Beyond Seduction (34 page)

He put his mouth beside her ear. "There are people fucking all over Venice. Whores, Mary, and wives and hard young men with barely hair enough for a beard. They're making love in boats and in bedrooms. In gardens and in grottos. In tangles of limbs no sensible man can count. They're groaning, Mary. They're tugging cocks and suckling breasts. They're sweating and slippery. Hot. Desperate. Trying to spill or wishing they hadn't just. The sheets of Venice are stiff with come, the thighs of Venice sticky, the arms

of Venice full. And now we're a part of it. We're fucking Venice until she screams."

She saw what he said. The men. The women. The body parts drenched with seed. She could not wait

for him. She came from the magic of his voice, not with a scream but with a moan. He gritted out a curse as the ripples of her pleasure gripped his cock. The tension in him changed. Suddenly his thrusts came harder; not faster, but with more force. He was battering her sweetest spot with every drive, blunt, smooth, turning one release into a violent, blissful string.

"We're fucking her," he gasped, his arm a stranglehold, his fingers digging into her softest flesh.

"Making love as if we never ... had ... before."

With that, he followed her into the maelstrom, shuddering, silent, with convulsively tightening muscles and bursts of seed only he could feel. Something swept through her— maybe Venice, maybe him—sweeter than sweet, softer than soft, deeper than any orgasm she'd known. The feeling was chocolate and velvet and kisses rolled into one; comfort, if comfort could shake one like the earth. She sighed from the pit of her belly, half sad, half happy, and heard him do the same. His hold on her eased but did not fall away.

He feels it, she thought. He feels the magic, too.

"Lord, Mary," he swore, curling round her like a cloak. "You are the sweetest thing."

She was ready to tell him then. That she loved him. That she had lied. That she sensed his heart was a good deal bigger than he believed.

But when she opened her eyes, the sight that met them drove the confession from her brain. Someone had been watching them. A man stood on the narrow landing beneath the balcony: a tall, slender man

with a golden beard and the gleam of knowledge in his eyes. It was Sebastian. Evange-line's husband. Nicolas's friend. His smile curled upward, slowly, sardonically, changing her flush of sweetness to one

of shame.

She couldn't pretend he did not guess what they'd been doing.

He brought his gathered fingers to his mouth, then opened them, an ironic Italian kiss. His lips moved. "
Bella
," she thought they mouthed. "
Bella signorina
."

He looked as if he thought she'd do the same with him, as if he were imagining it even then. Her body tightened and heated, a response she could not control. She might hate herself for it but she could not reason it away.

Attraction doesn't matter, she thought. It doesn't dictate what I do.

Nic stirred behind her, pulling gently from her body. "Cold out here," he muttered, clearly unaware that they weren't alone.

"Yes," Merry agreed and turned to push him into the room.

If she had her way, he'd never know they had been seen.

Fifteen

As always.  Nic slept like the dead.  Merry wished she could follow his example, but the day had left

her with too many troubling thoughts. Instead, she lay in the dark staring up at the swagged baldachin canopy, listening to Nic breathe and wondering if she dared creep down the marble stairs to

find a snack.

The cook would not be pleased. As they'd sat down to dinner, the countess's chef had burst into the dining room, bewailing the mysterious disappearance of a roast. Sebastian had laughed and told her

Nic would buy another, but the servant had not been calmed.

"This means the death of trust," she had pronounced. "Someone in my
casa
is a thief!"

Unimpressed by her drama, Evangeline shooed her off. Sadly, the cook's departure didn't improve the evening's tone. Sebastian spent the meal grinning wickedly at his plate—most likely reveling in what

he'd witnessed that afternoon—while Evangeline alternated between sniping at him and trying to get

Nic to take her side.

"
You
understand the treatment a woman deserves," she said, which prompted a snort from her

wandering spouse.

When she glared at him he answered with a smoky look, full of history and suggestion. "The treatment

a woman deserves," he drawled, "isn't always the one she needs."

Evangeline pretended to be annoyed by this, but Merry had no trouble guessing why she was flushed. Chances were Sebastian knew what made her body tick as well as Nic knew Merry's. In fact, after all these years, Sebastian probably knew his wife's susceptibilities better.

The thought of staying with Nic long enough to develop that sort of rapport was dangerously appealing.

Not that any of this crossed Nic's mind. He spent the evening in a daze, very much as if he were

planning another painting. To her surprise, when she asked if he wanted to see whether the valise with

his sketching implements had arrived, he merely shrugged.

At dinner he seemed to hear no more than half of what anyone said.

Between his abstraction and the others' war of words, only Merry gave the clam-laden spaghetti
alle vongole
the attention it deserved. If she'd had any sense, she'd have eaten Nic's portion, too. To hell

with being ladylike; Merry's stomach had catching up to do.

Because she'd ignored it earlier, it was making demands on her now. With a grimace of resignation, she pushed off the covers and swung out of bed. The terrazzo floor, a special surface of crushed and polished stone, felt like ice beneath her toes. Cursing, she grabbed Nic's robe from the end of the bed and groped her way through the elegant, moonlit suite.

