Seduction (9 page)

Caterina folded her hands under her apron.

‘Gently, B. Those aren't weeds. They won't grow if you're rough with them.'

‘Rough is best, believe me.' Beatrice thumped the wet grass back in and pushed at her headdress. ‘I could be in New Orleans or Vegas right now, having rough sex, backstage or in the bus, taking my pick of the dancers. They're the best.' She smiled, her wine-purple lips rolling back to show the sweet pink inside.

Once, when Caterina was new, the pair of them had been digging at the far end of the vineyard when Beatrice started singing an old blues song. Her deep voice had cracked from lack of use, but it made Caterina's heart beat faster.

Someone had heard, though, and after that they had been lashed, made to prostrate themselves in front of the others at Matins, then separated for weeks.

‘Strong, silent, hung like donkeys and oh so eager to please the lead singer. I was the star, Cat. I paid their wages. Sometimes I made them fuck me two at a time. And the performance on stage afterwards! You could smell it. But you wouldn't know about any of that, would you?'

Caterina tried to close herself off. Think of the muffled, powerful words like so many angry bees batting against her tight white cap. She plucked a couple of swollen grapes out of their leafy bed, and allowed herself a glimmer of pride. A year's tending, and they were perfect. So ripe in the palm of her hand. Oh God, she was hungry. Breakfast was a dry roll before daybreak, and now it was noon. So delicious if she could just take one tiny bite before taking the harvest to the wine press. Her teeth piercing the translucent skin, biting the red fruity flesh. The juice spurting onto her tongue, the cool, naughty liquid trickling down her throat. No one would know . . .

‘You're gorgeous when you smile. Like one of those teenagers the scouts pluck out of Top Shop and turn into virginal-waif supermodels.'

‘I'm not a teenager. I'm twenty.'

‘What a bloody waste! Smiling is God's gift we should all share, rather than forbid.' Beatrice tipped her face to the sun. ‘You'd never know we were in the middle of Tuscany. These four walls could be anywhere. Tennessee. Yorkshire. Anyway, what's so funny?'

Caterina liked the way smiling lifted her cheekbones. Her French mother used to stroke her face and call them
pommettes
. Little apples. But she pulled her mouth straight, back into its calm mask. ‘Just that we've another lead singer to please now.'

‘Very good. Try telling that to Mother Mary and see how she likes the analogy.'

Beatrice's smile was twisted.

‘That's all behind you. Why are you talking as if it's still happening?' Caterina glanced at the bell tower. Five minutes before the next silence. ‘You were the one who took me under your wing and convinced me this was the life.' Caterina blushed and leaned closer to Beatrice. Even this, being physically close, actually touching sleeves, was wicked because it
was forbidden. ‘You said hearing the Voice was like the rush of a class-A drug!'

‘And it was. I meant it. I was running away. But it's been three years. Something's changing in me.' Beatrice sighed. Her breath was warm and smelt of honey.' I have these dreams, Caterina. Being on stage, being fucked on stage, those dancers taking me right there in front of the crowd, except the crowd is all of you in the chapel. How kinky is that? But that's why it feels like it's all happening now. Every morning I wake up, and my fingers are shoved right up inside me, and I'm really wet, and I'm moving with them, so I push them right in and all I can think about is a big hard cock fucking me.'

She ran her finger over Caterina's top lip. ‘Smell that?'

Caterina sniffed Beatrice's finger, knowing she shouldn't. The sharp, sweet tang on her skin was instantly familiar.

‘That's my pussy juice. From this morning.'

‘Stop it, I won't listen, I can't listen to this!' Caterina put her hands over her ears and started muttering her prayers.

But Beatrice grabbed her and slid her hand up under the thick white linen veil flapping round her shoulders to touch the soft skin on Caterina's neck. Caterina flinched, and Beatrice breathed into her ear. ‘If you respond that quickly to one little touch, sister, how do you think you'd feel to have a cock ramming up you? Two gorgeous men fucking you, front and back, both at the same time?'

Caterina shook her head wildly, the bees buzzing right inside her ears now. Sensations shot through her, straight from where Beatrice was touching her neck down to the place under her apron, under her dress, under her serge petticoat, under the scratchy bloomers where her white thighs, her bottom, her dark private parting, were warm and naked and loosening . . .

