Automatically Carla’s eyes went not to the mistress of the former Count but to his wife. No sign of fertility there—and in the eyes only that haunting sadness.
Thoughts ran through her head, unstoppable.
How did she feel? How did she cope? Knowing her husband was having children, openly, with his mistress? Yet presumably she, too, must have had an heir, at least, or the line would have died out—which it obviously hasn’t?
‘But enough of my ancestors—have you seen the other paintings displayed here yet?’
The voice of the man at her side drew her back to the present. She turned towards him. Saw him with fresh eyes, it seemed. Her gaze went past him to the portrait of Count Alessandro, who had been so unconcerned as to have his wife and mistress painted simultaneously.
A shaft of female indignation went through her, as she brought her gaze back to the current Count.
‘Not all of them yet, no,’ she said. She made her voice purposeful. ‘And I really must. I have fifteen hundred words to write up about the exhibition.’
She named the arts magazine she wrote for, as if she was aware that by stressing her professional interest she would diminish her personal one.
‘And I must do my duty by all the paintings here!’
She spoke lightly but deliberately. She smiled. An equally deliberate smile. One that completely ignored the question he had asked her only a few minutes ago, making no reference to it.
‘Thank you so much, Signor il Conte, for showing me these fascinating portraits, and for giving me such insight into them. It’s always enhancing to learn the origins and the circumstances of a portrait’s creation—it brings it so to life! And especially since the artist Caradino is so seldom exhibited.’
She smiled again—the same social smile—signalling closure. For closure, surely, was essential. Anything else would be...
Her mind veered away, not wanting to think of the path she had not taken. The yielding she had not made.
Instead she gave the slightest nod of her head in parting and walked away. Her high heels clicked on the parquet flooring and as she walked she was intensely conscious of his following gaze, of how her shapely figure was outlined by the vivid tailored dress she was wearing. Intensely conscious of the urge overwhelming her to get away. Just...away.
As she walked, she sipped at her champagne again. She felt the need of it. Her colour was heightened, she knew—knew it from the hectic beating of her heart.
He desires me—the Conte di Mantegna has looked at me and found me pleasing to him...
Into her head sprang an image, immediate and vivid, conjured out of her ready imagination. That woman in the portrait—the brunette—working, perhaps, in her father’s shop, or sweeping floors, or even toiling out in the fields in sixteenth-century Italy... Il Conte passing by, seeing her, liking her beauty, taking a fancy to her. Finding her pleasing to him. Lifting her with one beckoning of his lordly, aristocratic hand out of her hard, poverty-stricken life to dress her in a silk gown and place roses in her hands and jewels around her throat, and take her to his bed...
She felt the pull of it—the allure. Had to force herself to remember all that would have gone with it. The price that woman would have paid.
To know that her place in his life was only ever to be his inamorata—never to aspire to be his wife.
And as for the Count—oh, he would have had everything he wanted. His pale, subservient wife—his compliant, obliging mistress.
Having it all.
She dragged her mind away, making herself inspect the other paintings, consult her catalogue, interview the exhibition’s curator, and then get a few words from the gallery’s director, who greeted her warmly, both in her professional capacity and as the stepdaughter of the late chairman of a global hotel chain—a generous patron of the arts himself.
It had been her stepfather who’d first noticed her interest in art as a teenager, and it was thanks to him that she’d studied history of art at prestigious universities both in England and Italy. He’d encouraged her in her journalistic career. It was a career she found immensely satisfying, and she knew herself to be extremely fortunate in it.
Now, with all her notes taken, she was ready to leave. She’d spend the evening going through them, drawing up the article she would write.
As she made her farewells she found herself glancing around. She knew who it was she was trying to glimpse. And knew why she should not be. Cesare di Mondave was far too disturbing to her peace of mind to allow herself to have anything more to do with him.
He was not to be seen anyway, and she told herself she was glad. Relieved. Because to further her acquaintance with Cesare di Mondave would not be good sense at all.
Involuntarily her eyes went to the portrait of his ancestor—Count Alessandro, regarding the world in all his High Renaissance splendour, his dark gaze compelling, arrogant. In her mind’s eye she saw his wife and his mistress. Two women, rivals for ever, their destinies yoked to the man who had commissioned their portraits.
Had they both loved him? Or neither?
The question hovered in her head, its answer long consumed by the centuries that had passed. All she could know, with a kind of ironic certainty, was that it would not be wise for any woman to have anything to do with the man in whose veins ran the blood of Luciezo’s Count Alessandro.
It didn’t matter that his descendant could have an impact on her that she had never encountered before. That his dark lidded eyes could raise her pulse in an instant...that her eyes had wanted only to cling helplessly, hopelessly, to his sculpted, powerful features, that her hand had yearned to reach towards him, graze the tanned skin of his jaw, brush the sensual swell of his mouth... It didn’t matter at all.
Because letting herself get embroiled with the arrogant, oh-so-aristocratic Count of Mantegna would be folly indeed!
She was not, and never would be, like the lush beauty in the Caradino portrait, haplessly dependent upon the Count’s continuing desire for her, fearing its demise. Her lips thinned slightly. Nor could she ever be like the woman in the other portrait—oh, she might move in Roman high society, but the Viscaris were hoteliers: rich, but with no trace of aristocratic blood. Carla knew without flinching that when il Conte chose a wife, it would be a woman from his own background, with an ancestry to match his.
I would be nothing more than an...an interlude for him.
She walked out onto the pavement and into the warm evening air of Rome in late summer. A low, lean, open-topped car was hovering at the kerb, blatantly ignoring the road signs forbidding such parking. Its powerful engine was throbbing with a throaty husk, its scarlet paintwork was gleaming, and the rearing stallion on the long bonnet caught the light, glinting gold like the crested signet ring on the hand curved around the wheel.
The man at the wheel turned his head. Let his dark, lidded gaze rest on Carla.
‘What kept you?’ asked Cesare di Mondave, Conte di Mantegna.
