot burst of something like defiance, because it was better than the alternative.
“Pearls before swine?” she threw at him. “Is that what you meant to say?”
Ranieri’s mouth went grim. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet box, then flipped it open.
And Annika was no stranger to beautiful jewelry. The museum was full of it. Her sweet mother had left Annika all of hers, and she treasured every piece. She told herself stories about the various jewels, and had, when she was younger, excavated every known photograph of her mother so she could wear her jewelry in the same manner. But it wasn’t only her mother’s jewelry. As the last in her family, she had been handed down beautiful heirlooms from every side. Wearing them, or even gazing at them, made her feel closer to all the women who had gone before her.
But the ring in that small box Ranieri held was in another category altogether.
For one thing, it was mammoth.
“Is that a ring or a life preserver?” she breathed.
“It is a one of a kind, sixteen-carat Asscher-cut diamond without peer,” he growled at her.
Annika had the strangest notion that she’d offended him, and then he was reaching over and taking her hand, notably without his usual patience, tried however sorely. And she knew what he was doing. There was only one thing he could be doing. Still, something inside her shivered with a certain wild anticipation that suggested she actually thought—
But of course she didn’t. Of course she didn’t think anything of the kind. She knew he wasn’t holding her hand, just as she knew this wasn’t real. He wasn’t actually proposing to her.
Most importantly, she didn’t want him to touch her. She’d never wanted that.
Annika felt the cool touch of the platinum band as he slid it over her knuckle, then into place. As into place as anything could be when the stone attached to the band was the size of a golf ball. It was obscene. It was outrageous.
It was really very beautiful, she thought in the next moment, almost against her will. It seemed to float over her hand, catching all the September light and making flares out of it. The diamond itself was cut to look like a hall of mirrors. As if she could simply sink into it and disappear forever...
And then both she and Ranieri seemed to notice, in the same moment, that the ring fit her perfectly. Almost as if it had been made for her.
Annika’s gaze flew to his, and just like that, it was as if they were somewhere else. No longer in this car, careening through the New York streets. They were somewhere else, a place where there was only her hand in his, that ring on her finger huge enough to take out an eye, and yet all she could concentrate on was the gold looking back at her. The gold that seemed to spear straight through her, filling her up, changing her—
“Congratulations,” Ranieri bit out, breaking the spell. His voice dark. Grim, even. A sensation that matched moved through her, a deep shudder. A dark knowing. A foreboding, she was sure. “We are now engaged.”
As if he was handing down a prison sentence.
Ten momentous days later, Annika made her way through yet another depressingly well-heeled crowd, all too aware that she had been to more parties in the past week and a half than in the entire previous five years.
She had discovered many things. That she did not, in fact, enjoy New York society parties, for example. This one had taken over the whole of an industrial loft that, as far she could tell, existed entirely for its floor-to-ceiling windows with lazy views all around. Sometimes, she was given to understand, there were art shows here. But tonight it was all the same sort of people doing the same sort of thing.
New York’s finest and brightest and snobbiest, too, raising money for some or other cause célèbre.
Annika had gotten her fill of them quickly. By the time Ranieri had dropped her home the afternoon of their engagement, such as it was, it seemed that all of New York had heard the news. Her phone had been ringing off the hook, and her phone never rang off the hook. It barely rang at all. Mostly because her friends knew that she preferred a text. Still, she’d locked herself away in the sprawling family apartment on Fifth Avenue that rambled over three floors, felt like a house, and was an excellent place to take refuge from the world.
She’d left her phone on the hall table so it couldn’t bug her and if it weren’t for the incredible piece of hardware on her hand, she might have been able to convince herself that nothing had happened.
Except the next day, far too early, there had been an impatient hammering on her door. Not the door to the apartment, the door to her bedroom.
When she’d opened it, expecting one of her father’s staff members to inform her that the ceiling had caved in or some such emergency, it was instead Ranieri.
