of those sexy little g-strings she liked to favour now and then.
Usually for his exclusive pleasure. So, when he saw Kranst’s long artistic fingers splay over the slender curve of her hips, Marco took it as a personal insult to see her accept the intimacy as if the man still had every right to place his hands on her like that!
The sudden burst of soft laughter brought his hard gaze flicking upwards in time to catch that laughter animating just about every exquisite feature on her face. Then one of her hands curled around Kranst’s nape, and they began talking to each other as if it was perfectly acceptable for them to behave like this in public.
But it was not acceptable, and she should know it. She should know that such behaviour with a man everyone here knew had been her lover before Marco only made her look cheap and made him look a fool!
Was she doing it deliberately? Was this her way of letting him know that he wasn’t the only fish in her sea?
Sometimes he hated her. Sometimes he hated her so much he was bewildered as to how he could want her so badly, feeling the way he did. She wasn’t his type. She had never been his type. She was too young, too uncultured and just too damn flighty! Or why else would she choose to stand out like an exotic flower in flimsy red silk while the rest of the room wore classy black chic?
Someone slid up beside him. ‘Well, caro, she certainly knows how to make a man welcome,’ a very mocking female voice drawled.
Gritting his teeth together behind the determinedly relaxed line of his mouth, Marco ignored Louisa Florenza’s silken barb, and maintained his silence as the two of them stood watching Stefan Kranst begin edging Antonia backwards a few steps until he had put them both on the tiny dance floor.
Her hand remained curled around his nape. Both of his rested on her slender waist as he set them swaying to the music while they continued to talk. And their concentration on each other was so absolute that it was clear Antonia had completely forgotten all about the man she had actually come here with!
‘You know, you cannot fail to be impressed by her complete lack of guile.’ Louisa smoothly injected her next poisoned barb. ‘Most women would be dying of embarrassment if they were confronted by their ex-lover in a room packed full of the friends of her present lover. But she doesn’t seem to care at all!’
‘You are standing next to me, cara,’ Marco pointed out. ‘Do you see me dying of embarrassment?’
As a reply, Louisa linked her arm through the crook of his arm. ‘We had some good times, Marco, hmm?’ she murmured wistfully.
Good times? Watching Antonia swaying sensually to the music, he promised himself that if the gap between their bodies grew any smaller he would go over there and…‘You were a cat with claws, Louisa,’ he drily reminded her. ‘Which made the good times very few and far between.’
‘I purred like a kitten in your bed, though,’ she came back, with an example of that sensual purr.
It did nothing for him, which further annoyed him because it had used to do many things for him. But now all he could hear was another woman’s soft sighs breathing tremulous pleas that could drive him out of his mind.
‘And you liked to feel my claws now and again…’ ‘I still bear the scars,’ he clipped.
‘Good,’ she said, but he sensed the knowledge getting through to her that his mind—and his body—was very much elsewhere right now. ‘I hope you will always bear them. For what you are feeling now, as you watch her make love to him on the dance floor, is what I feel every time I see you with her. And those scars will last for ever, Marco, I can assure you.’
The bitterness in her tone finally caught his attention. Turning his head, he looked down into the face of one of Italy’s most beautiful women—and smiled a very sardonic smile. ‘Any scars you retain from me, bella mia,’ he drawled, ‘belong exclusively to the loss of that intravenous drip you had attached to my money.’
Unfazed by the accusation, Louisa held his very mocking gaze. ‘Are you implying that she does not enjoy the same privilege?’
‘No,’ he conceded, and his smile began to tighten as he returned his attention to the two closely linked bodies on the dance floor. ‘But she has yet to abuse that particular privilege.’
‘Clever girl,’ Louisa commended.
Not so clever, Marco countered silently as he watched her soft-blonde head give a small shake that set the paste diamonds decorating the clasp holding up her lovely hair shimmering in the lights. Then she put her hand across Kranst’s mouth to stop whatever it was he was saying to her.
Was he asking her to go back to him? Was he asking to paint her again? Was he talking sex to her just as Louisa was talking sex to him?
Intimacy was the absolute devil, he decided. A forsaken intimacy was even worse. It gave people you no longer felt a thing for a power over you you could never take back.
‘He still wants her.’ Louisa’s remark hit him dead centre, as if she could tap into his thoughts.
‘His desires don’t interest me,’ he answered dismissively. The real point was—did Antonia still want Kranst?
Then another thought slid silk-like into his head, filling him with something disturbingly like dismay. Could it be that Antonia was becoming tired of him?
The very suggestion was so alien to him that he couldn’t quite work out how to handle it. No woman in his memory had even considered walking away from him until he was ready to let them go!
Then—no. Marco dismissed that idea with a contempt even he recognised as arrogance. She adored him. She always had done. If he walked over there right now and took her in his arms she would become his loving siren again within seconds, and Kranst would be the one left forgotten on the sidelines.
‘He has the looks, caro.’ Once again Louisa tapped into his thinking. ‘He has the body and the reputation of a great lover. And although he may not have the social standing you possess, he can claim star quality, which cancels out the proud Bellini name. In fact,’ she concluded tauntingly ‘the only thing you seem to have that he doesn’t are the financial resources you claim she doesn’t abuse. But it is interesting how it always comes back to the money, hmm?’
Even to his own surprise, Marco released a burst of laughter. Because he was seeing the new red Lotus Antonia had walked past tonight as if it wasn’t there. He was seeing a safe full of jewels she hardly ever asked to wear because she preferred to wear paste, like the clasp dressing her hair. And he was seeing an account in his own bank into which he paid a regular amount of money that she rarely spent.
So, no, avarice was not Antonia’s besetting sin. But at least Louisa’s peevish barb had put the humour back into his mood, so he repaid her by bending down to kiss her pouting mouth. She clung to him. He wasn’t surprised—only indifferent—which was a shame, really, because Louisa would be his mother’s idea of the perfect Bellini bride.
Shame—big shame—she wasn’t his own.
‘There,’ Antonia declared. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
Antonia was seeing that kiss Marco had just bestowed on Louisa Florenza as the final proof she needed to confirm that he was tiring of her.
‘Men
