Page 129 of Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride

Standing there in his arms, Antonia said absolutely nothing. He’d done this to her merely to make a point. It was humiliating.

After a moment, he sighed and let go of her. She swayed a little, but found her balance, and remained exactly as she was while he strode for the door. And what was the picture he took with him? Antonia asked herself as she watched him go.

His suitably chastened mistress standing there with her seduction-red silk robe still hanging from her waist by the belt, and her breasts still taut and alive and throbbing. Like her mouth—like her sex.

She had never felt so sickened in all her life.

Sickened by herself—sickened by him. Sickened by the knowledge that really they were both as bad as each other. For Marco might take and take and take, but she had let him do it.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, not sure if she was telling herself that or the wretched man striding out of the door.

Whichever, he heard it, paused and turned. There was contempt in that lean hard handsome face of his. Enough contempt to make her skin crawl.

‘Take my advice, cara, and think carefully about on which side your bread is buttered. Beautiful women come in disposable packs of ten these days.’ The cut of his cynicism was deep enough to draw blood. ‘A poor performer can therefore be tossed onto the scrap heap and replaced as easily as—that.’

The snap of his long brown fingers made her flinch. Marco gave a curt nod of his dark head to acknowledge it, then left 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 securit

y 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.

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