This was making love on a different level, this was intimacy so deep it touched parts of him never otherwise touched.
As she drew away again, her eyes held a promise. Maybe he would take her up on it in a minute, Marco idly considered. But for now he was content to enjoy the more simple pleasure of being the passive one while she did the seducing.
She began it by touching a finger to the satin tight hollow of his shoulder. ‘You showered without me,’ she complained.
He smiled a lazy smile. ‘You were asleep,’ he reminded her.
She was not in the least bit impressed by that answer, and her mouth took on a sulky pout. Taking the coffee-cup from his fingers she put it aside, took possession of both his hands and fed them round her slender waist, then lifted her own up to curve his nape. One small step and she was fitting her hips into the cradle of his hips and pressing her wonderful breasts against him. Then her head tilted back a little, her sulky mouth parted—and claimed his with another kiss designed to devour.
He would have to be made of stone not to respond to her. He would have to be half the man he actually was not to want what was being offered to him. It was special. She was special. He didn’t want to lose it.
‘What was that for?’ she broke the kiss to demand when she felt him shiver.
‘The sun has gone in again,’ he said.
And it had, he noticed. Like a bad omen, it had slid behind another cloud the moment he’d begun thinking about the future.
‘Big softy,’ she chided, her fingers tangling lovingly into his hair. ‘You want to try standing like this on an English balcony. You would die of frostbite, being such a thin-blooded Italian.’
He was supposed to laugh or come back with a light counter-charge, Marco was well aware of that. But he could do neither because he was suddenly seeing her standing naked on that English balcony.
Seeing her exactly as she had once been caught for posterity in a Kranst painting.
‘You would know, of course,’ was therefore the cynical taunt that slid from him.
Her sudden stillness was electric. If he’d slapped her he couldn’t have achieved a better response. Kiss-warmed lips lost all of their softness. Warm topaz became cold grey glass. With a single step she completely separated herself from him and, without a single word, she turned and walked back into the bedroom.
Remorse played havoc with his conscience as he watched her sensual stride take her towards the bathroom. The urge to go after her and apologise came a couple of short seconds too late. The door closed, he heard the bolt slide home and knew he now had one hell of a task on his hands to put right the wrong he had just done.
‘Damn,’ he cursed as he spun away.
The sun crept out from behind its cloud again. He scowled at it. Scowled at the seagull soaring overhead. Then he scowled at himself because he knew that putting right a wrong would not solve the dilemma that was sitting right on his doorstep waiting to be addressed.
On the other side of the bathroom door, Antonia stood with her eyes closed, waiting for the hurt contracting the muscles around her heart to ease. It hadn’t been the words but the way he had said them, with derision, deliberately aimed to cut.
Stefan, she thought wearily. It always came back to Stefan, and Marco’s inability to accept the life she had led before she met him. For a man who prided himself on his fast-track modern sophistication, he harboured some truly archaic principles.
One of these days she would find the strength to stand firm and challenge those principles, and this right he felt he had to speak to her like that, she promised herself.
But not yet, she conceded heavily. She just didn’t have that kind of strength yet. Because to challenge him meant challenging their whole relationship, and the day she did that Antonia knew would be the same day she lost Marco for good.
Though that moment was coming closer, she recognised, as the hurt began to fade much sooner than it usually did after one of his well-aimed barbs. And she found she could open her eyes and actually look at herself in the mirror opposite without wincing at what she saw.
And what did she see?
She saw a scarlet woman, she grimly mocked that reflection. A woman who was a mistress to a man who wasn’t even married but who still classed her as a mistress not a lover. In her view, there was a very important difference between the two titles. To be a man’s lover carried a certain amount of moral equality. To be his mistress showed a distinct lack of moral value. And was there such thing as a master to level out the playing field? No, of course not. He remained simply the lover, with no stigma at all attached to the title. You could have a pair of lovers but you could not have a pair of mistresses—not in this context anyway. No, that unenviable title belonged exclusively to her own fair sex.