Those Wicked Pleasures (43 page)

He took several steps back, but still held her hand. It was as if he wanted to get a better look at her, to etch her into his mind for ever. He told her, ‘I’ve been wanting to do that since the moment I saw you at the top of the stairs. I will remember you always in your exotic costume and feathered mask. One day I will have your portrait painted, dressed just as I see you now, so that all our children, our grandchildren and theirs, will know who you were, and be enriched by it and by your beauty.’

What was she to say? Overcome by his kisses and now by his words, she felt he was like no other man she had ever known, except maybe David. She reached out to trace his lips with the tip of a finger. She smiled, knowing
that the love she felt for him showed. He placed an arm around her waist and together they walked slowly down the long hall with its frescoed walls, their heels clicking on the marble floor. To the distant sounds of revelry and music drifting up from the party below and rain pounding against windows, enveloped by the scent of flowers and burning wax from the thousand candles lighting the palazzo, they each yielded to love.

She stopped in front of a door flanked by a pair of period pedestals topped by impressive white marble busts. ‘Your room?’ he asked.

‘Our room, I think.’

‘Only think?’ He hesitated. ‘You think?’ he repeated. ‘This is our entrance into paradise! I don’t have to think about it, and I don’t want you to have to either. Trust me. I’m already in love enough for both of us.’

Irresistible words for a woman. And most especially for a romantic woman looking for love and passion from a young man. It was she who opened the door. He followed her into the candle-lit room. When she heard the click of the lock, something in her heart clicked too.

He put a taper to the fire that had been laid in the massive fireplace. The flames whooshed, and then he gave his attention to Lara. He seemed not at all in a rush, but happy to savour every nuance of disrobing her. He caressed the feathers of her mask before he unclipped it. It was a nervous moment for them both when he removed it and Lara was revealed to him. His pleasure was obvious in his eyes. Her heart was beating fast while she watched and waited for him to untie the black ribbon that held his own mask in place. ‘Some day we can wear them while we make love. But for our first time, no.’

Without his mask, her hopes were confirmed. But she was nevertheless surprised. He was very handsome, with a large head dominated by magnificent bone structure.
He had a perfect Roman nose, a face more sensitive than somehow she had expected, and fiercely intelligent. Unmasked there was an even greater sexuality about him. He emanated a kind of bold sensuality – that of a man who loves women and making love to them, and does quite a lot of what he likes. It was all in his face and the way he moved, but so too was a bold honesty and an impressive self-confidence. Here was a young man who did not deal in fantasies. He believed he could have anything he wanted, and went out and got it.

He pulled the small diamond-star pins from her hair. The eighteenth century suddenly became now. The long, silky strands fell prettily down round her shoulders and back. He ran his fingers through the silvery tresses, gathered a handful and brought it to his lips. He removed his jacket, then his tie and waistcoat. She undid the bodice of her dress and allowed it to slip down to the floor. Their pleasure mounted as their garments fell from them.

Lara was astounded at how beautiful a body he had. His young flesh exerted its power on her. She caressed his arms and his chest. To feel his skin! The scent of him excited her. He stood before her now, naked and proud, and she in nothing but sheer black stockings and satin pumps with diamond buckles. He led her from beside the bed to in front of the fire, and threw cushions on the floor. She lay down on them and he dropped to his knees next to her. He raised her leg and removed her shoe – then higher and she watched him slowly roll down the stocking. The light from the blazing fire danced and reflected on them as if they too were aflame. He kissed the inside of her thigh, the back of her knee, the instep of her foot.

He didn’t have to ask her. She opened her legs wide, and placing her feet flat on the carpet held her arms open for him. He knelt between her legs. She revelled in gazing
at his body: the slim hips, the taut skin, the triangle of bushy pubic hair, the circumcised penis looking large and virile, lying flaccid along his thigh. His genitals looked to her sexy, perfect, the thick penis so in proportion to its length, and the sac beneath. The thighs so strong and muscular. In this young flesh and taut body, the magnificence of the genitalia, the warmth of character and virile sexuality, Leonardo would have found a perfect model.