‘Shall I tell you what else you're missing, Kitty Cat? All those earthly delights you've never tasted? Might never taste? The kissing, the licking, the way his cock goes hard when you
stroke it. Even when he sees you. The feel of it sliding in, opening you up, pushing inside you.'

Caterina looked into Beatrice's dark-brown eyes. It was like she was being tugged by a string, no, a great thick rope, towards all those dirty things Beatrice was saying, all those wild pictures she was drawing.

‘You can't give up all that pleasure. I don't care what Mother Mary says. Or what I said three years ago. I have to get back there, Caterina.'

And then the bell started to ring from the tower. They both glanced up to watch it swinging heavily from its wooden frame.

Beatrice jumped up then looked down at Caterina shivering on her hands and knees in the wet grass.

‘Anyone visiting you today?'

Caterina breathed deeply. Thank God, the subject, the temptation, the buzzing of those bees, those stinging dirty thoughts, was going. She bowed her head. ‘They've all turned against me.'

‘Well, I have a feeling someone's here for me. I'll leave you to your precious vines.'

‘Yes. It's time to make the wine.'

Beatrice took a step towards the convent. Already there was something different in the way she moved. Not the ghostly glide that made them invisible, but an obstinate stride. Caterina couldn't keep her eyes off her. The way she moved showed her body, her hips, the secret curve of her breasts. Even the divide between her legs. It was as if she could see right through her clothes to those long dark legs.

She turned, caught Caterina looking at her. Caterina felt coiled, her heart juddering in the chest she kept mercilessly bound.

‘You might not be a teenager, sister, but you're about the only one of us who is truly a virgin. You really want to stay that way forever?'

The bees were becoming a distant drone in the back of her head, but they buzzed with a vengeance at the dead of night. In her cell Caterina's fingers strayed under her nightgown as she thought about those big black dancers taking her roughly in front of a congregation. Wondered but could guess how it would feel as her nails scratched over the cool white flesh of her thighs, sensed the warmth pulsating from her opening sex, yearned to go further.

Down the hall Beatrice and the other sisters slept. Or perhaps they didn't? Perhaps they all dreamed of their past lives full of lovers, remembering naked limbs and bodies rubbing against each other and getting sweaty, men kissing and touching, maybe even other women kissing and touching them. Her sisters, putting fingers inside themselves while they writhed silently on their unforgiving horsehair pallets.

But Beatrice was leaving. She would soon be free of that wicked whispering.

The sun was blistering and Caterina was at the far end of the vineyard, where Beatrice had once sung to her and got them both into trouble. The last basket of grapes was heavy, but she kept silent, didn't even grunt as she lifted it towards the cool press ready to be turned into intoxicating wine.

The air hummed with heat. Sweat gathered in a hot wet tangle under her veil. Pooled in her armpits. Snaked down her neck and formed a jagged stain down her back. She got halfway across the parched lawn and stopped. A motorbike was roaring up the road from Siena and with a climactic revving of the throttle it stopped at the end of the private lane. All her senses were alert. A deer sensing danger rather than a prisoner sensing freedom.

Someone was rolling barrels about in the wine house while the augur fed the grapes into the crusher, but no one else was visible. They would all be inside, scrubbing the floors or
preparing lunch. But Caterina had shamelessly used what was left of her feminine wiles to get and keep this job. Chore, task, whatever. The red, potent wine from the fertile vines was the convent's main source of income other than anonymous donations, but they'd been about to abandon the press when, after that lashing she'd received last year, Caterina begged them to let her tend the grapes, even if she didn't have the skills to make the wine. And somehow, with eyelashes and innocence, she kept getting her way.

Now there were footsteps on the dusty road. Caterina crawled under the jungle of vines and ivy and clambering roses. She couldn't resist it. She pushed aside the glossy leaves to reveal a slit in the crumbling stonework and pressed her eye against the hole in time to see stones and grit being kicked up in front of the approaching feet.

Beatrice came into view. She was wearing faded old jeans and a white T-shirt. Caterina couldn't see as high up as her face, but she could see the outline of Beatrice's big breasts, pushing against the low-cut cotton, and the gleaming skin on her arms, and a sliver of chocolate stomach as she suddenly bent to put her rucksack down on the ground, right in front of Caterina's spyhole.

