Once upon a Dream (26 page)

His smile came slowly. But when it did, Annie felt her own fears begin to evaporate. “Win told you it was my re-birthday surprise. A good choice of words. Because, thanks to his generous gift, I have been reborn.”

She studied him carefully, noting that the little lines of stress around his eyes were gone, and the smile on his lips was as bright as the sun. “Does this mean you've forgiven Win?”

He nodded. “I never thought such a thing would be possible. The pain was too deep, the betrayal too vicious. But now I realize that sometimes a family's bonds are too strong to be severed, even by such a cruel act. However he managed it, Win found a way to come back and make things right. I'll always be grateful. Because of him, I've found you, Annie. And I don't want to lose you.” He did touch her then. Just the press of his hands along the top of her arms. But it was enough to bring the familiar rush of heat to both of them.

“Annie, I love you more than I could have ever believed it was possible to love anyone.” He took a deep breath, needing to impress on her the enormity of his feelings. “I've already asked my mother to reconsider the sale of White Pines. I'd like to buy it myself. That is, if you'd be willing to go up there with me on weekends and breathe life into the old place again. I think with a lot of love and hard work we could restore it to its former beauty.”

“But my work. My responsibilities. I…have so many debts from my grandmother's illness.”

He smiled that wicked, dangerous smile she'd come to know. “Annie, I'm a wealthy man. Your debts are the least of my worries. I still don't know how I'll fulfill my
obligations to a staff of employees on two coasts. I'll just have to figure out a solution. But I will. I have to. Because you're more important than anything else in my life.” His tone lowered for emphasis. “There are probably a hundred good reasons why we shouldn't rush into this, but only one very good reason why we should. Life is so short. And we've just found the most incredible love. Why shouldn't we just reach out and hold on to it?”

Annie twisted her hands together. “Oh, Ben. This is crazy. Impossible. Impulsive. It's so unlike us.”

“I know. But we can change. We can bend.” He held his breath.

“Win said you were so rigid that if you ever tried to bend you'd break.”

“He did?”

She nodded. A slow smile curved her mouth. “But he was wrong. And you're right. I love you. Nothing else matters.”

He grabbed her and held her a little bit away from him. “Is that a yes?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. I love you, Ben Carrington. And right now, I want it all. Love. Marriage. The fairy tale. The happily-ever-after.”

At her words, Ben felt his heart begin to beat again. With a shout he lifted Annie in his arms and swung her around, then kissed her until they were both breathless.

In that instant they heard a sound. Like a man's soft chuckle. Shelly would later say it had been the wind, but Annie and Ben knew otherwise. They looked at each other and began to laugh. Then they came together in another long, slow kiss to seal their bargain. As they did, they were convinced that a certain wild soul was watching with approval as the brother he'd admired, then betrayed, finally found the forgiveness and the peace he'd sought for so long, with the woman of his dreams.

This was, they realized, the finest gift of all. Love. Enough to last a lifetime. And beyond.

Marianne Willman

To my favorite spinners of enchanted dreams, Nora,
Jill, and Ruth, to Karen Katz, and to Dan.
May all your most beautiful dreams come true.

Venice, Italy

S
HADOWS FILLED THE
great room with its ornamental plastered and painted medallions. The girl glanced about nervously, then hurried inside. The hem of her gold velvet gown, the soft leather of her green embroidered slippers, whispered over the rose-and-white-marble tiles of the floor. Water dripped nearby.

The tall shutters at the far end of the salon were closed, but bars of fading light told her that twilight was approaching rapidly. A sense of urgency compelled her. She was late.

Dear God, please not too late!

She hesitated by the stairs leading down to the first floor, which opened to the canal. Her escape would be quicker by water, but she didn't dare risk being seen. The girl sighed and turned reluctantly away. Passing through a small vestibule, she pulled aside the heavy curtain that covered the door leading to a neglected courtyard.

Lifting her velvet skirts to keep them from being soiled, she moved silently around the starlit gardens. A bit of Pointe de Venice lace caught on the rough bricks of the ancient stone well, and she yanked it free.

She took the wine-colored cape from its hiding place in the alcove behind a statue, then tied the strings of her mask securely She had vowed on her life to meet him. He would already be there, waiting.

The door in the far wall that led to the
calle
was locked, but she had the key tucked in her pocket. She peeked through the intricate wrought-iron design set in the thick wood, then slipped into the narrow alleyway. The hinges sighed, and the door clicked shut behind her. There was no going back now. The outer door had no handle and could be opened only from inside the garden.

