Clasping him, with arms and legs so that they were almost one creature, she arched to meet his deep thrusts, their sweat-slick bodies clinging, parting only reluctantly and coming back together again with frantic haste.
She was in orgasm a moment later, a pleasure so intense it was almost pain, her head flung back, her neck and face tortured and rigid, her mouth open as she cried out wordlessly like an animal, jerking and shuddering underneath him as if she was dying. Sebastian drove on faster and faster to his own climax. When it came, he collapsed with a long groan on top of her, his body pumping fiercely, his throat vibrating with deep sounds of ecstatic satisfaction.
Afterwards they lay for a long time without moving or speaking. Laura was cold, on the point of tears. She felt them behind her eyelids, then a few began to trickle out down her face. Only a little while ago she had been thinking of death, convinced that Sebastian wanted her dead – had he been thinking about doing this to her, all the time?
Death and sex were so close, after all. The intensity of desire followed by that spiralling downward into emptiness … wasn’t that a sort of death? The reverberation still beat inside her body, but now she was as chill and limp and lifeless as a corpse. As the kitten in the waters of the Grand Canal.
Sebastian slid off her, stood up. Then he bent down, picked her up, carried her over to the bed and slid her between the sheets. ‘I need a drink,’ he said, and walked across to the mini-bar.
Laura’s teeth were chattering. She stared at his long, naked back, the deep division of his spine visible as he bent to pour the contents of two miniature bottles of brandy into glasses. There was a feathering of dark hair above his buttocks; they were paler than the rest of his tanned body. He spent most of his time out in the open air when he was filming, and back in the States when he wasn’t working he was often still out under the hot California sun, half naked around a pool, studying scripts and working out storyboards, or lounging on the sand below his bungalow on the coast.
He brought the drinks over to the bed, got in beside her and offered her a glass.
She shook her head, icy cold and still trembling. Sebastian put an arm under her, lifted her up, held a glass to her lips. ‘Don’t be stupid, you need it as much as I do.’
Her teeth hit it with a clink, the liquid flowed into her mouth and she had to swallow, her throat stinging. She gasped and more went down; she felt warmth growing inside her. Sebastian laid her back against her pillow, swallowed his own brandy, put both glasses on the bedside table and came under the bedclothes with her, his arm covering her, heavy on her shivering body.
‘Go to sleep,’ he whispered, pulling her close to him.
She shut her eyes, grateful for the heat of his body, but she remembered her fear and was afraid to relax. Somehow, though, she couldn’t stay awake. Sleep engulfed her, and that night she had no bad dreams.
When she woke up Sebastian had gone. She might almost have believed he had never been there, except that the other side of her bed was still warm where he had lain beside her all night. By the golden dawn light she could see the impression of his body. From the dampness and heat between her thighs she could feel him there, too. It had not been another of her passionate dreams.
She turned over towards the imprint of him in the bed and felt something brush her cheek. Sitting up, she saw a white envelope on the pillow. Her name stood out in black capitals on the front.
Laura heart thudded. The printing was familiar. She sat upright and tore open the envelope. There was one sheet of hotel writing paper inside with more capitals written on it.
SHE DESERVED TO DIE. SO DO YOU, YOU WHORE. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.
Hands shaking, Laura read it twice more. It could only be from Sebastian. How else could it have got on to her pillow while she slept? And he must have sent her the other note, the one that had been pushed under her door soon after she arrived here. There couldn’t be two anonymous letter-writers here.
Her head swam as if she was going to faint. My God. My God, why? If he hated her that much, why had he made love to her with such passion? She remembered the feelings she had picked up last night in the dining room: the cold, black hatred. It must have come from Sebastian. This note proved it. He might desire her, but he hated her too, just as he had obviously hated his wife. SHE DESERVED TO DIE.
Clea. It must mean Clea. He was telling her that he had killed Clea.
Desperately her eyes darted around the room, looking for an escape route. What was she going to do? Seeing the clock on the bedside table, she flinched. Seven already. Soon it would be time to get up and go to his suite to meet him for breakfast. How could she face him now?