It was as if she had been hungry for him all her life; had missed him in her youth, and had been seeking him out ever since. She felt so young, as young as she had been when taken for the first time by Sam. She had been ready for this man then, she was ready for him now. Only this time around the desperation to be loved was thankfully gone. The need was not so pressing. What she desired was not only for herself but for him too. To share her life with him. To give him the very pleasures she wanted. That came naturally to her because she sensed how much he wanted to be loved by her, taken by her into erotic oblivion. That in itself was a kind of excitement.

He pulled her up from the cushions by her hands and together in front the fire, facing each other, they took their time over their kisses and caresses. He told her how much he loved her body, the ripeness of it. The way he handled her breasts, caressed her bottom, licked her cunt – these were not the clumsy gropings of a callow boy. He was a seducer, who found lust in the very act of sexual seduction. He made love beautifully with the dominating lust and desire of a classic Don Juan, yet she felt him yield, responsive to being made love to by a woman. That added to the already smouldering fire in her, and her erotic sense flared up.

She felt the weight of his penis in her hands and the
softness of its skin, swelling with surges of lust for her. She licked the underside with pointed tongue until she found what she wanted. Holding the sac in her hands, she fondled and licked it moist. She sucked, she came. He had no inhibitions, held nothing back. Except that crucial climax. It was for sharing with her. Hence his tempered sighs of ecstasy. Rampant now, he was more than ready to take her. She held him off until she could see his love-lust was changing to passion gone wild with desire. Only then did she give herself up to him.

Such were her new beginnings. He had been right. They belonged to each other.

Dawn arrived in streaks of pearly grey and bands of pink. The storm had blown itself out, leaving the piazzas flooded, the canals swollen. The palazzo was quiet but not silent.

‘This is madness,’ she told him. Her happiness shone in her eyes. She was tingling with the expectations of adventure and love that being with this young man aroused.

‘Love is madness.’

They left her bedroom a shambles of discarded eighteenth-century clothes. More casually dressed, they padded carefully and quietly down the hall trying to avoid meeting anyone. He appeared to know his way around the palazzo and found the servants’ staircase easily. In the vast kitchen they seemed to know him and made him welcome. He charmed the cook and butler, teased several of the other helpers. Large cups of black coffee were produced. Chunks of newly baked bread still warm from the ovens were spread with thick slabs of fresh, sweet butter. They cut wedges of a semi-soft, white cheese, hungrily adding it to their morning snack. A bunch of big fat black grapes was there for the taking. The cook offered them slices of luscious pink ham. They ate
the butler handed them a large open wicker basket with a dramatically arched handle. A white damask napkin emblazoned with the family crest covered its contents.

Some notes were tucked in the butler’s pocket then Lara was taken by the hand and whisked out across the back garden, around the side of the palazzo and through a gate to where a gondola was waiting. There was a conversation and more bank-notes were paid over. They boarded the gondola. He took her in his arms, she laid her head against his shoulder. The gondolier plied his oar, and they quickly left the Grand Canal for a smaller one. They wove their way through the lesser waterways of Venice while the city came slowly to life.

‘What did you say in your note?’ he asked her.

‘ “Great party. Have run off with a handsome young man. Don’t worry, will be back in three days’ time.” What did you say in yours?’

‘ “Thanks. Have abducted the most beautiful woman at the ball.” ’

Chapter 29

They spent an idyllic three days on a small island far out in the lagoon, more than an hour from the palazzo on the Grand Canal. A deserted place of tall grasses and wild flowers, and a canal that ran in from the sea. There were ruins (A temple? A church? The house of a prince?), fragments of sculptures, pillars and capitals lying broken in the grass. A marble chair cut from a single block. Blazons of carved lions mutilated and worn from centuries of wind and rain wafting across this open flat place.

