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Julia had had to resist the urge to break up the argument, to remind Ronan that she was a grown woman who didn’t want or need to be sheltered from the details of her sister’s rescue. The fight was between Ronan and his brothers. It wasn’t herbusiness.
She was going, which was all she cared about. She wasn’t going to risk letting Elise slip through her fingers again, and she wanted to be the first person her sister saw when she knew someone had finally come forher.
“Let’s try these,” Joanne said, holding out a pair of strappy black heels somewhere between Fashion Week and Stevie Nicks circa1977.
Julia bent to put them on her feet, then stood to look at her reflection. There was something of Elise staring back at her in the elegant dress, the lighter hair catching the late afternoon sun slanting through the apartment’s bigwindows.
She thought again of Ronan, of the weighty silences that had been between them in the days since he’d accepted she would attend the Manifest party at his side. She knew he wasn’t angry at her — at the situation maybe, at Nick and Declan, but not ather.
Still, the tension between them, diffused only when she was naked in his arms, scared her. She couldn’t help wondering if this was the beginning of the end, one more thing in a line of things that would slowly undo them until Elise was finally brought home and they had no reason to be together atall.
15
Ronan satin the back of the limo and watched the outskirts of Florence pass by on the other side of the window. He was hyperaware of Julia next to him, the scent of her perfume taunting him like a dream to which he was too eager toreturn.
She looked magnificent, although to his mind no more magnificent than she looked in jeans and bare feet, or in the oversized boxer shorts she sometimes wore around the house when she wore no makeup and left her hair loose and messy around her face or pulled up into a haphazard knot at the top of herhead.
Still, the dress highlighted the perfection of her breasts, the toned length of her arms, and the slender line of her neck. Her hair was twisted not into a casual knot, but slicked back into an almost severe twist, and her features looked more pronounced thanks to the makeup artist Joanne Fuller had sent over to help Julia prepare for theparty.
She looked like a slightly different version of herself, and when he’d searched her eyes for the amber fire that sometimes sparked there, he’d found only a clear and unsettling shade ofblue.
She was still his Julia, he knew that, knew it from the way she came to life in his arms at night, the way she allowed him to occupy her body even if a dark corner of her soul was still off-limits, but he was eager to be done with this night. Eager to bring Elise home and prove to Julia that his love for her would be unchanged, to cook for her and take Chief for walks on the beach and sleep late onSundays.
He would do it as long as it took to earn her trust. He would do itforever.
She reached for his hand and he looked over at her across the darkness in the backseat of the limo, driven by Nick, who would be forced to leave Ronan and Julia at the gate of the villa in the city’s Firenze district in keeping with Manifestprotocol.
No one was allowed on the grounds without a chip, something Braden Kane had passed along from his contact on the FVEY taskforce.
“It will be okay,” shesaid.
“I know.” It was something he didn’t doubt. He knew it would be okay because someone would hurt Julia over his dead body, and he had a habit of not turning up dead even when the odds were againsthim.
The minute he’d accepted that Julia would be attending the party, getting her out alive had become his prime objective. It wasn’t something he could tell her. She had to think he would risk everything to save Elise, but there was no way in hell he would let anything happen to Julia. If that meant hauling her out of the place the way he had in Dubai, so beit.
If it meant she hated him, so beit.
He turned his thoughts to the villa that was host to the party. Even with Braden Kane’s sources, they’d been able to gain precious little information about the security they could expectinside.
It wasn’t unheard of. Ronan had been in more than one situation with too little information. But he hadn’t had Julia with him in those situations. Now the lack of information felt like the weakness it was, the potential consequences all tooreal.
He could assume there would be heavy security at the gate where their chips would be scanned for the first time and again at the front door to the villa. After that, it was anybody’sguess.
The one thing they did have was a decent grasp on the layout of the villa. A search through the digital building archives for the city had given Clay the basics, which included six exits, eight balconies, and a series of tunnels that had once been used in the operation of an onsitevineyard.
The tunnels were a last resort. They hadn’t been used in over a hundred years, but with all the doors and balconies, Ronan was fairly certain they wouldn’t have to make an exitunderground.
They’d gone over the layout more times than Ronan could count, he and Julia agreeing on three meeting places in the event that they got separated. They would try first for the sunroom at the back of the house. If anything prevented them from meeting there, they would head for the kitchen, which also happened to have a set of doors leading to the backterrace.
If the first two options failed, they would meet at the entrance to thetunnels.
He’d quizzed Julia incessantly on the details of her identity as Anuska Král. She’d passed with flying colors, delivering each lie so convincingly he’d begun to wonder where she’d honed theability.
The limo slowed down as they approached a line of brake lights, other limos stopped as they made their way to the gate of thevilla.
The privacy window rolled down with an electrichum.
“You ready for this?” Nick asked from the driver’sseat.
