Widow - Anne Stuart [93]
“You quit what? The story?” There was real panic in Gregory’s voice now.
“No, mate. I quit the job.” And he placed the telephone back on the cradle very, very gently.
Gregory got tired of calling back after about an hour. Maguire made himself strong coffee and told himself he didn’t need cigarettes. He stretched back out on the bed, but it smelled like sex and Charlie, and in the end he left the apartment and the ceaselessly ringing telephone and went out to find something to eat.
It was a cool morning after the rain from yesterday, and he sat at his favorite café, drinking dark, bitter brew and thinking dark, bitter thoughts. He’d basically fucked his life over completely, he thought. At least Charlie had been driven away—that was one good thing. She would have done nothing but drag him down. She made him vulnerable in ways he didn’t even want to consider. Now that she had taken off he didn’t have to even think about her again. About the sounds she made when she came. About the lost, tentative look in her mysterious golden eyes. About the way…
He swore under his breath, attracting the attention of the passersby. He had to pull himself together. He’d been a fool to tell Gregory everything was gone. Even crazier to quit his job.
Then again, he’d been thinking about it for more than a year. It was time to go back home—he could have his pick of newspaper jobs, from tabloid to respectable, and he could be back in the country, near his brother and his wife and their bratty kids. He did happen to like their monster children. George and Harry were two right hellions, a perfect match for Maguire and Dan when they were growing up. He missed them.
Maybe he’d have a few hellions of his own. Maybe it was time he grew up. Maybe it was time he stopped thinking about whether Charlie could learn to love Australia.
He needed to think about something else. Like that photo that was nagging at the back of his mind. Now that he’d lied to Gregory and quit his job there was no way he could saunter into the offices and have someone print him up a copy of that photo. No way he could even access it with his computer smashed on the ground, and he wasn’t in the mood to run right out and buy a new one.
He closed his eyes, bringing the picture up in his memory. It was one of his gifts—an almost photographic memory, both for pictures and words, that had saved his butt a million times.
He could see it quite clearly. The harried expression on Lauretta’s face as she tried to calm the old lady, the doubtful one on Tomaso’s. She looked like Madame Antonella, he realized with a start. Lauretta was younger, stronger, but there was a definite resemblance.
It wasn’t that obvious. Maybe it was something as simple as Pompasse going for the same type. Maybe he hooked up with Lauretta because she happened to look like his first model.
Or maybe Lauretta had already been there, at her mother’s side.
He stared at the old lady’s face. She was the key to everything, he thought suddenly. The look of malevolence on her face was extraordinary, almost eerie. And there was one more thing that wasn’t right.
The wedding ring. In the picture, Madame Antonella, the woman who had been Pompasse’s first mistress and never married, was wearing a wedding ring. A wide, old-fashioned band on her strong, aging hands.
It was nothing, he tried to tell himself. Plenty of women wore rings on that finger. Hell, she and Pompasse might have even exchanged rings at one point—what the hell did it matter?
But it did, he knew it as well as he knew his own name. The answers to everything lay in that thick gold band on an old lady’s hand.
And he wasn’t leaving Italy, and Charlie, until he had those answers and knew she was safe.
It was late morning when Charlie drove up to La Colombala. The place looked deserted. The Rolls was still in the barn, but there were no other cars. Olivia’s rental was gone, and so was the small Fiat that Lauretta favored.
There was no one on the terrace, and the table wasn’t set. The windows