But then her phone rang and she saw it was her mother, just back from her cruise.
‘How much more can I be shamed?’ her mamma shouted.
‘Mamma, please,’ Ariana attempted. ‘Maybe there is some explanation.’
‘Mia and Dante. My son!’
‘Mamma, you should surely hear what Dante has to say. They are closer in age...’ Ariana pleaded, repeating Gian’s words, but nothing would placate her.
‘That woman!’ she sobbed. ‘She has killed my family, my joy, my life. She takes and she takes and she leaves me with nothing.’
‘You have me,’ Ariana pleaded. ‘Mamma...’ But she had run out of excuses for Mia and Dante. ‘I’m going now to speak with him.’
‘Well, you know what to say from me.’
If Ariana didn’t know, she was specifically told.
‘Okay?’ Gian checked as they headed up to the rooftop, except she barely heard him. All she could hear was her mamma’s acidic, angry words.
‘I wanted the ball to be perfect for Papà.’
It was all Ariana said.
Sitting in his helicopter, Gian looked from her pale face down to the rolling hills and the familiar lace of vines. Now they were deep into spring and the poppy fields were a blaze of red, and there was foliage on the once bare vines.
He turned back to Ariana, who sat staring ahead with her headphones on, her leg bobbing up and down. He didn’t doubt that she was nervous to be facing her brother.
Gian was sure that it would soon be sorted out. He knew how close the Romano siblings were. At least, they had been growing up. And surely even Ariana could understand that grief and comfort were a heady cocktail. Hell, she’d sought comfort herself on the night of the funeral after all.
He spotted the lake and soon they were coming in to land. Only then did Gian wonder how it might look that he was arriving with Ariana.
Would it be obvious they had spent the night together?
Did it announce them as a couple?
Gian was nowhere near ready for that. If anything, a couple of hours ago he’d been ready to end things, as was his usual way.
But, as it turned out, Ariana wasn’t expecting anything from Gian, other than the equivalent of a rather luxurious taxi ride.
‘Wait there,’ she said, as she took her headphones off. ‘I shan’t be long.’
‘What?’ Gian checked, unsure what she meant.
She was more than used to entering and exiting a helicopter, and the second it was safe to do so, the door opened and the steps lowered and Ariana ran down.
‘Wait...’ he called, and then looked in the direction she ran.
Dante, even from this distance, looked seedy and was striding towards her, no doubt surprised by her unannounced arrival.
If Gian had thought for a moment that Ariana Romano had finally grown up, he was about to be proven wrong, for she was back to the spoiled, selfish brat of old. Only, instead of being placed over her father’s knee, it was Ariana delivering the slaps.
He watched her land a vicious hit on her brother’s cheek and then raise her other hand to do the same, but Dante caught it.
The scene carried echoes of another world, one Gian had loathed—champagne bottles on the floor, fights, chaos, all he had sought to erase, and the scars on his psyche felt inflamed.
Ariana heightened his senses. Gian was more than aware he had let down his steely guard in bed last night and it had shaken him. For a moment he had glimpsed how it felt to need another person, to rely on someone else, and that could never be.
Right now, though, her actions plunged him straight back into a world that had spun out of control—the chaos and fights between his parents, finding his older brother unconscious on the floor and shouting frantically for help, and their smiles and the making up that came after, the promises made that were never, ever kept.
Always they had taken things too far, and it was everything that he now lived to avoid.
‘Hey.’ He was speaking to the pilot, about to tell him to take off, for he wanted no part in this. Yet some odd sense of duty told him not to leave Ariana stranded, and so he sat, grim-faced, as a tearful Ariana ran her leggy way back to the helicopter and climbed in.
‘We can go now,’ Ariana said once her headphones and microphone were on. ‘I’m done.’
And so too was he.
And he told her so the minute they stood alone back on the roof of La Fiordelise.
‘You never cease to disappoint me, Ariana.’
He watched her tear-streaked, defiant face lift and her angry eyes met his as he gave her a well-deserved telling-off. ‘I thought you were going there to speak with your brother, to find out how he was...’
‘He shamed my mother!’ Ariana shouted. ‘She went on a cruise to get away from the ball and had to return to this!’
‘Ah, so it was your mother talking.’ He shook his head as he looked down at her, realising now what had happened between her leaving his suite and boarding the helicopter. ‘And there was me thinking you had a mind of your own. How dare you put me in the middle of this? I would never have offered to take you if I’d known your plan was to behave this way.’
She had the gall to shrug. ‘You have no idea what she did to us.’
‘I have every idea!’ Gian retorted.
‘Meaning?’
But Gian was not about to explain himself. ‘You know what, Ariana? I don’t need your drama.’
It felt like a kind of relief that he could finally walk away without the painful struggle with his demons he had faced earlier when considering how to draw a line under all that had happened between them.
Except Ariana Romano ran after him.
He didn’t want to hear her sobbing or begging for forgiveness, except Gian received neither. Instead he was tapped
