Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (33 page)

‘Luiz…’ Caroline murmured tentatively a long time later, when they lay curled up against each other. ‘Can we talk?’ she begged. ‘About Felipe?’

It ruined the moment. His body went taut, his jawline clenched. ‘Only if we have to do,’ he said tightly—which didn’t offer much encouragement.

Caroline pushed on anyway. ‘I know you have every right to hate him and his mother,’ she allowed. ‘And I know he behaved appallingly tonight. But…’ Leaning up a little, she looked anxiously into his ice-cold eyes. ‘It isn’t his fault his mother told wicked lies about your mother, or that she tricked and deceived your father! Just as it isn’t Felipe’s fault that you had the childhood you did. He
is
your cousin—and it’s been tough for him too, you know!’ she insisted at Luiz’s lowering frown. ‘Growing up in your shadow, with a mother who could barely live with herself for what she’d done to her own sister and a so-called father who rejected him at birth and hated his mother for putting him in your place. It’s all so very tragic and sad,’ she said. ‘And I know your father had a right to feel bitter as he wrote it. He broke his own heart by believing your aunt instead of your mother, and spent the rest of his life punishing
himself for it. But Felipe should not have been made to pay. It—’

‘What do you mean—how my father
wrote
it?’ Luiz put in.

‘Oh!’ she gasped in horror when she realised what she’d said. Then a long sigh whispered from her, and with a twisted smile that acknowledged it was probably for the best she lifted sombre eyes to his darkly glowering ones. ‘How he wrote it in his diaries,’ she said gently.

Softly and quietly she began telling him everything she had learned.

When eventually Luiz asked her where the diaries were, she told him, and without another word he got out of bed, pulled on a robe and went to get them.

A long time later, on his way back from Caroline’s bedroom, he saw Felipe and his mother just about to leave the castle. Standing there on the upper gallery, he viewed their sober features and felt something pick at the stone it was reputed he had for a heart.

‘Felipe,’ he said. The other man’s dark head came up and he spun on his heel to glance upwards. ‘We need to talk,’ he murmured quietly.

Instantly Luiz could see the battle taking place behind the defensive aggression pasted onto his handsome features. Then, on a sigh, Felipe gave a curt nod of his head. ‘One day,’ he replied. Maybe he, like Luiz, had had enough of the lies and bitterness and betrayal. ‘One day…’ he repeated, and turned away again.

Luiz watched gravely as his aunt lifted her pale face up to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she said, but Luiz understood. After all, what else could she add that could take away what had gone before?

When he went back into his bedroom, he found his bride no longer there. Tossing the diaries onto the tumbled bed, he went looking for her and found her soaking in a bath
of steaming bubbles. It took him ten seconds to join her, uncaringly sloshing water over the rim onto the tiled floor as he climbed in behind her then sat down and drew her back against him.

‘I’ve just seen Felipe and my aunt leaving,’ he told her levelly.

Caroline nodded. ‘She told me they would leave tonight.’

‘I didn’t want them to do that.’ He sighed. ‘I never meant to actually throw them out of here. Family is family…’

‘Warts and all?’ She nodded, ‘I know,’ she said referring to her own feckless father. Picking up one of his hands, she began kissing his fingers. ‘Did you read the diaries?’ she asked.

‘Mmm.’ His other hand slid up her slippery flesh until it found and closed around one of her breasts. ‘I knew some of it,’ he confessed. ‘First from my mother and then from my father, when we did eventually attempt to communicate.’

‘Seven years ago,’ Catherine sighed out bleakly, thinking of all those years they’d lost.

‘Seven years ago,’ he agreed. ‘When I made the trip to Spain to arrogantly lay claim to my roots and met the woman who claimed me instead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, thinking about how ruthlessly her father had used one of them against the other.

‘I told your father that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you,’ he informed her heavily. ‘He politely informed me where I could go. I wasn’t good enough for his daughter, he said. At the time I agreed with him.’ He grimaced. ‘Still do, actually.’

‘But you’ll have me anyway,’ Caroline added smilingly. ‘There really isn’t much to pick between you, my father
and poor Felipe,’ she said. ‘You’re all too self-motivated to be true.’

