Song of Seduction (24 page)

“That’s all it needs to be.”

A curt nod. A quizzical expression. And then resignation. “You are right.”

“Did it help, coming here?” She fought the urge to fidget and twist under the sweet, rhythmic pressure of his hands on her legs.

“The symphony, yes. But wanting you…” He freed a ragged exhale.

Arie wrapped his arms around her, surprising her with the strength of his ardent embrace. Despite the neglect that rendered him thin and exhausted, he was still a man—a man capable of claiming by force all that he desired. Instead, his simple, exhausted sigh pleaded for her mercy. Mathilda stroked his jumbled curls and held him close, his head bowed to her bosom. Her hair fell around his body like a silken curtain. She kissed the top of his head, kissed him again.

“Tilda, I missed you. Forgive me,
liefde.
”

“Only if you give me your word,” she whispered. “No more of this, Arie. No more leaving.”

“No more leaving.” He nuzzled her throat with kisses of his own. His long, tapered fingers tangled in her hair. When he sighed her name, his breath tickled her neck. “You give me no peace.”

Mathilda caught his face in her hands, refusing to let him look away. “Peace? Is that like satisfaction?”

“Only if you stay.”

“I will if you do.”

“All I fear in the world is to hurt you.”

“Then love me,” she said. “You remember that? Loving me?”

Each erotic memory competed for his attention. Blood blazed in his groin, and he pressed his hips closer to the cradle of her pelvis. “Of course,” he rasped. “But I remember what I did to you, as well.”

“Leave that to the past, along with all of the rest. You accused me of using Jürgen’s death to hide from you. I will no longer allow you to hide from me.”

She kissed him and Arie succumbed. Her tongue pushed past his lips, thrilling him with dizzying possibilities. Weary of fighting himself, he needed Mathilda. Nothing more. As her warm mouth promised paradise, he relented willingly.

No longer at odds, their tongues collaborated to craft an exquisite kiss of intensity and sweet, beautiful anguish. Arie drowned in sensation. Every touch left him in a frenzy to keep pace with all she offered.

He sank deeper into the mattress, pulling Mathilda across his nakedness like a sensuous blanket. His head grew heavy and sluggish as he basked in her softness, sighs and private curls. She nipped his upper lip and sat up to straddle his torso. At the sight of that erotic goddess—all hidden places and silken tresses—Arie forgot to breathe. She tortured him without mercy.

Lightly, she scored her nails down the length of his chest. “You bony thing. Really, Arie, you must eat more.”

“Do not distract me with petty concerns. I am busy lying in awe of you.” She blushed and lowered thick lashes. “You look quite comfortable up there,
liefde.
Ever on top?”

“Never.” She leaned across his chest and licked the sensitive hollow behind his ear. “Teach me.”

“Ah, my eager pupil.” He grasped the nape of her neck and brought her mouth to meet his for another eager kiss. Her scent, her warmth, her taste…Mathilda permeated his every sense.

She squirmed and pressed her corseted bosom to his chest. He wanted to see her naked, astride him, but an edgy need denied him the patience to unlace ribbons. Only a tangle of skirts separated his rigid flesh from the welcoming, damp softness of hers. And he had wanted her too much, too long.

With impatient hands, Arie searched beneath her gown to find her bare backside. Ripe flesh tempted him, a wealth of secrets and undiscovered pleasures. Breathless for his lover, he grasped her buttocks and savored her resilient curves. He positioned her pelvis, nestling his aching phallus along her intimate folds. But he did not enter.

Mathilda groaned against his neck. She bucked her hips in an instinctive pattern, wantonly rocking along the length of his erection. Arie watched, transfixed, as she strove for her pleasure, eyes closed, panting. She grasped his shoulders, her head bowed. The maddening cadence of her intimate, demanding caress clawed at his ridiculous attempt to maintain control.

She arched and cried out. With her head thrown back in ecstasy, her unbound hair tickled the tops of Arie’s thighs. He gripped her hips, hard, and urged her to rise on her knees just enough to slide inside. In a harmony of homecoming, his inarticulate sound of building pleasure—the relief of finding himself buried within her once again—matched her long sigh of satisfaction. Hot and slick, she consumed the last of his rational thought. He reared against her tender flesh, senseless and intense, until the shivering burst of his climax jerked his body.

When the haze of pleasure lifted, he found Mathilda collapsed atop him. Her arms were wrapped around his neck. Her hands smelled of her feminine scent, and he turned his head to take two fingertips in his mouth. She gasped and giggled as he teased those sensitive pads with his tongue, tasting her intimate salts. Pulling free, she replaced her fingers with her mouth, lazily exploring him. Her curiosity and gentleness revived his very soul.

“In ordnung?”

“Very fine.” Her voice was gauzy with contentment.

“You are a wonder,
liefde.
And a quick study.”

Smiling almost shyly, Mathilda shifted to release him from her body and curled against him, in his arms. Minutes, maybe hours passed as their heartbeats returned to normal. Arie breathed. The dread tension of the past months lessened with each cleansing exhale. They dozed, limbs interwoven and enveloped by peace.