What are you...? she’d started to ask him, bewildered and so beside herself that she’d barely even noticed that while he was completely dressed in another one of those suits of his that really should have been against the law, she was not dressed at all. She wore a giant, shapeless T-shirt that came down almost to her knees.
Our first event as an engaged couple is tonight, he had informed her, his golden eyes glittering. You’ll understand that I must insist steps are taken to make you presentable.
Annika liked to look back on that moment and tell herself it was because she was still half-asleep—and not entirely understanding why he was in her apartment in the first place—that she’d simply taken that at face value.
Because what had followed was one humiliation after another. It made the sight she must have presented to him—hair doing God only knew what and that sad tent of a T-shirt—fade into insignificance. What she would give now to fume about the fact the doorman should never have let him in. Even though she knew that wasn’t entirely fair. Throughout her father’s long convalescence, Ranieri had been a near-daily visitor. Of course they had let him in.
Her phone had been ringing when she’d come home, but she’d ignored it. So it hadn’t been until she’d walked out of the apartment building on Fifth Avenue the following morning, in Ranieri’s company, that she got a taste of how everything had changed.
It was awful.
Annika was now engaged to the most eligible man in...maybe anywhere. And she hated it. There were cameras everywhere. Flashbulbs and unpleasant men shouting her name. The ring itself caused a commotion. Almost as much of a commotion as Ranieri had caused inside when he’d discovered that she had not slept with it on.
I never sleep in my jewelry, she’d told him, scowling at him when she’d finally had enough coffee—and had found enough actual clothes—to deal with him.
I suggest you learn, he had retorted. Quickly.
In that way he had that wasn’t a suggestion at all.
He had dragged her off and delivered her to what appeared to be a pleasant brownstone not far from the neighborhood where she’d grown up. Except it turned out it was far more pernicious than that. It was no family home, it was the modern New York version of the modiste. Ranieri steered her to one of the house’s salons, and then—after conferring for some time—left her to the tender mercies of the women who worked there, all of them dressed in black and possessed of the kind of sharp gazes that suggested they existed entirely on cigarettes and spite.
What they did was provide her with an appropriate wardrobe. That was the word they had kept using. Appropriate.
I already have clothes, she had complained before he’d left. Lots of clothes, actually.
Ranieri had not rolled his eyes, though he had done something that she could only describe as the Italian version of almost rolling his eyes, but not quite. My woman will be held to a different standard, obviously. It is the kind of clothes. Not just anything will do. And if we’re lucky, the clothes themselves will lend you an air of elegance.
It had taken her a while to work out that when he said that, he meant the sort of elegance she did not possess already. And she wanted to be angry about that. She did.
But after ten days with the paparazzi in her face, she was forced to contend with the realities of her life. Like the fact she was so klutzy. Clumsy, even. Then there were all the ways she was incapable of doing her hair in the way people who contended with the paparazzi needed to. She kept falling over her own two feet, her hair a mess, the way she always did. And it was disconcerting to suddenly have an audience.
An audience that liked to take pictures of her looking foolish, not that it was hard.
Meanwhile, Ranieri kept dragging her to events. And it had been one thing when she was her father’s hostess or date. People had been a little more indulgent, not that she had entirely recognized that indulgence at the time. Back then, she would make idle conversation with her father’s acquaintances, but when he decided to start talking business, she would excuse herself.
And not so she could mingle with the sorts of people who attended these parties. Perish the thought. Her actual friends did not attend New York City social events. If they did, they wouldn’t be her friends. At such events Annika preferred to wander off on her own. She had befriended a great many caterers and actors that way, which meant, over time, she got into the best restaurants and went backstage at the best shows. She’d also seen a number of unexpected views, from unique angles. She’d also seen a lot of people doing things they probably shouldn’t have been doing, but anyway, none of that mattered now, because being with Ranieri was like being in the spotlight.
A glaring, endless spotlight that was as blinding as it was hot.
It was bad enough that she could never pull off looking sophisticated, while he oozed it with his usual edgy effortlessness. There were other hazards. Most of them of the feminine variety.
