Her face falls. "I could stay. I could help you with?—"
"Renzo." I raise my voice slightly.
He appears in the doorway. His eye twitches when he sees Gloria, a small involuntary response he has never been able to fully suppress in her presence.
"Escort Miss Mancini out," I tell him. "Take her shopping. See that she gets home safely."
"Luca—" Gloria begins.
"Renzo will take care of you," I tell her, in the tone that ends conversations.
She protests as Renzo leads. The door closes on the sound of her voice mid-sentence and I am alone.
I stand and light a cigarette and walk to the corner. The canvas faces the wall and I turn it.
She has painted me. Shirtless, from the angle of the chair she was sitting in, the bandaging at my chest was rendered in white, the tattoos suggested rather than detailed. She has caught a stiffness in my posture that I recognize as something about the set of the shoulders, the way the head turns slightly as though toward a sound.
I stand there for a moment with the cigarette and I look at it. Then I inhale what is left of her in the room, paint and I go to find her. She is in her room, coming out of the bathroom when I reach my room, and I go to her and lift her onto the vanity.
She grabs my arms for balance, eyes wide. "Did I do something wrong?"
I look at her face. The paint was still on her nose, a new streak of red on her wrist she must have put there without noticing. She looks up at me with an expression of genuine uncertainty and I think: she is pretending. She has to be pretending. Nobody is actually this good at looking innocent while knowing exactly what they are doing.
I had underestimated her from the beginning and I have been paying for it in increments ever since.
"Why did you leave the study?" I ask.
"Renzo told me to."
"I was with another woman," I say, watching her face. "Doesn't that bother you?"
She considers this with what appears to be genuine thought rather than performance. "Is she your fiancée?"
I take her waist in both hands. "Are you jealous?"
"I don't know," she replies, and something in the directness of it catches me. "I've never had anyone to myself. I don't know what jealousy feels like. I'm not sure I'd recognize it."
I run my hands slowly across her, watching her eyes. "Are you messing with me, princess?"
"How could I?" she replies.
I look down at her chained legs. It has been on her since yesterday morning and I had checked it myself for appropriate tension and I had been satisfied that it wasn't too tight. But her skin beneath it tells a different story, the skin at her ankle red and irritated where the metal has been sitting against it for too many hours.
I lower myself to the floor and I take the chain off. I put it aside. I take her ankle in both hands and I run my thumbs along the abraded skin and something tightens in my chest that I don't think is the stab wound.
"Why didn't you tell me this was hurting you?"
She doesn't answer. I look up at her.
She is watching me from the vanity with an expression I can't categorize and her lower lip is caught between her teeth and she doesn't say anything.
I turn back to her leg and I feel her breathing grow above me. Her skin is soft and supple. I feel all the self-control slipping away from me. I lower my lips to her ankle.
I kiss up along her calf slowly, and she makes a soft sound that she tries to contain and doesn't quite manage, and I bite into the inside of her knee gently and her hand finds my hair. I trail up the inside of her thigh and bite again and she pulls in a sharp breath and her legs wrap around me as I rise and I find her neck and I feel her pulse against my mouth.
"Do you do this with other women?" she asks, her voice unsteady. "For now it's only me, isn't it, Don?"
The word does something it has no business doing.
