by Dani Collins
Like sleeping with snakeskin. She shuddered at the headlines and comments from trolls that would stay in her mind forever. Her husband was lucky he died and didn’t have to stay married to that.
Ryzard’s interview was staged in a hotel room, the pristine white decor too bright for her gritty, bloodshot eyes. Neither of them had slept despite lying next to each other for a few hours. He’d stroked her for a time, but she hadn’t been able to respond, too frozen inside. Feeling betrayed. Her parents hadn’t called, not even replying to her text that she was available if they wanted to talk. The only friend she had right now was Ryzard, and he was so remote he might as well have stayed in Bregnovia and sent a wax double in his place.
She’d been too afraid to ask what he intended to say and wound up standing at the side of the room, staring dumbly from the shadows into the light as he took his seat. The interview began.
Her father had done a million of these things, so she wasn’t surprised to hear them tiptoe through a variety of political tulips on the way to the meat of the interview. Ryzard’s devotion to his country was on full display, and she imagined the whole world was reevaluating him as he spoke passionately about Bregnovia’s desire for peace and plans for prosperity. She hoped so. He deserved to be taken seriously.
She grew more and more tense as the interview dragged on, however. Didn’t they realize the audience was waiting for the mention of her name?
Twenty-five minutes in, the question finally came.
“Photos have circulated showing you with American heiress Tiffany Davis. Is it serious?”
“I take very seriously that your bottom-feeder colleagues are making their fortune on photos that for all we know have been manipulated for a higher profit.”
Nice of him to defend her with such an implication, but the photos had not been airbrushed. She genuinely looked that bad.
The interviewer smiled tightly. “I meant is the relationship serious?”
“That’s between us. We’re private people,” Ryzard stated implacably.
Tiffany caught back a harsh laugh. Did he really think he’d get away with as little as that?
“My sources tell me you met at the notoriously secret Q Virtus,” the newscaster continued.
See? she wanted to cry. The press never rested until they drew as much blood as possible, even when they called themselves a friend.
“That’s true,” Ryzard allowed.
“Q Virtus is a rather exclusive club, isn’t it? What can you tell me about it?” the journalist pressed.
“I’m sure contacting them would get you more information than you’d ever get out of me,” Ryzard said smoothly.
Oh. Ha. That was smart. She relaxed under a ripple of humor. The public’s insatiable curiosity would now turn to the club. Papers could trot out as many before-and-after photos of Tiffany Davis as they wanted, but viewers and readers would be more interested in learning the names of other people in the secret club. They’d hungrily eat up the scant yet salacious details of what went on there. She and Ryzard would be old news before the credits rolled on this broadcast.
In fact, when she watched later that evening, she noted that while the names rolled, her own image came forward to Ryzard’s reaching hand. She shook hands with the newscaster and thanked him, all of them standing in friendly banter. Her good side was angled to the camera. Her hair was done and her makeup was decent. Wearing a simple alabaster suit, she looked...normal. Pretty even.
Ryzard clicked it off as it went to commercial. She collapsed on the foot of the hotel bed, emotionally exhausted. Could it really be over as easily as that?
* * *
Ryzard watched Tiffany as he unknotted his tie and released first the cuffs, then the front buttons of his shirt. As tough as she was, he’d seen what a toll this attack had had on her. She’d been shutting him out as a result, and that infuriated him. Her talk of running away where he couldn’t reach her had nearly put him out of his mind.
He was still beside himself that this incident had happened at all. His captain had warned him that an unidentified boat kept turning up in their radar, but he’d shrugged it off. None of his mistresses in the past had warranted much attention, but he supposed his own profile was elevated to the international stage these days. Tiffany’s family was certainly of a level to feed the appetite of her country’s gossip columns.
