Yesterday he’d run into an American reporter who wanted to know if the rumor he’d heard was true. “Word is, you and Isabel Favor are an item.”

Savannah and her big mouth had already gotten busy. Ren had denied everything, pretended he barely knew who Isabel was. Her fragile reputation could never survive a public liaison with him.

He told himself the same thing he’d been saying for days. At some point an affair either had to end or take the next logical step forward, and there was no next step for two people who were so different. He should have left her alone from the beginning, but the attraction had been more than he could resist. And now, when it was time to walk away, some needy part of him still wanted her to think well of him afterward. Maybe that was why he was trying so hard to come up with at least one good memory he could hand her before they said their last good-bye.

He flushed the toilet he hadn’t used and went back out. The conversation stopped when he appeared, which took away the mystery of what they’d been talking about. Oliver, he noticed, had left. Not a good sign.

Jenks pushed his half glasses on top of his head. “Sit down, Ren.”

Instead of dropping into a chair as he should have to show that he understood the gravity of the situation, Ren wandered over to the bar and popped a bottle of Pellegrino. Only after he’d taken a slug did he sit. His agent shot him a warning look.

“Larry and I have been talking,” Jenks said. “He keeps reassuring me that you’re totally committed to this project, but I’m having some serious doubts. If there’s a problem, I want you to put it on the table so we can deal with it.”

“No problem.” A bead of sweat had formed near his hairline. He knew he had to say something that would reassure Jenks, and he tried to find the right words, only to hear himself come out with the opposite. “I want a child psychologist on the set whenever the kids are there. The best you can find, got it? I’ll be damned if I’m going to be responsible for any little girls’ nightmares.”

Except that was his job, being responsible for people’s nightmares. He wondered how Isabel was sleeping.

The furrows in Jenks’s jaw grew deep enough to plant wheat, but before he could respond, the phone rang. Larry picked it up. “Yeah?” He gazed at Ren. “He’s not available at the moment.”

Ren whipped the receiver from his hand and brought it to his ear. “Gage.”

Jenks exchanged a long look with Larry. Ren listened, then shoved the phone back into the cradle and headed for the door. “I have to go.”

Isabel’s anger stayed with her. It simmered beneath the surface as she chopped vegetables in the villa’s kitchen and pulled serving dishes from the cupboard. By late afternoon, when she met Giulia in town for a glass of wine, it still hadn’t gone away. She stopped to see the Briggs children, but even as she listened to them talk, the anger bubbled inside her.

She’d just started to drive home when a splash of color in the window of the local boutique caught her attention. The dress shimmered there, a flaming red-orange confection that burned as hot as her anger. It was like nothing she would ever wear, but her Panda didn’t seem to know that. It swung into the No Parking space directly in front of the store, and ten minutes later she emerged with a dress she couldn’t afford and couldn’t imagine wearing.

That evening she began to cook in a frenzy of hostility. She turned up the flame on the stove until the skillet sizzled and fried the spicy sausage she’d bought earlier. Her knife pounded the cutting board as she rough-chopped onion and garlic, then threw in hot peppers from the garden. When she realized she hadn’t boiled water to cook the pasta, she poured her fiery sauce over a thick wedge of day-old bread, then carried everything out to the garden, where she sat on the wall and devoured the food with two glasses of Chianti. That night she washed dishes to the blare of Italian rock and roll on the radio. She broke a plate and threw it into the trash. It hit so hard the pieces shattered.

The phone rang.

“Signora Isabel, it is Anna. I know you said you would come up tomorrow morning to help arrange the tables in the tent, but it is not necessary. Signore Ren is taking care of it.”

“He’s back?” The pencil that had found its way into her hand snapped in her grip. “When did he arrive?”

“This afternoon. You have not spoken with him?”

“Not yet.” She put her thumbnail to her teeth and clipped it off.

Anna began going on about last-minute details for the festa, the girls she’d hired to help, the fact that she didn’t want Isabel to do anything but have a good time. Isabel’s anger burned so hot she could barely manage a response.

Later that night she gathered up the pages of notes she’d written for her book on overcoming personal crisis and tossed them into the fire. When everything had turned to ash, she swallowed two sleeping pills and went to bed.

