Page 80 of Royally Roma
She stared in disbelief at the pile, unable and unwilling to comprehend what it meant. She sifted through the bills, trying to do the math in her head, but there was just so much. Far too much to add up at a glance, particularly when she reached the bottom of the stack and found a cashier’s check drawn on the Royal Bank of Lazaretto.
A check.
With more zeros than she’d ever seen in her life.
Surely she was seeing double. Or triple. She checked the written amount to be sure and then the name of the intended recipient. There it was, spelled out in black letters and numbers, which she could only assume had been penned by Piero’s hand.
Pay to the order of Julia Costa. One million euro.
NICCOLO HAD NEVER DREADEDa press conference quite as fervently as he dreaded the one awaiting him at the Hotel de Russie. But it couldn’t be avoided. He’d fallen off the radar for a full forty-eight hours, leaving people angry and confused. All of Rome felt betrayed, not to mention his grandfather. They deserved an explanation.
En route to the hotel, he practiced the speech that Piero had sent to his phone. He only had an hour before he would face the press. The official excuse was believable enough—he’d taken ill, struck down by an acute intestinal ailment. Not food poisoning, lest he offend Rome’s culinary infrastructure. Rome’s auto workers, orphans, reporters, photographers, and government officials were angry enough at him as it was. There was no need to risk antagonizing the city’s chefs. After all, they had knives.
He went over the speech once, then twice. However, his heart wasn’t in the rote repetition of words that had been put in his mouth by someone else. It seemed he’d left his heart elsewhere. Back in Julia’s apartment.
In her bed.
No matter how much he tried to concentrate, his thoughts kept returning time and again to her eyes, her lips, her breasts, and the absolution he’d found in the beauty of her porcelain curves. That’s what making love to her had felt like, an absolution. A deliverance from every painful memory he’d ever had. All the lies. All the pretending.
How could he have been so wrong? It had felt real, damn it. All of it. For one night, everything he’d said and done had been authentic. Honest. Raw. In pretending to be someone else, he’d never been so genuine.
He could have sworn Julia had experienced it, too. He would have bet his throne that she’d given herself to him in ways that she’d never even thought about doing with another man. Undressing her had been like unwrapping a priceless gift.
It had been real.
Or so he’d thought.
Concentrate. It’s ended.
The ride was over sooner than he was ready. In a flash, he was looking out from behind tinted windows at the Via del Babuino, which he’d last seen from the back of Julia’s Vespa. The limousine pulled to a stop, and he stepped out, flanked on either side by two of the men he’d been running from since the day before.
Niccolo hadn’t said a word to either of them, and he didn’t plan to. The lines had permanently blurred when he’d ditched them at Café Rocha. He knew they’d been charged with his protection, but it no longer felt that way. Quite the opposite, in fact.
They were promptly greeted by the largest mob of paparazzi he’d encountered since the days immediately following his mother’s death, which did nothing to keep the newly resurfaced memories at bay.
Flashbulbs went off left and right, bursts of blinding white light that threw his equilibrium off balance. He kept his head down and focused on putting one step in front of the other on the red-carpeted entryway until he reached the marbled silence of the hotel lobby.
He took a series of deep, steadying breaths. This was going to be even more difficult than he’d imagined. He wasn’t prepared to face the press while so many thoughts, feelings, and memories were vying for attention in his head. Even more impossible to shake was the overwhelming sense of loss and the all-consuming, aching hunger he still felt for Julia, even after all that had happened.
It disgusted him that her absence resonated in the deepest marrow of his bones. His feelings for her should have ended the moment he’d seen the magazine on her night table. But they didn’t. They haunted him. On the outside, he still looked every inch the crown prince. But on the inside, he felt like an empty mansion, with room upon room filled with ghosts.
Her spirit lingered.
“Welcome back to the Hotel de Russie.” The concierge greeted him with a bow and a respectful smile. “The press will be assembled on the piazza if that meets with your approval. We’d originally planned to use one of the downstairs conference rooms, but the number of reporters exceeded our expectation.”
Of course it did. The only thing the press loved more than a hero was watching one fall from grace.
“That’s fine,” he said tightly. “Grazie.”
“Can I get you anything while you wait?Cafféor a cappuccino, Your Highness?”
He was half-tempted to order a Bloody Mary again.
“Cappuccino,per favore. And if I could see the morning newspapers and a television, perhaps?” As much as he didn’t want to hear what they were saying about him, he needed to know before he walked out onto the piazza. Had Julia already shared the photograph? If she’d sent it toNovella 2000before Piero had deleted it, the salacious image would be all over the place by now.
He could only hope that she hadn’t. Or that she’d reconsidered. One million euros could be awfully persuasive, especially to someone in Julia’s position. Jobless.
And whose fault was that?
