Loving Venus (Sally-Ann Jones Sexy Romance) (13 page)

     She blushed deeply, ashamed of her lustful thoughts.

     “
Cara,
are you all right?” Umberto asked, slipping his arm around her waist to steady her.

     She nodded and tore her eyes away from those of her second-cousin, but not before she had seen the flash of anxiety in them, the fire of envy as the doctor claimed her.

    “I wondered if I might take a lift down to Fortezza Rosa with you?” Alessandro stepped forward to ask the other man. “I saw your car as you drove past the cottage.”

     “Of course, Alessandro,” Umberto said graciously.

     “Is Signora Silvestro not back then?” Annabella asked her relative, regretting her question as soon as she had uttered it.

     “No. She
’s still in Siena,” Alessandro replied coldly, not daring to meet her eyes again. There was a limit to the number of cold showers a man could endure in one day and he’d well and truly exceeded his borderline already. He wondered briefly what Titian had done while painting his Venus. Had he been in a constant paroxysm of desire too? Perhaps he was lucky enough to have sampled those delights he had so eloquently recorded. Or maybe the great artist’s very frustration had been the secret to his brilliant work?

     “Shall we go?” Umberto asked, leaving his arm around her waist.

     “Yes, let’s,” agreed Annabella, anxious to be away in the dark interior of Umberto’s car, where her second cousin couldn’t scrutinize her.

     “Is Tonia back?” asked Alessandro, leading the way to the driveway where the red Fiat waited and eager to seem nonchalant and in the mood for conversation, although he wanted nothing except to be alone … with the woman who was becoming an obsession.

     “Yes,” Annabella told him, wishing her voice was steadier. “Tomasina is better, thanks to Umberto, and she walked home from the village with me earlier today. But as soon as she was dressed and ready for the ball, off she went again. We’ll see her there.”

    Alessandro was stung by her praise for the doctor, yet glad he
’d been able to make the elderly woman well again.

     Umberto opened the front car door for Annabella and motioned for Alessandro to climb into the back. In a moment, they were motoring down the hillside, waving to small groups of people as they went. Most of the families who lived on small land-holdings within a ten-mile radius of the village attended the ball and many preferred to go to the village on foot, the pleasant walk part of the whole evening’s fun.

      Soon Umberto had parked the Fiat near the church and the three of them were walking side by side into the square, where a piano accordianist was already playing foot-tapping tunes to an as yet small crowd.      

      Heads turned to watch the handsome trio enter the heart of Fortezza Rosa. The stunning redhead in her gorgeous dress, the tall, dark-headed Lothario on her left, the fair-haired man on her right, whose hand she clung to.

     Because the two men were well-known to the locals, there were friendly shouts of greeting and even several wolf-whistles, the loudest from Carlo, despite the presence of his fiancée. Although Umberto had not long lived in the region, he was already popular, being the only local doctor. Umberto led Annabella to one of the small tables that had been placed around the side of the square and pulled out a chair for her, motioning for her to sit down.

     “I’ll go and get a jug of wine for us, and perhaps something to eat,” he suggested before Annabella could beg to go with him.

     Anything than to be left marooned with Alessandro. As the doctor disappeared through the thickening mass of people, she became painfully aware of her second cousin. Of the clean, pine-scent of his aftershave. The warmth that radiated from his taut body. She marvelled that she had ever been able to converse easily with him. Where was the child she’d once been? And where was the lovable boy-man he’d been? He’d notice her trembling like a leaf and think she was crazy. Thank goodness it was dark enough for him not to see how unusually pink her cheeks and neck were.

     An old piano was being wheeled from one of the houses that edged the square, across to the other side. The two men pushing it shuffled past the table where the second cousins sat, and Alessandro moved his chair closer to Annabella’s to let them through. As he did so, his thigh brushed against hers and she felt an electric current bolt through her body, igniting every cell.