The blank walls of the buildings rose up four and five stories on either hand. As darkness deepened, their mellow tints of peach and pink and rose faded to dull terra-cotta and lavender. Soon they would be leached of color and merge into the night shadows.

She listened to make sure no one had followed. By daylight she felt safe here, as if she were in a secret passageway leading to adventure. Tonight, with only the deepening incandescent twilight to light her way, she was terrified. This path to freedom could so easily become a trap!

There were no footsteps. No sound but that of her own ragged breathing. After a moment she went on.

The
calle
narrowed, then branched off into a maze of other alleyways. There was no way she could get lost. She had only to look for the tall, pointed roof of the
Campanile San Marco
rising above the tiles of the neighboring houses to guide her.

Suddenly the plaintive call of a gondolier drifted on the breeze, and another picked it up in the distance, like an echo. The sound was so lonely, so wrenching, she felt as if her heart might break.

She touched the necklace at her throat for courage. It
was the only thing she had taken with her when she fled the house
. He
had given it to her. Her fingertips slid over the smooth beads that held the heart-shaped ruby pendant, as if she were telling the beads of her rosary. Starlight caused the matching ring on her finger to glow with intriguing lights. She'd never dared to wear it before.

Thoughts of her lover, of their future together, made her brave. He would be waiting for her at the bridge. But the closer she got to the bridge, the more her heart pounded beneath her lace-trimmed bodice.

She hid in the shadows. Domenico was not there. She was suddenly afraid.

Deeply afraid…

“I had had my dreams of Venice.
But nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.”

—
A
RTHUR
S
YMONS,
Cities

C
LAIRE JERKED SUDDENLY
awake, completely disoriented. The frightened girl in the long velvet gown and embroidered slippers faded and reality took over. The comfortable leather chair, the elegant cabin interior, the muted roar of the private motor launch as it sliced through the fog and rain.

Sandbagged by jet lag, damn it! And that dream. Again.

She always awakened before the girl reached the bridge. Before dream changed to nightmare.

Clair shook her head to clear it, then looked out the window beside her. Opalescent mists rose from the surface of the lagoon to meet the fine silver rain, almost totally obscuring the view. Somewhere out there was Venice, the most romantic and intriguing city in the world.

Now and then the mist shifted, creating a strange, dreamlike effect. Bits of Venice hovered in the air like apparitions: The spire of a church, a square bell tower, or the Gothic facade of a palazzo took shape, only to dissolve once more into the pearly, scattered light.

Claire felt as if she were floating softly back in time, into a world filled with decadent charm and unearthly beauty.

It was snug and warm inside the richly appointed cabin. Count Ludovici had insisted on sending his launch to pick her up. Leaning back against the luxurious leather chair, Claire smiled. This trip to Venice to appraise several of the count's paintings was the high point of her career.

Sterling Galleries in San Francisco, where she worked as a specialist in Renaissance art, had scored a major coup when Count Ludovici had commissioned them to offer several drawings from his family's extensive collection at private auction. Now he was planning on doing the same with some fabulous paintings.

But the real bombshell had come in a cryptic phone call she'd received from Ludovici himself, hinting that he had an unknown Titian. Why he would want to sell it was a mystery, but if it was true, Sterling Galleries and Claire would be on their way!

Not that it was definite that Sterling Galleries would get the private auction. Claire had to convince the count that they were up to the job. That they'd deal with the Italian authorities, that they'd find the right buyers—discreet patrons of the arts who would only be too glad to pay fabulous fees for incomparable works and avoid the notoriety that attended a public auction. Then most of them would be donated by the philanthropists and art patrons who bought them to a local museum. A win-win situation. Everyone came out ahead.

She wasn't sure she could pull it off. Panic fluttered inside her breast.
I'm not a saleswoman or a dealmaker. I'm researcher, a bookworm. A behind-the-scenes kind of person, damn it!

Tish Sterling, the ultra-fashionable gallery owner, had thought otherwise and was eager to clinch the deal.

“You'll do fine,” Tish had assured Claire her smile as bright as her expensively cut, copper-penny hair.
“And you have a connection with Venice. That's a link between you and the count, right there.”

Claire had splayed her hands and examined her nail polish. Venetian Pearl. Maybe it was an omen. “I just don't want to ruin this opportunity for you, Tish. I've never done anything like this before.”

“Why are you always afraid of trying something new?”

It was an old question, and Claire still didn't have an answer.

