Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (37 page)

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 security 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.

The
Mirror Woman
was easily the best of the series—which was why Marco had bought it. It was also the most disturbing, because this was the only painting where Antonia stood in full focus. She was standing on a balcony—an
English
balcony, he mused with a grimace. Long and slender, naked and sleek, with an early-morning sunrise caressing her skin with pale gold silk. She was looking back over her shoulder towards the mirror with a terrible—terrible sadness in her beautiful eyes.

Frowning, he reached out to absently graze a fingertip over an unusually careless brush-mark blemish that shouldn’t be there on her left shoulder. Then her eyes were drawing his attention again. Those dreadful, empty, haunted eyes. What was she supposed to be seeing when she looked into the mirror like that? Herself? The artist? Something else unseen by anyone else from this angle?

He’d once asked Antonia why the look. ‘Life,’ she’d answered flatly. ‘She’s seeing life.’ Then she’d shuddered and walked away and never asked to see the painting again.

It had been an unexpected response from someone who refused to reveal any hint of embarrassment whenever she came up against her own nudity in one of the many other forms it had taken since Kranst had painted her. The signed prints, the calendars, greetings cards, etcetera, being the mediums by which the artist earned his real fame and fortune.

Only this painting upset her. Or was it the fact that
he
owned it that made her walk away? She refused to talk about it, and would be appalled to find out that to acquire it he’d had to convince his own mother to sell it to him.

The irony in that put a smile on his lips. ‘Stefan Kranst is a worthy investment,’ his mother had said. ‘He has a gift for catching the inner soul of his subject. This poor creature, for instance, is dying inside that beautiful outer casing. I feel for her. I feel for the artist because he so clearly loves the inner woman.’

The word
dying
was a disturbing description. He preferred the word
empty
, because it soothed some part of him to know that Antonia had never looked empty while she had been with him.

But his mother had admired the woman in the painting
before
she had known Antonia had moved in with him. Now all she saw was a woman willing to expose herself for all to see and who possessed no conscience about doing it. She also despaired, because her son had not yet assuaged what she saw as his obsession with both the painting and the woman.

The smile turned itself into a sigh, because he was aware he hadn’t assuaged anything where Antonia was concerned. Not his desire for the woman or his fascination with this painting.

Now Kranst was implying that there was another
painting, like this one. Which meant what, exactly? That Kranst hadn’t painted out
his
obsession with Antonia? That this new painting was going to tell him things he didn’t want to know?

If that was Kranst’s motive, then Marco didn’t want to find out, but he knew he needed to. He didn’t want to go to Kranst’s damned private viewing, but he would have to go.

And he didn’t want to lose Antonia, but he had a horrible feeling he was going to lose her one way or another. By his own stupid actions or with the help of exterior forces like Kranst or his mother or the compelling pull of his sick father’s need.

The whisky no longer had any flavour. The painting of Antonia suddenly did nothing for him. He wanted the real woman. The one he had just hurt for no other reason than a need to reassure his own ego.

But she was
still
the warm and pliant woman probably lying fast asleep in his bed now, he then added, with yet another kind of smile as he left the room and closed the door behind him. Then, with a walk that was almost unwavering, he rid himself of his glass and went to join her.

The bedroom was in darkness, the bed a mere shadow on the other side of the room. Making as little noise as possible, he stepped into the bathroom, silently closed the door to spend a few minutes trying to shower off the effects of the whisky, before going back into the bedroom and over to the bed.

He meant to surprise her awake with some serious kisses in some very serious places. She would be sulking, of course, but he could deal with that. She would fight him too, he would expect nothing less. And he would grovel a little because she deserved to have him
grovel—before he drowned himself in the sweetest pleasure ever created for a man to share with a woman.

Then he stopped and frowned when he found himself staring down at the smooth neatness of an untouched bed.

A SHAFT of alarm went streaking down his backbone and massed deep in his abdomen. He spun, sharp eyes piercing the darkness to scan the room for a sign of her shadowy figure—curled in a chair, maybe, or standing by the window.