In the morning she threw on her clothes and drove to town. Generally she felt groggy after taking sleeping pills, but her anger was still with her, and it burned away the cobwebs. She downed a lethal cup of espresso in the bar on the piazza, then walked the streets, but she was afraid to look into the shop windows for fear she’d crack the glass. Several of the villagers stopped her, anxious to talk about the missing statue or the feast that afternoon. She dug her fingernails into the heels of her hands and kept her responses as brief as possible.

She didn’t return to the farmhouse until a short time before the festa. She headed for the bathroom, turned the shower water to cold, and stood under it trying to make her skin stop sizzling. When she began applying makeup, her fingers pressed more firmly than usual on her eyeliner pencil, and the bronzing brush took an extra swipe at her cheekbones. Foundation, eye shadow, mascara-each seemed to have a will of its own. Tracy had left behind a lip wand filled with bloodred gloss, and Isabel slid it over her mouth. When she was done, her lips glimmered like a vampire’s.

She’d hung the dress she’d bought on the door of the wardrobe, and it beckoned from its hanger. The fabric fell straight from bodice to hem in a slim, fiery column. She never wore bright colors, but now she yanked it from the hanger and pulled it on. Only after she’d jerked up the zipper did she remember to put on a pair of panties beneath.

She turned to look at herself in the mirror. The scattering of tiny amber beads hidden in the fabric glowed like banked embers. The slashed bodice left one shoulder bare, and the jagged, scarf-point hem flickered like flame tips from midthigh to calf. The dress wasn’t right either for the occasion or for her, but she intended to wear it anyway.

She needed dangerously high stiletto heels with gilded beads across the toes, but she didn’t have any, so she pushed her feet into her bronze sandals. All the better to stomp your heart into a thousand pieces.

She gazed into the mirror. Her scarlet lips clashed with the dress, and her sandals didn’t match, but she didn’t care. She’d forgotten to dry her hair after her shower, and her wild blond curls looked like her mother’s at her most reckless. She remembered the men, the screaming, all the excess that had marked her mother’s life, but instead of reaching for a headband, her fingers closed over her manicure scissors. She stared at them for a moment, then lifted them to her hair and began to snip away.

Little chopped ends curled around her fingers. The scissors made angry clicks, moving faster and faster until her sleek bob became a riot of disheveled wisps. Finally she pulled off her bangle, tossed it on the bed, and left the room.

As she made her way up the path from the farmhouse, the heels of her sandals sent the stones scattering. The Villa of the Angels came into sight, and she spotted a dark-haired man climbing into a dusty black Maserati. Her heart gave a lurch, then settled back into its normal rhythm. It was only Giancarlo moving the sports car off to the side of the drive to make more room for the cars of the guests who were still arriving.

The day was too cool for such a bare dress, but even as the sun disappeared behind a high bank of clouds, her skin burned. She made her way through the formal gardens to the back of the villa, where the villagers had already begun to gather. Some of them stood chatting beneath the canopy that had been erected, others gathered on the loggia. Jeremy and a few of the older boys were kicking a soccer ball through the statuary while the younger boys got in their way.

She’d forgotten her purse. She had no money with her, no tissues or lipstick, pens or breath mints. She didn’t have Tampax, car keys, or her pocket screwdriver set-none of the objects she carried to protect herself from the messy reality of being alive. Worst of all, she didn’t have a gun.

The crowd parted.

Ren sensed that something unusual had happened even before he saw her. Tracy’s eyes widened, and Giulia made a soft exclamation. Vittorio lifted his head and muttered a familiar Italian phrase, but when Ren saw what had captured everyone’s attention, his brain lost its ability to translate.

Isabel had set herself on fire.

He took in the glowing conflagration of her dress, the heat in her eyes, the angry energy that radiated from her, and his mouth went dry. Gone were her tidy neutrals-all those comforting blacks, whites, and beiges that defined her world. And her hair… Disorderly curls blazed around her head in a style that Beverly Hills hairdressers charged hundreds of dollars to produce.

Her lipstick was wrong and her shoes didn’t match, but she burned with a sense of purpose that put him on high alert. He’d spent a year on The Young and the Restless. He’d studied the scripts, and he knew exactly what was happening.