The Widow (11 page)

“You're right, Mama Lauretta,” she said, using the old term of affection from her youth. “I'll behave myself. But Mr. Maguire has to find another room—we're expecting more guests.”

“Not to worry, Mrs. Pompasse,” he said in that ironic voice that made her want to hit him. “I'm already packed. I'm planning on bedding down in the studio. Tomaso found me an old bed and I'll be perfectly comfortable.”

“No,” she said flatly.

“Yes. You can't get rid of me, babe. Not until I'm good and ready to go.”

Charlie looked at Lauretta for help, but there was none. Maybe Henry would figure out a way to dislodge him, but she had no idea when he'd be showing up. Sometime before the service on Saturday, but when was anybody's guess.

“Very well,” she said. “In the meantime, keep out of my way.”

“Signora Charlie!” Lauretta said, shocked at her rudeness.

It shocked Charlie herself. She hadn't allowed herself to display open hostility in years. If ever. And yet Maguire seemed to drag forth all sorts of unnerving reactions and emotions she'd thought were long buried. It was an unpleasant reminder that she was still occasionally vulnerable and all too human.

“Sure thing, sweetheart. As soon as I find the paintings. I told you, I don't trust you. If you run across them when I'm not around you might just forget to mention them to me, and therefore to the tax bureau.”

“And I've told you, Maguire, that getting rid of you is worth far more to me than a few million dollars' worth of paintings,” she said wearily.

“Flatterer. Are we going to force our way into Madame Antonella's house or wait for another time?”

“You'll wait for another time,” Lauretta informed them. “She'll go to confession tomorrow—you can look then. Unless, of course, the two of you feel the need to purge your souls of sin.”

“I'm lapsed,
bella,
” Maguire drawled. “And it would take years for me to list all my transgressions to the good father. I'll just stay in my sinful state. As for Charlie here, I don't imagine she could drum up even five minutes' worth of misdemeanors.”

“You underestimate the effect you have on me, Maguire,” she said in a cool voice.

“Turn you on that much, do I? Well, control yourself, babe. We've got more important things to take care of right now than our libidos.”

She stared at him in shock. He was being completely outrageous, with Lauretta as a witness, and he didn't seem to care. “I'm going to hurt you,” she said in a dangerous voice.

“No, you're not. Let's go back to the house and…”

“I'm not going anywhere with you.”

“Hey, I promise. Hands off.” He held out his hands in a gesture of innocent surrender. The hands that had touched her. Held her.

“Go along, Charlie,” Lauretta said fondly, totally oblivious to how dangerous Maguire really was. “The
signore
will make sure you don't stumble again. He's all talk, aren't you,
signore?
He flirts with everyone but he doesn't mean a word of it. Just ignore him.”

“I'm trying,” she muttered.

Maguire, in true gentlemanly fashion, had already started down the narrow path, not even bothering to see whether she was coming. She considered hanging back, waiting on the terrace until he was back at the house, but Madame Antonella was moving around in the cluttered cottage, muttering angrily in a mixture of French and Italian, and in a few moments she was likely to erupt onto the terrace again. And who knew who she'd think Charlie was this time?

“Go with him, Charlie,” Lauretta said in a slightly urgent tone. “I'll take care of the old lady. But go now.”

And she had no choice but to follow him down the narrow path, as the sound of Antonella's voice trailed after her.

O
ne thing was for certain, Maguire thought as he picked his way down the pathway. Charlie Thomas didn't like kissing.

Or maybe it was more obvious than that. Maybe she just didn't like him. But he didn't think that was the problem.

Well, of course she didn't like him—that went without saying. He'd gone out of his way to get under her skin—the fastest way he could think of to get information out of someone with defenses as strong as hers were. It was a delicate balance. He had to be just obnoxious enough to get her to react, but not so bad that she kicked him out of the house. He was walking a fine line, and he'd almost fallen over the edge today.

She was following behind him—he could hear the rattle of loose pebbles as she walked down the path. He made no effort to slow down, and she wasn't about to catch up with him. They marched down the hillside to the villa, single file, and if he was half tempted to stop and turn, so that she'd have no choice but to barrel into him, he resisted the impulse. He'd pushed her enough for now.

No, she didn't like him, and she didn't like kissing. But there was definitely more to it than that. She was fascinated by him; he recognized that without any false modesty, though he wasn't sure why. It wasn't straightforward sexual interest—he doubted if Charlie even knew what that was like. If she did, she kept it for her fiancé.

Maybe she simply saw through him. Knew him for a liar and a cheat, no insurance bureaucrat at all. But she'd asked him no leading questions, and she seemed to take him at face value. If she had any doubts that he was who he said he was, it would have been a simple enough matter to make a few phone calls and then kick him the hell out of the house. This whole intricate charade was going to collapse soon enough, and all that was needed to hurry it along was the hint of suspicion. And yet as far as he knew she hadn't done anything to check up on him.

