Alex frowned. ‘You’re not selfish. You’re a very warm, generous man and a terrific friend.’
Jeremy came as close to blushing as Sergio had ever seen.
‘And you, my friend,’ Jeremy shot back whilst trying not to look too pleased, ‘are the biggest bull-dust artist in the world. You could sell ice to Eskimos. You’re going to make another billion before you’re finished.’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ Alex concurred. ‘I have a lot of poor people to house and their kids to educate.’
‘You and your charities,’ Jeremy said. ‘I suppose you’ll be hitting me for more donations after today.’
‘Absolutely. And you too, Sergio. I’ll email you both with the details and amounts. Now I don’t know about you two, but I’m bushed. It’s been a long day. On top of that, I have a twenty-three-hour flight back to Sydney tomorrow. So let’s get the bill. Sergio, you can pay since you got the lion’s share today.’
‘My pleasure,’ he said, and reached for his wallet.
‘I DON’T UNDERSTAND why you can’t tell me where you’re going,’ Dolores complained. ‘In fact I don’t understand why you have to go anywhere at all! I thought you’d come home to have a holiday.’
Bella glanced up from her packing to give her mother a droll look. ‘It’s hardly a holiday when you keep hammering away at me to do that movie Charlie wants me to do. If I’ve told you once, Mum, I’ve told you a thousand times, I do not want to do movies.’
‘Then why did you get yourself a Hollywood agent?’
‘I didn’t. Josh did. I only agreed because at the time some famous producer in Hollywood was thinking of making a movie version of An Angel in New York. I would have done that. After that project fell through I kept Charlie on because I thought maybe some other party might pick up the option. But that hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, I do not intend to do some second-rate musical which just wants to use my name to get distribution.’
‘How do you know it’s second rate?’
‘I’ve read the script. And the songs are rubbish.’
‘Scripts can be changed. And songs can be rewritten. Charlie says they’ve hired a top director.’
Bella sighed. ‘See what I mean? You just won’t stop. That’s why I’m going away. And why I’m not going to tell you where I’m going. It’s not as though you can’t still contact me on my mobile,’ she added, immediately making a mental note to turn the infernal thing off the moment she hit Lake Como. ‘Now would you please leave me alone? I have to finish packing and I need to leave for the airport soon.’
That was a lie. Bella hadn’t even booked a taxi yet. She had, however, secured a flight to Milan, leaving Mascot later today. Not a direct flight, of course. They didn’t seem to exist from Sydney. She would have to endure a couple of stops. One in Singapore and then again in Rome. It was going to take her eons to get there but, hopefully, she might get some much-needed sleep on the way. Also hopefully, Sergio wouldn’t let her down when he finally rang back. If he changed his mind about her staying at his villa, then she’d go anyway and check into a hotel on Lake Como. Lots of the large old villas had been made into boutique hotels.
Bella had every confidence, however, that Sergio would not let her down, not after telling her to book a flight. Sergio had obviously matured into a decent man, like his father. Nothing like the kind of man she kept getting mixed up with and who always let her down in the end.
‘It must be somewhere warm, by the look of the clothes you’re taking,’ her mother said, having not moved an inch from where she was standing at the foot of the bed, her arms crossed, her expression as stubborn as usual.
Bella didn’t comment, just kept on packing.
‘Dare I hope you’ve come to your senses and are going to meet up with Andrei in Europe somewhere? It is summer over there, isn’t it? If truth be told, I still can’t fathom why you left him in the first place.’
Exasperation finally had Bella’s head lifting, her glare more than a little angry. ‘I didn’t actually leave Andrei, Mum. We never lived together. I broke up with him because he was sleeping with other women at the same time as he was sleeping with me.’
‘So you said. But truly, Bella, all seriously wealthy men have wandering eyes. And Andrei isn’t just wealthy. He’s a billionaire many times over. I read on the internet that he’s just opened the most luxurious hotel in the world in Istanbul. Just think what kind of life you could have as his wife. He doesn’t care about those other girls. It’s you he pursued and wanted. You he would have proposed to, in the end.’
‘No, he wouldn’t have, Mum. Andrei’s not the marrying kind.’
‘Which is why I advised you to get pregnant. He would have married you then. A proud man like that would not have wanted to have an illegitimate child.’
Bella shook her head, thinking ruefully she should have told her mother the truth about Andrei. Yes, he was proud but was also totally selfish with absolutely no conscience. He’d fallen in lust with her when he’d seen her on stage one night in New York, pursuing her quite ruthlessly—and romantically—till she’d given in and gone to bed with him. At the time, she’d actually thought he loved her, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, their sex life was not a great success. Her fault, of course. It was always her fault; all of her lovers over the years—and there’d been a lot less than the tabloids suggested—having grown bored with her after a relatively short while. None of them could believe that she was actually quite shy in the bedroom. That was why she’d been a virgin till she was twenty-one, and why it always took a very determined admirer to seduce her.
When Bella had confronted Andrei with his unfaithfulness last year—his cavorting on the deck of his yacht with some female had been all over the gossip rags—he’d claimed that her lack of passion was why he had to have other women. He’d said he’d grown tired of her refusing to do all the erotic and exotic things he craved. But he would put up with her being somewhat boring in bed, he’d added, because he loved having a woman of her exquisite beauty on his arm in public. He’d even offered to buy her an apartment in Paris, if she would overlook his other mistresses and continue to go out with him. He’d actually been shocked when she’d told him their relationship—such as it was—was over. Andrei was not used to rejection from the opposite sex.
Of course, if Bella had told her mother all that, she would have said that she’d been a fool not to at least accept the apartment in Paris.
She was indomitable, her mother. Indomitable and dominating and downright infuriating, with a moral compass that was as suspect as Andrei’s. Bella had grown up thinking Dolores was wonderful: a single mother who’d become estranged from her own family when she’d fallen pregnant during a working holiday overseas; supposedly seduced by a married Swedish chap she’d met on the snowfields of Switzerland. She’d refused to tell her disgusted parents the father’s name, refused to have an abortion, then refused to live under their roof by their rules. Bella had admired that. If it were true, that was. She’d come to believe in recent times that maybe a lot of what Dolores had told her over the years might not have been strictly true. Still, it was true that Dolores had worked hard to give her daughter everything she’d needed. She’d even managed to budget her meagre wage as a receptionist to pay for dance and singing lessons. Though not with the kind of teacher she’d wanted for her talented Isabel.
So when a new boss had arrived on the scene, an Italian widower who’d been sent out to Sydney by his father to head the Australian branch of the family’s import business, Dolores had seen the answer to all her problems. From photographs Bella had seen, Dolores had been a very attractive woman back then. Poor Alberto hadn’t