‘Felipe was right when he compared my father’s life with the life of the ancestor who built this castle,’ Luiz remarked gruffly. ‘It was history repeating itself.’

Twisting in the water until she was facing him, Caroline murmured softly, ‘Not this time, though. This time the Conde got his woman. That makes for a happy ending.’

Eyes like dark chasms filled with satisfaction. ‘A very happy ending,’ Luiz agreed huskily, and began to kiss her…

Michelle Reid

T
HE BED
was a sea of rumpled white linen. Tangled amongst it Marco Bellini could see a long golden leg bent at the knee and the smooth silken-curve of a hip and thigh. The rest was covered by fine white sheeting but for a slender arm and the rippling swathe of strawberry-blonde hair flowing away from the kind of profile that would have launched ships in times gone by.

Only her name was not Helen, it was Antonia, and, although her beauty might have launched many metaphorical ships in her time, there was no disputing to whom she now belonged.

Leaning back against the balcony rail, Marco allowed himself a smile as he brought his coffee cup to his lips. It was still very early, but the sun was already hot against his naked back. He had come out onto the terrace directly from his shower, and the white towel draped low around his narrow hips was his only concession to modesty, here, in his summer villa perched high on the hill above Portofino, where the only eyes to see him belonged to the seagulls soaring on the early morning currents of air.

And Antonia, of course, if she bothered to wake up. But, unlike him, she didn’t have to be back in Milan by nine o’clock, so she had no reason to rise this early. Although… he then added ruefully to that, if she did happen to awaken now, it would be the simplest thing in the world for him to linger long enough to drop the towel and join her back in the bed.

But not yet, Marco told himself as he took another sip from his cup. The coffee was hot, black and strong and was just another pleasure he enjoyed lingering over while he leant here watching his woman sleep.

In the year they had been together he had never seen Antonia look anything but beautiful. Dressed to slay or stripped bare to the exquisite skin nature had given her, she exuded a beauty that by far outclassed any other woman he had known. He was proud to be her lover, proud that only he held the right to place a possessive hand upon any part of her anatomy. Proud that she only had eyes for him.

But did he love her? he asked himself.

No, he admitted heavily. He didn’t love her. He loved how she looked, and how she always made him feel. And he would willingly have laid down his own life if it meant him saving hers. But true love had to go deeper than that. He had to love
what
she was, and he didn’t.

A sigh caught in the depth of his chest. A cloud blotted out the sun. A seagull shrieked in protest. The coffee suddenly tasted bitter. Putting the cup aside he turned to stare at the misted-blue waters of the Mediterranean shimmering in the distance—and wished to hell he knew what he was going to do about her.

Letting her go was out of the question. Letting her stay meant trouble in more ways than one. Out there, across hills and lush valleys that made up his beautiful Italy, trouble was brewing. It came in the form of an autocratic mother and an ailing father with an urgent desire to see his son safely married and settled before he died.

Marrying Antonia, even without the true-love bit, would be the easiest thing in the world for him to do. She was young, she was beautiful and she loved him
totally. But what parent would condone their only son, and the heir to the great Bellini fortune, marrying himself to a woman like Antonia?

A woman with the kind of past that was destined to dog her for ever. A woman with the kind of past that would reflect poorly on him
and
his family name.

A woman who made the perfect mistress—but could never be the perfect wife for him.

Another sigh whispered from him. Maybe Antonia heard it, because she began to stir. Recovering his coffee-cup, Marco turned to watch her slide lazily onto her back then, even before she bothered to open her eyes, send an arm out to search the empty space beside her in the bed. It was a gesture so familiar to him that he actually felt the hairs on his chest prickle as if she had reached out and touched him. The sensation placed the smile back on his lips, because it pleased him to know that the first thing she always thought about on waking was him.

When she found no warm male body lying beside her, her next move was to open her lovely eyes, pause for a moment to allow the remnants of sleep to disperse, then, in a single smooth graceful movement, she sat up and began to search for him.

