Montega's Mistress by Doreen Owens Malek Page B

wished.
    As Helen paid her bill, she wondered idly how long it had been since her mother had shopped in a supermarket. Queen Sophia, as Helen’s father still called her, never bought her own groceries. Clothes and jewelry, however, being far more important, commanded her personal attention. One of Helen’s earliest memories was of being dragged around to various salons while her mother tried on samples, took fittings for alterations and ordered up originals from designer sketches. Helen could also recall very clearly sitting in the reception rooms of Tiffany’s or Van Cleef and Arpels, fidgeting with a crystal paperweight on the salesman’s desk while her mother shopped. Sophia sipped tea with lemon from a Limoges cup and shook her head repeatedly, waving away the trays of rings, bracelets and necklaces presented for her inspection. The patient clerks, hoping for a big sale, tried to amuse the fractious child, but Helen was finally sent away with her nanny so Sophia could get on with the important business of selecting a new bauble to add to her collection. What a disappointment I must have been to her, Helen thought suddenly. She really wanted a friend to share her interests, and since Helen’s lay elsewhere, Sophia was forced to resort to the likes of Claudia Fierremonte. Claudia, who lived in Rome but didn’t know who the President of Italy was, could pick out any dress at a charity ball and tell you which designer’s house had made it.
    Helen realized that she was standing in the store’s foyer, carrying her bag and looking through the plate glass window at nothing. She shook herself and walked out to the parking lot, blinking in the blazing sunshine and pausing to extricate her keys from her purse. When she reached the car, she inserted her key into the door lock. As she did so, a black sedan came roaring to a stop next to her and two figures bolted from the rear doors on either side. Before she could react one man snatched the bag from her hands and the other one took her arm in an iron grip and hustled her into the back seat. In the space of several seconds she found herself sitting with a captor on either side of her as the driver took off again, tires squealing, the car bulleting into the street and rounding a corner almost instantly.
    “What’s going on?” Helen sputtered, looking from one man to the other. “Who are you?”
    Neither answered, gazing directly ahead.
    Helen’s first thought was that she had been kidnapped for her father’s money. Once, when she was about ten, he had been having trouble with the union at one of his plants. The fighting had been bitter, finally resulting in threats against Helen’s life by anonymous members of the local. The dispute had been resolved eventually, but she always remembered the incident, which served as a warning that wealth carried its penalties as well as its privileges.
    “Where are you taking me?” Helen demanded, trying to sound braver than she felt.
    The man on her right turned to look at her. “Do not be afraid,” he said, in thickly accented English. “We mean you no harm.”
    “What is this about?” she said slowly, beginning to change her mind about the purpose of her abduction. His accent, though cruder and far more pronounced than Matteo’s, sounded hauntingly familiar. Could it be...? Her heart leaped into her throat as he reached inside the collar of his shirt and withdrew a silver chain. A medallion hung from it, and he held it out, displaying it for her. A tropical bird inscribed in a circle glowed in the filtered light from the tinted windows. Helen looked down at her ring; the symbols were the same.
    “Matteo,” she whispered. “Does Matteo want to see me?”
    Her companion nodded. “Si, Matteo. We take you to him; you come with us. Yes?”
    Helen didn’t ask why Matteo hadn’t come himself or why he had chosen such a dramatic method of providing her with an escort. She knew from experience that he had his own reasons for