The Secret of the Glass (40 page)

She felt herself respond to the distinct pleasure of his caress, her body rousing where her mind only dared, reacting on its own. She gave sway to it, arching her back, and thrusting against him, an instinctual answer to his primal call. His body shuddered as it bent and curled around hers.

“If it’s all we can have…” he moaned against her lips, his breath a caress, his coarse whisper an animal’s low growl, “…then it is all I’ll ask, just, please, be mine tonight.”

With a low moan, a hard and fast grasp of the clothing she longed to tear from his hard chest, Sophia surrendered.

Teodoro’s hands moved down from her face, along the graceful curve of her neck, and over the round fullness of her breasts. He slipped apart each one of the long row of buttons on her bodice with the flick of a long, lithe finger, untying the cream satin laces of her shift beneath with slow, languid movements. Sophia felt the stirring touch of the breeze on her bare breasts. Her head fell back in pleasure as she released herself to the deluge of caresses, that of the wind, the rain, Teodoro’s hands, and his mouth.

Teodoro groaned and she felt the rumble of it against her abdomen. One powerful hand cupped the back of her head, the other the small of her back. Like a graceful dance, he lowered her until she sat on the cushioned ground, Teodoro kneeling by her side. He whipped off his doublet and laid it on the ground behind her.

His perusal of potent ardor found her face and she answered his silent question with a small smile, one more seductive than she herself intended. He laughed a deep, masculine growl, sweeping back the long strands of hair slicked against his forehead by the rain. He leaned toward her, his nose playfully teasing hers, brushing her lips with his moist ones, keeping them a breath apart as he lowered her upon the ground.

Teodoro hovered above her for a time, his eyes roving over her face; his features alight with wonder and desire. He lowered his lips to hers, worshipping at her mouth, tracing her lips with the tip of his tongue, sinuously moving it in and out. The warmth of his lips and tongue forged a trail of fire down her neck to lick at her breasts and the ache of pleasure throbbed along every nerve in her body, a pleasure she had never conceived in all her imaginings of this moment. He lowered his dark head, lapping at the hollow of her abdomen, his tongue tickling the tender skin between her ribs and her hips, drinking of the sweet rainwater that pooled there.

A throaty moan escaped her well-used lips as Sophia raised herself up on her elbows. Her heavy-lidded eyes traveled along the length of her half-naked body. She had to see Teodoro’s hands and mouth upon her, to know how his touch looked not just how it felt. Rising up, the rainwater that had collected in the hollows of her shoulders ran down her breasts in rivulets; where Teo’s fingers ended and the streams began, she could not tell. She languished in the concupiscent sensations, never more present in her life than in this abyss of time.

Saturated with rainwater, Teodoro’s white linen shirt stuck to his body, clinging evocatively to the hard muscles and tawny skin. Sophia needed to touch him, to feel his strength, a stroke she had been longing to experience for so long. She felt him quiver beneath her caresses and became bold, moving her flickering fingers down into the valley of his chest muscles and along the ripples of his abdomen, pushing the ties of his shirt apart to reveal the thin line of hair leading down his body.

Teodoro touched her face, his slick fingers brushing her lips and she opened her mouth to them, sucking on them, licking at the earthy water and the flavor of his skin.

Teodoro’s moan turned to a guttural growl. The naked lust so revealed, so pervasive in his impassioned eyes, Sophia felt a moment’s fear at the raw, unbridled passion; it clenched her in deeper arousal, her ache, her need tearing at her.

His eyes never leaving her face, he reached both hands down to the tangle of skirts upon her legs. Sophia saw it in his eyes; this gentleman waited for but one word, one look from her and he would stop. She gave him another smile.

Teodoro’s hands found the edge of her gown; they gathered the folds and lifted, raising them higher and higher upon her thighs. She felt a tingle as each dollop of water falling from the sky dripped upon her freshly revealed skin, gleaming in the dim light.

Teodoro’s eyes beheld her flesh, his features contorting as if in prayer, drinking upon the beauty of the sight. His head dipped, moving his lips closer to her shuddering flesh. Her eyes fluttered; she couldn’t breathe, strangled by anticipation. When his mouth and fingers found her, a million thoughts ravaged upon her mind. She discarded them all and just…felt.