A ruined house from antique times incorporated a courtyard with a marble well at its centre. An impressive arched cloister stood half in ruins.

He pulled her along after him with childlike enthusiasm, anxious for her to see it all. From under a stone, he took a large iron key. He opened the house and flung wide its shutters. One large room had windows that faced the lagoon on one side, the courtyard on the other. A wall of books, and a sturdy eighteenth-century Venetian table. A Doge’s chair stood near a huge double bed covered in clean crisp white linen and large square pillows, a blanket of silver fox. On a mosaic floor, as old as the ruin itself, stood a black concert grand piano, a gilded bench with shapely legs, covered in a faded tapestry depicting a wood.

Leading off that room was another, a kitchen with a
large table and chairs, a great fireplace, a wood-burning stove, and a white marble sink. Off that a bathroom dominated by a white marble bath, once a sarcophagus.

A small motor-launch visited once a day to deposit on the bank a basket of fruit, bread and cheese, wine, cured meat, and fresh pasta which he cooked for her, dressing it at each meal with a different succulent sauce: tomato, a perfect pesto, once something as simple as oil and fried garlic. Otherwise no one else appeared at the island. They had it all to themselves. By night, kerosene lamps and candles and love. By day, the sun and the sea. They hardly spoke. Instead, they explored the island and made love.

Lara was reminded of another time and another island, but this was not Sam. This was a young, sensitive man with a strong libido like her own. He delighted in her sexuality, did not feel threatened by it. Like Jamal, he wanted only to feed it, take it and her along with it, to even greater adventures. It was here, not at the palazzo, that they explored the wilder bounds of eroticism. Here that he took command of her sexually with his youth, vigour, and a libido that demanded adventurous sex. He knew well how to play with depravity, how to satisfy their lust and continually excite a vital relationship between them.

The days and nights seemed to drift into one and they lost track of time, as they lost themselves in each other. They were like a single being with two souls. They bathed naked in the sea, and often walked that way through the tall grasses, gathering bouquets of wild flowers. He read her poetry: Keats, Shelley, Cavafy. She played the piano for him, and often he would play Schubert and Schumann for her. This beautiful young man whom she had run away with must surely be the one she had been seeking to share a life with. Happiness, real happiness, must at last be within her grasp.

It was time to leave the island, quit one world he had created for them for another. He told her, ‘We must always remember this is as much the real world as any. This is what our life is going to be, wherever we may be. It was a perfect place and time to fall in love. Repeatable wherever we are, for every day in our life.’

She could have wept. What had she done in her life to have deserved this remarkable young man? She had no doubts that there had been for him many other women but that he had never said such words to any of them.

‘Is that why you bought this place. To fall in love?’

‘Maybe. I’d have bought it for that. But, really, it’s been in the family always. A place no one but me ever wanted. In fact, my mother gave it to me. I am restoring it. Who knows why? Maybe it was to fall in love. Who can say? I go to a masked ball, and my life is turned upside down. In an instant I find the one piece that has been missing. Everything has changed for me. Is it the same for you?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘I don’t ever want you to leave me.’

‘I won’t. I couldn’t. Nothing in this world could make me do that. To begin again with you – it’s like a rebirth. It will be a wonderful life. Where shall we begin?’

He laughed from sheer happiness. ‘I think we have.’

‘We have to leave, and I don’t know where the time has gone.’

‘I do. It vanished, was blown away when love and sex took over. Do you think it will be like this for the rest of our lives? What bliss.’

‘There will be problems. Even greater than the difference in our ages,’ she said, matter-of-factly, but without anxiety.

‘That’s life. We’ll solve them, or learn to live with them. We’ll do what it takes.’

‘There are things you should know.’

‘There are things that both of us should know.’

‘I’ve had a complex life. It has taken a great deal of living to straighten it out.’

