“Doesn’t she make a beautiful bride-to-be?” the stylist gushed.
Everyone applauded.
Pia wanted to die.
It took every one of her twenty-four years of struggling to overcome her bashfulness to smile distantly and hold up her chin as she crossed what felt like a mile of hot coals to reach Angelo.
“You look stunning.” The warmth in his smile evaporated when she only offered a deliberately absent, “Gracias.”
Angelo introduced the jeweler, who had recently been to New York and had brought back a fresh selection for the well-heeled travelers who vacationed on the island.
“I thought this one? The setting wouldn’t catch on anything,” Angelo said impassively, offering a platinum-set, emerald cut diamond. It had to be three carats, but was remarkably understated despite the trapezoid cut diamonds on either side. The band was lightly brushed to give it a frost-kissed finish.
Pia looked at the ring and saw water in all its phases, from ice to glimmer to mist. Mostly, she was knocked off her feet that Angelo had heard what she’d said and was trying to find something that would work for her.
“Or this?” Angelo started to reach for another, but Pia couldn’t take her eyes off the first ring. The last time she had experienced such a covetous desire for an object, she’d been looking at a two-man deep-dive submarine.
“I like this one.”
He threaded it on her finger and, when it fit perfectly, another cheer went up.
A fresh flush of being too conspicuous and unguarded came over her. She tried to fight it, but Angelo surprised her with a kiss. His fingertip touched her chin, tilting up her mouth. In a smooth move, he captured her lips, casually flipping her into memories of the night they had shared. His other hand skimmed lightly across her bare shoulder, finding the exposed skin in a tickling caress as he gently brought her in closer.
No, she realized belatedly. She was the one who moved into him, trapping her own hands between them in her need to be closer while he warmed the back of her shoulder with his palm. Her fingertips reached to his jaw, begging him to stay close enough to allow her to continue devouring his lips while sensations tugged in her middle and her knees became liquid.
Distantly she heard a click and there was a flash behind her closed eyes. Melodie murmured, “That was the one, mark my words.” The stylist tittered.
Pia blinked her eyes open and saw the flare of satisfaction in Angelo’s, as though he had deliberately provoked her clingy reaction.
The magnitude of the moment struck her. She was marrying this man. Having his child. She would be under his power forever.
Shaken, she did everything she could to recover her composure, drawing back and smoothing a hand down her dress only to see a hard light come into his gaze.
Pia pretended she wasn’t bothered and went through the motions for the rest of the shoot. All the photos were nice, but Angelo decisively chose, “The kiss.”
The image on the back of Melodie’s camera might as well have been a compromising nude. Pia was clearly in the throes of passion, encouraging the slant of Angelo’s mouth over hers with reaching fingers while her ring caught the sunlight.
“The one with my hand on your shoulder is more elegant, don’t you think?”
“For the eighteen hundreds, sure,” Angelo mocked.
“I adore this,” Melodie said of the kiss. “You look like one of those timeless cinema couples from a classic black-and-white film.”
“Keep the color,” Angelo said, and insisted Melodie transfer it to him immediately, without working any editing magic. Within minutes, he had forwarded the photo to his publicity company.
Twenty minutes later, Pia’s phone was making more noise than a popcorn popper. Colleagues, acquaintances, former students and fellow scientists wished her well. Social invitations began pouring in from every corner in ill-disguised attempts to be invited to the wedding.
She didn’t have much chance to respond. The wedding planner arrived and details were decided on the fly because, according to Angelo, “We want to marry within the month.”
Pia did prefer to marry before her pregnancy began to show, which gave them until mid-January. They wouldn’t announce she was expecting until after the three-month scan, but her head whirled at the scale of wedding Angelo wanted in less than four weeks.
“A thousand?” Pia snapped her head around when he said it. “Mother’s assistant said five hundred.”
“That was her estimate for how many she would invite. I’ll have the same.”
A thousand people. They might as well be televising the event while performing it naked on a beach.
She reminded herself that the half dozen pairs of eyes in his lounge this afternoon had been excruciating. It could be ten thousand at this point and it would be the same torture.