Exotic Affairs: The Mistress BrideThe Spanish HusbandThe Bellini Bride

by Michelle Reid

  With frustration attacking him from all angles, he dragged off his jacket and had to really fight the temptation to slam it down beside the red dress and shoes in a counter-declaration.

  It was realising the childishness in the act that made him stop to wonder bleakly what was happening to him. Anger, frustration, childish acts of temper? These were not the scenes he expected to fill his home with! They lacked the sophistication with which he liked to run his private life.

  And, on top of that, he was beginning to feel like a jealous husband without the official bit of paper that said he had to put up with this. Hot anger suddenly turned to ice, the mere suspicion that Antonia was digging her claws into him deeply enough to make him feel that way, literally horrifying the heat out of him.

  Marco was draping his suit jacket on a hanger when Antonia came out of the bathroom. Wide shoulders, long body, tight behind, powerful legs and a sleek olive hue to his skin that made her fingers itch to stroke it. She wished so much he had the face of a Gorgon to offset the perfect rest of him.

  But he didn’t. So when he turned to face her, even looking as coldly remote as he did, her body stirred beneath the silk robe she was wearing.

  She wanted to hate him for being able to do that to her. Especially when all he did was freeze her with a look of contempt before turning away again.

  ‘You’ve been working with Kranst again,’ he declared flatly.

  Without bothering to answer, she walked over to pick up the red dress and shoes from where she’d stepped out of them, and carried them over to the wardrobe next to the one he was standing by.

  She opened one of the doors as he flicked one shut. ‘Answer me,’ he commanded coldly.

  ‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked a question,’ she tossed back with equal cold. ‘It sounded more like a statement of fact to me.’

  From the corner of her eye she saw his mouth tighten, ignored the stinging warning in his eyes, and placed the shoes on the shoesrack before reaching up to pluck a hanger from the rail and begin hooking the thin shoulder straps of the dress onto it.

  ‘Explain to me, then, what he was implying tonight, when he talked about something interesting.’

  She shrugged as she re-hung the hanger on the rail.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’ Though she certainly had a few worrying suspicions.

  ‘You must do,’ Marco insisted. ‘You know the man. You lived with him for over five years.’

  Ten, she wanted to correct, but held back the information. ‘And I’ve lived with you for all of one,’ she pointed out as she closed the wardrobe door. ‘But knowing what makes you tick is beyond me.’

  ‘Oh, very trite,’ he mocked. ‘Now, answer my first question and tell me if you’ve been secretly working with him again.’

  ‘For a man famed for the sharpness of his intelligence, you can be really dense sometimes,’ she derided. ‘Ask yourself—when?’ she suggested. ‘Have I had the opportunity to work or do anything else with Stefan?’

  He didn’t like the derision, his eyes darkened. ‘For all I know the man might have a secret studio set up right here in Milan where the two of you meet on a regular basis.’

  ‘So, I’m keeping the two of you happy?’ Her laugh was scornful. But even Antonia was aware that her expression was suddenly guarded, because Marco had unwittingly drifted too close to a carefully kept secret of her own.

  He saw the change. Of course he did. Reaching out with a hand, he drew her across the few feet separating them. His eyes were hard, his features grim and his grip on her wrist was firm. ‘You’re hiding something,’ he gritted.

  She refused to answer, her mouth set in a defiant pout. Marco formed his own conclusions, his expression darkening some more. ‘If the two of you are plotting my embarrassment on Friday, then I’m warning you, you will regret ever knowing me!’

  ‘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 questi
oned 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.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked tauntingly. ‘When it is all I—’

  Marco stopped himself—but not soon enough. And the black anger went flooding through him again as he watched her annoyingly provocative face blanch.

  ‘You asked for that,’ he insisted, wishing to hell he had never started this.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I surely did.’ But the fight had disappeared from her tone, and his jaw felt so tight it was in danger of snapping.

