‘No. Enlighten me with your deep insights into my psyche.’ Her lips were just a thin line.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know what you look like, Nella.’
‘What does what I look like have to do with being jealous?’
Jett glanced out the window and saw Tom scream into the phone as he leant against a dark karri tree. Maybe Luca had thrown another house party where the guests drained the pool and refilled it with wine. Or perhaps Tom had asked him about his history with Ariana La Marca.
‘You can’t be jealous,’ he said, still staring away from her. ‘You always win.’
‘What?’
‘You know you always “win”’—he made air quotes—‘in these situations with other women because you’re alwaysprettier.Isn’t that how it works?’
Her dark eyes widened like he’d shot her. ‘Impressive, Jett,’ she said. ‘You’ve just managed to insult me and my entire gender in twenty seconds. Not bad for a chauffeur who never graduated high school.’
‘How is it an insult to be told you’re ...’ He closed his eyes. Surely she knew what he thought about her body, her face. Surely she’d felt it back in the office. ‘Never mind. Compliments mean an instant fail at ... what number challenge? Seventeen? Twelve?’
‘It’s not acompliment, you fuckwit.’
‘Fuckwit?Don’t censor your language for a high school drop-out, Nella, you can use the complicated words if you want. I’ve got Siri primed and ready to translate for me.’
They were as close as they’d been right before she’d pressed her mouth against his in the office. Her eyes were clouded with fury, her chest rising with the same intensity.
He spoke, only to give his mouth something to do besides what it wanted to. ‘You know why the security guards thought you were being taken advantage of. You saw the look on Oliver’s face. They know I’m so far beneath you it’s comical.’
‘The only reason you’rebeneath me,’ she seethed, ‘is because you’ve tied me to a fucking pedestal like a witch on a stake. Why do you think I have my challenges? It’s because of shit likethis.’ She waved a hand between them. ‘You think you know me?’
She moved impossibly close; if he breathed out, the loose bits of hair framing her face would sway. He would die of oxygen deprivation before he let that happen.
‘You think I can’t possibly feel jealousy or embarrassment or anything because I’m a Barbarani? A non-human? A gimmick? You’re no better than the fucking internet trolls. You’ve been around for fifteen years, and you still don’t know a thing about me.’
‘I know everything about you,’ he hissed, anger, lust, letting whatever this poison was inside him boil and scorch through his veins. ‘And I know what you sound like now.’ He said the last part as a whisper, barely a breath. ‘I know how you sound when you’re turned on.’
She swallowed. ‘I wasn’t turned on.’
He wished he didn’t know her enough to know when she was lying. ‘Okay,’ he breathed the word into her ear. ‘You weren’t turned on.’
He felt her shiver, felt her chin dip towards him. Her tongue ran over her lips, wetting them. ‘I wasn’t.’ It was just a breath. How had they got this close?
‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘It was all just for show.’ He pushed himself back against his seat, light splintering in his eyes like the incoming sensation of a migraine.
‘Yeah, right,’ she snapped, her eyes flickering down to his crotch. But he didn’t miss the flash across her face. Doubt. He almost burst out laughing. Her denial was one thing, but he was a thief caught on CCTV in the jewellery store, surrounded by a SWAT team.
He forced his eyes to stare at the black shape that was Tom, still on the phone, none the wiser. He felt Nella freeze over next to him, and that was, he needed to remember, the best possible outcome. He couldn’t take it back, not the kiss and not what he’d told her about Emily, about his tattoo. Nella had this ability to flitter through his carefully constructed walls like a ghost, but he had to find a way to exorcise her from his mind before it was too late.
I wasn’t turned on.He needed to take those words and tattoo them onto the inside of his skull. Hell, why break with tradition? He’d ink them on his other bicep. He needed to remember the look on Oliver’s face.
Because thatwasthe truth. No matter what Nella said about pedestals and their friendship and her challenges, the real world was always waiting patiently for Jett’s plane of delusion to crash.
Nella Barbarani’s world was not his. And Jett had been flying with minimal fuel for far too long, not wanting to come back down to reality. Not wanting to move on, as he always did, before he’d made connections, before any place started to feel like home, before he got too comfortable and the thought of leaving became decidedlyuncomfortable. But the sooner he braced for landing, the less destructive the crash would be when he finally came back down to his own world.
20
Nella
Journalists and news anchors surrounded the Barbarani property like the dementors in the thirdHarry Potterbook, even though it was only a few minutes into the next day. It was Christmas, Easter and Grand Final Day all rolled into one for them. All the major news channels made their way to the winery after Matteo La Marca had fed them an official statement about the court case. And then the announcement of ex-Victoria’s Secret Model Divya Patel’s pregnancy had dropped.
The two things, at face value, were not related at all. Until Divya confirmed she wasthirteenweeks pregnant.
