That’s very earnest, I am sure. And very naive.He’d shaken his head.There are lingering whispers about us, as I’m sure you know. Getting married in a place that has such resonance can only put those to rest. That and a honeymoon.
We’re not having ahoneymoon, Ranieri, she had yelped. She had actuallyyelpedat him.Honeymoons are for people who need to loll about on beaches and have marital relations. That is not us.
She’d regretted that, instantly. It was bad enough when he traipsed around Manhattan, speaking endlessly aboutpassionto all and sundry. They did not speak of it themselves. That seemed... like adding fuel to the fire, at the very least. Foolish, in other words.
And then, in the back seat of a limousine, it seemed something far worse, far more dangerous, than simply foolish.
It almost seemed like a dare. Or like arson. Annika couldn’t breathe.
She’d never in her life been so happy to arrive at a party she already knew she would dislike. And now, having managed to slip away from the main room of the party, she made her way out to one of the balconies. This one looked north, and she took a moment to sigh a bit and look at this marvelous, magical city she’d called home her whole life. New York was unknowable and familiar at the same time. New York always rose, no matter how it fell.
Staring out at the city, she felt something stir inside her.
She’d been going about this all wrong. She’d been so surprised by Ranieri’s ferocity and command since the reading of the will, especially after the milder guardianship years, and he was pressing his advantage, wasn’t he?
But then, she should have expected he would. That was who he was.
The stark reality was that she had only a little bit of time left to get him to break this engagement. If he was the one to break it off, he would lose the company and she would lose nothing. More importantly, she would be free.
She’d been so busy letting him trot her about from stylist to fashion house to party, each stop more soul killing than the last. And she’d gone along with it, because implicit in every ultimatum he handed her was the fact that if she refused, he could report that she wasn’t playing along. He could make the case that she was not abiding by the rules her own father had set out.
But there were levels of compliance.
And two could play this game.
She stood there, looking out at the gleaming, glittering city. Always so many bright lights, from red brake lights on the streets below to all the thousands of lit-up windows, so many people and so many lives piled on top and around each other.
Surely there was no passion greater than this.
But that word echoed around inside her differently now. Maybe because she’d heard Ranieri use it so many times. Maybe because she finally felt as if her head was a little bit more clear, at last. Out here in the cool air of a late September night.
Because he wanted to get married at Schuyler House and she wanted to keep Schuyler House as it had always been. Hers, alone. Not marked by him the way everything else in her life was. And yes, maybe she’d thought that it might be nice to get married there someday, but not to him.
Never tohim.
But if she didn’t want this to happen, she had only one path forward.
Passion, she thought to herself.
Maybe it was time that she gave Ranieri some of that passion he kept going on about. A lot of passion. More passion than he could handle—and none of it violating the terms of her father’s will. Or involving sex, no matter what she dreamed about, curled up in his guest room in Tribeca.
All these people in his glittering, shallow world already treated her like she was some kind of loon.
Annika smiled at her beloved city. Why not act the part?
She couldn’t think of a better way to get him to end their engagement, so she could keep Schuyler House to herself.
And free her from him, once and for all.
CHAPTER FOUR
RANIERIWASANhour into an important, if somewhat tedious, meeting when the conference room door burst open. His immediate assumption was that the building was on fire, for there could be no other reason his people would disturb him. They knew better.
It took him long moments of staring down the length of the conference table, over the laptops and stacks of documents everywhere, to make sense of the fact that the person who stood there in the open door was not his long-suffering personal assistant, the competent Gregory, though he could see Gregory himself out in the hall, looking horrified.
The person who had tossed the door open was, improbably, Annika.
“I don’t want to interrupt,” she trilled, while doing exactly that.