by Holly Rayner
Chapter 18
Matteo
Nothing had ever been more wrong than standing here on this beach, waiting for a woman who had already stood him up once. Nothing could have possibly felt more at odds with the man Matteo thought he had become.
He wasn’t supposed to wait. He wasn’t supposed to wonder. Any woman he was interested in should automatically be interested in him. He was supposed to be certain that whichever one he picked—if he ever felt compelled to pick at all—he would choose because she recognized how lucky she was to have landed a billionaire.
That was the narrative, wasn’t it? That was what he had been trying to sell others, and what he had sold himself.
He didn’t like that story. Not anymore. Because even as exposed as he felt—standing here on this beach, waiting for a woman who may not come—nothing he had ever done felt so natural, so right. In his mind, he knew she might not come. But in his heart, he had only hope.
He missed her. He had missed her while he was traveling. But from the time since she had stood him up, it had been a different kind of missing. A kind of missing that felt familiar—but that he couldn’t place. Until he could. Until he remembered the days after his father’s death.
It felt embarrassing, like an insult to the memory of his father. That the same feeling he experienced after he lost the most important man in his life could be applied to some woman that he didn’t even know—and that he might not ever know.
In time, though, he began to realize that it wasn’t unnatural, and it wasn’t an insult. It was a loss. And loss is loss. Whether it’s the loss of someone you didn’t know was holding the ground beneath your feet, or the loss of the future you were already beginning to plan without realizing. It was the same. And it hurt. That was all. Nothing very complicated—nothing worth analyzing.
But sometimes a loss isn’t really a loss. Sometimes, the things we lose come back to us. And, as he saw Josie walking down the beach toward where he stood at the edge of the water, he felt the weight of it lift from his shoulders.
Chapter 19
Josie
Usually Josie loved the beach. It had been no small factor in her decision to move to Miami. But since seeing Matteo’s tape, the setting had taken on a sinister tone. Now, seeing him with the aquamarine ocean behind him, flashbacks from that video threatened to overcome the excitement of seeing him again.
He didn’t look nervous. Why wasn’t he nervous? It wasn’t fair that he should be so calm when she had been tearing herself apart. He had texted—that meant something, right? He had broken his own rule for her. So why wasn’t he looking at her like she was worth breaking the rules for?
She didn’t know what to say. Why hadn’t she been rehearsing on the way over? Finding some cruel line that would make him understand how much he had hurt her, while leaving just enough room to move past if his explanation was good enough.
But what could the explanation possibly be?
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
So casual! How was he so casual?
“I almost didn’t,” she lied.
Was that a grimace she caught on his face for a split second? She hoped it was. She hoped there was a tinge of pain somewhere in that calm, collected persona.
“Lewis came to see me,” he said.
The name sounded strange on his lips. Josie had barely thought of Lewis, even though he had been the one who had shown her the tape.
“Why?” she blurted out in surprise. Where was her filter? The filter that she relied on for her livelihood? Of all the time she needed it most, why would it abandon her now?
“He wanted to show me your audition tape. He thought it would change my mind about you. And it was hard to watch—I can admit that.”
“I was acting,” Josie said, a tinge of annoyance in her voice.
How had he done this? Wasn’t he supposed to be justifying his own tape? And the things that he had said were so much worse than anything she had said—she was certain of that. Besides, wasn’t it obvious that the woman she acted like in the interview was nothing like the woman she had been while they were together?
It was unfair, making her hear her own justification. It was impossible not to feel the hypocrisy.
But that hypocrisy wasn’t true—what they had done wasn’t the same thing. Pretending on her part would have no impact on anything. She was just going to be in the background, being vaguely entertaining. Her playing the gold-digger wouldn’t hurt anyone. Her playing that part had no chance of breaking anyone’s heart.
“And it occurred to me that he might have also shown you my tape,” Matteo said.
There it was. There were the nerves. She could see them now, rippling up toward the surface.
“He did,” she replied, her voice raw and rough.
“And you thought I meant the things I said in my interview, when you didn’t?” Matteo asked her, his eyes boring into her soul.
“I was never going to do any of it. I mean—the show. I was going to do the show, sure. But there was no chance anyone was ever going to get hurt. You were going into this, and even if you were playing a character, which I’m not sure you were…”
She lied again. She knew as she said it that things she had believed the last few days were ridiculous. But she re-gathered her thoughts.
“You were going to be the center of the show. And maybe you can guess that most of us there were only in it for the attention. Maybe you can figure that we were just acting or playing things up. But you can’t know that. You were going to stand there and lead us on, and it’s not like we were going to be able to tell you weren’t genuine from what you said. How many women were you going to sleep with? How little was that going to matter to you?”
Her voice was going. She had barely spoken since she saw the tape, she realized now. But it was like saying these words to Matteo required so much weight that her vocal chords were breaking trying to lift it.
