The audience took advantage of the applause break to set their heads together and murmur, flicking speculative glances toward her. Luca joined his assistant behind the winners and glanced at the screen his assistant showed him.
He stiffened and his gaze lifted in a flash to hit hers like a punch.
Amy’s stomach clenched. What?
As the couple at the podium finished speaking and left, they seemed disconcerted by the growing undercurrents in the room.
The cameraman who’d been filming the event turned his lens on her. A reporter shoved a microphone in Amy’s face.
“Is it true? Did you cause a teacher to lose his position with Upper Swell School for Girls? Do you have a history of destroying men’s lives?”
CHAPTER TEN
LUCA DISAPPEARED OFF the stage behind the curtain, abandoning her to the reckoning of harsh stares and harsher questions.
As Amy was absorbing the profound pain of his desertion, another reporter joined the first. People stared while she desperately tried to gather her handbag and light jacket, which was being pinned by a reporter. On purpose.
Panic began to compress her lungs. She struggled to maintain her composure. She was hot and cold and scared. As scared as she’d been the day she was told to leave the school and had no idea where she would go.
Do not cry. Do not, she willed herself while her throat closed over a distressed scream.
And these damned buzzards kept asking their cruel questions.
“Did you lure the prince into that nude photograph? Did someone hire you to do it? His sister?”
One of Luca’s bodyguards shoved into the fray and shielded her with his wide body and merciless bulk. He grabbed her things and escorted her out of the nearest exit, but it was still a gauntlet of shouted questions and conjecture.
When he shoved her into an SUV, Luca was already in it. His PA sat facing him; his other bodyguard was in the front. The bodyguard who had rescued her took the seat facing her and pulled the door shut behind them.
“Is it true?” Luca asked stiffly. She hadn’t seen this particular shade of subdued rage under his skin since he’d spoken of his father’s death.
“I’m not talking about it here.” Her voice was hollow. All of her was. It was the only way she could cope, by stepping outside her body and letting the shell be transported wherever he was taking her. If she let herself see and think and feel, she would buckle into hysterical tears.
“That’s not a denial,” he growled.
How had this happened? Why?
“Who—” She had to clear the thickness from her throat so her voice was loud enough to catch the PA’s attention. “Who released this story?”
He told her the name of an infamous gossip site. “Their source is the wife of Avery Mason. She claims he confided in her early in their marriage.”
Amy set her hand across her aching stomach and looked out the window.
“The flight plan has been changed, sir,” Luca’s PA informed him after tapping his tablet. “The team will meet us when we refuel in Athens.”
No photo op at a factory in Jiangsu then. Big surprise. “The team” would be the same group of lawyers, spin doctors and palace advisers who had handled his first damning scandal and were continuing to massage it.
Obviously, she was off the job. Amy couldn’t be trusted. Luca would control the messaging, and his lawyers would likely press her to sign something. Maybe Luca would sue her for defamation. The contract she’d signed with him hadn’t stated explicitly that she was supposed to ruin him. They’d left that part as a handshake deal. Could that come back to bite her? She needed Bea!
The private airfield came into view. They drove up to his private jet, and even that short walk of shame was photographed from some hidden location that turned up on her phone when she checked it as the plane readied for takeoff.
“You’re shaking,” Luca said crisply. “Do you need something?”
A time machine? Her friends? She dug up one of the sleeping tablets she’d taken on the flight here, requested a glass of water and swallowed the pill.
Luca answered a call and began speaking Italian. His sister perhaps. He was cutting his words off like he was chopping wood. Or beheading chickens.
“Sì. No lo so. Presto. Addio.”
She handed back her glass and texted Bea and Clare, already knowing it was futile. They were tied up with other things, and she didn’t know how to ask for forgiveness when she was piling yet more scandal onto London Connection.
In a fit of desperation, she sent out a text to a few of her closest contacts, fearful she would be locked down in Vallia again. A commercial flight was out of the question. She’d be torn apart, but a handful of her clients flew privately throughout Europe. There was a small chance one of them might be going through the airfield Luca used in Athens.
As she was texting, her mother’s image appeared on her screen as an incoming call.
Don’t cry. Do not cry.
Amy hit ignore, then tapped out a text that she was about to take off and had to set her phone to airplane mode. It wasn’t true, but she couldn’t face the barrage that was liable to hit her. She turned off her phone and set it aside.
Luca tucked away his own phone and studied her.
The plane began to taxi. The flight attendant had seated herself near the galley. The rest of his staff were sequestered in their own area, leaving them alone in this lounge, facing one another like duelists across twelve paces of tainted honor.
“Yes. It’s true,” she said flatly, appreciating the cocooning effect of her sleeping tablet as it began to release into her system, reducing her agitation and making her limbs feel heavy. It numbed her to the profound humiliation of reliving the most agonizing, isolating experience of her life. “I had
