Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Luca
She has paint on her nose. I notice this before I notice anything else.
It is a small streak of blue across the bridge, put there at some point during the last two hours while she has been sitting cross legged in the corner of my study, her legs bound with a chain in a way that allows her to walk but not run with a canvas propped against the wall and a collection of paints she requested from the maid yesterday evening.
I said yes before I had finished processing the request.
Renzo looked at me with an expression that contained an entire conversation he was choosing not to have out loud, and arranged for the paints to be delivered, and was now sitting at the far end of the room with his arms folded and the particular tension in his jaw of a man watching someone track mud across a clean floor.
She is wearing a red dress and her hair is loose and there is paint on her hands and forearms and a streak of green along her left collarbone and she hasn't looked up in two hours.
She is entirely absorbed. Whatever is happening in the rest of this room, the documents on my desk, Renzo's suffering, and my presence, do not appear to register.
She has a perfect figure, I notice, slender in a way that one might mistake for fragility.
Her lips are slightly parted and she is arched in a way that is subconsciously enticing.
I shouldn't have let her in here.
I work shirtless because the wound makes anything else impractical, and I have spent the better part of the morning pretending to review shipping contracts while watching her paint in my peripheral vision.
The door swings open and I look up.
"Don." comes a shrill voice. "Heard you were hurt.
I came as soon as I could." Renzo grins.
I shoot him a look that wipes it off his face and then I turn to the tall, chubby dark-haired woman in front of me.
Gloria Mancini is nineteen years old and the favorite niece of Carlo Mancini, who controls the eastern supply chain and whose goodwill I cannot afford to carelessly discard.
She was supposed to be my fiancée but the arrangement that existed between our families had been informal and mercifully never formalized, more the ambition of older men at a dinner table and I had never encouraged it because she is not my type in any direction and the age gap between us is not the romantic kind.
She doesn't see it that way.
Her hands are on my arms now and she is looking at the bandaging with enormous eyes and making sounds of distress that bounce off the walls of my study, and I look past her to the corner where Nathalie is painting.
She hasn't looked up. Not once. She is adding something to the lower left of the canvas with a small brush, her tongue at the corner of her mouth.
Renzo materializes at the edge of my vision with an expression of absolute evil. "Miss Keller," he says pleasantly, "why don't we give them some room?"
Nathalie sets down the small brush and picks up a larger one and stands without looking at either Gloria or me, and walks toward the door with the chain making its soft sound against the floor and I watch her go and I watch the way the red dress moves and I watch until she is through the door.
I remove Gloria's hands from my arms.
"What do you need?" I ask her.
"I want to take care of you." She looks up. "I heard you were injured and I was so worried and I thought—"
"I'm fine. How did you hear?"
"Renzo mentioned it."
Was this his way of reminding me of Gloria's existence? Touché! No wonder he looked so smug.
"Gloria." I move back to the desk and sit. "What do you want?"
She is quiet for a moment. Then she glances toward the door Nathalie walked through and back to me. "Who is she?"
"A guest."
"She doesn't look like a guest." A pause, and then something more careful enters her voice.
"I know you don't like younger women. I know I'm not — I know what you think of me.
But if you keep a woman like that too close, she'll fall in love with you.
" She tilts her head. "And then you won't be able to get rid of her. "
I look at her.
I think about Nathalie in the corner of my study for two hours. The paint on her nose. The way she had walked past Gloria without a single glance in my direction, chain and all, with her back straight and her chin level.
I wonder, briefly and with some irony, whether Gloria understands that the person she is warning me about is not the one I'm struggling to get rid of.
"Thank you for the advice," I reply. "I'm busy."
Her face falls. "I could stay. I could help you with—"
"Renzo." I raise my voice slightly.
He appears in the doorway. His eye twitches when he sees Gloria, a small involuntary response he has never been able to fully suppress in her presence.
"Escort Miss Mancini out," I tell him. "Take her shopping. See that she gets home safely."
"Luca—" Gloria begins.
"Renzo will take care of you," I tell her, in the tone that ends conversations.
