Malone’s heartbeat lurched. Apparently, his wasn’t the only one. Seeing the barrel being swung past him, Potter stumbled to keep out of its way. In the background, the guards rushed toward the cover of trees.
Bellasar peered along the barrel toward Malone’s chest. Despite the effort it must have taken to control the weapon during the damage he had inflicted on the village, Bellasar looked as if he had expended no more energy than steering a car.
“I’ll show you what it feels like on the opposite end of the recoil,” Bellasar said. “How would you like a couple of hundred rounds through your chest?”
“I think I’m missing something here.”
“No, I don’t believe you are. I think you know exactly what’s going on.”
Christ, does he know I’m working with Jeb? Malone wondered. Bluff, he warned himself. He couldn’t assume anything. He didn’t dare risk showing even the slightest sign of having been caught at anything. “Just so there’s no confusion, why don’t you be explicit?”
“Do you think I’m a fool?”
“Never.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t know the effect it would have on you to be with my wife all day every day? Did you think I wouldn’t expect you to be attracted to her when she took her clothes off? I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep from imagining what it would be like to make love to her.”
Malone’s heart pounded less violently. So this wasn’t about Jeb. “You’ve got the wrong idea about -”
“Shut up. I want you to understand something very clearly. I can’t control what you feel when you’re with my wife. But if you ever act on those feelings, if you ever touch her in a way that’s more than what I saw a while ago, if you ever react to her more than an artist merely giving comfort to his model, I’ll drag you back here and… My wife belongs to me. I don’t like people touching what I own. Is that clear?”
“Very.”
“You’re certain you understand?”
“Absolutely.”
Bellasar swung the barrel back toward the village and squeezed the trigger, atomizing the walls of several buildings, until the last round fed through the firing mechanism and the gun became lifeless. He glared toward the ruins, a tremble working through him, but not from the effect of the massive recoil. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight. “Now get the hell back to work.”
5
“I’m sorry.”
Malone looked up from a sketch he was doing from memory. Sienna stood at the entrance to the sunroom. He wouldn’t have thought it possible for someone whose face had been so ravaged by tears to repair the damage in such a short time. She wore a loose pullover and a similar ankle-length skirt, both of them a blue that reminded him of the jade of the Caribbean that he had loved to look at from the beach of his home on Cozumel. Had loved, he emphasized to himself. Even though Bellasar had promised to return the property to its original condition, Malone would never go near it again.
“What are you sorry about?” he asked.
“Making a scene.”
“You didn’t make a scene. Your husband did.”
“No. I apologize for being unprofessional. We both had jobs to do. I didn’t approach mine very well.”
“It’s not a big deal. We had some issues to work out.”
“And now that they’ve been settled…” Sienna gripped the bottom of her pullover and started to raise it over her head.
“Stop.”
“I don’t want to make Derek any angrier than he is. You’ve never seen him when he’s truly upset. We have to do this second portrait. The sooner the better.”
“Sit down.”
“Is that how you want to pose me?”
“It’s where I want you to relax a minute while I talk to you.”
“No, please, we have to work. If Derek thinks we’re wasting time, he’ll -”
Malone’s muscles tightened. “I’m the one doing the portrait. Let me worry about your husband. I want you to sit down. Please.”
Sienna peered nervously toward the door. Hesitant, she did what she was asked.
Malone brought over a second chair. Straddling it, resting his arms on its back, he hoped that his casual movements would put her at ease. He spoke softly. “When your husband came in this morning, he said you looked the way you did when he first saw you in Milan. He said you weren’t photographable then.”
Sienna peered down at her hands.
“What was he talking about?” Malone asked.
Something in her eyes went somewhere else. She was silent for so long that Malone didn’t think she was going to answer.
“That was a bad time for me,” she said.
“When was this?”
“Five years ago.”
Malone waited.
“I…”
Malone gave her an encouraging look.
“You have to understand…” She took a deep breath. “Models are the most insecure women you’ll ever meet.”
Malone didn’t respond, afraid that if he said anything, he might make her too self-conscious to keep talking.
“We keep trying to assure ourselves that we’re more than just a beautiful package. We worry about aging. We’re always afraid that our best days are behind us.”
Malone forced himself to remain silent.
“Oh, there are exceptions. But I wasn’t one of them. Imagine what it’s like to have to stay so thin that if you eat even a small amount, the camera shows the bulge in your stomach. To go as long as you can without eating. Or to eat and then make yourself throw up. Along the way, you try a little cocaine. It doesn’t put on any weight, and for a while, it makes you feel better about yourself, so you try a little more, and meanwhile, with so many people trying to manipulate you, you hope for a man, stronger than the others, to help you get your life together. But when you think you’ve found him, he turns out to be a son of a bitch who wants to control everything you do, and…”
Sienna had spoken faster and faster, and now all of a sudden she seemed to realize that Malone was before her.
He took the risk of saying something. “Tell me what your husband meant about your face not being photographable back then.”
“I’d been eating so little, I finally got too thin even for the camera. Worse, the cocaine had put a permanent glaze in my eyes. Worse than that, the man I was living with had split my lip and given me two black eyes.”
Malone felt sick.
Her hands fidgeted. “This happened in Milan. I was there for the fall shows, but after I got beaten up, I obviously couldn’t work. I stayed in my hotel room while the guy I was with went out to screw everything in sight, and the next thing I knew, there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, Derek was standing there. I’ll never forget it. He was wearing a tuxedo and holding red roses. In my blur from the cocaine, I frowned at that handsome tan face, and I swear, for a moment I thought he was Rossano Brazzi, that Italian actor. I have no idea how he knew where I was or what had been done to me. He put a hand under my chin and said, ‘I’ve come to take care of you. Don’t bother packing. Just get your coat and come with me.’ I blinked. I nodded. I didn’t even bother with the coat. I just shut the door behind me and went down to his limousine.”
“But you told me you had a loving family. Why would you have been insecure?”
“I didn’t say I had a loving family, only loving parents.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sienna swallowed. “After my parents died when I was twelve, I was sent to live with my uncle. He couldn’t keep his hands off me. Whenever his wife wasn’t around, he’d try to…”
Malone tasted bile.
“A couple of times he forced me to…”
“Jesus.”
“He warned me that if I told anybody, he’d throw me out. I’d be sleeping in the gutter, he said. I couldn’t concentrate. I did poorly in school. I cried myself to sleep. Finally, I retreated into a fantasy world. All I did was read fashion magazines and fantasize about being a model and having a glamorous life. This went on until my sixteenth birthday. When he snuck into my room again, I screamed that I wasn’t going to do it anymore. I woke up his wife and kids. My aunt wouldn’t believe what I said had been happening. He beat me black-and-blue for telling what he claimed were lies about him. I hurt so much, I had to stay in bed for two days. The third day, while they were at work, I stole money from under the flour jar, where I knew my aunt hid it from him. I hoped she’d think he’d found it and taken it to buy booze. I packed a bag and took a bus to Chicago, where I lived in a boardinghouse and worked at every rotten job you can imagine. But I never stopped dreaming about becoming one of those women in the fashion magazines. I found a company that gave modeling classes at night. I worked as hard as anybody can imagine to make good on my dream. And by God, from modeling for underwear ads in the newspaper, to doing swimsuit ads in catalogs, to appearing in Vogue, to doing covers for it and Cosmopolitan and every other major fashion magazine you can think of, I finally got what I wanted. The only trouble was, it wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. It wasn’t glamorous. It was a meat market.”