According to his early-morning phone call with Gregory, no one had seemed the slightest bit interested in the whereabouts of one Connor Maguire. He probably should have used a different name when he showed up at the villa, but he tended to find it easier to keep his lies to the absolute minimum. But if Charlie decided to start looking into her insurance consultant, it would be easy enough to track down the name of Connor Maguire among the registered aliens working in Italy. And it would lead her to the
Starlight,
not some nice, boring insurance conglomerate.

But apart from Gregory's general antsiness about getting things done, there was nothing to suggest he needed to rush things. He had a few days' grace. And despite his editor's demands for information, he'd told him next to nothing. He'd learned early on that knowledge was power, and that no one could be trusted. He'd fill Gregory in when he was ready to, and not a moment sooner.

In retrospect, he realized he shouldn't have kissed Charlie. He'd been wanting to ever since he'd first seen her—hell, he wanted to do a hell of a lot more than kiss her. And covered with plaster dust, trembling with panic, she'd been damned near irresistible.

But he'd almost overplayed his hand. She stood frozen in his arms like the ice princess he knew she'd be, and the panicked beating of her heart doubled when he put his mouth on hers. He should have pulled back then, feeling the iciness of her skin, but he'd given in to temptation, vaguely aware that she was too frightened to move.

Frightened of what, for Christ's sake? She'd been married to a notorious womanizer. The old goat had gone through some of the world's most beautiful women, including Charlie. And she had a fiancé. It wasn't as if she hadn't been having it regularly.

Maybe he was just too rough and crude for her. Pompasse had been an elegant old man, and if he knew Charlie as well as he was beginning to, then she'd probably chosen another creature of refined tastes for her fiancé, someone just like her. Not a working-class bloke from the outback who…

Who what? Who was out to find out every bit of dirt he could about her marriage, her dead husband, and even about her if he thought it would sell books? Who was entirely willing to sleep with her, and just about anyone else in the household, in order to further his cause? Who could end up turning her over to the Italian police if it turned out she'd killed the old man?

He couldn't see Charlie killing. She was so guarded she didn't allow herself to feel that much of anything. Besides, she was probably the least likely suspect. She'd been in New York—and even if she
had
made a fast trip over to Florence to off her former husband, she would have left a paper trail. And besides, she had no reason to do it.

So then, who did it?

It didn't matter in the slightest that the police didn't seem to suspect a thing. Bestsellers were made of just such stuff. If he was going to present Pompasse's death as a murder, then Gregory would be expecting a suspect. And he still wasn't sure who he liked the best for the role of killer.

Charlie would be the most interesting, of course, but it would be far too easy for her to prove her innocence. He had to preserve the shreds of his so-called journalistic integrity. If he smeared her without reasonable proof, it would destroy what credibility he did have. Of course, he didn't have to outright accuse her in the book—he just had to use enough innuendo to titillate the readers of highbrow trash. He could destroy a life without much effort at all. Not that he particularly wanted to, but he refused to allow sentimentality to get in his way.

He glanced back at her. Her head was down, and she was concentrating on the narrow path beneath her feet. She must have sensed his eyes on her, because she halted, looking up at him.

No, she definitely wasn't happy with him. If he thought her eyes had been cool before, they were now chips of ice.

“It was only a kiss, sweetheart,” he drawled. “You act like I took a hammer to the Pieta`.”

“The subject is not open for discussion.”

“Not that I put you up there with Michelangelo. I mean, you're pretty and all that, but you're only a woman, not a masterpiece. Then again, you've been a masterpiece, haven't you? What does it feel like to have your portrait worth millions of dollars? Must be flattering.”

She glared at him. “Don't be an idiot, Maguire. The value of the paintings has absolutely nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Pompasse's brilliance as a painter. Whether or not he was an admirable human being, he was certainly a great artist.”

“I suppose so. But why are his paintings of you so much more valuable than any of the others? Why are those the ones that were taken? Were you that inspiring? The work he did after you left him was shit and you know it. Doesn't that make you feel guilty?”

Bingo. He'd touched a raw spot, an important one. For some crazy reason Pompasse's artistic talent seemed to excuse everything in her mind. If he lost that, then all that was left was a selfish, degenerate old man.

“Not particularly,” she said after a moment. “He'd stopped painting me several years before I left.”

“Except for the last one. His so-called masterpiece.”

Her laugh was entirely without humor. “Are you talking about
Charlie When She Left
? Pompasse was an excellent manipulator of the media. You're right—it was the final portrait of me. But he painted it two years before I left him, just as he was starting in on Gia. And he called it
Charlie in a Bad Mood
until he decided to show it. No, I don't feel guilty.”

