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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 sophysicalin 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 whathis pleasuresmight 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 andpassion.
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,shamefulAnnika Schuyler.
Forsex, 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.