     He felt it too and he drew his beautifully-cut jacket closer to his sides, the better to disguise his rampant, insistent desire for her.

     Each sought desperately for something innocuous to say, but each was tongue-tied.

     Umberto rescued them from their agonies by triumphantly placing on the table a tray which bore wine, glasses, olives, bread and cheese. By now, the square was full of noisy people and the first stars were appearing in the velvet sky. Someone began to play the piano and, as well as the accordianist, a violinist joined in. More and more of the villagers chose partners and were dancing exuberantly. The doctor poured three glasses of wine and they sipped and watched, their feet tapping to the irresistible music.

     “Annabella, dance with me!”

     It was an order, not a request and it was uttered with such urgency that she unquestionably obeyed, getting to her feet slightly unsteadily.

     Alessandro, already standing, grabbed her wrist possessively and pulled her into the pulsing, throbbing crowd of people who were, at that moment, executing the tango in a hundred different ways. The music teased and crooned like a lover and Annabella knew she
’d never be able to resist her cousin while it cajoled her into subservience. Still clutching her wrist, he dragged her against him with his free arm and they were caught in a fierce embrace. Pressed hard against his lean frame she knew without a shadow of a doubt that he wanted her. She knew exactly how badly.

     But, despite longing to feel his nakedness against hers, she realized it would be wrong for her to give in to her physical yearnings when he was so contemptuous of her. She
’d feel used by him and she wanted much, much more than that from Alessandro de Rocco. Her father worshipped her mother and her mother adored the man she had married. That was what she wanted too. Complete reciprocal love, given and received whole-heartedly. If she couldn’t have that she would rather be a virginal spinster all her life.

     But it was thrilling to be held in his arms as he expertly whizzed her around on the cobbles of the village square, to know that every hard, powerful inch of this handsome, discerning, aristocratic man found her attractive.

     Alessandro realized, as soon as her pliable body was in his arms, that he’d made a crazy mistake. He should never have given in to his wild impulse and asked her to dance with him. What had he been thinking? As it was, he fantasized about her every waking moment and for most of the night as well, torturing himself with imagining his lips on the pink-tipped luscious breasts, his tongue in the perfect whorl of her ear …. Ah! And now his fantasy was almost reality – almost. But not quite. And it was excruciating to be so near and yet so, so far from realizing his most cherished dream. It was, he knew in the small part of his brain that was able to be rational, better to imagine making love to her than to allow it to happen in reality, no matter how much he longed to. There would be no way the stunningly gorgeous Miss Smith, as he contemptuously thought of her, would ever live up to the ridiculously high expectations he harboured in his dreams of her. Yes, it was better to keep her in the realm of unreality. Otherwise, how would he bear the disappointment he was sure to feel?

     But, he thought, as he spun her into the air and admired the way her eyes sparkled with the exhilaration of it, how delicious it was to tango with her! He was the envy of every man in that square and he was powerfully aware of it.

      “
Caro!”

    
Annabella fought the rush of nauseating envy the voice provoked.

     The woman – the intruder – had stepped between her and Alessandro and was gripping his shoulders with her taloned fingers, having forced him to relinquish his hold of Annabella.

     “I’ve missed you so, so much, my darling neighbour,” Claudia continued. “I hope you missed me too, Alessandro?”

     Alessandro raised his eyebrows sardonically. “You can see I
’ve been managing to enjoy myself without you,” he said. “Even you must admit you’ve never seen my little second cousin looking quite so lovely.”

     Claudia turned and swept scornful, black-kohled eyes over the younger woman.

     “Pah!” she spat, swiveling her coiffed head back to Alessandro. “In that old thing? It must be at least fifty years old. It pre-dates even Dior, I’m sure. Now, be sensible,
caro.
You must be longing for some adult company, are you not?”

      “You know I always enjoy
your
company, Claudia,” he answered. “But right now I am dancing with Miss Smith. Perhaps it will be your turn next.”

