Those Wicked Pleasures (44 page)

It was all too perfect, too right. She was too happy. How could she keep from him such a secret as she had? She saw how women looked at him with longing, at her with envy. Two days in Rome and she understood. He was the most eligible man in Italy, adored by the
demimonde
, respected by the snob Italian aristocrats.

How could she deceive this very special man? How not tell him about his father? Yet how to tell him about his father? She didn’t want to deceive him. But she didn’t want to reveal her secret either. Not least because Evan would have deplored her doing so. All those years of being a back street love and now to come out with it? Impossible. But what would Charles want her to do? He had already told her, ‘Keep your secrets.’ But such a secret as this?

When, after he placed the ring on her finger, he asked her to commit herself to a date for their wedding, she kept changing the subject. He pressed on. He knew what he wanted and he was not going to let her go. He could not understand her sudden hedging. He asked her, ‘Do you have doubts?’

Caught off guard, she answered him truthfully: ‘No doubts about you.’

‘You must. Or you wouldn’t be hesitating about the time and place.’

Her hesitation was posing more of a problem for Lara than he could have guessed. She had found in their relationship physical, spiritual and emotional love. The very idea of living again without those things was a reminder of the past, those bleak times in her life before she had met his father. He was forcing her to push forward with her life while the secret held her back. It made Lara uneasy.

‘Nine years’ age difference,’ she told him. ‘I think I’m worrying about that. I think I’ll be cheating you of nine more years of babies you could make with a younger woman. I saw the way those beautiful young things we met on the Via Veneto looked at you.’

‘You can’t seriously be thinking of throwing our love away because of an age difference? You should have thought about that before I took you in my arms for our first dance. Not valid. Now that’s the end of that.’

‘Not quite.’

‘Oh, you’ve found another excuse not to marry me? A better one, I hope, than the last.’

‘It isn’t, it’s the same one. I can live with my being older than you. But can you? You say it doesn’t matter, but what about your friends, what will they think? And your mother? Oh, I just bet she will sing hosannas to have
an older woman for a daughter-in-law. Especially one with two children and a past!’

The very thought that she would have to meet his mother appalled her. How could she live with that? Facing Evan’s wife and his son, with such a great secret to keep from them. How could she reveal to them that she had been the last great love of Evan’s life? Evan and her secret life with him now belonged to the past. She had distanced him from her mind and her heart, but he was not forgotten. He had wanted it that way; it had been hard going, but she had accomplished it. Nothing – not even falling in love with his son, wanting to marry him and to begin to build a real home with him and have children again; not even facing Evan’s wife – could bring back emotions about what she once had with Evan. But it was the deceit that troubled her, panicked her even. The dilemma was eroding this love and her desire to start a new life with Charles. Lara knew that he was the love that she had never found as a girl. The young love that had eluded her. That she had been searching for and, having missed, had taken many different paths to find. Here was her future laid before her, there for the taking, and her dilemma was killing it. His voice broke into her thoughts.

‘My mother? No. I suppose I didn’t mention it. My mother is no longer with us. She died. I lost both my parents within the same year. First my mother and then, almost seven months to the day later, my father. How they would have loved you! And they would have been so happy that I have found someone as special as you.’

That news shocked her. She seemed unable to recover herself sufficiently to find words to express to Charles how sorry she was for his loss. Instead she tried to put her own thoughts out of her mind and concentrate on what he was telling her.

‘It was so sad. She put up a heroic battle against her illness for a very long time, three awful years.’

Lara wanted to hear no more. Evan and his family had been blocked out of her life. She didn’t want to know about them now. But Charles continued, and what she heard only added to her dilemma.

‘I loved my mother. She was a great lady. My father was devoted to her, and so was I. But we had a long time to get used to the idea that she was going to die, so it wasn’t a shock when it came. In many ways a relief. The real shock for me was when, seven months later, my father was killed in that accident in Paris.’

Seven months. For the last seven months of her life with Evan, he was a widower and free to marry her. It was too much to contemplate. Lara tried to forget what she had heard.