And she’s not just a mistress, is she? The question beat in warning like a jungle drum in his chest, ominous and dark. His plans for his relationship with Tiffany were changing, but he hadn’t wanted to allude to anything more in his interview. The last time his link to a woman had been public and indelible, she’d been used as a pawn in his country’s civil war and the outcome was fatal.
Seeing Tiffany beaten and wounded by words shook loose his nightmare of losing Luiza. He’d grasped at anger to counter his resurgence of helplessness, hating that he couldn’t stem the damage being done to her, but agony and guilt were constant. He should have protected her better. If he could have stopped Tiffany from searching out what they were saying about her, he would have. Humanity’s capacity for ugliness astounded him. His job, the one he’d taken on for his country, for his own sanity, was to push brutality and attacks to the furthest fringes of existence that he could.
And keep himself apart so the pain of life couldn’t reach inside him and wring him into anguish.
It wasn’t easy when Tiffany sat with her spine slouched and her golden hair trailing loose from its neat bun, seeming incredibly delicate, like a dragonfly that had its wings crushed. When she was like this, she stirred things in him that needed to stay in firmer places. The chin-up, spoiled and cheeky Tiffany he could easily compartmentalize as a friendly partner in a game of sexual sport. Like a tennis opponent who gave him a run for his money, athletic and quick.
The vulnerable Tiffany frightened him. She made him feel so ferociously protective he would do violence if he ever found the photographer who’d reduced her image to a commodity in filthy commerce.
Shaken by the depth of his feelings, he tried to pull them both out of the tailspin with a blunt, “Dinner out or in?”
She sighed and looked up at him. Her heartrending expression was both anguished and amused. His heart began to pound in visceral reaction, and he swayed as though struck with vertigo, not sure why.
“My first thought is, Duh, Ryzard. Of course I’d never dine in public, but how could I be such a coward when you’ve just defended me so fiercely? No one else has. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
A sensation of wind rushing around him lifted all the hairs on his naked chest, as if he was free-falling into space. Her gaze was so defenseless, he couldn’t look away. She reached inside him with that look, catching at things he couldn’t even acknowledge.
“You already know I would only wish away your scars because I hate that you were hurt at all. But I see them as a badge of your ability to overcome,” he heard himself admit. “Your sort of willpower, your deep survival instinct, is rare, Tiffany. You probably don’t realize it because it’s such an integral part of your nature to fight, but not everyone accepts such a life blow and makes herself live through it.”
Luiza hadn’t, he acknowledged with a crash of his heart into his toes. Thinking about her when he was with Tiffany, contrasting them, was wrong. Setting aside Luiza in his mind was like ripping an essential part of him away and abandoning it, but he had to do it. They couldn’t occupy the same place inside him, and right now Tiffany needed him.
“All my life I heard, ‘You’re so pretty.’ Like that was the most important thing to be. You’re the first person to compliment me on having substance. I really thought I’d lost everything by losing my looks.”
Where Luiza had built him into the man he was with vision and belief in him, Tiffany slayed him with honesty and vulnerability. His heart f
elt as though it beat outside his chest. When she rose and came to him, and went on tiptoe to brush soft lips against his jaw, he closed his eyes in paralyzed ecstasy. Deep down, at a base level, it felt wrong to be this gripped by her, but he couldn’t help it. In this moment, she was all he knew.
“Thank you for wanting me exactly as I am.”
He did. God help him, he wanted her in ways he couldn’t even describe.
They shouldn’t come together like this, with hearts agape and defenses on the floor, but he couldn’t not touch her. Pulling her in, he settled his mouth on hers, tender and sweet. The animal in him wanted to ravish, but the man in him needed to cherish.
She drew an emotive breath and kissed him back in a way that flooded him with aching tenderness. The sexual need was there, strong as ever, but it sprang from a deeper place inside him. Hell, he thought. Hell and hell. Lingering feelings of infidelity fell away. This woman was the one he had to be faithful to. This one.