‘And I. Do you think I don’t have a life behind me? And I also have a reputation. A womaniser who has never fallen in love. Until now. I told you we don’t have to tell each other all our secrets. No confessions, my darling.’

‘If you take me on, you take on two children with me.’

‘I love children. We’ll give them little brothers and sisters.’

This was the first time they actually spoke about themselves. They had been too busy with sex and love and the sun and their island to reveal much in words, to talk about pasts or think about futures. And now the world was coming in on them, yet it was not an intrusion, but an addition to add to an already rich and beautiful love. They fell silent. ‘Little brothers and sisters’ sparked that sexual attraction so very much alive between them. And they wanted each other. They stopped talking and gave themselves up once more to Eros.

In those three days of sex with this young man on his romantic island, he had taught Lara to let loose and to call out, to cry into the wind as she came. It had touched a nerve in her sexual being and she found yet another kind of security in being able to express her lust in that way. Had he no inhibitions, this beautiful young man who had inspired her to shed what little sexual reticence she did have? Only when they heard the call of the gondolier announcing his arrival to take them back to Venice were they able to calm themselves and make ready to leave.

Lara watched him close the piano. Together they shook out the fox blanket and covered the bed with it. They
shuttered the windows, and he locked the door with the heavy iron key. She watched him place it in its hideaway before they left to walk down the path to the waiting gondola.

She watched her handsome young lover greet the gondolier. The two men shook hands and spoke for several minutes before he helped Lara into the gondola. She felt like a young girl, this might have been her first love, and she was excited to think they were going out into the world together. But in the gondola, as they traversed the canal, he whispered things to her that told her his feelings were the very same as hers. Half-way down the canal, they looked back over their shoulders. They smiled and he took her in his arms and kissed her. ‘I call it Aurelia.’

When they arrived back at the palazzo, Julia and the other guests had gone. The party had flown back to New York. Lara had miscalculated their departure time. Roberto, kindness itself, had left the palazzo at their disposal for as long as they liked.

‘Great. I’ll show you a Venice you’ve never seen before.’

That night they dined out in the Piazza San Marco, drank cognac, and walked slowly home over arched stone bridges and through a maze of dark, narrow streets. Then they returned to the bedroom where it all began.

Naked in each other’s arms, bursting with happiness, they called Julia in New York. Less to apologise for running off together than to share their joy with someone. When Lara put down the telephone, she turned to her young lover and said, ‘Julia says your name is Charles. I didn’t dare to tell her I forgot to ask you your name. It suits you.’

She rolled over in his arms and kissed him and told him again that she was happy. They lay in the dark, with
just a few candles lighting the sumptuous room. ‘Lara.’ He kept repeating her name. ‘Lara.

And then, ‘Lara Valentine.’

She lay there quite still and a most dreadful feeling came over her. She shook it off, refusing to allow anything to threaten her happiness. Had she misheard him? Against her better judgement she heard herself ask, ‘What? What did you say?’

‘Lara. Lara Valentine. It’s nice. Mrs Charles Sebastian Valentine.’

The coincidence was remarkable.

How strange life was.

Charles, inspired by the idea of Lara’s becoming Mrs Charles Sebastian Valentine, rolled on top of her and pinned her down by straddling her. With loving hands he caressed her hair and touched her face, fondled her breasts and manoeuvred her legs apart with his. He asked her in a voice thick with passion, ‘Take me inside you, Mrs Valentine.’

She reached beneath him, found her pussy and pulled the outer lips open, then parted the already moist, silky-soft inner lips. She guided the fleshy knob pulsating in her hand between them. He needed no more help than that. One quick, sharp thrust buried him nearly to the hilt inside her. She wrapped her legs around him. Another push and she could feel him pressing hard against the tip of her womb, his balls packed close against her body. She eased her legs down slowly. They lay on their sides, wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, locked together in sex and heart to heart.