She wasn’t there. The alarm leapt up to attack his heartbeat. She wouldn’t, he told himself. She couldn’t have quietly dressed and left him while he’d been busy drowning his sorrows—could she?

No, he wouldn’t have it. He might have behaved like a rotten bastard, but Antonia would never just walk out and leave!

But then there was Kranst waiting on the sidelines, he remembered, and started moving, unsure, so damned unsure of himself that the uncertainty was actually making his legs feel hollow with fright!

It was the whisky, Marco told himself. But he was still going to kill her when he found her for scaring him like this, he vowed, as he began striding round the apartment opening doors and closing them until he came to the locked door belonging to one of the spare bedrooms.

Relief shuddered through him, followed by a shaft of white-hot fury at her whole attitude. Stubbornly forgetting his own bad behaviour. he banged hard on the door. ‘If you don’t unlock this door I’ll break it down!’ he shouted threateningly.

And kept on banging until the door flew open.

Antonia was already walking away from it even as it swung back on itself. Her hair rippled about her naked shoulders and his body almost screamed as it responded to the carelessly sensual sway of hers. And it was the turn of the red silk wrap to lie in a discarded blot on the floor.

‘Don’t ever lock me out of a room in my own home again,’ he ground out as he strode forward.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she replied in a voice meant to freeze a man’s nether parts.

A willingness to grovel was forgotten—ousted by a much more satisfying desire to remind her just who called the tune around here.

Arriving at the bed, she prepared to climb back into it. In two long strides he stopped her, by the economical act of scooping her off her feet. Her protesting shriek was ignored, as were her wriggling attempts to get herself free. Without a single word from his tightly clamped lips, he turned and began carrying her out of this bedroom and down the hall to
his
bedroom.

‘You are such a primitive underneath the layers of breeding,’ she sliced at him disgustedly.

He stopped dead and kissed her—so hot and so hard she was gasping for breath by the time he lifted his head again.

‘Is that primitive enough?’ he asked, not in the least bit insulted she’d called him that. In fact he liked the whole scenario, since he was feeling very primitively aroused right now.

Marco shut the door behind them with a very satisfyingly primitive kick. The bed waited. He dumped her on its pale blue cover, then followed with the long hard length of his body in a very primitive man-on-top-of-woman pinning down.

Her angry eyes shot amber bright warnings at him. Her beautiful hair streamed out above her head, and her clenched fists made a puny but determined effort to do him some damage. ‘Get off me,’ she insisted. ‘You’re just a big brute—
and
you taste of whisky!’

‘And you taste of champagne and woman—
my
woman,’ Marco growled back, enjoying this new primitive role that allowed him the rare luxury to completely dominate.

Her breasts heaved against the solid wall of his chest and her slender hips writhed delightfully beneath the pressure of his. She felt the rise of his passion and spat her utter contempt at him, while the mocking arch of his eyebrows asked her who was to blame.

She hit back with more than her fists, ‘Stefan was right about you,’ she lashed. ‘You are a—’

Ducking between the flailing fists, he stopped the words with his mouth. Discussing Kranst was
not
going to happen in
his
bed! he grimly determined, and kept on kissing her until her hands stopped punching and began to anxiously knead his shoulders instead.

Triumph sizzled through his system; the red-hot heat of desire spun through his blood. He made love to her as if there was no tomorrow and, because there was still the heat of an angry fear burning behind the passion, he drove her to the edge more than once before ruthlessly drawing back again.

‘I hate it when you do this to me,’ she sobbed in frustration.

‘You would hate it more if I didn’t do it at all,’ he threw back.

Her breath broke on a whimper because she knew he was right. The helpless little sound did things to him
no woman could ever begin to understand. He thrust into her with the force of absolute possession.

‘You belong to
me
. Just remember that next time you feel like wrapping yourself around another man.’

If he’d expected her to respond at all, it was not the way she did. With the slick roll of her body he suddenly found he was the one pinned down and she the one most definitely on top. For the next few minutes he experienced what it was like to be utterly seduced by a woman hell-bent on making him embarrass himself.