What sort of man was he, this man who had made love to her, got into bed and slept with her in his arms all night, seeming so tender and loving, but who, before he went, wrote such a terrifying threat to her and left it on the pillow beside her sleeping head?
He must be mad. What other explanation could there be?
What about you? she mocked herself angrily. Aren’t you mad too?
She had been determined not to see him again, and she certainly hadn’t intended to let him make love to her, yet last night he had had a walkover. She had been easy. How he must have laughed. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she had said one minute, and the next she had been burning up underneath him, out of her head with pleasure.
She crumpled up the note and threw it across the room. No, that was stupid, she must keep it, it was evidence. She had always laughed at people who threw away menacing letters without showing them to the police. She wasn’t going to make that mistake.
She scrambled out of bed and picked it up, smoothed it out and hid it in a drawer in an antique table by the window, under a little pile of paperback books she had put in there when she unpacked.
Now that she was up she might as well stay up, she thought, so she picked up her crumpled nightdress and put it out to be washed by the hotel, then walked into the bathroom. The window was open and she stood beside it, naked, gazing at the crenellations of the roof in black shadow on the lawns, breathing in the salty air, glad of the cool of morning.
People were already on the beach and in the distance she saw heads bobbing in the water, early-morning swimmers. Laura leant over to watch them and felt dizzy. She clung giddily to the window-sill. For a second she had almost fallen, had wanted to let go, to give herself up to the emptiness of space and death.
That was what Sebastian had done to her: he had made her yearn for death as an escape from the pain of loving him and fearing him, swinging helplessly between the two agonising extremes.
Had Clea ended her life because she couldn’t bear the pain of loving Sebastian any more?
Chapter Five
Nico d’Angeli had never cared much for the Hotel Excelsior. Like many of his friends, he had made fun of it as a young man, sneered that it was far too over the top, camp, an extravagant film set dreamt up by Hollywood – all of which made it the perfect place for the film festival headquarters. Every year they flooded into Venice: actors, directors, producers, camera men and sound men, set and costume designers, the accountants and executives of film companies – and they loved the Excelsior. It was their idea of high style, and as it had been built at the start of this century to Americans it was an antique, they thought it classy.
Nico hadn’t been there for some time and found himself quite looking forward to seeing the place again as he came over on his own launch from Ca’ d’Angeli. He was beset by memories of the hotel: summer days when he and his friends, or girls he was dating, had come over to play golf or tennis after lunch in the splendid dining room, or to swim off the private beach with its Moorish beach huts, so luxuriously furnished that you would have been happy to spend the day down there without ever going up to the hotel itself – except that the food was so marvellous that you couldn’t miss the chance to sample it. Nico found the sediment of years stirring, resurrecting his own past, making him feel distinctly middle-aged.
&n
bsp; As he arrived the doorman stopped him, judging him by his wind-blown black hair and well-washed old clothes.
Most of the time Nico barely noticed what he was wearing, and that morning he had simply put on the nearest clean clothes – pale beige cotton pants and a dark green shirt, clearly neither designer style nor expensive, and worn with grubby trainers. The doorman needed to take only one glance to place him as a workman. Nico was muscular, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and his body bore the badge of his work: healed scars on his hands and face where he had been caught by flying chips of marble, rough skin on his palms, a toughness about him that spoke of manual labour.
‘Where do you think you’re going? Back door for trade.’
Nico grinned. ‘I’m meeting one of your guests. I’m Count Niccolo d’Angeli.’
‘Yeah, and I’m Michael Jackson,’ the doorman said. ‘Ma va là, amico! Round the back!’
Without shifting an inch, Nico said, in the deep-accented Italian of the streets, ‘Sta attento, amico! Just watch yourself, my friend. You’re making a mistake. The manager is a friend of mine – ask him to come down and identify me.’
The man’s eyes flickered uncertainly, but he wouldn’t back down. ‘And get myself sacked for wasting his time? Oh, yeah, I’ll do that.’