There were entirely too many sophisticated, not-a-hair-out-of-place type women who circled her like sharks at these things. All of them seemed to take her engagement to Ranieri personally. Especially because he’d made no secret of the fact that they intended to wed at the end of the month. Within two weeks, now. She assumed that was why all of them tried, in various ways, to mean girl her whenever they saw her.
No one, in or out of a tabloid, could believe that Ranieri Furlan was marrying her.
Most people suspected she was pregnant.
But being assumed pregnant usually meant that people had accepted the notion that she and Ranieri had something between them. That they’d actually had sex. There were a lot of others who couldn’t quite get there.
Tonight, for example, Annika had been caught against her will in a tedious conversation with three debutantes she wished she could pretend she didn’t know. But she did. They’d all gone to private school together. One was on her fifth engagement. Another was on her second husband, having rid herself of the first when he was stripped of his royal title—though she let it be known that she was already in the market for her third. The other debutante—really more of a socialite, since they weren’t eighteen any longer—spent more time in the tabloids than some actual Hollywood celebrities. And what they’d wanted to talk about was how much they’d desperately wanted to be her friend all these years.
Lies, of course. Which she’d known even before the much-engaged one felt the need to make a few pointed comments about the rock on Annika’s hand.
I’ve always preferred a classic style myself, she’d said, though the look in her face was one of pure envy. But I suppose that if I’d managed to land Ranieri Furlan, I’d also want evidence of my triumph to beam out into outer space.
What Annika wished she could have said was that she didn’t particularly want to be engaged to Ranieri in the first place, and certainly didn’t view it as a triumph. What she’d done was hold out her left hand and gaze down at the enormous stone as if she’d never seen it before, then had glanced at the “classic” stone on the other woman’s hand.
Which, she realized only after she’d done it, might possibly have been seen as some kind of...flex.
The reality was that Annika was no good at these games. She didn’t like playing them. Especially because Ranieri had gone and told anyone who would listen that their engagement so soon after her father’s death was all about passion.
He actually kept saying that, repeatedly. Passion.
She’d heard him talking about it some more tonight, though she had attempted to give him a wide berth as she’d headed out of the main loft space. At a certain point, passion can no longer be denied, she’d heard him say. Mea culpa.
The man was terrifyingly focused. It wasn’t enough that he’d taken it upon himself to My Fair Lady her. It wasn’t enough that he’d followed that up by hiring her a personal stylist that she didn’t want, so that now she had to contend with being followed around by the steel-eyed Marissa, who was always trying to do things with eye pencils and foundation, whatever that was.
I will have your things moved into my loft in Tribeca, he had told her that first day, after she’d spent entirely too long being measured and then forced to try on clothes and prance about in them. At least she hadn’t had to do it in front of him, and then he hadn’t even looked up from whatever it was he was doing on his laptop when he’d collected her. She shouldn’t have cared. Tomorrow, I think.
I have a much better idea, she had retorted, feeling stung. And maybe something like overwhelmed, though she had chosen not to ask herself why, exactly, that was. Why don’t you move into my apartment, which has the added benefit of numerous floors we can put between us?
His golden gaze had swept over her and left her feeling... Not shaken, not really. It was more a quivering, deep inside. I think not. That would not give off the right impression at all. You will move in with me.
She had, because she knew as well as he did that any refusal to cooperate with him could be leveraged against her. And with everything around her changing so rapidly, and so against her will, she couldn’t lose Schuyler House.
It was the only thing she had left.
Which was why she’d reacted the way she did to Ranieri’s nightly round of ultimatums tonight.
The wedding will take place a week from Sunday, he had informed her on the way to tonight’s fundraiser. Looking as bored as ever. I have already had your dress made.
Of course you have. She had stared out the window, toying with the ring on her hand and making it flash against passing cabs like a beacon. Possibly a cry for help. No need to consult me. I’m only the bride.
He had ignored that the way he ignored most of the things she said. Sometimes she thought that if he had his way, she would stay tucked away in the guest room in his loft where he’d installed her. It had exposed brick and a sumptuous bathtub, a killer view, and every night she went to sleep and dreamed of him.