Sophia lay on her right side, curled into a ball. One hand, propped beneath her head, served as a pillow while the other traced the angles of Teodoro’s face with her fingertips, as if to brand his masculine but elegant features indelibly upon her senses.

Teodoro faced her, similarly curled, the curve of his long form wrapped around her smaller one, a circle around a circle. With his head buttressed up on one hand, one graceful finger of the other caressed the bottom curve of the breast peeking out at him from her still-open bodice.

As night aged, the fog rushed in from the ocean, hulking around them in anonymity and stillness. Stars poked in and out of the clouds, sparks of pinpoint light glittering through the clearing sky. Their senses filled with the earthy redolence of the rain upon the earth as it mixed with the soil and plant oils and the scent of love upon their bodies, as their breathing slowed and deepened.

“Are you in…was there much…pain?” Teodoro asked, his husky, worried voice sounding much like the croaking tree frogs.

“There was.” Sophia held his face for a moment, wishing him no concern for her well-being. “It passed so quickly, I barely remember it. The pleasure chased it away.”

She lowered her eyes, embarrassed to speak so brazenly of what they’d shared.

Teodoro leaned toward her, smiling that sensual half smile, his lips capturing hers in a short, tender embrace. “I have never known its like.”

The contentment vanished from his features; his face clenched and tightened as he pressed her palm against his lips, closing his eyes against an onslaught of emotion.

Sophia leaned close, startled by the waves of his feelings. Like the deepest ocean, she longed for nothing more than to swim forever in their fathoms.

“There are moments, in every life, that stay forever, living in it, untouchable to time or distance.” She felt her throat tighten, the emotion tasting bittersweet. “For me,
this
is such a moment. I will have it, live upon it, forever.”

Teodoro lay his face against hers, resting there. When he pulled back, his tender, solicitous expression said what he could not.

In the distance, the tinkling of bells reverberated in the air, each small ting calling in another day.

“I spend the first minute of this day with you, as I wish I could every day,” Teodoro whispered.

Sophia lay back upon the fine cloth of his doublet, still damp with the heaven’s water.

“I cannot bear the thought of returning to that room. Not now, not after…this. To be there, even for a moment, would tarnish the beauty of this night and this time with you.”

Teodoro leaned over her, her vision filled with him as his lips lowered upon hers.

“I will send a note, from you to your friends, saying that you have hired a squire to escort you home and then I will take you there myself.”

Sophia nodded, her swollen, well-used lips curling softly upward. To be truly cared for was a satisfaction as deep as any physical coupling, expanding beyond the physical and into the spirit.

He left her by the gondola for a moment, long enough to pen the missive and send it on its way. Teodoro rushed back, assisting her off the shore and onto the waiting boat with almost doting concern. She knew he still worried for her discomfort but she felt little, no more than her monthly menses would cause, much less than she would endure when, by force, they would say good-bye.

Teodoro pressed a handful of coins into the gondolier’s waiting hand.

“We do not need to ride all the way, Teodoro, I can walk. The cost is so dear.” Sophia protested, knowing how few
ducats
he and his family possessed. A memory flashed in her mind and she almost smiled; she had become her mother.

Teodoro bobbed his head decisively at the gondolier, instructing him to make way.

“If I cannot spend what I have now, on you, then there will never be a more worthy time.”

They sat as close together as possible upon the cushioned bench closest to the stern, leaning against the rear of the slim vessel as they leaned against each other. Undulating, striated moonlight reflected off the water and up into their faces, the shining matching the light within them. They spoke to each other with their eyes. Their hands finding the other again and again in the eerie, wavering light, touching every part of the other, not in lust but in exploration and the raging desire to know the other, every inch.

They weren’t alone as they boarded the barge to Murano, even at this early morning hour. Sophia and Teodoro stood in a quiet corner, as far from the others as possible, watching as the domes of San Marco, and the gardens beneath it, their gardens, diminished on the retreating horizon.

