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And then he laughed, as if the very idea was so absurd it was funny.
Annika opened her mouth to suggest he take a flying leap out the window behindhim andconcentrate on forgetting about her and anything having to do with her on the way down, but shut it again, hard.
Because she’d almost forgotten what happened if he goaded herintowashing her hands of this.
But she doubted very much that he had.He was a master manipulator. It was literally his job.
“Don’t be silly,” she said instead. “Sure,your dating historyis basically a Who’s Whoof Fashion Week, but no one will be surprised if a man who dates supermodels exclusively ends up with a normal woman. Men like you are forever settling down with unflashy women.It’s how your type signals that you’re taking your marriage seriously.A time-honored rite of passage for a certain kind of tragically shallow man.”
“Come now, Annika.” Ranieri did something with his chinthat swept over her, head to toe. “You must be realistic. It is not that you’re plain.It is that I am me.” He shook his head as if he shouldn’t have to explain this to her. “I am a man of exacting tastes.Who will everbelieve, for even a moment, that I would willingly shackle myself to a woman who takes such little care with her own appearance?Who would accept that I might sport such an unsightly disaster upon my arm?”
It took her a moment to realize that the true insult here was not that he was saying these things. But that he clearly did not evenregister them as insults. To him, they were simply facts, not opinions.
Annika found herself gaping at him, openmouthed.Normally he would raise his dark brows and ask her if her motor skills were impaired, but today he didn’t even notice.
“It is too implausible,”Ranieri continued as if he was alone. Then again,heprobably thought he always was. “Unless we wish the entire world to think that I’m conducting my own personal charity, or suffering from a head injury, we must come upwith a different reason for this.”
It required all the willpower Annika had to simply sit there, close her mouth,and somehow keep herself from telling this man exactly where he could go.
“Don’t be too hasty, Ranieri,” she cautioned him. She made herself smile, lazily, as if this was her idea of entertainment. “The head injury can always be arranged.”
CHAPTER TWO
THEINSULTOFthis situationateat him.
The indignity of it all.
He almost felt as if he’d already suffered that head injury.
“Are you threatening me?” he asked. Very mildly, because even if she was, he could not conceive of a threat with less weight. “Do you plan to hurl one of your precious statues at me?”
Annika sniffed in a dismissive manner no other being alive would dare to display in his presence. “I would hardly risk damaging a Rodin on your hard head, Ranieri.”
As usual, it took only moments in her company to feel the beginnings of a headache. She didn’t need to use whatever statuary she had to hand. She simply existed and was irritant enough.
Ranieri could not blameBennett Schuyler, a man he had grown to admire deeply over the years, for these machinations on behalf of his daughter. In fact, Ranieri had long wondered what was to be done about the problemof Annika, the last of the great Schuyler family.She was obviously a problem without any clear solution.New York was heaving with heiresses, but in Ranieri’s experience, all of them weremore or less thesame.
Annika was most emphatically not the same, despite having attended the same schools and the same debutante balls. She had always stayed entirelyherself.He had known the girl for how many yearsnow?And in all that time, she had never managed to acquire the faintest bit of polish.Not even by accident.
Today she sat hereon this most solemn occasion looking as if she’d come to the meeting via a wind tunnel.She’d arrived late and flustered. She’d come limping in, looking disheveled. Her cheeks were still unduly flushedand her dark hair was twisted up on the top of her head, but not well. Some of it was standing out as if making a break for the ceiling even as half of itfell down.
For a long time, he’d believed shetriedto look like this.That this committed untidiness in all things was no accident, but a campaign.He had assumed this wassome kind of gameshe played with her father, or something she didathim, attempting to get revenge on him for some or other manufactured teenage reason.The way he was told American teenagers often did, especially in her class.
In the years since Bennett’s accident,Ranieri had come to understand, however reluctantly,that this was no act.This was the real Annika Schuyler. She was constitutionally incapable of pulling herself together.Ranieri hadbeen forced to concludethat despitea hefty and generous personal trust, a world-class education, and the fact that she lived in one of the most fashionable cities on the planet, Annikawould simply always look like this. Her dark brown hair was always in some state of disarray. Whatever clothing she wore, no matter the occasion, it was always unequal to the taskset before it. He had seen her in casualwear as well as in formal attire, and it was always the same.He had come upon her in that museum of hers when she could not have been expecting to see anyone, and it was the same. It was always the same.No matter what she did, she always looked as if she’d only moments before rolled out of bed.
He told himself that the familiar sensation that swept through him at that thought was distaste.That was all.
“This all sounds like a terrible quandary for you,” she said sweetly now. Too sweetly from a woman who usually spent her time scowling at him. Openly. “Shall wecall all the lawyersin and sayyou’ve defaulted before we even start?”
Ranieridecided his head would not ache. Not even in the face of such provocation. “I think not.The Schuyler Corporation is not merely an eccentric personal project, like your museum of curiosities. Many people will suffer if I am forced to abandon it.”
“Schuyler House is consistently ranked as one of the city’s favorite museums,actually,” she replied, sounding offended at the notion that her stake in this was...exactly what it was. Her odd little obsession. Not quite the same thing as a major multinational concern. “Probably because its curiosities include the odd Vermeer or two mixed in with Great-Grandmother Schuyler’s childhood dolls.”
“I am more familiar with the museum’s exhibits than I could ever wish to be after these last five years,” Ranieri growled before he thought better of it, because he knew by now that engaging with Annika was a recipe for frustration. She was the most maddening woman he had ever encountered. “Not that it matters. We have to come at this issue before us in a different way.”
When he said such things in the office, battalions of underlings frothed about in a frenzied attempt to impress him with their “out of the box” thinking.
Annika, by contrast, wasloungingback in her chair, looking more than a little ornery.And the real problem here was that Ranieri truly could not believethat this was happening to him.
