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“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 whilehewas completely dressed in another one of those suits of his that really should have been against the law,shewas 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 ofalmostrolling his eyes, but not quite.My woman will be held to a different standard, obviously. It is thekindof 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.
