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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 astage?”
“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.Sheliked 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 courseshe didn’t think anything of the kind. She knew he wasn’tholding her hand, just as she knew this wasn’t real. He wasn’tactuallyproposing to her.
Most importantly, she didn’twanthim 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. Asinto placeas 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,changingher—