The rending sensation inside him hurt so much he had to squeeze her into him to stop what broke open, fearing his lifeblood would leak away if he didn’t have her pressed to the wound. Her arms went around his neck, light palms cradling the back of his skull as she fingered through his hair, soothing and treasuring and filling the cavernous spaces in him with something new and golden and as unique as she was.
When they stripped and eased onto the bed and came together, it was with a shaken breath from him and a gasp of awe from her. She gloried in his possession, and he bent his head to her breast in veneration, golden lamplight burning the vision of her into his memory with the eternity of a primordial being caught in amber.
* * *
Twin fingers traced on each side of her scar, the sensation dull on one side, sweet on the other. She stretched in supreme pleasure and reached for him without opening her eyes, finding only cool, empty sheets where he was supposed to be.
“I’m already showered and dressed, draga,” he said on her other side. “You said to let you sleep and I did as long as I could, but we have to leave soon. We have a dinner engagement in Zurich.”
“Are you serious?” She rolled onto her back so she could see him where he stood over her, his knife-sharp suit of charcoal over a dove gray shirt set off with a subdued navy tie. He looked way too buttoned-down, hair still damp, chin shiny and probably tasting spicy and lickable. She skimmed the sheet away and invited, “Come back to bed.”
“Your parents are expecting us. I already agreed to see them, but if you’d like to send our regrets...”
“They’re in Zurich?” She sat up, bringing the sheet to her collarbone as if her father had just walked in the room. “How? Why?”
“I left it to our collective staff to work out the how. I simply extended the invitation when I informed him about the photos. He wanted you to come back to America. I said you were accompanying me to Rome and that I had a commitment in Switzerland, but that we’d be pleased if they could meet us there.”
“How delightfully neutral. I guess that explains why they haven’t been in touch. They’ve been traveling.” She threw off the sheet and walked naked to find her phone, pleased at the way he pivoted to watch her.
Sending him a saucy smile over her shoulder, she clicked her screen and tapped in her code, reading aloud the message she found. “‘Staying with the deHavillands in Berne.’ That’s the American ambassador. Mom went to school with her. Longtime friends of the family. ‘Where will you be staying?’” She looked to him.
“At the hotel where the banquet will be held. My people should have sent the details already. I’ll ask them to extend the invitation to include your parents’ friends.” He reached inside his jacket pocket for his mobile.
Tiffany heard only one word and lowered her phone, barely hanging on to it with limp fingers as she repeated, “Banquet?”
He gave her a long, steady look. “Something I arranged months ago. I’ve been trying to ease you into the public eye, draga. Don’t look so shocked. It’s not something I can miss since it’s a charity I personally fund. We remove land mines and petition to stop their use completely. They’re an appalling weapon.”
She felt as though she stood on one, but he didn’t coddle her over what attending would mean. Given everything that had happened, she supposed it was time to set aside her fear of being in public. As long as she had him by her side, she’d be okay, wouldn’t she?
CHAPTER NINE
A FEW HOURS LATER, she wasn’t so sure. She’d taken an in for a penny, in for a pound approach and forgone the one-shouldered gowns that would have disguised a lot of her scarring, deciding instead to let her freak flag fly. Her halter-style gown set off her breasts and hips beautifully and was the most gorgeous shade of Persian blue that glistened and slithered over her skin as she walked.
...snakeskin...
Stop it. She pretended she was her old self, the somewhat infamous fashionista who had graced more than her share of best-dressed lists. With her trained yoga posture reaching her crown to the ceiling, shoulders pinned back with pride, she entered the lounge and took the druglike hit that was Ryzard in a tuxedo.
“I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me,” he said. His smile was sexy and smug, but held a warmth of underlying approval.
Winded, she dissembled by checking her pocketbook, trying to grasp hold of herself as she reacted to him and the effect he had on her. Did he know how defenseless she was around him? She suspected he did. He was coming to know her very well, maybe too well. There was an imbalance there because he could see right past her defenses, but he remained unpredictable to her.