‘You there, Kitty Cat? Breaking the golden rule?'

She rested her hands on her knees and stooped to grin straight at the wall. Caterina swallowed. Beatrice had ringlets coiling off her head. Bracelets on her wrists. And big black breasts dangling down inside the T-shirt, threatening to fall out of it.

‘You know the first thing I'm going to do? My mate on the motorbike? Christ, how did I bear it in there?' Beatrice ran her hands over her breasts. Her pink tongue slipped wetly across her red painted lips. ‘I'm going to pull my knickers off and I'm going to sit on his face, right there outside the gate, and spread my pussy all over his mouth, and I'm going to make him lick
my sweet wet hungry cunt, make him do it real slow till I come in his face.' She moaned and tilted her head back, gyrated there in front of Caterina. ‘Then I'll make him fuck me.'

Caterina felt the moisture springing in the curly hairs round her – what had Beatrice called it? – her cunt. Her pussy. Her sex. She pressed her thighs together. There was a pulse going, just inside, close enough to touch, the same deep throbbing she felt at night when those buzzing thoughts tormented her, those dirty things Beatrice had done and was going to do again. Her breath rasped in her ears as Beatrice touched herself out there in the deserted lane.

What would be the harm, no one could see, just one touch, just put her hand under her skirt and stroke there on the soft twitching skin, push through the curly hairs and feel that slick of wetness. She was safe in her garden. It would be like picking out a tune on the piano in the parlour. She moved her hands over her thighs, over the thick material of her garments, rubbed them up and down, each time shifting her skirt a little higher, over her ankles, over her knees . . .

‘But you'd better be careful, girl. You'll get a lashing. But maybe you'd like that. You know, I creamed myself when Mother Mary lashed me last year. That's why I like getting into trouble. You know that? All wet smeared down my petticoat afterwards.' She turned her back, stuck her bottom out and slapped her rump, hard. ‘Hmm, maybe it's not so bad in there after all.'

Then she picked up her rucksack and was gone. Caterina was shaking, her fingers clawing at her skirts. Beatrice found sex everywhere, even in the lashing of those whips across their bottoms when they'd sinned.

She let the branches bounce back over the hole and staggered backwards into the sunshine, panting and doubled over. One of her stockings had come loose, rolling down her leg and irritating her, the black wool scratching her skin to leave it raw
and sensitive as if she'd been burned. She pointed her toe like a ballerina, lifted her skirt and reached under it to yank up the stocking.

A bird screeched up behind her and she jumped round, leg still cocked, dizzy with heat and blinded by the sun. In the glare a tall figure stood holding her heaped basket of grapes.

‘Oh, Sister Agnes, I was just – I thought I heard a swarm of bees.'

The figure said nothing and started walking off towards the wine press. It was wearing trousers.

Caterina shielded her eyes and stared. It was a man. The only man she'd seen in over a year apart from Father Christophe. And not a wrinkled old man like the priest, but a tall man with wild black hair and wide shoulders and long legs in baggy blue stained trousers. Strong, suntanned arms, the muscles flexing as he lifted her heavy basket like it was a punnet of strawberries.

Her stomach knotted right behind her navel. Her mouth went dry. Beyond the gate the motorbike suddenly roared into life, making her squeal with shock at the unaccustomed din. The man kept walking. The bike screeched off towards the horizon. Still he took no notice. So. Had Beatrice done it? Had she pulled down her jeans and her knickers and sat on her friend's face like she had said?

The bell, goddamnit, started to toll.

‘What are you doing with my grapes?' She let her skirt drop down her legs, the fabric brushing her skin and settling back around her ankles. But her habit didn't comfort her. It suffocated her. She wanted to kick her skirt off, rip off her veil, her blouse, feel the sun burning into her skin. She tried a harsh whisper. ‘Are you the guy coming to make the liqueur?'

He didn't answer. She tapped him on the shoulder, bristling with impatience. ‘Excuse me?'

He looked round slowly. The curly hair was streaked with grey, and the stubble on his chin was flecked with white. How
would Beatrice describe him? Handsome? Rugged? Craggy? Old? Horny. The word bit at her from nowhere, and she shoved her hands under her apron to stop them flying up to her reddening face. The way he hoisted that basket. And the eyes. Green and deep-set under a ferocious frown.