It didn’t happen. He was no one’s easy victim. But Antonia in this mood was irresistible. She was the true sensualist born to pleasure man. She kissed him and stroked him and rode him towards heaven. And when his body began to tighten and his heart began to pound, she gave him back a taste of his own medicine by pulling away to rise up and stand over him.

Feet planted either side of his body, hands resting in the delicious groove of her slender waist, and her wonderful long golden hair spiralling around the face of an absolute wanton, she asked, ‘And who do
you
belong to, Marco?’

The little minx. The beautiful, outrageous little minx! he thought, and, with a laugh of appreciation, he jack-knifed into a sitting position, clamped his hands to her hips—and gave his mouth the pleasure of bringing her to heel again.

The battle progressed to a different level. She gasped and protested and tugged at handfuls of his hair in an effort to dislodge him, and eventually lost the ability to stand. She was groaning and trembling but still in there fighting, matching him kiss for kiss, caress for caress, intimacy for exquisite tortuous intimacy, which had them crossing a few boundaries they’d never attempted
to cross before in their quest to get the better of the other.

By the time he was back where he belonged—on top and deep inside her—he had lost the will to pull back again. Hot, bathed in sweat and no longer on this planet, they rode the fiery dragon with a focused compulsion that blocked out everything else.

He climaxed first—she was so damned determined to make him do that. But she followed a half-second later, urging him on with the convulsing tug of her muscles towards the kind of prolonged orgasm that laid them both to waste for long minutes afterwards.

Yes!
he thought with a deep satisfaction as he lay heavy on her, fighting for breath. This was it, the elixir of life, and to hell with the covetous Kranst. To hell with his disapproving mother! he added fiercely to that—he couldn’t bring himself to repeat the dismissive curse regarding his father, but inside he was aware that the need to hold on to what he had here was beginning to overshadow everything else.

Lying there beneath him, almost completely engulfed in his body and his scent and the glorious weight of his utter satiation, Antonia wondered ruefully if she would ever find the energy to move again. Her bones felt like liquid and certain muscles were trembling in the aftermath of something pretty spectacular, even for them.

What she couldn’t understand was how it could be like that after what had gone before it. She should have been repulsed by his touch. She should have lain like a stone beneath him. But she hadn’t—she hadn’t…

Weak, you’re weak, she derided herself miserably, and made a move to remind him that she was still here, just in case he’d forgotten while he basked in sexual bliss.

With a kiss to her brow, he acknowledged her presence, then relieved her of his weight by rolling them onto their sides so he could wrap her against him.

‘You move me like no other woman,’ he murmured huskily.

Did he think that was a compliment? she asked herself. Because it wasn’t. She had no wish to be tagged and sorted according to performance. In fact, if she had the energy she would take serious offence and get up and leave!

But she didn’t have the energy. And, in truth, lying here against him in the soft darkness of the summer night, with one of his hands gently stroked the curve of her hip while the other absently grazed over her left shoulder, she could think of no other place she would rather be.

Weak, she repeated. It was her biggest problem. She needed to be with him though she didn’t
want
to need. He was arrogant, self-motivated, insensitive and…

Her sigh warmed his throat. Dipping his dark head, he caught the sigh with the kind of kiss that squeezed the heart dry. When it was over she reached up to touch his lips with her fingertips, unable to believe that a mouth could be so tender and not feel something deeper than desire for her.

‘I wish I’d never met you sometimes,’ she quietly confided.

‘Only sometimes?’ he threw back.

Tipping her head, she expected to find him smiling. But he looked quite sombre as he gazed down at her through swirling smoke-blue eyes set between kohlblack lashes in a polished bronze framework no gifted sculptor could improve upon.

‘Do you want me to apologise for my earlier behaviour?’ he asked her. Huskily spoken, sincerely meant. No, she thought sadly. I want you to love me. Then had to swallow the lump of tears in her throat as she gave a shake of her head. ‘I just want you to promise never to do that to me again,’ she replied.

