‘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 like Bellini do not replace old with older,’ Stefan drawled sardonically. ‘And you’ve just been kissing me,’ he further pointed out. ‘I would be flattered to think it was because you wanted me as your replacement lover, but we both know it wouldn’t be true.’
‘I love you more than anyone else on this earth, and I wish I’d never met him,’ Antonia told him so tragically that Stefan had to sigh.
‘My darling, the man is besotted with you. One only has to look at the too-cool way he is handling this little scene you’re so carefully laying on for his benefit to know he’s paying you back by doing the same to you.’