“Ferma! You can’t come in here!”
“People who try to hide behind their authority do so out of fear, and they need our compassion. At the same time, we can’t let their fears become our own.”
“I’m sorry to upset you, signora,” she said as compassionately as she could, “but I must speak with the owner.”
“Who told you he was here? No one is to know this.”
The owner was a man then. “I won’t say anything.”
“You must go at once.”
Isabel heard Italian rock and roll coming from the back of the house. She headed toward an ornately carved archway with green and red marble inlays.
“Signora!”
Isabel was tired of people messing with her-a crooked accountant, a faithless fiancé, a disloyal publisher, and her fair-weather fans. She’d lived in airports for those fans, taken the podium through a bout of pneumonia for them. She’d held their hands when their kids did drugs, curled her arms around them while they struggled with depression, and prayed for them through desperate illnesses. But the minute a few dark clouds had shown up in her own life, they’d run like rabbits.
She charged through the house, down a narrow gallery where ancestral portraits in heavy frames juggled for space with baroque landscapes, across an elegant reception room wallpapered in brown and gold stripes. She whipped by grim frescoes of hunting scenes and grimmer portraits of martyred saints. Her sandals left scorch marks on the marble floors and singes in the fringes of the kilim rugs. A Roman bust trembled on its pedestal as she rushed by. Enough is enough!
She came to a halt inside a less formal salon at the back of the house. The polished chestnut floors were laid in a herringbone pattern, and the frescoes showed harvest scenes instead of boar hunts. Italian rock music accompanied the shafts of sunlight spilling in through long open windows.
At the end of the room an arched doorway much grander than the one in the farmhouse opened to a loggia, the source of the blaring music. A man stood inside the arch, his shoulder resting against the frame as he gazed out toward the sunlight. She squinted against the glare and saw that he wore jeans and a rumpled black
T-shirt with a hole in the sleeve. His profile was so classically chiseled it might have belonged on one of the room’s statues. But something about his rebel’s slouch, the liquor bottle tilted to his mouth, and the pistol dangling from his free hand told her this might be a Roman god gone bad.
With a wary eye on the gun, she cleared her throat. “Uh… scusi? Excuse me.”
He turned.
She blinked against the sun. Blinked again. Told herself it was only a trick of the light. Just a trick. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t…
6
But it was. The man who’d called himself Dante stood slouched in the doorway. Dante of the hot, glazed eyes and decadent touches. Except this man’s hair was shorter, and his eyes were a silvered blue instead of brown.
“Son of a bitch.”
She heard American English-movie-star English-spoken in the deep, familiar voice of the Italian gigolo she’d met the night before last in the Piazza della Signoria. Even then it took a moment before she understood the truth. Lorenzo Gage and Dante the gigolo were the same man.
“You…” She swallowed. “You’re not…”
He gazed at her with assassin’s eyes. “Shit. Leave it to me to pick up a stalker.”
“Who are you?” But she’d seen his movies, and she already knew the answer.
“Signore Gage!” Anna Vesto burst into the room. “This woman! She would not leave when I told her to. She is-she is-” The English language couldn’t contain her indignation, and she released a torrent of Italian.
Lorenzo Gage, the philandering movie star who’d driven Karli Swenson to suicide, was also Dante, the Florentine gigolo, the man she’d allowed to taint a corner of her soul. She slumped into one of the chairs along the wall and tried to breathe.
He growled at the housekeeper in Italian.
She replied with wild gestures.
Another growl from him.
The woman huffed and swept from the room.
He stomped out onto the loggia and snapped off the music. When he returned, a lock of inky hair had fallen over his forehead. He’d left the bottle behind, but the pistol still hung from his hand.
“You’re trespassing, sweetheart.” His lips barely moved, and his deadly drawl sounded even more menacing in real life than it did in digital SurroundSound. “You really should have called first.”
She’d had sex with Lorenzo Gage, a man who’d bragged in a magazine article that he’d “screwed five hundred women.” And she’d let herself become five hundred and one.
Her stomach heaved. She buried her face in her hands and whispered words she’d never before spoken to another human being, never even thought to speak. “I hate you.”
“That’s how I make my living.”
She sensed him coming closer and dropped her hands, only to find herself staring at the pistol.
It wasn’t exactly pointed at her, but it wasn’t exactly not pointed at her either. He held it loosely near his hip. She saw that it was an antique, probably several hundred years old, but that didn’t necessarily make it any less deadly. Look what he’d nearly done to Julia Roberts with a samurai sword.
“Just when I think the press can’t sink any lower. What happened to your non parler anglais, Frenchy?”
“The same thing that happened to your Italian.” She sat straighter, finally focusing on what he was saying. “The press? You think I’m a reporter?”
“If you wanted an interview, all you had to do was ask.”
She jumped up from the chair. “You think I went through all that just to get a story?”
“Maybe.” Faint alcohol fumes wafted her way. He planted his foot on the chair she’d vacated. She gazed at the pistol resting on his thigh and tried to decide whether he was threatening her or he’d forgotten it was there.
“How did you find me, and what do you want?”
“I want my house.” She took a step back, then was angry with herself for doing it. “Is this how you get your kicks? Disguising yourself so you can pick up women?”
“Believe it or not, Fifi, I can do that without a disguise. And I was worth a hell of a lot more than those fifty euros you left.”
“A matter of opinion. Is that gun loaded?”
“Beats me.”
“Well, put it down.” She gripped her hands.
“I don’t think so.”
“Am I supposed to believe you’ll shoot me?”
“Believe whatever you want.” He yawned.
She wondered how much he’d had to drink and wished her legs didn’t feel so boneless. “I won’t tolerate being around guns.”
“Then leave.” He sprawled into the chair, legs extended, shoulders slouched, pistol on his knee. A perfect portrait of decadence in the Villa of the Angels.
No power on earth would make her leave until she understood what had happened. She clenched her hands tighter to keep them from trembling and managed to drop into the chair across from him without knocking it over. She finally knew what hatred felt like.
He studied her for a moment, then pointed the pistol toward a wall-size tapestry of a man on horseback. “My ancestor, Lorenzo de’ Medici.”
“Big deal.”
“He was a patron of Michelangelo. Botticelli, too, if the historians are right. When it comes to Renaissance men, Lorenzo was one of the best. Except…” He stroked the stock with his thumb and regarded her with narrow-eyed menace. “He let his generals sack the city of Volterra in 1472. Medicis aren’t good people to piss off.”