They had been having that conversation sitting in the late afternoon sunshine in a street café. The ‘beautiful people’ of Rome were having their afternoon aperitifs. There was the usual chatter all around them, and laughter, and waiters rushing to and fro. Quite suddenly Charles stood up and pulled her up out of her chair with him. He kissed first her hand and then the ring he had given her only a short time before. Then he pulled her roughly into his arms and kissed her deeply, with such passion that for a few seconds she forgot everything else.

Everybody loves a lover. Neighbouring tables of young Romans supplied cat-calls and applause and called out in Italian, cheering him on. He released Lara and they both smiled, and when she began to laugh, he was thrilled. It seemed obvious to him that nothing could keep them apart, no matter what excuses she made.

Pulling her into his arms once more, preparatory to kissing her again, he told her in a low voice, ‘You see how people react to us? They see no age difference any
more than I do. They see only love and passion between a beautiful young man and woman. And what do they do? Applaud us.’ Then he placed his lips upon hers and kissed her again and felt her give in to him, her lips parting. Their tongues met. Under her open jacket she felt his hands caress her breasts; the hidden, but to her obvious, bulging within his trousers rubbed against her. She felt dizzy with yearning for him. They were pelted with little bunches of spring flowers bought by the playful romantic Romans from the baskets of the two gypsies working the pavement in front of the café.

The lovers separated at last. Though Lara was pink with embarrassment, she was the only one. Charles was all smiles and taking bows. Clinging to Lara’s hand, he told her, ‘I am the envy of every man here. You are mine and that’s that. Do you understand?’

There could be but one answer to that. ‘Yes,’ she told him, and then again but louder, ‘Yes,’ for all to hear. ‘Yes.’

A burst of applause from their now enthralled audience. Charles, the happiness visible in his handsome young face, ignored it. He pressed on, ‘Since you seem incapable of setting the date, I will. Three weeks from today. You can decide the place. Now say yes just one more time.’

A hush had suddenly fallen all around them. All that could be heard was the honking of horns and the hum of the traffic going past the café. Even the waiters had stopped to hear her answer. They had the dozen or so tables now involved in their romance.

Lara threw her arms out, as if to embrace the world. ‘Yes!’

The place erupted in convivial applause and lots of laughter. A few men rose from their chairs to shake Charles’s hand, and pat him on the back. One young man
kissed Lara on the cheek. Everyone was chattering away among themselves or congratulating Lara and Charles. He grabbed her with one hand and the waiter with the other, thrusting some money into the waiter’s hand. ‘Negronis for anyone who wants to drink to our happiness.’ Then he pulled Lara between the tables to the kerb where they jumped into a taxi. Both leaned out of the same window, waving goodbye to a café full of strangers.

She fell back in the seat laughing. ‘You are mad, Charles. What an exhibition.’ And then added, ‘And what fun.’

‘Not mad, just happy. Well,’ he conceded, ‘maybe, mad
and
happy. Let’s go back to the hotel and make love.’

‘Yes, please,’ was her answer to that.

There were moments during his passionate possession of her when she would be overcome to think that this handsome, multi-faceted, very special, so-sexy young man and she were going to have fun together for the rest of their lives.

He had learned so quickly the things that excited her sexually. He had found ways to give her multiple orgasms where she could hardly catch her breath. He was, among other things, a young stud in his full sexual prime. He wanted to exercise that in every way he could with her. He seemed, as once Jamal had been, obsessed with taking her down a path of sexual bliss, and revelled in her comings. He liked to rub her body and whisper the sexual delights he had in store for her that he knew would make her come. He liked to fuck her in the steamy bath-water and then, clean, lie her on a towel on the floor and massage her warm body with oil of almonds until she glistened and smelled like an orchard of almond trees in full bloom. And then he enjoyed taking her slippery-smooth
body and rubbing it against his while he fucked her fiercely from the front and then the back, and filled her with his sperm, and told her about all the love-babies they would make.