It was not ideal.
But then, none of this was.
I’m thinking we should just run down to City Hall and be done with it, she’d told him earlier. No muss, no fuss.
And, bonus, it wouldn’t feel like a real wedding.
Absolutely not, he had replied. He’d looked up then, that gaze of his far too steady. We will get married here in New York City. Where both of us are known so well. We will not get married at City Hall. I’m thinking your beloved Schuyler House will do.
She’d sat bolt upright. No. That’s out of the question.
It is not a request, Annika, he had replied in that dark, stirring way of his. For one thing, there are very few appropriate venues on such short notice. For another, it is no secret that it is a place you love. What else could possibly lend this enterprise the patina of truth?
Truth does not have a patina, she had tossed back at him, surprised at the rush of red-hot temper inside her. Surprised, but not enough to tamp it down or hide it. Truth is truth, no patina required. Why am I unsurprised that you don’t know that?
That’s very earnest, I am sure. And very naive. He’d shaken his head. There are lingering whispers about us, as I’m sure you know. Getting married in a place that has such resonance can only put those to rest. That and a honeymoon.
We’re not having a honeymoon, Ranieri, she had yelped. She had actually yelped at him. Honeymoons are for people who need to loll about on beaches and have marital relations. That is not us.
She’d regretted that, instantly. It was bad enough when he traipsed around Manhattan, speaking endlessly about passion to all and sundry. They did not speak of it themselves. That seemed... like adding fuel to the fire, at the very least. Foolish, in other words.
And then, in the back seat of a limousine, it seemed something far worse, far more dangerous, than simply foolish.
It almost seemed like a dare. Or like arson. Annika couldn’t breathe.
She’d never in her life been so happy to arrive at a party she already knew she would dislike. And now, having managed to slip away from the main room of the party, she made her way out to one of the balconies. This one looked north, and she took a moment to sigh a bit and look at this marvelous, magical city she’d called home her whole life. New York was unknowable and familiar at the same time. New York always rose, no matter how it fell.
Staring out at the city, she felt something stir inside her.
She’d been going about this all wrong. She’d been so surprised by Ranieri’s ferocity and command since the reading of the will, especially after the milder guardianship years, and he was pressing his advantage, wasn’t he?
But then, she should have expected he would. That was who he was.
The stark reality was that she had only a little bit of time left to get him to break this engagement. If he was the one to break it off, he would lose the company and she would lose nothing. More importantly, she would be free.
She’d been so busy letting him trot her about from stylist to fashion house to party, each stop more soul killing than the last. And she’d gone along with it, because implicit in every ultimatum he handed her was the fact that if she refused, he could report that she wasn’t playing along. He could make the case that she was not abiding by the rules her own father had set out.
But there were levels of compliance.
And two could play this game.
She stood there, looking out at the gleaming, glittering city. Always so many bright lights, from red brake lights on the streets below to all the thousands of lit-up windows, so many people and so many lives piled on top and around each other.
Surely there was no passion greater than this.
But that word echoed around inside her differently now. Maybe because she’d heard Ranieri use it so many times. Maybe because she finally felt as if her head was a little bit more clear, at last. Out here in the cool air of a late September night.
Because he wanted to get married at Schuyler House and she wanted to keep Schuyler House as it had always been. Hers, alone. Not marked by him the way everything else in her life was. And yes, maybe she’d thought that it might be nice to get married there someday, but not to him.
Never to him.
But if she didn’t want this to happen, she had only one path forward.
Passion, she thought to herself.
Maybe it was time that she gave Ranieri some of that passion he kept going on about. A lot of passion. More passion than he could handle—and none of it violating the terms of her father’s will. Or involving sex, no matter what she dreamed about, curled up in his guest room in Tribeca.
All these people in his glittering, shallow world already treated her like she was some kind of loon.
Annika smiled at her beloved city. Why not act the part?
She couldn’t think of a better way to get him to end their engagement, so she could keep Schuyler House to herself.
And free her from him, once and for all.