Bloodline. Сидни Шелдон

the hunter’s chicken. After dinner, a bottle of chilled champagne to drink in bed … Ah, yes, Ivo loved stage four.

      But stage five was probably the most delicate of them all. It consisted of a heartbreaking farewell speech, a generous parting gift and a tearful arrivederci.

      But all that was in the past. Now Ivo Palazzi took a quick glance at his bleeding, scratched face in the mirror over his bed and was horrified. He looked as though he had been attacked by a mad threshing machine.

      ‘Look at what you’ve done to me!’ he cried. ‘Cara, I know you didn’t mean it.’

      He moved over to the bed to take Donatella in his arms. Her soft arms flew around him and as he started to hug her, she buried her long fingernails in his naked back and clawed him like a wild animal. Ivo yelled with pain.

      ‘Scream!’ Donatella shouted. ‘If I had a knife, I’d cut off your cazzo and ram it down your miserable throat.’

      ‘Please!’ Ivo begged. ‘The children will hear you.’

      ‘Let them!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s time they found out what kind of monster their father is.’

      He took a step towards her. ‘Carissima –’

      ‘Don’t you touch me! I’d give my body to the first drunken syphilitic sailor I met on the streets before I’d ever let you come near me again.’

      Ivo drew himself up, his pride offended. ‘That is not the way I expect the mother of my children to talk to me.’

      ‘You want me to talk nice to you? You want me to stop treating you like the vermin you are?’ Donatella’s voice rose to a scream. ‘Then give me what I want!’

      Ivo looked nervously towards the door. ‘Carissima – I can’t. I don’t have it.’

      ‘Then get it for me!’ she cried. ‘You promised!’

      She was beginning to get hysterical again, and Ivo decided the best thing for him to do was to get out of there quickly before the neighbours called the carabinieri again.

      ‘It will take time to get a million dollars,’ he said soothingly. ‘But I’ll – I’ll find a way.’

      He hastily donned his underpants and trousers, and socks and shoes, while Donatella stormed around the room, her magnificent, firm breasts waving in the air, and Ivo thought to himself, My God, what a woman! How I adore her! He reached for his bloodstained shirt. There was no help for it. He put it on, feeling the cold stickiness against his back and chest. He took a last look in the mirror. Small pools of blood were still oozing from the deep gashes where Donatella had raked her fingernails across his face.

      ‘Carissima,’ Ivo moaned, ‘how am I ever going to explain this to my wife?’

      Ivo Palazzi’s wife was Simonetta Roffe, an heiress of the Italian branch of the Roffe family. Ivo had been a young architect when he had met Simonetta. His firm had sent him to supervise some changes in the Roffe villa at Porto Ercole. The instant Simonetta had set eyes on Ivo, his bachelor days were numbered. Ivo had got to the fourth stage with her on the first night, and found himself married to her a short time later. Simonetta was as determined as she was lovely, and she knew what she wanted: she wanted Ivo Palazzi. Thus it was that Ivo found himself transformed from a carefree bachelor to the husband of a beautiful young heiress. He gave up his architectural aspirations with no regrets and joined Roffe and Sons, with a magnificent office in EUR, the section of Rome started with such high hopes by the late, ill-fated Duce.

      Ivo was a success with the firm from the beginning. He was intelligent, learned quickly and everyone adored him. It was impossible not to adore Ivo. He was always smiling, always charming. His friends envied him his wonderful disposition and wondered how he did it. The answer was simple. Ivo kept the dark side of his nature buried. In fact, he was a deeply emotional man, capable of great volatile hatreds, capable of killing.

      Ivo’s marriage with Simonetta thrived. At first, he had feared that marriage would prove to be a bondage that would strangle his manhood to death, but his fears proved to be unfounded. He simply put himself on an austerity programme, reducing the number of his girl friends, and everything went on as before.

      Simonetta’s father bought them a beautiful home in Olgiata, a large private estate twenty-five kilometres north of Rome, guarded by closed gates and manned by uniformed guards.

      Simonetta was a wonderful wife. She loved Ivo and treated him like a king, which was no more than he felt he deserved. There was just one tiny flaw in Simonetta. When she became jealous, she turned into a savage. She had once suspected Ivo of taking a female buyer on a trip to Brazil. He was righteously indignant at the accusation. Before the argument was over, their entire house was a shambles. Not one dish or piece of furniture was left intact, and much of it had been broken over Ivo’s head. Simonetta had gone after him with a butcher’s knife, threatening to kill him and then herself, and it had taken all of Ivo’s strength to wrest the knife from her. They had wound up fighting on the floor, and Ivo had finally torn off her clothes and made her forget her anger. But after that incident Ivo became very discreet. He had told the buyer he could not take any more trips with her, and he was careful never to let the faintest breath of suspicion touch him. He knew that he was the luckiest man in the world. Simonetta was young and beautiful and intelligent and rich. They enjoyed the same things and the same people. It was a perfect marriage, and Ivo sometimes found himself wondering, as he transferred a girl from stage two to stage three, and another from stage four to stage five, why he kept on being unfaithful. Then he would shrug philosophically and say to himself, Someone has to make these women happy.

      Ivo and Simonetta had been married for three years when Ivo met Donatella Spolini on a business trip to Sicily. It was more of an explosion than a meeting, two planets coming together and colliding. Where Simonetta had the slender, sweet body of a young woman sculpted by Manzù, Donatella had the sensuous, ripe body of a Rubens. Her face was exquisite and her green, smouldering eyes set Ivo aflame. They were in bed one hour after they had met, and Ivo, who had always prided himself on his prowess as a lover, found that he was the pupil and Donatella the teacher. She made him rise to heights he had never achieved before, and her body did things to his that he had never dreamed possible. She was an endless cornucopia of pleasure, and as Ivo lay in bed, his eyes closed, savouring incredible sensations, he knew he would be a fool to let Donatella go.

      And so Donatella had become Ivo’s mistress. The only condition she imposed was that he had to get rid of all the other women in his life, except his wife. Ivo had happily agreed. That had been eight years ago, and in all that time Ivo had never been unfaithful to either his wife or his mistress. Satisfying two hungry women would have been enough to exhaust an ordinary man, but in Ivo’s case it was exactly the opposite. When he made love to Simonetta he thought about Donatella and her ripe, full body, and he was filled with lust. And when he made love to Donatella, he thought of Simonetta’s sweet young breasts and tiny culo and he performed like a wild man. No matter which woman he was with, he felt that he was cheating the other. It added enormously to his pleasure.

      Ivo bought Donatella a beautiful apartment in Via Montemignaio, and he was with her every moment that he could manage. He would arrange to be away on a sudden business trip and, instead of leaving, he would spend the time in bed with Donatella. He would stop by to see her on his way to the office, and he would spend his afternoon siestas with her. Once, when Ivo sailed to New York on the QE 2 with Simonetta, he installed Donatella in a cabin one deck below. They were the five most stimulating days of Ivo’s life.

      On the evening that Simonetta announced to Ivo that she was pregnant, Ivo was filled with an indescribable joy. A week later Donatella informed Ivo that she was pregnant, and Ivo’s cup ran over. Why, he asked himself, are the gods so good to me? In all humility, Ivo sometimes felt that he did not deserve all the great pleasures that were being bestowed upon him.

      In due course Simonetta gave birth to a girl and a week later Donatella gave birth to a boy. What more could any man ask? But the gods were not finished with Ivo. A short time later, Donatella