They had dinner brought to their suite of rooms. There they dined on artichokes, pasta with cream and three cheeses, and cherry ice-cream – which he rubbed inside the lips of her cunt. She writhed with the cold against her warm genitals, and laughed while it melted and he licked his ice-cream from what he called his favourite vessel. Sex was fun and crazy at such times with him. He tried to insert spoonfuls of the ice-cream into her and suck it out. Sated with sex, they fell asleep to the sound of a clock chiming the small hours away.

Lara slept at first the deep sleep of the exhausted, and then fitfully. She woke and tried to fall asleep again. She tossed and turned. Awake, it came rushing back to her over and over again that Evan had never told her his wife was dead, that they had been free to live openly. He had never given her an inkling that anything had changed in their circumstances. That they might have married and made a home together. Not a word. Only that single important hint. She should have guessed something was amiss when he told her he wanted to take her to Tuscany. And she didn’t even get it. She had been so drilled into believing they could never go there together, she had crossed Tuscany out and been unable to accept Evan’s suggestion.

The last thing she thought of before drifting off once again into a deep sleep was that in the morning she would tell Charles they had been hasty, she needed more time. There was too much to cope with if she married him now. She felt suddenly like a woman with too much of a past to settle on this delicious young lover, lying blissfully happy in peaceful sleep next to her.

It had been Lara’s intention to sit down and talk sensibly to Charles, to make him understand that they had been acting in haste, in moments of passion, when they committed themselves to marry in three weeks’ time. That in the cold light of day she had thought better of it. This seemed the only way she could solve her dilemma. Her intentions were thwarted the moment she opened her eyes to the kiss he placed upon her lips, an affectionate, gentle kiss, and saw the love he had for her shining in his eyes.

She pulled herself up against the headboard of the bed, and he arranged the pillows behind her to make her more comfortable. She gazed at him, his youth, his handsomeness, the fierce intelligence in his face, the provocative sensuous way he used his body. She knew by the way women turned to look at him when he was walking down a street, when he was relaxed and in conversation, that it was not just her own sexual attraction to him calling out. He was a passionately lusty young man who had had all the women he had ever wanted. There was something about his young flesh, his vigour, his passionate love for her, that told her what folly it was to run away from him. And yet …

She smiled at him. He removed the sheet covering her and gazed at her nakedness. He was making love to her with his eyes and his heart. He kissed her on her flat tummy, caressed her hips and then cupping one breast in his hands, he sucked hungrily on her dark, erect nipple. With his thumb he caressed the nimbus around it and then tongued it gently. She could not hold back her sighs of pleasure. He pulled her into his lap and said, ‘Good morning. It is my intention to wake you every morning of our life together with some sort of kiss. Just to remind you how extraordinarily lovely and sensuous a woman you are, and how much I appreciate your love.’

She wanted to weep, so touched was she by his love for her. He found her clitoris and teased it with hungry fingers, then slipped them between the lips of the slit beneath her Mound of Venus and buried them as deep deep inside her as his hand could reach. Then rocking her lightly in his arms he caressed her already moist, silky-smooth vagina. She placed her arms around his neck and rested her head against his chest.

‘I have to stop this, and you have to get dressed. But first you must call your children. A change of plans. We are not going to Perugia today, and you will not get to see Fontefresca for a while yet. We are going to have lunch with some friends in the country – my best friends, in fact. And then we are Concording to New York. The children will meet our plane, and I am whisking you all off to LA and a house on the beach in Malibu where we are going to spend a few days together. It would be nice for the children to like me before they have to call me Dad.’

‘I have to think about this, Charles.’

‘What’s to think about? I have to meet them sometime.’

Slowly and most reluctantly he withdrew his caresses. He licked his fingers and laughed. ‘Have a taste. It’s still cherry ice-cream.’

He carried her to the bath he had already drawn for her, placed her gently in the scented water and handed her a sponge.

‘And why LA?’ she asked.