Their rooms were shabby but impressive, filled with heavy chairs and ancient chests, just waiting to clap her knees. The aqueous light confused the shadows, as did the numerous gilt-framed mirrors. Twice the small Turkish carpets tried to trip her, causing her to gasp and flail her arms.

It was too much to hope that Nic would hear her and get up.

As luck would have it, she met Sebastian coming up the stairs as she was tiptoeing down. She saw him before he saw her, but didn't have time to back away. The landing windows, with their interlaced ogee peaks, cast circles of moonlight across his head and shoulders. In one hand he held a bottle, in the other

a basket of bread. He was trudging up the treads as if he were weary—a sympathetic figure until he saw her, froze, and wolfishly flashed his teeth.

He closed the distance between them in two long strides.

"I'm going for a snack," she said rudely enough to discourage anyone but him.

Smile broadening, he braced his legs to block her way. "Work up an appetite, did you?"

"I was sick on the boat. Cast up my accounts all over the place."

His throaty chuckle was a pleasure she didn't care to acknowledge. "If you wish to disgust me, you'll

have to do better than that."

"And if you wish to attract me, you'll have to do better than these childish games."

He threw back his head on a silent laugh, his throat bared, his eyes creased appealingly at the corners.

He recovered abruptly, tucking the wine beneath his arm so he could cup her cheek in his lean, long-fingered hand. She shivered at his touch, but not completely in distaste. "Come with me," he said

like a seducer in a novel. "I have something special to show you."

Merry crossed her arms. "I'm sure you do."

This time his chest was all that shook with his amusement. "Nothing of
that
sort, I assure you. I could hardly expect you to decide your sexual future this soon after meeting me. Unlike Nic, my personality takes a while to grow on one. No, I've something else to show you, something of artistic interest that

may shed light on the tangled web that is Nic and Sebastian and Eve. Besides which, I have prosciutto

in this breadbasket, along with the most amiable sweet sparkling wine: Prosecco, Mary, the pride of the Veneto." Her stomach betrayed her by rumbling loudly.

"You see?" Sebastian purred. "I do know what women need."

His beseeching smile, manipulative though it was, was too charming to resist. She did want to understand Nic better, which meant understanding his history with his friends. "No tricks," she insisted. "You'll show me whatever it is and let me go."

"Absolutely," he assured her. "I may not be as civilized as Nic, but I'd never take a lady against her will."

*  *  *

"She's a genius," he said wistfully, "a fucking bloody genius."

Sebastian had led her to a room in the palazzo's attic, one that had served for some time as an artist's garret: obviously Evangeline's. It was a cluttered, cozy space with exposed brick walls and dusty wooden flooring. A woman's shawl hung from a nail on one of the ceiling beams, and a volume of Browning's poems shared a rickety table with a paint-smeared palette. Not concerned with these homey details, Sebastian held a branch of candles before his wife's latest artistic effort. The flames wavered in what Merry guessed was inebriation.

The possibility did not frighten her as it might have with other men. Alcohol didn't seem to change Sebastian's personality to any discernible degree. She suspected he was too used to being foxed for it to matter.

"Nic doesn't hold a candle to her," he said, "and God knows a hack like me can't." Shaking his head,

he swung the bottle at his side. "Fifty years from now the world will be ready to see her gift. Then

they'll be sorry they ignored her."

Merry wasn't enough of an expert to dispute this. She only knew the painting was the strangest, most disturbing work of art she'd ever seen. It was a portrait of Nic and Sebastian and Eve—but just barely. Their figures looked like displaced shards of glass, the pieces shifted from one body to another so that breasts and eyes and hands jumbled all together. The colors screamed rage and sorrow and an odd,

insinuating sensuality. "I'm ugly," the picture seemed to say, "but you know you can't look away."

The picture frightened her. It held a threat, or perhaps a warning, and even though Evangeline scarcely knew Merry, the message seemed to speak directly to her.

"It's powerful," she said, "uncomfortably so."

She could tell he was pleased with her answer. "Yes," he said, "I knew you'd understand."

His expression amazed her. Nic had claimed Sebastian loved his wife, but she hadn't believed it until

she saw those tears of pride shimmering in his eyes.

She touched his arm before he could lift the Prosecco to his mouth. "Have you told her how you feel?"

The bottle descended with a slosh of sparkling wine. When he laughed, it sounded like a sob. "Too many times to count. She's afraid to believe me, afraid to admit she's better than either one of us. Oh, she pretends she hates how unfair the world is, that a woman is the equal of any man, but in truth, in secret truth, she wants Nic and me to be her heroes." He took a swig, long and thirsty, then saluted the extraordinary painting. "Ain't goin' t' happen, Evie. You've got more to say in your little finger than the two of us put together."

Nic has something to say, Merry thought. Maybe he says it more gently but he does.

She shut her mouth on the words. She suspected Sebastian knew this. And maybe, in secret truth, he needed his image of Evangeline to cut Nic down to size.

Fearing she'd learned more than she bargained for, she dried her hands on Nic's dressing gown and tried to frame her next comment with care. "Nic says Evangeline fancied him once."