the room.
But he took with him the sight of her standing there still half stripped of her robe. It made him sigh again as he slammed into his study. For, no matter how ruthlessly he had just set out to demolish her, the way she had refused to cover herself seemed to give her the last word that was strangely demolishing him.
What was it exactly he had been trying to prove? he asked himself as he made directly for the whisky bottle. That she had to love him more than she loved Kranst?
She’d left the handsome bastard for him, hadn’t she? Marco argued with his own angry head. And why bring the love thing into it when he had never asked or wanted love from any woman?
But neither do you want to believe she could have the capacity to love another man, his conceited side answered the question. You’re an arrogant swine, Bellini, he told himself. You want it all. You always have done. But you’re never going to give that much back in return.
Snatching up the bottle and a glass, he took them over to his desk then threw himself down into the chair. Whisky splashed into the glass. He tipped it down his throat, swallowed, then sat back to glower darkly at nothing.
He’d never felt like this before, and he didn’t want to feel like this now! Angry and guilty and—yes, he admitted it—riddled with confusion and jealousy. It creased his insides every time he heard Kranst’s name leave her lips in that oh, so tender way she always said it. And seeing her clinging to the man tonight had forced him to trawl whole new depths of jealous resentment.
‘He still wants her,’ Louisa had said. Well, so do I!
Another splash of whisky burned its way down to his stomach.
And he wasn’t giving her up just to watch her walk straight into the arms of her ex-lover as if Marco Bellini had never even been there!
Was that it? he thought suddenly. Was that what was really bugging him? The idea that if he did send her packing she would simply go back to where she had been before she met him and pick up where she’d left off, with hardly a tear to say she was sorry to do it?
To hell with Kranst. Antonia was his woman! And Kranst could go and look elsewhere for his inspiration.
Which reminded him about the painting the guy had been taunting him with tonight. Getting up, he staggered, frowned down at the whisky bottle, and was amazed to discover how much of it had gone.
Drunk. He was drunk. Well, that was a first since his reckless youth, he thought with a grimace. Would Antonia be pleased to know what she had driven him to?
Concentrating on walking in a straight line, he went over to a door and punched a set of numbers into the security console, heard the lock shoot back and pushed the door open on the investment side of his art collection—the Rembrandt, the Titian, the Severini and the Boccioni, which his insurers insisted he kept housed in a secure room.
Would Antonia be pleased to know what else he had in here? he mused as, with glass in hand, he walked right past the masters, his attention fixed only on Stefan Kranst’s Mirror Woman.
It was only one of a series the artist had produced over several years. Each painting was different, but the theme was always the same—perfection seen through the eyes of the artist via a mirror reflection.
What had Kranst really been trying to say when he’d painted Antonia like this? Marco pondered thoughtfully. That the mirror reflected her perfection where reality did not? Or had Kranst merely been the voyeur, capturing on canvas something he knew he could never have any other way?
Marco frowned as he always did when he tried to understand what Kranst had been trying to relay here. No suggestion he could come up with ever truly fitted. The idea of Kranst as the mere voyeur, for instance, was shot to pieces the moment you saw the two of them together. They knew each other intimately. Touch, taste, sight, sound. In fact he had never experienced intimacy like it between two people, unless he included himself with her.
As for the mirror-perfection versus reality: the painting didn’t lie. Antonia was as perfect in real life as Kranst had portrayed her here.
The Mirror Woman was easily the best of the series—which was why Marco had bought it. It was also the most disturbing, because this was the only painting where Antonia stood in full focus. She was standing on a balcony—an English balcony, he mused with a grimace. Long and slender, naked and sleek, with an early-morning sunrise caressing her skin with pale gold silk. She was looking back over her shoulder towards the mirror with a terrible—terrible sadness in her beautiful eyes.
Frowning, he reached out to absently graze a fingertip over an unusually careless brush-mark blemish that shouldn’t be there on her left shoulder. Then her eyes were drawing his attention again. Those dreadful, empty, haunted eyes. What was she supposed to be seeing when she looked into the mirror like that? Herself? The artist? Something else unseen by anyone else from this angle?
He’d once asked Antonia why the look. ‘Life,’ she’d answered flatly. ‘She’s seeing life.’ Then she’d shuddered and walked away and never asked to see the painting again.
It had been an unexpected response from someone who refused to reveal any hint of embarrassment whenever she came up against her own nudity in one of the many other forms it had taken since Kranst had painted her. The signed prints, the calendars, greetings cards, etcetera, being the mediums by which the artist earned his real fame and fortune.
Only this painting upset her. Or was it the fact that he owned it that made her walk away? She refused to talk about it, and would be appalled to find out that to acquire it he’d had to convince his own mother to sell it to him.
The irony in that put a smile on his lips. ‘Stefan Kranst is a worthy investment,’ his mother had said. ‘He has a gift for catching the inner soul of his subject. This poor creature, for instance, is dying inside that beautiful outer casing. I feel for her. I feel for the artist because he so clearly loves the inner woman.’
The word dying was a disturbing description. He preferred the word empty, because it soothed some part of him to know that Antonia had never looked empty while she had been with him.
But his mother had admired the woman in the painting before she had known Antonia had moved in with him. Now all she saw was a woman willing to expose herself for all to see and who possessed no conscience about doing it. She also despaired, because her son had not yet assuaged what she saw as his obsession with both the painting and the woman.
The smile turned itself into a sigh, because he was aware he hadn’t assuaged anything where Antonia was concerned. Not his desire for the woman or his fascination with this painting.
Now Kranst was implying that there was another painting, like this one. Which meant what, exactly? That Kranst hadn’t painted out his obsession with Antonia? That this new painting was going to tell him things he didn’t want to know?
If that was Kranst’s motive, then Marco didn’t want to find out, but he knew he needed to. He didn’t want to go to Kranst’s damned private viewing, but he would have to go.
And he didn’t want to lose Antonia, but he had a horrible feeling he was going to lose her one way or another. By his own stupid actions or with the help of exterior forces like Kranst or his mother or the compelling pull of his sick father’s need.
The whisky no longer had any flavour.