Ever since she had met him she had been moved by his young body. It had excited her. Now this man was a part of her life. It was a miracle to her to feel about him as she did. She gripped him tight inside her and made love to him that way. She was alive for him. Her cunt-kisses
were her way of telling him. He revelled in her passion, adored the way she kissed him. They lay that way for a long time, entwined as one, and talked to each other.

She discovered her worst fears were true: Charles Sebastian Valentine was Evan’s son. He told her so casually, as no more than a point of information. ‘My father was Sir Evan Harper Valentine, he was a Nobel laureate. Awarded for his work on genetics. He could have won it for several other contributions he made to science. He was a very wonderful man. My hero, and my friend. You would have liked him. He would have loved you.’

The shock was proving almost more than she could take. Evan! It had taken a great deal of soul-searching to forget him, to put him in her memory bank and treat him as he had wanted to be treated, as dead is dead. He was gone and now she was in love, on the brink of a new life. One that need not be a dark, selfish love, nor a secret. Lara and Charles: a life filled with adoration and love. No boundaries to hem them in. The sort of love she had been seeking all her life. How could she give him up? But how could she tell him about his father and her? It was too much to cope with. She had to set it aside. She had too much rage to love and be loved by Charles to be able to leave him.

They remained together for several more days. If Lara felt utterly unable to tell Charles she had been his father’s secret love for five years or of her own passionate love for Evan when she was first made aware of the father and son relationship, the passing of time only magnified her dilemma. How could it not when she was given a vision of the life she and Charles could have together.

‘I’m an art historian. A visiting professor of art history at Harvard and Cambridge. But most of the time I work
from home. It’s a good life. I travel a great deal and see wonderful works of art, and for the most part am involved with interesting people and few fools – just so long as I avoid being frivolous and partying. At masked balls, for instance,’ he teased.

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Oh, good. I have a house on a mountain about thirty miles from Perugia. A marvellous palazzo, twelfth century some of it. It’s called the Palazzo di Fontefresca. My mother’s brother left it to me. I was his favourite nephew. My inheritance made me a wealthy landowner, a farmer on rather a grand scale. I should be able to feed you. I’m quite well off which is important for a man who has chosen to write books on Bernini, Caravaggio … I could name you five or six more, but I’ve no need to impress you. I’m only telling you now so you will know what kind of a life we are in for. What about you? You’re the other half of this team. Will you be happy living with me at the Fontefresca?’

‘I adore Tuscany. And I think I could live with you anywhere.’ She did not miss the way he bit his lip and fell silent, the obvious need he had to calm himself, so touched was he by her words. Then he continued, spurred on by the enthusiasm he saw in her face: ‘It’s a quite marvellous house with lots of room for the children and visitors. It is surrounded by acres and acres of olive trees, a huge peach orchard, fig trees by the hundred, and vineyards. We bottle a very good wine.’

Then she told him who she was, about her family, her attachment to them, her own work. She saw the admiration for her in his eyes, and the enthusiasm he had for the life she had made for herself. She knew their lives fitted together like a hand in a glove. He even understood her inordinate love for Cannonberry Chase, and responded with, ‘We can live in both places. It will be
just a matter of timing. We can be wealthy, working gypsies, without a caravan. I have a plane. There’s even a good grass field I keep in top condition at the foot of the mountain.’ And the more he told her the more they had in common.

He was impressed that she had soloed across the Atlantic. There would be places to fly to together, a new plane they would buy to accommodate them, the children, their friends. He was the man she wanted to marry, a life with him all she really wanted. And she was what he had been waiting for all his young life.

They stopped in Rome on the way to Perugia for her first visit to his mountain of olive groves dotted by thousands of cypress trees and crowned by the Palazzo di Fontefresca. There he sought out a dealer in Renaissance jewellery and bought her a ring, an engraved ruby set in gold and studded with emeralds. Once owned and worn by Catherine de Medici. He paid a king’s ransom for it and then slipped it on her finger. It was of such breathtaking beauty she wanted to weep.