  She went to turn away from him. It was sheer frustration with the whole sordid scene that made him stop her, he told himself. It had nothing to do with the sudden suspicion that if he let her turn away she would never turn back to him again.

  So his hands found her shoulders and drew her against him, then, simply because he needed to do it, he lowered his head and his mouth took her mouth by storm.

  At least she didn’t fight him, but neither did she respond. She just stood limp and lifeless against his body while his mouth ravaged hers without receiving any feedback at all.

  Not liking what was happening here, and liking even less the knowledge that she could stand there lifeless while his own body was reacting as fiercely as it always did to her, he went for the kill with a pride-staking vengeance aimed at demolishing her resistance.

  For he knew this woman, he consoled himself grimly as he began covering her face with the kind of small light teasing kisses guaranteed to drive her wild. Her cheeks, her jaw-line, her firmly closed eyes, the length of her small straight nose. His kisses found all the right pleasure points while carefully avoiding her mouth even when, with a helpless whimper, she slackened its tense little line in sensual expectation.

  Yes, he confirmed triumphantly. He knew her so well. The way her breathing quickened, and she began to vibrate to the feather-light stroke of his fingers. It was easy to urge the silk from her shoulders and leave it to slither down her body until the only thing holding it up was the belt knotted around her waist.

  As she released a gasp in startled surprise he at last captured her mouth again. She fell into his kiss like a woman with a fever. When her fingers came up to clutch at his rock-solid biceps, he stroked her hair, stroked her body, and stroked her beautiful breasts with their sensitive points that simply begged for his further attention.

  He gave it willingly, knowingly—ruthlessly, arching her over his arm so far that she had no choice but to reach up and hook her hands around his neck to maintain some control over her own balance.

  Within seconds she was groaning. Eyes closed, head tilted right back so her long silken hair swung in a rippling swathe over his arm as he grimly tore through every veil of rejection she had dared to pull on against him. When the groans became hot little gasps of pleasure, he consolidated his success by gliding a hand along a silken thigh until it found the cluster of golden curls that shrouded her sexuality. The robe was no barrier; it had already slid apart to give him easy access. But the real triumph came when her thighs parted for him in all-out invitation.

  The battle, in his mind, was surely over. Having won it, as abruptly as he had started it, he brought it to an end and watched with a grim detachment as she leaned weakly against him, dizzy and disorientated enough to find it impossible to support herself.

  ‘You want me, Antonia,’ he declared in a tough cold voice that made her shiver. ‘Try dangling another man in front of me in an effort to improve on what we have, and you will find yourself having to learn not to want.’

  It was an outright warning.

  Standing there in his arms, Antonia said absolutely nothing. He’d done this to her merely to make a point. It was humiliating.

  After a moment, he sighed and let go of her. She swayed a little, but found her balance, and remained exactly as she was while he strode for the door. And what was the picture he took with him? Antonia asked herself as she watched him go.

  His suitably chastened mistress standing there with her seduction-red silk robe still hanging from her waist by the belt, and her breasts still taut and alive and throbbing. Like her mouth—like her sex.

  She had never felt so sickened in all her life.

  Sickened by herself—sickened by him. Sickened by the knowledge that really they were both as bad as each other. For Marco might take and take and take, but she had let him do it.

  ‘I hate you,’ she whispered, not sure if she was telling herself that or the wretched man striding out of the door.

  Whichever, he heard it, paused and turned. There was contempt in that lean hard handsome face of his. Enough contempt to make her skin crawl.

  ‘Take my advice, cara, and think carefully about on which side your bread is buttered. Beautiful women come in disposable packs of ten these days.’ The cut of his cynicism was deep enough to draw blood. ‘A poor performer can therefore be tossed onto the scrap heap and replaced as easily as—that.’

  The snap of his long brown fingers made her flinch. Marco gave a curt nod of his dark head to acknowledge it, then left the room.

  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 securit
y 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?