But at least if she was frantic, and broken, and exposed here on the beach, it seemed he was beginning to be too. His calm expression was fading, to be replaced by something much more frantic.
“I wasn’t going to,” countered. “I told you I decided not to do the show a little while after we met, but that isn’t really true. I decided not to do the show the second we met. I knew when I was doing that interview that there was no way I was going through with it. I knew that everything I wanted to get out of that experience I had already gotten and so much more.”
“Then why even do it? Why even say those things?”
The questions were sharp—jagged. She meant them to cut.
He didn’t respond immediately. Josie wasn’t sure he immediately knew the answer, even though it should have been obvious to him.
“I guess I wanted to see how it felt to say it out loud. All the things that people think of me. All the things that I want people to think of me. The things that I want to think of myself sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“Most of the time,” he corrected. His voice was quieter, now. She had to step closer to be able to hear him over the crash of waves on the beach. She would have thought it was by design, but they were being real now.
He moved closer to her and continued. “The things I’ve been wanting to think about myself since we went public, and suddenly I was this new person.”
“Money makes you a new person?”
How were they back here? How were they suddenly in this quiet, intimate space between them? She had spent the last few days trying to come to accept that it had never existed, and within a few brief sentences, they were back in it.
“It makes you a success. It changes how you are supposed to act, and who you are supposed to be. All of a sudden, you’re not allowed to make a mistake again when it was making mistakes that got you there in the first place.” Matteo was pacing now.
He continued. “That was who they wanted me to be on the show. They wanted me to play the version of myself I was already trying to pl
ay, and I think a part of me just wanted to say the words out loud—wanted to take it to its most extreme version.”
Josie didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure what to say—didn’t know how to climb back to where they had been, a place of intimacy and trust. She only knew that she was doing it, somehow.
Matteo ran his hand through his dark hair and continued. “You know the strangest thing about giving that interview? I kept expecting them to stop me. They led me there, and I knew it was supposed to be over the top, and absurd, and I was supposed to be this ridiculous character. But I still expected them to say that it wasn’t right. I kept thinking at some point someone would call me on it.”
“Nobody ever gets called on that. Isn’t that kind of the point?”
Matteo stopped pacing and stood directly in front of her. “You did.”
She looked at him. The last few minutes had stripped away her grief, and her grief had stripped away everything else. And now she just felt bare and vulnerable in front of him.
He smiled, and it was the gentlest smile she had ever seen. His dimples made an appearance. She’d never forget those dimples.
“You are best like this. Do you know that? You’re an amazing woman, Josie. You really are. Even if you decide you never want to see me again, I want you to know that. Every ounce of the success you’re going to have—and you’re going to have so much success—every ounce of it was earned.”
Matteo looked away for a moment. When he looked back at Josie, his eyes locked onto hers. “Do you know when I decided to do the show?” he asked.
Dumbly, Josie shook her head.
“It was the second I saw your picture. It was from a magazine shoot—had to be. You were reaching out in it, and you grabbed my heart and my attention. And I have to admit that over the last few days, I looked up more of your work. You act amazingly well. But I swear, if I could take a picture of you right now, it would blow everything you’ve ever done out of the water.”
This man! Always trying to make her blush. For the first time, he succeeded.
“It’s just selling people pretty things they don’t need,” Josie said, feeling the heat of the blush on her cheeks.
“Don’t say that. It’s more than that. You make it more than that.”
They stood, close together on the beach. But the impossibility of touching him—of feeling him hold her after the last few days—made him feel so distant.
“Do you believe me?” Matteo asked at last.
Tears sprung from her eyes as she laughed. “I can’t even keep track of what I’m supposed to be believing.”
“Do you believe I didn’t mean it? Do you believe that I was never going to be that man, even pretending? Honestly, I’m glad you saw it. I know what he was trying to do, but I’m glad you saw it.”
“You wouldn’t be glad if you knew what I’ve been thinking about you the last few days.”
The tension had broken, and she felt it in his return to laughter.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But the last few days made me examine who I am. Who I want to be. And who you deserve.”
She stepped forward. She kissed him. And he felt real—so much more real than every false version of him she had constructed over the last few days. So much more real than every theory she had crafted since she’d known him. He wasn’t the mythos, or the reputation, or the success. He wasn’t the magazine covers or the expectations. He was just Matteo. Those arms, and those lips, and those eyes. That heart.
So caught up was Josie in the feeling of kissing him that she barely noticed that her feet were no longer on the ground. It wasn’t until she lost the sound of the waves crashing in her ears that she realized how far he had carried her.
“Whose house are we in?” she asked. She felt him laugh beneath her.
“Do you like it?”
Chapter 20
Matteo
Matteo had asked a lot of important questions in his life. He had pitched investors who had the power to determine whether his dream would take off or crash. He had asked questions whose answers affected people the world over.