The small boy ran up to them the instant they stepped off the barge and onto the
campo
at Murano.

“Signore, signorina, I will light your way.”

Raggedly dressed in simple clothes too small for him, smudged with dirt on his impish face, the child could have been no more than ten, but like so many others, he earned what he could carrying torches, leading pedestrians through all of night’s dark hours. Linkboys were everywhere in Venice, in this place as much alive at night as it was during the day.

Teodoro tossed him a coin. With keen deftness, the urchin snatched it from the air and raised his torch, the light shining blue upon his dark, tousle-haired head. Like all lantern bearers, he paraded a few paces ahead of them, holding his bright flame high.

They ambled in amiable silence, no need for words between them. Teodoro held her hand in his, the pad of his thumb rubbing circles on her soft skin. Here and there snippets of music found them, swirling through the air from the open windows and balconies above. Sophia imagined the people within, wondering if they were making love, enfolded in the throes of passion and ecstasy; she hoped they were, as she herself had been.

Their long shadows foreshortened as they approached the
anacone;
the torch-lit, street corner shrines. Their spectral selves changed in size as they drew closer, shrinking down to the size of small children. The silly perception made her smile; all of life was perception. She would see this night not as the
only
moment of greatness in her own, but as
the
greatest.

Teodoro’s thoughtful voice broke their comfortable cloak of silence.

“If you stayed, we—” He stopped abruptly, wrenching her to a halt beside him. “No, that’s wrong.”

Sophia took two steps back, a soothing hand upon his taut chest muscles. “If it vexes you so greatly, you must tell me, to rid yourself of it.”

He shook his head, but opened his mouth.

“If you stayed, you’d be married, but we would…we could be…together.” He slapped a hand against his forehead and closed his eyes. “When I think of your skin beneath my hand, the feel of your breath on my neck…” His lids flinched open “…the way your mind finds mine so distinctly, so perfectly, as if you can know my thoughts before I do. When I think of all this, I can think of little else and I get carried away.”

He captured her hand still firm against him. He held it tight in both of his, pressing it hard against his chest, the pounding of his heart reverberating through his clothes and into her palm.

“But then I think of you, your Mamma and sisters, and the life that may be forced upon you and I know myself as a truly selfish man.”

Sophia looked up into his lovely, troubled face, features sullen with anguish.

“A selfish man feels no remorse, feels no guilt for his wants.” She ran one delicate finger across his brow, lifting his fringe of hair out of his sorrowful, soulful eyes.

Teodoro shivered at her touch, grabbing her hand, pressing her palm against his cheek, melting into the touch of her hand upon his face. She smiled.

“You desire, you dream, you hope, as I do. There is no selfishness, only yearning.”

Teodoro closed his eyes. “I may have found you a way out.”

Sophia blanched, a tumult of words and questions bursting in her mind, but allowed him to continue.

“I have family in Greece that may be willing to assist, and…someone here who may help you get there.”

Hope thudded in her chest, jumping at the thought of freedom yet tempered with the pain of impending separation.

“You could not stay with them, my family, as much as I may wish you to, I would not put them in danger, but they will assist you in finding a home in another land, far from the reach of
La Serenissima.
Say nothing to anyone yet,” he instructed her. “I will send word.”

She raised herself up on her toes, kissing him with all she felt, all her gratitude and love she gave him with her lips. He brushed the trickling tear from her cheek as she lowered herself down.

“Walk on, boy,” he called out to the linkboy waiting in silent patience a few paces ahead.

They neared the small Ponte Santa Chiara. A short distance ahead, the light golden brick of Sophia’s home loomed into view on their right.

“You must leave me here,” she told him with a woeful whisper.

“But—”

“No, dear Teo, any closer and someone may look out and see you. I cannot explain you, not tonight. Someday I should like to tell them all of you, but not tonight.”

The muscles of Teodoro’s jaw jumped. He raised her hands to his mouth, his full lips kissing them, his tongue darting out to stroke one quivering palm. The rapture of their coupling rushed back to her with this lightest of touches, and she curled her body as the wave of it washed over her.