Smoke-blue eyes darkened with repentance. ‘On my life,’ he vowed, and sealed it with a kiss, then repeated it again and again until both the vow and the kiss became yet another seduction.

It was his way, a willingly humble side to his proud character, which had the power to demolish her resistance far more easily than the ruthlessness he had meted out before.

Her fingers began trailing tender caresses across hair-peppered, muscle-hard, satin-tight flesh. He was built to worship, she thought mistily. Built to make any woman melt with desire. It was she who deepened those soft penitent kisses into one long sensual banquet. She who slid onto her back and drew him over her, then slowly relaxed her thighs so he would settle between. In a wonderful intimacy that had her long legs tangling with his and her body arching to a sensual rhythm, they indulged in a different kind of kiss.

His mouth left hers to taste other parts of her, and she sighed in pleasure as it closed on her breast. Fingers trailed into his hair, stretched out to glide down the satin smoothness of his back. He shuddered in response and drew on her nipple until she felt the needle-sharp pleasure reach deep down into her very core.

As quickly as that, it all began again. No tormenting this time, no battle of wills. In only seconds he was feeding his powerful arms beneath her so he could lift
her into closer contact with the pulsing length of his sex.

Dragging his mouth from her breast, he requested, ‘May I?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she invited, aware that they were both more than ready for this.

This time he came into her with the gentle force of a man who was very mindful of his own power. She willingly accepted him, and wasn’t surprised to hear them both utter those exquisite sighs of pleasure because, quick though this was, they were perfectly in tune.

Can I walk away from him? Antonia found herself questioning as not just her senses but her whole world began to quicken. Can
he
really want this to end?

As if he could sense that her mind had strayed, Marco was suddenly rearing up and over her. His eyes were like two dark circles of passion, his mouth warm and moist and hungry for hers. ‘This is special,’ he said roughly. ‘And it is ours.’

‘Sometimes it feels as if you hate me,’ she whispered.

‘No, never,’ he denied, and crushed her mouth beneath his and crushed all thoughts from her head by other means.

The next morning, the light brush of his lips on her cheek awoke her. Opening her eyes, she smiled sleepily at him.

Clean-shaven and smelling deliciously vital, he was already dressed for his busy day in a dark grey suit and pale blue shirt that did sensational things to his golden features.

‘Get up, get dressed and come and join me for breakfast,’ he invited. ‘I have a surprise for you.’

‘A surprise?’ she repeated, yawning while stretching.

‘Mmm,’ he murmured, and it was the sexiest murmur Antonia had ever heard in her entire life.

It brought an invitation to her eyes and a hand reaching up for him. ‘Show me now,’ she commanded in a tone which was demanding something else entirely.

He caught the hand, kissed it, then firmly replaced it back on the bed. ‘Not on your life.’ He grinned. ‘You have to come downstairs looking prim for this surprise.’

And with that thoroughly intriguing statement he turned and strode out of the room. Antonia watched him go with a smile in her eyes, quietly amazed at how a night of loving could turn their relationship around. The man was an enigma of complicated mood codes: one minute looking as if he wished to see the back of her, the next almost dying with pleasure in her arms. Now he wanted to please her with surprises—though how he’d found the time to come up with anything to surprise her with at—she checked the bedside clock—seven o’clock in the morning was completely beyond her.

Innovative, that was what Marco was, she thought indulgently as she climbed out of the bed and went off to shower and dress, as instructed, in something prim. Her choice was a white tailored linen suit teamed with amber accessories that almost matched the colour of her eyes.

On her way to the breakfast room, she popped her head into the kitchen and was surprised to find no housekeeper there to exchange the usual morning greetings. Still frowning slightly at Carlotta’s absence, she entered the sunny breakfast room to find her favourite breakfast bowl of fresh fruit and a steaming pot of hot coffee waiting for her on the table—and her favourite
man reclining in his chair reading his morning newspaper.