He really wanted to kiss her for that juicy little tidbit, but he wisely kept his distance. “So you left him because you were jealous? Someone else had taken your place?”

“I left him because he didn't need me anymore.”

“You're that easy? All someone has to do is need you and you're his?” He didn't bother to temper his disbelief.

“If I loved him.”

For a moment he said nothing. If she loved him? It was almost an alien notion. He wasn't even sure if he believed in love. Lust, yeah, and affection. But not the kind of love she was talking about. Not the kind that required sacrifice.

“So you loved him?”

“I married him, didn't I?”

“Sweetheart, people get married for thousands of reasons, and I doubt if love enters into it much. Besides, when you were eighteen you must have been starry-eyed and romantic. You couldn't have been looking for an old man.”

“When I was eighteen I'd been married to Pompasse for over a year. And he was exactly what I needed.”

“An old man. Father figure, right? Whatever happened to Daddy?”

“My father died in a plane crash when I was young. But it wasn't traumatic—I'd only seen him a couple of times in my life. Olivia goes through men rather quickly.”

“That was your mother?”

“She still is.” She didn't sound particularly pleased about it. “You'll have a chance to meet her soon enough. In the meantime, do you suppose we could get back to the house? I don't know why you give a damn about my life, but it has very little to do with your job. The missing paintings, remember?”

“And those paintings were of you, remember?” he shot back.

“Pompasse did quite a number of paintings of me, and only three are missing. And my childhood has nothing to do with it, thank you very much. Are you going to move or am I going to go around you?”

The path was very narrow. She'd have to brush against him to get past, and while the thought was tempting, he decided to give her a break.

“Sure thing, sweetheart,” he drawled, turning back on the path. “We can continue this discussion later. First dibs on the shower.”

“We're not sharing a bathroom anymore. If you really insist on sleeping in the studio then I'll show you the shower down there. Pompasse frequently painted in the nude and then showered afterward.”

“I really didn't want to know that,” he said.

“Why not? You seem to have an avid fascination for everything involving Pompasse's life. You have tabloid sensibilities, Maguire. You probably read those garbage newspapers for your view of the world.”

This was getting too close for comfort. “I don't read newspapers, love. I don't have time.”

“Stop calling me that!” she snapped. “You seem to have plenty of time to hang around here and bother me.”

“Priorities,” he said with a grin. “Simple priorities.”

 

She was going to kill him, Charlie thought, once she'd left him at the empty studio. Tomaso had already brought a double bed down from somewhere and set it up in the middle of the room. The windows were open to the bright sunlight, the dust had vanished, and there was even a vase of wildflowers on the small table beside the bed. The same as the flowers in her room. She wanted to spit.

His battered duffel bag was there, and fresh towels hung in the tiny bathroom off the back of the room. She had managed to escape before he annoyed her enough to do something about it.

She still wanted to kill him.

His unnerving curiosity shouldn't have surprised her. The world had been fascinated with Pompasse—he'd cultivated his outlandish reputation with assiduous care. Never a month had gone by while Charlie had been in exile in New York that she hadn't seen an article or heard a news story about the Great Artist and his eccentric ways. Once people knew who she was they would usually pelt her with questions. What was it like to be married to the great man? How had it felt with all his legendary womanizing? And worst of all, they always wanted to know why she'd married him in the first place. And she could never come up with an answer, not when she wasn't sure of the reason herself.

She'd soon learned to stop telling people about her background. It was a lot easier if they simply thought of her as Charlie Thomas, owner of La Chance, and not the relict of a legend.

So Maguire's incessant curiosity shouldn't surprise her. And he was a man—a rough, no-nonsense type without the sensitivity to realize that there were some questions you shouldn't ask, some subjects that shouldn't be discussed. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about that.

But it didn't feel right.

She needed a shower almost as badly as he did, but she detoured by way of the study. His laptop was still there, unguarded, and she slipped behind the desk and opened the lid.

Once more the cartoon figures raced across the screen, a touch of whimsy that was totally unlike Maguire. She tried a few buttons haphazardly, rebooting the computer to see if it would help, but it just returned to the demand for a password. Charlie groaned.

She typed Maguire. Too easy, of course. What was his first name? Connor, right? She went through the gamut of possibilities, meeting only with an invalid-password message. Why hadn't she spent more time learning how to mess with computers and less time with solitaire and Free Cell, she thought grumpily. There was something that Maguire was hiding in this computer and she wanted, needed, to find out what it was.

But she wasn't going to find out what it was today, that much was certain. Besides, she was dusty and dirty and starving—one always had better luck at spying if one was showered and well fed. Or maybe she could just sneak up on him again when he didn't realize she was there. Have someone call him away and she could race back in. Except there was no one here she could trust.