The roses move slightly in a wind I can't feel from the bench. I sit there for a while longer and let the quiet be what it is.
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 leftcollarbone 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."
