Exotic Affairs(148)
‘Why won’t you listen?’ she snapped. ‘I don’t know what Stefan is planning for Friday!’
‘Then why the shifty look?’
‘You don’t own the right to know my every secret!’ she hit back bitterly. ‘I’m your mistress, not your wife!’
This came hard on the fact that he had just reminded himself of the same thing, and his expression hardened into steel. ‘The way the two of you were lost in deep conversation while you clung to him like a vine says to me that you were discussing something important while you made love to each other in front of everyone. And I want to know what that something is!’
‘We were discussing you!’ she flashed. ‘And whether it was time for me to leave you or not!’
The claim had hit a nerve. Antonia actually saw it flick like the tip of a whip across his taut cheekbones. ‘Are you saying he wants you back?’ he demanded thinly.
‘He will always have me back!’ she flung at him recklessly. ‘And when I’m ready to leave you, then I probably will go back to him!’
With that, she gave a tug at her wrist to free herself and walked proudly away, trying not to show how badly shaken she was feeling at this, the worst row they’d had to date.
Needing something to do in the drumming silence that followed her, she sat down on the stool in front of the dressing table and began to let down her hair.
‘If there was the remotest possibility of you actually walking out on me, you would have done so without the warning,’ Marco drawled in a voice loaded with derision.
‘You think I’m a real push-over, don’t you?’ she muttered, tossing hairpins in an angry scatter across the dressing table top. ‘You think that because you’re as sexy as hell and so darn wealthy you can afford to buy anything, that I should be grateful that you decided to buy me!’
‘I did not buy you,’ he denied. ‘I chose you. There is a definite difference between the two.’ His arrogance, she noted, really showed no bounds. ‘Whether or not you sold yourself to me, though, is a question I have no wish to hear the answer to.’
‘Why not?’ she challenged, via his reflection in the mirror. ‘Are you afraid to discover that maybe your wealth is more appealing to me than your body?’
About to undo his bow-tie, she watched him stop and stiffen as if something really nasty had just stepped into the room. Antonia was very pleased to watch him do it. The man could be so insufferably conceited sometimes that it made her want to hit him where it would hurt the most!
‘I sit here swathed in the finest silk,’ she continued, to compound his momentary disconcertion, ‘with my flesh pampered by the finest beauty products money can buy. I live in the kind of luxury most people only see between the pages of glossy magazines, and downstairs in the basement sits the kind of car most women only dream about owning—’
‘The car belongs to me,’ he inserted. ‘You are merely permitted the use of it.’
‘Permitted—!’ A choked gasp brought her twisting round on the stool to stare at him. Then, ‘Ah…’ she said. ‘So now we get down to the nitty-gritty. The car is yours. The luxury accommodation is yours. The expensive clothes I wear belong to you, as does the wonderful array of priceless jewels you keep carefully locked away in your safe until I require the use of them.
So—yes,’ she acknowledged, ‘I suppose it is natural for you to believe that I sold myself to you.’
‘I never said that,’ he snapped, a deep frown suddenly darkening his features as fresh irritation flicked into life.
‘Then let’s just clarify the point, shall we, so that it can be done with once and for all?’ Getting up, she went to stand right in front of him. Confrontation wasn’t in it. ‘If, let’s say, I decided to walk out on you right here and now, what would I be allowed to take with me?’
‘This is stupid,’ he sighed, sliding the strip of black silk out from under his shirt collar. ‘When we both know you have no intention of walking anywhere.’
‘The car? No,’ she continued, regardless. ‘The jewels? Definitely no. What about all the designer clothes, then? Have I performed well enough to earn the right to take those, Marco?’ she questioned provokingly. ‘Or do you intend to let me walk out on you naked? If so,’ she added, without giving him a chance to answer, ‘then you surely can’t say that I sold myself to you. For what exactly is it I am supposed to have gained from doing so?’
‘A year of great sex?’ he suggested nastily.
‘Oh,’ she pouted. ‘I was hoping you would have the good taste to leave the sex thing out of this.’