but her brothers—as much as she loved them—were way beyond the highbrow circles Antonio moved in.
‘When the police caught him he identified himself,’ Antonio said. ‘He made no effort at all to cover up the fact he was my young brother-in-law.’
Claire felt her stomach drop.
‘Wh-where is he?’ she asked. ‘Where is my brother now?’
‘I have arranged for him to spend a few days with a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘He runs a centre for troubled youths on the South Coast.’
She clenched her fists by her sides. ‘I want to see him. I want to see my brother to make sure he’s all right.’
‘I will organise for you to speak to him via the telephone,’ he said, and reached for his mobile.
Claire sank her teeth into her bottom lip as she listened to him speak to his friend before he handed her the phone. She took it with a shaking hand and held it up to her ear, turning away so he wouldn’t see the anguish on her face, nor hear what her brother had to say.
‘Isaac? It’s me, Claire.’
‘Yo, sis. What’s up?’
Claire mentally pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘I think you know what’s up,’ she said, stepping further out of Antonio’s hearing and keeping her voice low. ‘Why did you do it, Isaac? Why on earth did you take Antonio Marcolini’s car?’
Her brother muttered a filthy swear word. ‘I hate the way he treated you. I thought it would help. Why should he drive around in such a cool-dude car when yours is a heap of rust?’ he asked. ‘Rich bastard. Anyway, I thought you were going to divorce him?’
Claire cringed as the sound of her brother’s voice carried across the room. Turning away from Antonio’s livid dark brown gaze, she said, ‘I’m actually considering…um…getting back with him.’
Her brother let out another swear word. ‘Get out. Jeez, why didn’t you tell me that the other day?’
‘Would it have made a difference?’ she asked.
There was a small silence.
‘Yeah…maybe…I dunno. You seemed pretty cut up about that article and the photo in the paper.’
Claire squeezed her eyes shut. Why hadn’t she thrown it in the rubbish, where it belonged? ‘Look, I just want you to promise me you’ll behave yourself now you’ve been given this chance.’
‘Don’t ‘ave much choice, locked up here,’ he grumbled.
Claire frowned. ‘You’re locked up?’
‘Well…sort of,’ Isaac said. ‘It’s some sort of youth reform centre. It’s kind of all right, though. The food’s OK, and they’ve given me a room to myself and a TV. The head honcho wants me to think about teaching some of the kids to surf. I might take it on; I’ve got nothing better to do.’
‘Just stay there and do as you’re told, Isaac,’ she pleaded with him.
‘So you’re dead serious about getting back with the Marcolini bloke, huh?’ Isaac asked.
She lowered her voice even further, but even so it seemed to echo ominously off the walls of the plush suite—just as her brother’s damning words had. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am as of this moment going to return to Antonio and live with him as his wife.’
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAIRE handed back Antonio’s phone with a look of grim resignation on her face. ‘Would you like me to lie down on the bed now, so you can get straight down to business?’ she asked. ‘Or would you like me to perform a strip show and really get your money’s worth?’
Anger flared like a struck match in his dark eyes. ‘There is no need to prostitute yourself, Claire,’ he said. ‘We will resume a physical relationship only when I am convinced it is what we both want. Right at this moment I can see you would much rather rake your nails down my face than anything else.’
Claire felt relief tussling with her disappointment, making her feel disconcerted over what it was she actually felt for Antonio. She had told herself so many times how much she hated him, and yet standing before him now she found that hatred proving frustratingly elusive. Other feelings had crept up on her—dangerous feelings of want and need. She could feel the traitorous beat of her pulse, the hit and miss of her heartbeats reminding her of the sensual power he still had over her.
‘So…’ She tried to keep her voice steady and her expression coolly detached. ‘This three-month reconciliation…Am I supposed to move in here with you, or do I get to keep my own place?’
‘You are renting at present? Is that correct?’ he asked.
Claire wondered again how he knew so much about her current circumstances when their contact had been so limited. In the first weeks after she had left he had called and left message after message on her mobile, but she had deleted them without listening. He had e-mailed her several times, but she had not responded, and in the end had changed her e-mail address and her mobile number. She had assured herself if he really wanted to contact her he would find some way of doing so. But after some months had gone by, and then a couple of years, and then another couple, she’d resigned herself to the fact he had well and truly moved on.
‘Claire?’
‘Um…yes,’ she said. ‘I’m renting a place in Glebe, not far from the salon.’
‘Do you own the salon outright?’
She frowned at him. ‘What, do you think I am made of money or something?’ she asked. ‘Of course I don’t own it outright. I work for a friend, Rebecca Collins.’
Antonio searched her features for a moment. ‘So if you do not own a share in the salon, and you rent where you live, what exactly did you do with the money my mother gave you?’ he asked.
Her shoulders went back and her blue-green eyes flashed flick knives of resentment at him. ‘So she told you about that, did she?’ she asked.
‘She reluctantly informed me of it a couple of weeks after you left,’ he said, keeping his expression deliberately shuttered.
‘I looked upon it as a severance payout,’ she said. ‘After all, you no longer required my services once you’d hooked back up with Daniela Garza.’
Antonio ignored that little jibe to ask, ‘Is that why you refused to accept money from me, even though I offered it repeatedly in my e-mails and phone calls?’
She gave him another castigating glare. ‘Do you really think I would have accepted money from you after what you did?’ she asked.
His lip curled in disdain. ‘And yet you demanded it from my mother.’
Shocked, she stared at him with wide eyes. ‘What did you say?’
He let a three beats of silence pass.
‘I think you heard what I said,
