He spun round to face the doorway. Silence roared, tension sung, the sunlight shone on his black silk hair. He was wearing slate-grey. Slate-grey suit, slate-grey shirt, darker slate-grey tie. His skin had a polished gold cast to it, and his eyes were the same colour as his tie—dark with anger and passion and hurt pride.

She wanted to break down and weep at the sheer beautiful sight of him. She wanted to go to him, wrap her arms around his neck and cling so tightly that he would never ever be able to shake her free.

But instead her chin went up, it simply had to. No matter how desperate she was to feel his touch, or how shaky she was feeling inside, or even how afraid she was of hearing his answer to the question—she had to challenge him with it. It was a matter of her own pride.

‘You’re on a plane,’ he said. It was really stupid. It was the very last thing she’d expected him to say.

‘I couldn’t go.’

‘I’m not laughing.’ He answered her question.

‘What I do here is important to me,’ she told him.

‘I can see that,’ he answered. ‘Why couldn’t you go?’

Her eyelashes flickered. Everything felt as if it was coming to her through a confused mist. She wet her lips with her tongue, linked her fingers together in a trembling pleat across her trembling stomach.

‘Y-you didn’t want me to,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘Y-you trusted me to stay but I didn’t trust you to…’ The words trailed away on a wash of distraction. ‘Th-that s-sketch you’re holding isn’t a good likeness.’ Her fingers unpleated so she could point to what he was holding in his hand.

He looked down at it like someone who had no idea that he was holding anything. ‘You think I’m a shark,’ he murmured as he looked back at her.

‘Sometimes.’ She nodded.

‘Are you coming in, or are you thinking of running again?’

‘Oh.’ It was her turn to glance down as if she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She was still standing on the threshold, with her case sitting beside her and her bag swinging from one of her shoulders.

She went to pick up the case. The moment she moved, so did Marco. He came across the bare-board floor at the speed of lightning. The case was lifted out of her reach. Her arm was imprisoned in long fingers. Before she knew what he was about she was fully inside the room and the door was being firmly closed behind her.

That was when she saw Stefan, leaning against a wall with his arms casually folded and his expression—interested. ‘Hi,’ she murmured self-consciously.

‘Hi, yourself,’ Stefan softly replied. ‘I don’t suppose you would like to explain what’s been going on here?’ he drily requested.

‘She doesn’t need to explain anything,’ Marco put in tensely, and his hand tightened on her arm as if he expected her to break free and run, when in actual fact she was already hanging on to his shirt at his waistband and had no intention of letting go of it.

Stefan sent the dry look Marco’s way. ‘She does if you want me to get out of here,’ he replied, without bothering to hide his meaning.

Marco grimaced and remained silent, conceding Stefan’s right to demand an explanation.

Still shaking too much, and not thinking straight, it needed a few attempts at breathing properly before Antonia could find some semblance of intelligence.

‘Y-you know I paint. You taught me to do it,’ she reminded Stefan.

‘You taught yourself,’ he drily corrected. ‘By being a pain in the neck and insisting on placing your easel next to mine every time I worked so you could copy my every damn brushstroke.’

‘I learned from you then.’ She sighed at the play with semantics.

‘Not this kind of stuff,’ he said with derision. ‘This is chocolate-box art they sell on street corners.’

‘It’s art,’ Marco sliced back at him in her defence.

It was sweet of him, but Stefan was right. ‘Shops,’ she corrected. ‘I sell them to the shops on the Brera. They sell them to the tourists. It—it makes me a nice little living…’

‘So that’s why you hardly ever touched the money I gave you,’ Marco said bleakly.

‘And your serious work?’ Stefan asked, refusing to be sidetracked.

She tensed up; so did Marco. ‘What serious work?’ he demanded.