She found him almost instantly. A warm lover’s smile touched her lovely mouth. ‘
Ciao
,’ she greeted him softly.

His response was a lazy masculine gleam over the rim of his cup, while inside he became aware of the chemical responses already beginning to stir his blood. She moved him in so many ways he didn’t dare count them.

Sliding out of the bed, she lifted her arms above her head and indulged in a long lazy stretch that highlighted
every perfect contour of her very naked frame from slender toes to delicate fingertips. Her light golden skin shone like the finest silk ever created. Her wonderful hair tumbled in loosely spiralling threads down her arching spine. In all his life Marco had never known any woman quite so perfect as Antonia. Her face, her hair, her sensational body—the way she moved as she began to walk towards him.

Like the world’s most dangerous siren, she roused the male senses without even having to try. Even the sun worshipped her by coming out from behind its cloud at the same moment she stepped onto the terrace, pooling her in soft golden light as she continued her slow graceful journey towards him.

It was no wonder Stefan Kranst had been so obsessed with her, Marco thought with a sudden grimness. No wonder he’d painted her every single way an artist could paint an obsession. Seeing her like this, he could easily understand why the man had felt so compelled to preserve her naked image. For years Antonia had appeared in all of his paintings, not always the main focal point but always the slender naked figure you looked for whenever you found yourself viewing a Kranst.

But in his desire to make Antonia immortal he had turned her into every man’s titillating fantasy. Her naked form now adorned the walls of the rich and famous. When she walked into a room those in the know stopped and stared in intimate recognition.

Did she care? No. Did she blush with embarrassment or hide her eyes in shame? Not this woman, who was as comfortable with her body as she was comfortable with those wretched paintings.

As for him? Marco was very much aware that Antonia’s notoriety as Stefan Kranst’s famous nude
model gave him a certain kudos amongst his envious peers. But it didn’t mean he liked it, only that he had learnt to accept it because, like Kranst in a way, he was obsessed with the woman—though not the haunted creature held captive in oils.

Coming to a halt directly in front of him, Antonia said absolutely nothing but just held his gaze as she folded slender white fingers over the strong brown ones he had wrapped around his coffee cup. Her eyes gleamed like topaz in the sun, his darkened into humour as she guided the cup towards her own mouth and took a few delicate sips at the coffee before just as silently lifting the cup to his own mouth.

More than happy to play this little game the way she wanted him to play it, Marco obediently drank while their eyes remained locked in the beginnings of seduction. With both mouths moistened by warm black coffee, she then guided the cup away, lifted herself up on bare tiptoes, and replaced it with a kiss.

The aroma of coffee swirled all around them, its erotic taste flavoured their mouths, the points of her breasts hovered a soft-breath away from his chest and, beneath the towel, his body began to respond.

This was making love on a different level, this was intimacy so deep it touched parts of him never otherwise touched.

As she drew away again, her eyes held a promise. Maybe he would take her up on it in a minute, Marco idly considered. But for now he was content to enjoy the more simple pleasure of being the passive one while she did the seducing.

She began it by touching a finger to the satin tight hollow of his shoulder. ‘You showered without me,’ she complained.

He smiled a lazy smile. ‘You were asleep,’ he reminded her.

She was not in the least bit impressed by that answer, and her mouth took on a sulky pout. Taking the coffee-cup from his fingers she put it aside, took possession of both his hands and fed them round her slender waist, then lifted her own up to curve his nape. One small step and she was fitting her hips into the cradle of his hips and pressing her wonderful breasts against him. Then her head tilted back a little, her sulky mouth parted—and claimed his with another kiss designed to devour.

He would have to be made of stone not to respond to her. He would have to be half the man he actually was not to want what was being offered to him. It was special.
She
was special. He didn’t want to lose it.

‘What was that for?’ she broke the kiss to demand when she felt him shiver.

‘The sun has gone in again,’ he said.

And it had, he noticed. Like a bad omen, it had slid behind another cloud the moment he’d begun thinking about the future.

‘Big softy,’ she chided, her fingers tangling lovingly into his hair. ‘You want to try standing like this on an English balcony. You would die of frostbite, being such a thin-blooded Italian.’