But no question he had ever asked had felt quite as important as the one he was asking now.
She was his. He felt it in the way that she kissed him, and the way that she felt perfect in his arms. She had tipped over the line sometime when they were talking on the beach—though he couldn’t say exactly when. All he knew was that all of the ambiguity, all of the doubt and fuzzy edges were gone.
A small, petty part of him briefly entertained the thought of reaching out to Lewis, letting him know what the effects of his actions had been. He had wanted to tear them apart, and by the looks of how angry Josie had been, he had almost succeeded. But going in for the final blow had been his undoing. All he had achieved was to force Josie and Matteo to push past the uncertainty of a new relationship and be what they both knew they wanted to be.
Josie was nodding—that was a good sign.
“I do like it. But that wasn’t really what I asked.”
She was casual and playful again. But she was different now—her playfulness wasn’t covering up anything. She wasn’t playing coy or pretending to be the kind of person she thought she was supposed to be. She was being playful because that was who she was.
“It’s mine. Well, it’s been mine for almost three hours now.”
Josie raised an eyebrow. “You know, buying new houses on a whim is really exactly the stereotype of what rich playboys like to do.”
She was out of his arms now, but he still had her hand in his.
“It wasn’t a whim, not really. I realized when I brought you back to the penthouse that it didn’t feel right. I bought a penthouse because that was what I was supposed to do, but it wasn’t what I wanted. What I want is the beach, and the ocean, and room for you.”
Josie laughed through a wide smile. “Asking me to move in with you? Already?”
He held up his hands in mock defense. “Eventually. Eventually. When I feel like it, and you feel like it, and we feel like it.”
“I like the sound of that.”
They were so far beyond the bounds of what they were supposed to say now. All the little games, all the little attempts at seeming eager but not too eager. All of that was gone. All that was left was genuine.
He liked watching her face so much more like this. He had enjoyed the game of it before—seeing the masks that she put on for him and others. But Josie without any masks at all was infinitely superior. He couldn’t wait for the rest of the world to see it too.
And he couldn’t get enough of watching her explore the house. There was no furniture yet—the place had been offered furnished, but he had opted to make his own decisions. The rooms were empty, and their footsteps echoed through the hallways and bedrooms and around the balconies and spare rooms and bathrooms… As if exploring some magnificent cave together. And every time they walked into a room together was like the beginning of that room. It felt like the story of that room was being started.
Every room was in competition for Josie’s favorite place in the house, but none of them won. No, the clear winner was the upstairs balcony off of the master bedroom—the room that would one day be their bedroom. It was there that Josie came back after every new round of curious exploration. This was the place with the best view of the waves. Where you could feel closest to the ocean.
He saw her getting lost in that. He wanted to be lost in it too.
The doorbell rang at one point—the movers were delivering a few things from his penthouse. Matteo didn’t disturb Josie while they were there—just left her standing on the balcony. His couch, and bed, and all of his belongings seemed too small here. Everything he had, expensive and refined as it was, was not enough for his new life. It wasn’t enough for her, nor for him anymore.
When he was satisfied that George was supervising the movers satisfactorily, he returned to Josie on the balcony. She was standing just as he had left her—eyes cast out over the water. He go
t the feeling for a moment that she wasn’t a person at all. She was a photograph, a moment in time taken and stretched forward in his imagination. Just as her modeling was an art form, so was the stillness of her now.
He put his arms around her from behind and felt her come back to life again. As sorry as he was to disturb her, he was glad to feel the warmth of her. He loved the way she settled back into his arms as though she had never been out of them.
“What was that noise?” Josie asked, and he was almost surprised she had heard it, far away as she had been.
“Just the movers. The movers, and the delivery.”
“A delivery?” There was joy in her question.
“Yes, I’m afraid I’ve been a little bit presumptive.”
“That’s called confidence.”
“It’s called hope.”
He stood, arms around her, and looked out at the ocean. They had spent a good long time exploring the house, and it was a longer time still before he heard the sound of the moving truck pulling away and knew that they were alone in their home once again.
Josie shifted, meaning to head inside. The sun was beginning to go down, and he wondered if she was hungry.
He held her fast. “Not yet.”
As willful as she was, he loved the wordless way she accepted that he had a reason to ask her to stay, and stand, and wait.
They didn’t have to wait long. It was only a few moments before a string of servers in crisp uniforms began to cut a line across the beach, down to the water’s edge.
Matteo watched Josie’s growing smile as they constructed a canopy, and set up a table and chairs, and began bringing out covered plates.
“All right,” he said. “I think they’re ready for us now.”
It wasn’t lost on him how unwilling he was to let go of her hand, even for a moment. He hadn’t felt this way since he had been in his first relationship in high school. And looking back, that had been more about the excitement of the new experience more than excitement over the girl herself. This time, he knew exactly what he was excited about. He knew exactly what he couldn’t let go of.