The candle she brought from the Schindlers’ house had long since extinguished. Only moonlight invaded their sheltered darkness, illuminating the cabin with traces of silver.

He eased her off his chest. Fumbling among the moonbeams, he found a candle and lit it with banked embers in the fireplace. From atop the piano, he retrieved the basket of cheese and bread his hosts had provided for breakfast.

“Tilda?”

She pulled from a groggy sleep, her face slightly lined from the fabric of the pillows.

Arie snuggled behind her and began the patient task of unlacing her stays, freeing her from the prison of the gown. The fabric gaped and sagged in unexpected places. “This is not yours.”

“Rain soaked everything. Frau Schindler gave this to me.” Shrugging her shoulders, Mathilda sighed as he massaged each new revelation of bared skin. “She told me she has no need for it anymore.”

“She enjoys her own cooking too well?”

“I would, too, if I could cook as she does.”

She stood away from the bed. Arie watched, dry-mouthed and entranced, as she wiggled her hips. The dress fell into a heap at her naked feet. Her grin turned unquestionably shy and she dove beneath the covers. Arie joined her within the cocoon of the blanket, and together they made short work of the food.

She worried a piece of bread with her fingers, heedless of the crumbs sprinkling across the quilt. With a look both sharp and vulnerable, she studied his face. “Arie, why did you do it?”

He flinched, startled as if by a gunshot. Lovemaking had loosened the knot of anxiety in his gut, forestalling the inevitable, but he had known her need. “The symphony?”

She exhaled slowly through her nose, nodding. After setting the bread aside, she pulled a corner of the quilt around her nakedness. “The symphony. Everything.
You.
This is your chance. You know I want to think the best of you.”

His fear multiplied, building a palpable wall between them. “And if you cannot? If I tell you all I thought and felt and you cannot—”

“I need to know.” She touched his shoulder, a simple gesture offering sanctuary and faith—as long as he told the truth. “Try, Arie.”

Against his will, he traveled to a region of his memory he rarely confronted, yet one that continuously shaded his life. Guilt propelled his words, certainly, but as he began to speak, so too did he feel a sense of relief. The privilege of sharing his history was the gift only Mathilda could have provided.

“My father was a merchant’s son who fought against the English, and then with the Dutch patriots.”

Memories of his father burned brightly in his mind: a wide mustache, tight lines around eyes that were Arie’s same color of blue, a voice of surprising expressivity and melody, the scent of stagnant canals and cigars. A pang of sharp remorse and injustice still burned within him, nearly two decades later.

“The English and the Austrians supported the monarchs, and the attempted revolution only increased their vengefulness. My grandfather lost his business selling glazes to potters.” He paused, a shudder overtaking him. “Both he and my father were hanged for treason when I reached six years.”

“Arie,” Mathilda whispered, her face ashen. She tightened her arms around her waist, hugging the quilt close. “I’m so sorry.”

He inhaled, hoping to dispel the tension that always accompanied that image, both beloved men swaying from ropes beneath a hastily erected scaffold in the shadow of the Nieuwe Kerk. Only a breeze laden with the stink of the canals had lent motion to those inert forms, already stiffening in the moments after death.

“My three sisters died as young children. My mother and I traveled to Bruges in Catholic Flanders where she found work as a maidservant. When she died, I had no one.”

Mathilda quietly stroked the length of his forearm, staring as if at a distant landmark. She sat in silence, in contemplation, and forced Arie to fill the distraught void.

“I wanted to be successful, a man to rival the foreign nobles my father had detested…but not to avenge them, not to prove my own worth. No, I thought to escape from my birth and be better than my parents.” His head throbbed—heavy, fat and bursting with malice. “I was a wreck of a boy.”

“And you began to tour?”

“Tour. Drink. Nothing mattered.”

He snorted and shook his head, his hair dipping across his line of sight. He thrust it back. “I performed where I could, no matter the destination. After a year, maybe longer, I arrived in the city of Pest. I had no money, no possessions, just my education and a string of successes in alehouse contests. Maestro Bolyai attended a competition and proposed a partnership.”

“How so?”

“He took me in and he completed my education. About music, about the business of music. I learned how to audition musicians, hire halls and print leaflets. I had no idea what performance taxes were, let alone how to pay them.”

Arie regarded his partner and her engrossed air. He found only sympathy in her hazel depths, an expression that gave him strength. He wanted to push his nose into her hair, breathing, calming himself. But he held fast. He would not touch her yet.

“In return…I think he was lonely.” He laughed, a manic sound of fatigue and worry. “Imagine that, a lonely composer living on his own. I helped with whatever I could, running errands. And I…I worshiped him. He was father and grandfather and teacher. My friend.”

He hunched his chest across his knees and threaded both hands through the hair at his temples. “When he grew ill…”

Throat tight, he could not speak. Seconds passed with the thudding rhythm of heartbeats as Arie worked to regain his composure. When he could not, he spoke past the pain and the building tears. “When he grew ill, I hated him.”

“Hated him? Arie, why?”