As if to prove it, he came forward and threaded a bracelet up her marred arm until it wrapped in delicate scrolls against her biceps. It was a stunning piece of extravagant ivy tendrils fashioned from platinum. Diamonds were inset as random pops of sparkling dew, fixating the eye.
“It’s beautiful.”
“When people stare, you can say, ‘Ryzard gave it to me. He thinks I’m a spoiled brat, but wouldn’t change a thing about me.’”
She wanted to grin and be dismissive, but she was too moved. Her voice husked when she admitted, “You do spoil me. I have no idea why.”
“You inspire me,” he confided, then swooped to set a kiss against the corner of her mouth. “Lipstick, I know,” he muttered before she could pull away in protest. “In the future, don’t put it on until I’ve finished kissing you.”
“Then we’d never leave the room, would we?”
“And how is this a problem?” He held the door as he spoke, the light in his eye making her laugh, reassuring her the evening would turn out fine.
* * *
They stopped by another suite on their way downstairs. He’d arranged it for her parents and the ambassador. Her father greeted her with a long hug before he set her back. Then he looked between her and Ryzard, not seeming to know where to start.
She quickly introduced them and included the ambassador’s husband, Dr. deHavilland, using Ryzard’s title as the president of Bregnovia, and heard the crack in her voice as she queried, “Mom didn’t come?”
“The ladies are fussing down the hall,” the doctor said after kissing her cheeks. Taking her chin, he turned her face to eye her scar. “The specialist did wonders, didn’t he? It’s good to see you out, Tiffany. Ryzard, what’s your poison? We’re having whiskey sours.”
He accepted one and she squeezed his arm. “Do you mind if I...?”
“Of course, go say hello, but we need to be in the ballroom to greet the guests in fifteen minutes.”
“Five,” she promised with a splayed hand and hurried in search of her mother, nervous of the confrontation, but experiencing the homesick need to reconnect.
Following voices through a bedroom to the open door of a bathroom, she approached and set her hand on the inner door only to hear a makeu
p compact click over her mother’s voice. “Are we supposed to believe he’s in love with her? Any fool can see he’s using her for our connections.”
“Any fool except me?” Tiffany blurted, pushing the door farther in while outrage washed over her. It was followed by a stab of hurt so deep she could barely see.
Nevertheless, her vision filled with the flawless image of her mother turning from the mirror. Shock paled her mother’s elegantly powdered cheeks. An automatic defense rose to part her painted lips, but first she had to draw a breath of shock as her gaze traveled her daughter’s appearance and measured the amount of exposure. A trembling little head shake told Tiffany what her mother thought of this gown.
“You won’t be comfortable in that.”
“You mean you won’t,” Tiffany volleyed back and turned to leave. A type of daughterly need for her mother’s bosom had driven her in here, and now she wished Barbara Holbrook had stayed home.
“Tiffany Ann.” The strident voice didn’t need volume to stop Tiffany in her tracks. “He told your father he wanted to marry you. You met him last week. What are we supposed to think?”
Tiffany spun back, thrown by the statement. “He did not.”
Her mother held her lady-of-the-manor pose, the one that had too much dignity to descend into a did-so, did-not quibbling match. Instead, she gave Tiffany another once-over and asked primly, “How on earth did you come to be his guest? I mean, if he had brought a party aboard, I’d understand you being swept along, but obviously he wants us to believe he has a romantic interest in you. What sort of promises has he made you?”
Tiffany heard the strange lilt in her mother’s voice. Concern, but something else. Something shaken and protective...
She felt her eyes go wider and sting with dryness as understanding penetrated. Her mother genuinely believed she was being used—and was too blind to see it.
If her high school diary had been passed around the football locker room, she couldn’t have felt more as though her deepest feelings were being abused. If only she could have defended Ryzard. If only she believed he had deeper feelings for her beyond the physical and amusement with her “great personality.”
