Page 11

Signora Rossi stepped into the boat with agile ease, and lowered herself down to sit beside Xan, just as he had imagined she would. The flimsy cabin was not enormously wide; her muslin skirts overlapped his buckskin breeches, and her shoulders rested against his. He had her light, elusive scent in his nostrils; it was a drug to him. He reached out, an entirely involuntary motion, and took the fine fabric of her gown between his fingers, rubbing it between them. Even that was astonishingly arousing, a sort of surrogate for touching her. He would be doing that soon. And he could not help but noting that, apart from a light shawl and tiny puffed sleeves, her shapely, rounded arms were bare today. Her skin had fine dark hairs upon it, and those blue veins at the wrist that had so affected him before. She was, it seemed, really here, not some figment of his fevered imagination.

‘Mario is taking us out to a place he knows on the lagoon,’ Xan told her hoarsely. ‘He says we will be quite private there. I have a picnic in a basket, and he will come back for us later.’

‘Much later?’ She looked sideways at him under the welcome shade of the cabin, her dark eyes dancing with unholy mischief, as well as something else – anticipation to match his own.

‘A week could not be long enough for me. But it somewhat depends on the tide, he tells me. He speaks good English; the other fellow does not. Three hours, perhaps. I am not a seaman, I grew up inland, so I did not perfectly understand.’

‘And perhaps also you were a little distracted?’

‘More than a little. Don’t look at me like that, I beg you, or I will be lost again.’

Xan could not have said how long it took, to reach their destination across the open, sunlit waters of the lagoon. To have her so close and not be able to touch her properly was exquisite torture. He knew now why dogs, penned up in their kennels, howled at the moon.

But at last they did arrive on a low, scrubby island; there were no buildings in sight but there was a rickety old jetty with a low platform for gondolas, and Mario’s assistant handed them out onto it, conversing incomprehensibly with Bianca, presumably to arrange their return. He passed out the basket of provisions and the folded rug, and Xan took them. The gondola shot swiftly away, propelled with careless skill, and neither of them watched it go, or paused to admire the fine view of cupolas and towers from here. They were alone, and the city might have been a thousand miles away.

They walked a little among the sand dunes, saying little, seabirds crying and calling around them because their solitude had been disturbed, and then found a cosy little spot, where a stunted tamarisk tree in full flower gave some dappled shade. Xan laid down the blanket and set the basket beside it. ‘I want to kiss you,’ he said. It was all he could manage in that moment, but it was the truest thing he had ever said in all his life.

Bianca sank down onto the rug and looked up at him. ‘Why delay?’ She seemed oddly serious now; he hoped she had no regrets. But she had uttered those words of encouragement, and she was here, taking off her bonnet and her gloves.

He removed his own hat, shrugged off his dark coat and set it carefully aside, then lowered himself beside her and took her hand, lifting it and pressing his lips to her palm, holding it there and breathing, enjoying the significance of the moment, tasting her, the tips of her fingers just caressing his cheek. He felt her shiver; it was contagious. ‘A part of me wants to go slow and savour every second,’ he told her with ragged honesty, ‘and a part of me wants to fall on you like a ravenous animal and sate myself and you, again and again.’

‘Go slow,’ she said with endearing and uncharacteristic awkwardness, which much later he was to understand very differently, cursing his own obtuseness. ‘Recall that I am a widow, as are you.’

He went slow. He took the tips of her fingers in his mouth and ran them along the tenderest parts, inside, then sucked on them, his eyes closed in fierce concentration. His hands were loose about her waist as she lay back, and he gloried in the warm contact, but he did not move further yet; he did still have a little self-control, it seemed, now that he needed it most, and he was keen to obey her every wish.

After a while he opened his eyes and looked down at her. He saw her slightly dazed expression, her flushed cheeks and open mouth, and then he bent to kiss her, covering her body with his own at last, pressing himself to her, desperate for the closeness.

A long while later, after he had kissed her eyelids and explored every inch of her face, he found the tiny buttons that fastened her gown and began unfastening them to bare the smooth skin to his lips. Her hands were tangled deep in his hair, and her lustrous dark locks had come down and lay in wonderful disorder about her face and shoulders; he had kissed that too. ‘Do what you said,’ she whispered. ‘Touch me as you said you wanted to. Pull up my skirts and do that now. I promise you will find that I am ready.’

And so he did, as the seabirds cried unheeded above them.

15

Bianca had not been entirely sure, up until the moment when she stepped into the gondola Mr Challender had hired and let it bear her away, unresisting, out into the lagoon, that she was actually going to do this momentous and irrevocable thing. It was not a marriage – that was rather the point, as far as she was concerned – but it had this much in common with a marriage: it was a step which, once taken, could never be undone. If she really didn’t want to be a debutante, an innocent, a young lady waiting patiently or impatiently for a man to claim her as his virgin bride, then this would decisively signal that rejection. Even if nobody in the world but she and Xan ever knew what passed between them – and she devoutly hoped this would be the case – it would mark the change for herself. This path chosen, not that one. She was not wearing her precious miniature today, but she held it in her mind’s eye always. Did Rosalba Carriera ever have such adventures, in the private spaces of a life otherwise dedicated to art and family? Maybe she did. The point was, no one would ever know. Did this prove that secrets could be kept, if one was very careful, or simply suggest that there had been no secrets?