     “Perhaps?” she sneered. “I can see I have my work cut out for me to get back into your good books. But you needn’t be jealous, my love. As it happens, when I was in Siena enjoying the hospitality of the Ferri family, my husband joined us. So I didn
’t relinquish you for a younger man, Alessandro. This time, there is nothing to forgive me for.”

     “What you do with your life is not my affair,” he told her. “Now, please, excuse me while I turn my attention to the music.”

     The music. Annabella was stung. He could have said, Now please excuse me while I turn my attention to my cousin. But no, it was the music. Fiercely, she extracted herself from the arms he had wrapped around her after Claudia had stalked away.

     “Enjoy the music alone, Al,” she said, also marching determinedly away from him.

     Umberto, who was peering through the crowd to watch the little drama unfolding in the middle of the village square, stood up when he saw her coming towards him. He went to her and took her hand in his.

     “Will you dance with me, Bella?” he asked gently, stung by the tears that glittered in her eyes.

     She nodded gratefully and they made their way into the sea of moving bodies, a sea where Alessandro no longer dominated. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen, although Annabella’s eyes raked the square as well the tables and chairs that flanked it. Nor was Claudia there.

     Alessandro stormed up the hill to the cottage, his white dinner jacket flung untidily over his shoulder. His brain was full of images of his young relative. Before tonight, he had known she was beautiful. Had he not already begun painting her as a modern-day Venus? But tonight, in that fabulous dress, she was even lovelier. Naked, as he had seen her in the kitchen, she was a natural, unaffected young woman. But in that gown, she was a seductress, fully aware of her power over men, especially, he was sure, of her power over him. He’d have to guard against letting her get a glimmer of that power ever again.

     As he raged away from Fortezza Rosa, the sounds of laughter and music receding as one foot stamped urgently in front of the other, he was tormented by memories of her as she had been in the village square. Of a shoestring strap sliding off her white shoulder. The rise of her breasts in the beautiful sequined bodice. Of the red banner of her hair flying out behind her as he spun her above the ground. Of her leaning lovingly against the doctor as he led her into the square to dance. He must record all these pictures before they crowded his head and drove him crazy!

      Entering his little domain, he tossed the jacket on the rumpled, unmade bed and rushed into the room he used as his studio. Not bothering to change out of his evening wear, he snatched up a paintbrush and feverishly began to work, despite having only the light from a 40 watt naked globe to illuminate his picture.

     He caressed the canvas with his brush, stroking on the paint as he would stroke the skin and tender, secret places of a lover’s body. Every touch was sensual, charged with feeling. Gradually, a female form did appear beneath his careful, clever fingers. Annabella’s, in all its glory. But the creation of her did nothing to dispel his desire. He could never quite lose himself enough in his work to be able to forget, or even to ignore, his own hard, insistent masculine body.  He sweated with the force of his desire, the urgent compulsion to create the illusion that his second cousin was right here, with him, in the lowly cottage where he was now forced to live.

     He lost track of time, of hunger, of thirst, of fatigue.

     But, suddenly he was jerked back to reality.

    
“Tu sei la reginella
,” he heard. You are the little queen. It was the song his mother always sang. La Bella Campagnina. He tore his eyes away from the vibrant, throbbing colours of the canvas, from the gorgeous creature immortalized there and turned in the direction of the sound, amazed to notice that sunlight was streaming through the window, that, judging from its brightness, it was almost mid-morning. He saw her bending in the field halfway up the hill, perhaps to pull a previously unnoticed weed from the now well-tended vineyard. She wore their great-grandfather’s big straw hat over her unruly curls, the ridiculous square of silk that doubled as a scarf or a top, and very short cut-off jeans. Seeing her surrounded by the vines she had tended so competently they were now boasting glossy bunches of golden grapes, hearing her singing the Italian folksong he knew so well, Alessandro was struck with an unwelcome thought.