“For leaving me alone.
Again.
I was terrified.” His chest ached with an unrelenting heaviness. “I sat with him in that stifling room for weeks, nursing him, taking dictation for
Love and Freedom.
He ranted like a madman, humming and conducting an invisible orchestra. He waved his hands and the ropes beneath his mattress shook. Near the end, he could no longer speak. I kept working, trusting that some part of him still knew what he wanted to create.”

Talking threatened to pull him back, back to that foul room. He had wondered which would find satisfaction first: death or his dying maestro’s muse. And he had waited in vain for temptation to pass. Instead, dread and ambition had mingled to form an acid strong enough to erode his principles.

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen.” Tears blurred his picture of Mathilda. “When he slept, I prayed. I cried. But nothing changed. By the time he died, I thought…I thought I deserved to take it.”

Whereas Arie tried to hide his tears, Mathilda wept openly. “And now?”

“I was right to take it—he would have wanted to share his music. But I was a fool to claim it as my own. An ungrateful, scared fool.”

Arie. Arie. Arie.

Mathilda’s brain throbbed with him, absorbing his confession. She wanted to pull his hair as hard as he did, yanking him and demanding more. More contrition. More regret. She wanted to add to his hurt, to punish him for destroying her idol, smashing it beyond repair. She had believed him a hero, someone beyond the realm of human frailty. But no man had ever looked as piteous as Arie did, hunched and hating himself.

Yet memories remained. Arie at the piano in the Stadttrinkstube. Arie conducting at the Dom, his hands and hair flying. Arie at his studio, coaxing beautiful melodies to life. Beside her and above her and around her—she could not breathe for how she ached for him. For the frightened and lonely boy he had been. For the tormented and lonely man he had become.

Like Mathilda, he had been thrust into a life without security. But she had depended on Ingrid’s family and on Jürgen. She knew the comfort of their affection and care. She knew companionship and loyalty. Although an orphan, she had always had
someone
.

Sitting across from her on the bed, his chest arched over his knees, Arie was still alone. He believed himself beyond understanding. Even now he prepared for the worst, just as he expected the worst from his own musical efforts. Where she heard magic in his newest compositions, he heard only the failure of falling short of his mentor.

The story explained the curiosities of his character. His contempt for success had little to do with fame, fickle patrons or the difficulties of composition. Instead, guilt haunted him because his best-known work, no matter how many stunning pieces he produced in its wake, had been written by another man.

Renowned, famous, adored—idols needed no one. But Arie…he
needed.
He needed forgiveness. He needed to prove his worth.

He needed her.

Mathilda sniffed and pushed insistent tears from her cheeks. She reached between them, bridging the chasm with her arms, and patiently unwound his fingers from fistfuls of hair. She petted the distressed brown snarls back, touching, touching again. The quilt dropped from her breasts, but she made no move to replace it.

He turned to burrow his mouth into her palm, kissing her there. “Mathilda,” he rasped against her skin. “I swear, I will make amends.”

She caught his face in her hands and tugged against his lingering shame, forcing him to meet her eyes. “And when you do, I’ll be beside you.”

“I—”

“You don’t need to explain any more, Arie. Grief makes people act strangely. I know that.” Sitting up, she shook her head. “When Jürgen died, I followed the old customs. I washed his body. I rubbed ashes in my hair and slept in rags. At Sebastiankirche, Father Holtz offered his condolences. Neighbor women looked after me while the men buried him. But all the while, I kept waiting for a dark impulse to take hold of me.”

He watched her through a narrowed gaze. His knuckles, gripped in a fist in his lap, clenched to a sickly white. “What impulse?”

“The need to take my own life.”

“Mathilda!”

“I thought it would be inevitable, because I’m my mother’s daughter. Grief would overtake me and I would feel compelled to follow my husband into death.” The mattress wiggled as she shrugged. “Instead, I lived. I wanted to live, even when all I knew was guilt.”

“You cannot be like your mother, Tilda. You are stronger.”

“I don’t know that.”

“I do.” Pulling her arm, gently, he urged Mathilda into his embrace. A grim resolve covered his features, almost obscuring the fear that she would refuse him. But she went willingly, and he tightened his loving hold. “Why did you wait until now to ask? Why not after Frau Schlick’s concert, when you knew?”

Bunched muscles eased as she petted his forearms. “You want to know why I stayed with you that night, regardless of what I had learned?”

“Yes.”

“I was afraid, too.” Her breathing quickened even within the safety of his arms. Although the tension between them had somewhat dispelled, the pain and uncertainty of those days, those thoughts, threatened to resurface. “If I could no longer believe in you, what did I have left? I liked to think I could forgive anything, but it was safer not to ask at all.”

“You have done much of that, forgiving me.”

She pinched the back of his hand. “Don’t make a martyr of me. I did so out of necessity. To discover your flaws would’ve pulled down all of my fantasies. I would’ve lost the picture of you that had sustained me, needing to grieve all over again.”

“And now?”

“You’re a mess. And so am I. We are doomed, but we are together.”

She turned in his arms and traced the curve of Arie’s cheekbones, down to his mouth. His smile vanished, stealing her pulse.

“Arie, what is it?”

“I want to marry you.”