Tish opened the window, lit a cigarette, inhaled, and blown a smoggy cloud out over the parking lot. With her bright green-gold eyes and spiky hair, she looked like a friendly dragon, with two streamers of gray smoke curling lazily from her nostrils.

“I'm a good businesswoman, Claire, and believe me, I wouldn't pack you off to Italy if I didn't think you could pull it off. Be yourself, but treat the count with kid gloves. Fitzgerald was right, you know: The rich
are
different. Especially the old, noble families.”

She waved her manicured hand with its wide cuff of silver and gold at the marvelous burled-chestnut paneling of her office, the view of the Golden Gate Bridge beyond. “We're Johnny-come-latelies. The Ludovicis can trace their roots back a thousand years, to when Venice was nothing but a few huts stuck up on pilings in the mud flats of the lagoon. They don't think in terms of years but of generations.”

Tish took a second drag on her cigarette, then stubbed it out carefully in the only ashtray allowed at Sterling Galleries. She let herself use it once a day. “Count Andrea Ludovici's ancestors were ruling Venice even then. Mine were raiding English cattle over the border from Scotland, wearing nothing but blue paint beneath their plaids. If they even bothered to wear their plaids.”

She ran a hand through her hair, making it stand straight up, and still managed to look chic. “You go to Venice, Claire, and convince the count to sign the contract with us.”

 

And here I am, Claire thought in amazement, as the launch changed course in the glowing mist. The engine slowed. The panic hardened to a dull lead fist, right in the pit of her stomach. The moment of truth was growing closer every minute.

Over a thousand years. She tried again to grasp the enormity of that span of time. To know exactly who your ancestors were for the past millennium! It seemed impossible.

Certainly it was for her. She knew her father's great-grandfather had sailed to America from Scotland when he was a boy of sixteen and started the family ranch in Idaho. On her mother's side, Claire's bloodlines were Irish and Italian.

That was about it, as far as her own family history went. Her mother had died too young to tell her more, and her father and grandfather were more interested in the future than the past. Perhaps that was why she loved the past so much. It was real and constant.

Once again she felt the launch swing right in a long arc. With her small map spread across her lap, she tried to guess how close the launch was to her destination. If only the mist would burn off and the skies clear! Off to one side, she knew, was the Isola de Guideca, the curving island of crumbling palazzi and neglected squares, with the elegant Hotel Cipriani set like a jewel at its tip. On the other side were the multitude of small islands, connected by humped bridges, that formed Venice proper.

She caught her reflection in the polished brass fitments. The interior lights winked off her emerald-cut topaz earrings and turned her wildly curling blond hair to masses of beaten gold. On their first date, her ex-husband had told her that she looked like a woman from a Renaissance painting. Val's deep voice floated through her memory:
“Botticelli's Venus, rising from the sea. Only with clothes on. Unfortunately.”

Claire remembered laughing up into his blue eyes—and
that had been that. She ran her fingers through her hair. One thing about Val, she thought wryly. He certainly knew the way to an art major's heart. He just didn't know how to keep it.

His loss, she told herself, but an ache remained just the same.

The launch's engines reversed suddenly, slowing their forward motion. “Behold,
signorina,
” the pilot said over the intercom. “Venezia!”

She swiveled her chair for a better look out the side window. The weather was changing. The soft rain that had been falling since the launch had picked her up at the airport suddenly ceased.

It was pure magic. The gray waters lightened, turned silver, and suddenly the sun burst through the clouds. Mists vanished as though at a conjurer's command. The scene, a monochromatic ink drawing a short time earlier, was now a glorious watercolor, the lagoon the same shifting, blending aqua and deep turquoise as Claire's eyes.

Claire was stunned. Distinct rays of gold radiated across the sky, like the background of a Renaissance Madonna and Child. All it lacked was a few angels descending to earth in fluttering robes with garlands of flowers in their hair.

A shock of pleasure rippled through her. There it was: La Serenissima, the most beautiful and mysterious city in the world.

The place where she'd been born almost twenty-six years ago.

It looked like a mirage, a dream of Byzantine domes, fantastic towers, and ice-cream-colored palazzi, shimmering in the liquid light dancing off the waters.

No wonder so many artists and writers have made their home here, she mused.

Claire sometimes dreamed of Venice—or thought she did. One of her plans was to visit the
penzione
where her parents had their apartment. Her father had been working in Venice when she'd been born. She wondered if she
would recognize anything that she hadn't seen in a thousand pictures and photos and calendars. If there was a little piece of Venice somewhere that was truly hers.