She protests as Renzo leads. The door closes on the sound of her voice mid-sentence and I am alone.
I stand and light a cigarette and walk to the corner. The canvas faces the wall and I turn it.
She has painted me. Shirtless, from the angle of the chair she was sitting in, the bandaging at my chest was rendered in white, the tattoos suggested rather than detailed.
She has caught a stiffness in my posture that I recognize as something about the set of the shoulders, the way the head turns slightly as though toward a sound.
I stand there for a moment with the cigarette and I look at it. Then I inhale what is left of her in the room, paint and I go to find her. She is in her room, coming out of the bathroom when I reach my room, and I go to her and lift her onto the vanity.
She grabs my arms for balance, eyes wide. "Did I do something wrong?"
I look at her face. The paint was still on her nose, a new streak of red on her wrist she must have put there without noticing.
She looks up at me with an expression of genuine uncertainty and I think: she is pretending.
She has to be pretending. Nobody is actually this good at looking innocent while knowing exactly what they are doing.
I had underestimated her from the beginning and I have been paying for it in increments ever since.
"Why did you leave the study?" I ask.
"Renzo told me to."
"I was with another woman," I say, watching her face. "Doesn't that bother you?"
She considers this with what appears to be genuine thought rather than performance. "Is she your fiancée?"
I take her waist in both hands. "Are you jealous?"
"I don't know," she replies, and something in the directness of it catches me. "I've never had anyone to myself. I don't know what jealousy feels like. I'm not sure I'd recognize it."
I run my hands slowly across her, watching her eyes. "Are you messing with me, princess?"
"How could I?" she replies.
I look down at her chained legs. It has been on her since yesterday morning and I had checked it myself for appropriate tension and I had been satisfied that it wasn't too tight.
But her skin beneath it tells a different story, the skin at her ankle red and irritated where the metal has been sitting against it for too many hours.
I lower myself to the floor and I take the chain off. I put it aside. I take her ankle in both hands and I run my thumbs along the abraded skin and something tightens in my chest that I don't think is the stab wound.
"Why didn't you tell me this was hurting you?"
She doesn't answer. I look up at her.
She is watching me from the vanity with an expression I can't categorize and her lower lip is caught between her teeth and she doesn't say anything.
I turn back to her leg and I feel her breathing grow above me. Her skin is soft and supple. I feel all the self-control slipping away from me. I lower my lips to her ankle.
I kiss up along her calf slowly, and she makes a soft sound that she tries to contain and doesn't quite manage, and I bite into the inside of her knee gently and her hand finds my hair.
I trail up the inside of her thigh and bite again and she pulls in a sharp breath and her legs wrap around me as I rise and I find her neck and I feel her pulse against my mouth.
"Do you do this with other women?" she asks, her voice unsteady. "For now it's only me, isn't it, Don?"
The word does something it has no business doing.
I pull back and look at her and her eyes are steady on mine and her chin is taut and she is the most inconvenient person I have encountered in forty years of a life that has not been short on inconvenience.
"Yes," I reply.
She slides off the vanity and smooths her dress with both hands.
"Then I'll go finish my painting," she says, and walks out.
I stand in the bathroom doorway and watch her go and I stay there for a moment after she has rounded the corner and there is nothing left to watch.
My phone rings.
"Talk," I answer.
"Our contact at the NYPD says that someone filed a missing person's report on our girl," comes Renzo's voice.
I straighten. "Who?"
"Anonymous. But it's been kept very low profile. Whoever filed it didn't want noise, just a quiet record." A pause. "We have reason to think it's Keller."
I am quiet for a moment.
"An anonymous report?" I ask.
"He is avoiding making this big. Probably to avoid press attention pre-election," Renzo replies.
"Keep our contact close," I tell him. "I want immediate updates."
"Understood."
I end the call and stand in the empty room and look at the doorway she walked through, at the space where she had been sitting on the vanity with paint on her nose asking me if she was the only one.
"Your father," I say quietly, to the empty room, to no one, "is a real asshole, princess."
* * *
Renzo's text comes in at half four.
Our records show today is the girl's birthday. Thought you should know.