Widow - Anne Stuart [45]
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