He was supposed to laugh or come back with a light counter-charge, Marco was well aware of that. But he could do neither because he was suddenly seeing
her
standing naked on that English balcony.

Seeing her exactly as she had once been caught for posterity in a Kranst painting.

‘You would know, of course,’ was therefore the cynical taunt that slid from him.

Her sudden stillness was electric. If he’d slapped her
he couldn’t have achieved a better response. Kiss-warmed lips lost all of their softness. Warm topaz became cold grey glass. With a single step she completely separated herself from him and, without a single word, she turned and walked back into the bedroom.

Remorse played havoc with his conscience as he watched her sensual stride take her towards the bathroom. The urge to go after her and apologise came a couple of short seconds too late. The door closed, he heard the bolt slide home and knew he now had one hell of a task on his hands to put right the wrong he had just done.

‘Damn,’
he cursed as he spun away.

The sun crept out from behind its cloud again. He scowled at it. Scowled at the seagull soaring overhead. Then he scowled at himself because he knew that putting right a wrong would not solve the dilemma that was sitting right on his doorstep waiting to be addressed.

On the other side of the bathroom door, Antonia stood with her eyes closed, waiting for the hurt contracting the muscles around her heart to ease. It hadn’t been the words but the way he had said them, with derision, deliberately aimed to cut.

Stefan, she thought wearily. It always came back to Stefan, and Marco’s inability to accept the life she had led before she met him. For a man who prided himself on his fast-track modern sophistication, he harboured some truly archaic principles.

One of these days she would find the strength to stand firm and challenge those principles, and this right he felt he had to speak to her like that, she promised herself.

But not yet, she conceded heavily. She just didn’t have that kind of strength yet. Because to challenge him meant challenging their whole relationship, and the day she did that Antonia knew would be the same day she lost Marco for good.

Though that moment was coming closer, she recognised, as the hurt began to fade much sooner than it usually did after one of his well-aimed barbs. And she found she could open her eyes and actually look at herself in the mirror opposite without wincing at what she saw.

And what did she see?

She saw a scarlet woman, she grimly mocked that reflection. A woman who was a mistress to a man who wasn’t even married but who still classed her as a mistress not a lover. In her view, there was a very important difference between the two titles. To be a man’s lover carried a certain amount of moral equality. To be his mistress showed a distinct lack of moral value. And was there such thing as a master to level out the playing field? No, of course not. He remained simply the lover, with no stigma at all attached to the title. You could have a pair of lovers but you could not have a pair of mistresses—not in this context anyway. No, that unenviable title belonged exclusively to her own fair sex.

Sex being the operative word here. She lived in his home, she slept in his bed, and she relied on his financial generosity for her day-to-day survival. In return she gave him her absolute loyalty and her body—the true definition of a mistress, in other words.

Not a bad life for a girl who came from nothing, she supposed. In fact, it would be pretty much a perfect life—if she didn’t love him as desperately as she did. Loving Marco made it a miserable life.

How had Stefan described Marco when he’d tried to talk her out of coming to Italy to live with him? ‘He’s one of life’s élite,’ he’d said. ‘He might want your body, but he will never want you the way you want him to want you. You’re not of the fellowship, my darling. It is a simple fact of life that élite marries élite.’

Tough but wise words, as she’d found out the hard way. And if she had any sense at all she would get out, she told her reflection. She would gather up what little bit of pride she had left, and go, before he cleaned her out completely.

And maybe she would do—soon, she resolved.

But she turned away from the mirror as she thought it, knowing that it would take more than the occasional cruel remark on his part to make her leave him. She loved him too much and had stuck with him too long to give up so easily.

Which didn’t mean she was going to forgive him, she determined as she stepped into the shower cubicle. Forgiveness came at a price, and Marco was going to have to pay that price with some serious grovelling.

A smile touched her mouth, the very idea of making the arrogant Marco Bellini grovel doing wonders for her mood.

He was gone from the bedroom by the time she reappeared. Gone from the villa too, she discovered when she came downstairs to find Nina, the maid, clearing away what looked like a hastily eaten breakfast.