The motor launch swept on toward the
molo,
the traditional landing place for visitors to Venice before the causeway and train station had been built from the mainland. Black gondolas filled with sightseers, a few launches, and the sleek
vaporetti,
Venice's aptly named water taxis, plied the entrance to the Grand Canal.

The air shimmered with the silvery incandescence the city was noted for, making everything seem just a little bit unreal. Slanting sun caught the forest of mooring poles rising from the water, the huge statue-topped columns that guarded the
molo,
the pale pink and white Gothic facade of the Doge's Palace, and the Byzantine domes of the Basilica San Marco beyond.

Claire blinked. It was like catching a glimpse of another world.

“I'm here,” she murmured. Full circle. “At last.”

Holding her breath, she waited in vain for the feeling she'd expected, the one that would tell her that she was home. Back in the place where she had begun life. Disappointment filled her.

Venice was beautiful, exotic, beguiling. And it was as alien to her as the moon.

The water had turned a lovely milky green as they entered the Grand Canal. Before she knew it, they were pulling up to the mooring poles at the landing of the Europa e Regina Hotel where she had booked a suite. She stood with her face to the sun as the pilot unloaded her bags.

“Your first visit to Venezia,
signorina?”
the launch pilot asked in a mix of Italian and English.

“I was born here,” Claire told him. “My father was one of the engineering consultants brought in to help prevent the flooding.”

“Ah!” the man shook his head. “The
aqua alta.
”

Venice had suffered severe damage back in the sixties
and seventies, and the world had responded in an effort to preserve her priceless treasures from the surging tides.

His dark eyes smiled down into hers. “Then you have Venice in your blood,
signorina.
You must go to see Nona Frascati…she has a shop in the Mercerie. Past the fashionable designers, you understand, and into the older quarter, where she sells old jewelry and reliquaries. If she likes you she might tell you your fortune. Tell her Pietro sent you.”

“I will.
Grazie.
”

She gave him a generous tip and went into the hotel. After registering in the elegant lobby and handing over her passport, she was taken up to her rooms. It was a fabulous suite with brocade-covered furniture, tall mirrors of Venetian glass, and a marvelous chandelier.

Tish must be out of her mind! Either that, or she's pretty damned sure I can convince the count to let us handle the auctioning of his entire collection.

Claire wished she felt as confident. She was secure in her knowledge and expertise. It was her persuasive powers that worried her. When she was vetting a painting or examining a piece of furniture, she was sure of herself. It was her people skills, as Tish called them, that were lacking.

Being raised alone on an isolated ranch, with only dogs, books, and a silent grandfather for companions, she'd somehow never learned the knack of talking to people.
And if I need any evidence to prove that to me, there's a divorce decree sitting in my desk back in San Francisco
.

Six months, she thought with a pang that might be anger, and not a single word from Val. He'd vanished from her life as if their marriage had been nothing but a remote dream, the kind that started out wonderfully and morphed into a nightmare.

Like the ones she'd been having almost nightly for the past eight weeks.

“The honor bar,
signorina.
” The bellman unlocked an elegant gilt cabinet to show the rows of bottles behind the
carved doors. Claire was glad he hadn't noticed how abstracted she'd become.

He showed her briefly where everything was, then left her. Once she was alone, her first thought was to flop on the bed in the other room and sleep for hours. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the terrace beyond the open double doors, and the splendid view.

Across the canal, the frosted white marble church of Santa Maria della Salute dominated the horizon. It was breathtaking. Although supported by more than a million wooden pilings sunk deep into the clay beneath the water, it seemed to sail upon its own reflection in the Grand Canal, like an enormous floating pearl.

The scene was familiar to her, not just from movies and travel books. The Salute was featured in several of the paintings in Count Ludovici's collection. She'd seen several fine reproductions of them. Oh, but the reality of it was so much more lovely!

As she took it all in, a black gondola filled with happy tourists was overtaken by a vaporetto filled with even more. It left a foaming wake and a waft of engine fumes on the canal. Otherwise, she thought, surely nothing had changed in decades.

Or centuries.

All thoughts of a nap vanished. Claire wanted to step out through the ivory curtains stirring in the breeze, relax in the chaise longue on the small terrace, and drink in the view as if it were a glass of sparkling wine.

She took two steps past the doors and stopped short. The chaise was already occupied. She could just see gleaming dark hair above the back cushion and the tips of a man's butter-soft Italian shoes.