Exotic Affairs(166)

She turned to look at him. It was like watching snow cover a mountain her skin turned so white. Then the rain came, flooding into those beautiful amber eyes and her lips erupted with an agonised quiver.

Shaken to the roots by his own proposal, stunned beyond movement by her response, he watched one of her hands come out and give a flick in a bitter throw away gesture. Then she began walking towards him. His skin came alive to a million bee-stings; his heart lost the ability to beat. When she reached him she paused, and those awful tear-washed eyes looked right into his.

‘May you go to hell, Marco,’ she whispered thickly, then pushed him out of the way so that she could get past him.

It took him several moments to gain the will to move again. By then, a door further down the hallway had shut and the key had been turned. Staring round the chaos she had left behind her, he suddenly felt like a man standing in the middle of a ruin. Helpless, hopeless, unable to come to terms with how quickly it had all come tumbling down around him.

His legs eventually managed to take him forward, his feet picking their way through the debris of her clothes. Sitting down on the bed, he leant forward and clasped his head between long tense fingers.

He could have played an old scene again and gone charging after her, but it didn’t even come up as an option this time. She needed to cool off, and he needed to get a grip on what had just happened because at this precise moment he didn’t have a single clue!

One minute he had been the one with all the grievances, the next Antonia had been spilling hers out all over him. His sigh was heavy, shot with a residue of anger and frustration because so much of what she had thrown at him was true!

Her mother… he remembered, and got up with a swing of his body that responded to a sudden clutch of dismay. His feet took him back to his study, took him back to the Mirror Woman where he stood gazing into a face he’d believed he knew. But the differences were already manifesting themselves, as if someone had come along and altered certain brushstrokes. The curve of her eyebrows, the tilt of her jaw, the way her slender neck blended into her slender shoulders. The birthmark he’d assumed was the artist’s carelessness with his paintbrush. All very subtle differences that only an expert eye would ever notice.

He’d thought he had that expert eye. He’d believed he was a great connoisseur, when in actual fact Antonia was right and he was merely one of many, seeing only what he wanted to see.

Now he could look at this sad creature and pick out a hundred differences between her and her beautiful daughter—if he could bring himself to look at the rest of her, that was. It felt like a sin to do so now. He’d always thought Kranst the voyeur in this painting, and it didn’t sit comfortably to realise that the real voyeur had been himself.

It made him want to turn the darn thing to the wall and forget he’d ever seen it. But—

This was Antonia’s mother, he reiterated bleakly. Antonia loved this woman. It had been there in every word that she spoke! To turn her to the wall would be a rejection of someone who was as precious to Antonia as his own mother was to him.

Though he didn’t want to think about his own mother right now, he accepted with an angry hardening of his jaw.

And Antonia had never been uncomfortable with the nudity in this painting. Her discomfort had been in looking at someone she had loved and lost, not the nudity itself.

Not her own nudity—or her mother’s, he extended, as many things began to make sense. She had lived for ten years with an artist who specialised in the naked female form. He had a gift—no, a genius—for the genre, therefore it was only natural that she would learn to see nudity as something to appreciate in its own right, and not something to turn away from in shame. As it had been to him until he discovered who it was he was actually looking at!

Since when had he developed a bigot’s view of something this special? Marco asked himself. This was art! Master-class art! If he’d been in a better frame of mind, he would have been purchasing one of Kranst’s latest offerings. And not just for the investment, but because he liked what Kranst painted on the canvas!

But who had painted Antonia’s nude image? he then asked himself, and felt his whole sophisticated outlook tumble like a house of cards. Anger enveloped him, spewing forth from a strange place inside him that could now accept Kranst as her painter—but not some other man!

How the heck had she managed to divert him so thoroughly that he hadn’t demanded some answers about him? And there was Anton Gabrielli lurking in the shadows.

Behind Marco the telephone started ringing. If it did nothing else it diverted his attention away from what was beginning to flood his veins again.