No wonder she had been uncertain, nervous, and undecided up to the last minute. She could so easily have walked away. Xan didn’t even know where she lived; she could avoid him; she could leave Venice, telling nobody. She was still free to do that.

But if she ran away, she knew she would forever berate herself as a pathetic coward. She’d always had the idea of passion and sexual experience at the back of her mind as one object of this European trip, and no better opportunity than this would ever arise for her to experience it with so little risk. There was gossip about her and Mr Challender – very well, this could not matter one jot, because she was not that object of whispers, but the mysterious widowed Signora Rossi. Nobody in Venice, and precious few people in Italy, knew that she was in fact Bianca Constantine, and they need never know. Xan himself need not, if she could keep a secret.

There’d been a man in Rome – a boy, really, the son of Miss Macintyre’s friends in the city. Pierpaolo. He’d shown her the sights while their elders stayed at home, and after a little while, by mutual unspoken consent, they’d shrugged off the restrictions of their listless chaperon – a bored maidservant who’d rather be about her own affairs with a handsome bribe in her pocket. They’d kissed enjoyably among moonlit ruins, and done a little more than that, but he’d not had the confidence to take matters any further, and she had been fatally undecided over whether she wanted to. He knew her real name and identity, and he did not, in truth, inspire her with any great desire to throw her bonnet over the windmill. She knew without being told that he was as inexperienced as she was, and she was not enormously excited by the prospect of awkward fumblings, midnight creeping along corridors, and of deceiving his parents, who had been nothing but kind and generous towards her and did not deserve such a return for their hospitality. She weighed the risk against the reward and found it insufficiently tempting.

But, God knows, Venice was not Rome, and this was not that. She had changed since she had been here, she felt – her bid for independence had been successful, and her art had improved because of it. She’d taken that risk, and profited as a result. But still she had not taken the final step. At Carnival, she had been an observer, not a participant. Intrigued by what she saw, heard and sensed in the crowds around her, aroused even, but no more than that. No man or woman she had met or seen had tempted her enough.

But from their very first brief meeting, and certainly after their second, Xan had given her the impression of tightly leashed physical power, which made a great and unexpected impression. He struck her as a man of very strong, even volcanic passions, which were habitually left unexpressed, and the extent of which he himself had been ignorant until now. He was undeniably handsome, with strong, regular features, lively grey eyes and a resolute mouth and chin, but that was not what affected her so. Her artist’s mind struggled to find a way to comprehend him – perhaps he was a panther who’d been brought up by some mistake as a house cat, and was only now realising that he had claws and teeth. If Italy – Venice – might offer her liberation from a life of convention, it must be the same for him. And that was an unspoken bond between them, too.

He was not a libertine, or a rake, or one of those men women trusted at their peril and almost always to their lasting regret. Such creatures held no attraction for her; she had no desire to be anyone’s plaything, taken up easily to pass the time and discarded with just as little ceremony. She had no wish to be seduced, either, which in her opinion was just a fine word for relentless coercion, for a refusal to hear the word no. She would not be a victim, if she could help it, or a footnote in any great man’s biography. Like Carriera, she was a person in her own right, and she would not be chosen – she would choose.

Of course it was true that Mr Challender’s fancy had lighted on her before she had been aware of it. But she could have rebuffed him with perfect ease; the plain fact was, she had not done so. She had sought him out, when the rumours had reached her, she had sat down freely at the table, she had picked up the cake, and bitten into it, even though he had warned her what might come of it. And it had been delicious. She had watched his face as he had so very nearly lost control of himself, and listened to him when he told her all he wished to do to her. Even then, she could have stood up and walked away. But she had known in that moment that she wanted it – she wanted him. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

And today, she would have him.

16

LONDON

Xan was dreaming; he must be. He’d been dreaming a lot, since Venice. Dreaming, always, of Bianca Rossi. Her body, soft and lush and infinitely responsive, her dark, silky hair, her eyes like Adriatic water in the moonlight, her sinful red mouth, her secret places, and all the things they’d done together. Her hands and lips on his skin, his on hers. The map of her body, explored inch by exquisite inch. Her face when she lost herself in passion. The erotic obsession he’d thought was mutual, until he’d realised with a cold shock of reality that it couldn’t have been. It was nothing but an illusion and always had been; important to him, but not to her, since she had found it so easy to leave him without a word of explanation or farewell spoken between them.

He’d dreamed of spending hours with her in Venice, reliving the exquisitely painful past and also imagining more, and he’d also dreamed her into being here, in cold, grey England, in his house, in his bed, where she’d never been and could never be. So perhaps he’d summoned her up like some spirit today; perhaps his senses were disordered… but no. Because she was really here, shockingly present and unchanged, yet she was not the woman he’d thought she was. She was a different person, had a different bloody name – that was obvious enough. Everything that had passed between them had been a wicked lie.