Even her time with this man.
The only thing she could call her own was the dress.
Because, dammit, she had money. She’d earned it by being smart and canny and—yes—ruthless.
Why was it she couldn’t be as ruthless about this man as he was clearly being with her?
‘You didn’t tell me your family were going to be here.’
‘I didn’t know.’
One glance and Ava could see the muscle ticking in his jaw. She realised Gianluca wasn’t any more relaxed about this discovery than she was.
She guessed introducing her to his friends was one thing—to his family was another.
It hadn’t occurred to her until she’d looked up into his beautiful face, recognised his set expression, that there had been a method in the madness of their dash from Positano to Naples, their flight from Naples to Rome.
It wasn’t romantic. It was pragmatic. It was what a man did when he could feel the walls closing in around him. If the man was Gianluca Benedetti and had a jet and a palazzo at his command.
He’d dazzled her, wooed her, done things to her body she couldn’t imagine doing with anyone else, and when this was over—whatever this was—he would walk away. He wouldn’t be so crass as to do it by phone call, but the time would come. It wouldn’t be in the near future. His desire for her was too present in their lives at this point.
This was where it was at for him. This was what worked for them, apparently. This being sex. Long-distance wasn’t really going to work, then, was it?
Oh, she suspected once she was back in Sydney they would drift on a little longer together—he would fly in, she would fly out—but other women would cross his path and, really, without anything stronger to bind them how long would he lie in sheets grown cool? One day it just wouldn’t work any more.
She’d accepted all this last night—told herself to toughen up, to take it like a man. Men didn’t confuse the issue. There was sex, and there was emotional attachment, and apparently they could exist separately. He might have given her the whole package once, but those waters had flowed by.
But it was hard to be a tough operator in a glamorous ballgown that made her feel so intensely feminine it was all she could do not to spin around like a little girl and send her skirts flying just for the joy of it.
It was hard not to yearn when you found yourself swaying to the romantic strains of Strauss as interpreted by a symphony orchestra, dancing in the arms of the man you had longed for all your life.
It was hard not to cry when the man you loved had had no intention of introducing you to a single member of his family until tonight, when he was being forced into it. He had gone out of his way four weeks ago to make sure that couldn’t possibly happen.
Oh, yes, now she knew why she’d always been so wary of dresses. They had a way of transforming you into someone you didn’t recognise.
‘My mother always gets an invitation,’ Gianluca informed her tightly, ‘but this is the first time she’s come.’
With the air of a man condemned Gianluca steered her across the room. Ava became aware they were the sinecure of every eye.
And with that the last of her confidence fell away.
She felt like a circus freak in her glamorous gown. Every inappropriate outfit her mother had paraded in down their suburban street, every time some teenager had hung out of a bus or car window and shouted, ‘Freak!,’ at her mother—everything bad about being Tiffany Lord’s daughter came rushing back.
Knowing she had to keep it together, Ava stopped listening to Gianluca’s quiet instructions. As if he thought she needed guidance on how to be with his mother. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew how to behave.
Maria Benedetti looked faintly surprised as Gianluca leaned down and kissed his mother’s hand. Ava noticed there was an odd stiffness between mother and son, but then the Principessa was regarding her curiously.
Gianluca introduced them and Ava heard herself offering a polite, ‘How do you do?’
‘Ava, how much like your brother you look. So, you are the young lady who has bedazzled my son?’
It wasn’t what she had expected the Principessa to say and Ava immediately floundered.
‘Are those the Principessa Alessandra sapphires, Gianluca?’
‘Ava carries them off well,’ he said tightly.
The older woman gave a insouciant shrug, eerily reminiscent of her son. ‘It’s nice to see them out of the vault.’
Some other conversation was going on, and Ava didn’t even try to follow it. The smile pasted to her face felt paper-thin.
‘You look as if you’re having a wonderful time, Ava.’
‘I am,’ Ava lied.