Nico looked past the man’s broad shoulder. ‘There he is now!’ He waved, and the hotel manager came over to greet him warmly.
‘Come sta, Nico? It’s a long time since we saw you over here. What are you doing here so early in the morning? Playing golf?’
The doorman had paled, his face tense. Nico met his pleading eyes and shrugged. He decided not to bother to complain: he would feel guilty if the man lost his job.
‘No, I’m not here for golf. I’m having breakfast with Sebastian in his suite.’
The manager’s face changed. ‘Of course, I’d forgotten, he’s … His mother was …’ He paused, looking self-conscious, asked, ‘Have you seen him yet? Has he been over to Ca’ d’Angeli?’
Nico nodded. ‘Yesterday.’
The other man seethed visibly with curiosity but was too discreet to ask direct questions. ‘He had dinner here last night, with his crew. Of course, we’re packed at the moment, full to the rafters. The festival brings in so much business. And tonight we have the prize-giving – the biggest event of our year! Everyone who is anyone in the film world will be here. My staff are buzzing with excitement.’
‘Good business for you, and this is the perfect hotel for the festival,’ Nico said, as he walked towards the lift.
‘Wonderful business, and it spreads our name, worldwide, with all the TV and other media people here. The hotel is on the news in a lot of countries every year, great free publicity. You should visit us more often, Nico – we haven’t seen you for a long time. Don’t you play golf any more? You used to come over to our course every week.’
‘Too busy for golf these days, I’m afraid.’ The truth was, he had lost interest; if you permitted it, golf could take over your life and although Nico was a good player he had better things to do with his time than tramp around a golf course following a little ball.
‘A pity. You’re good, and you’ll lose your handicap if you don’t play.’
‘That won’t keep me awake at night.’
The manager laughed uncertainly with the air of a man who does not appreciate jokes about golf, his own personal religion. He played whenever he had a spare minute. He said, ‘I guess you don’t have time. I know you’re becoming a big name in the art world. I read the rave reviews in the local newspapers of your pieces in the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Moderna here last year. They really loved your stuff. I meant to try to get to the exhibition but I never had time. The papers said you were selling your sculptures all over the world these days. Congratulations.’
‘I’m doing okay,’ Nico agreed. ‘I’ve even got one here, in the Galleria d’Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Ca’ Pesaro. A mother and child, not very big, but I got a good price for it.’
Now the manager did look impressed. ‘I’d no idea! You must do something for us, something special that will fit in with our décor.’
Nico glanced around, his brows lifting in disbelief. Something that fitted in with all this turn-of-the-century kitsch? But the lift arrived before he had to answer. ‘Ciao,’ he said, then as the doors closed he began to laugh.
A few floors up the lift stopped, the doors opened and Laura Erskine walked in. He looked at her with real pleasure: she knew how to dress, this girl – he admired the white cotton tunic she was wearing. The simplicity was perfect for her: elegant, sophisticated, exciting, with that Titian hair in soft coils around her face and her long, long legs beneath the white cotton, touchably smooth in sheer stockings. Few women had that height, even fewer the ability to carry it off, with head held high, moving with cool grace, the touching vulnerability of a foal.
‘Ciao,’ he said softly, and for a second saw a freezing rejection in her face because she hadn’t yet looked at him closely. Then she did a double-take, her features unlocked and she smiled shyly.
‘Oh, hello, it’s you. I didn’t recognise you for a second.’
She was pale this morning, he noted, her beautiful green eyes underlined by bluish shadows on that delicate skin, and there was a faint quiver on the wide, generous mouth. What bone structure! He traced it from the high temples to the fine jawline. Wonderful.
Had she dined here last night, with wine flowing freely? She looked as if she was suffering from a hangover.
‘Oh, we’re all linguists in Venice,’ he said. ‘We need to speak most of the major European languages. People are our business and we can’t expect our visitors to speak Italian.’ He grinned. ‘Late night?’
A warm pink flush ran up her face, delighting him. It suited her better, that glowing colour. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was husky and self-conscious.
She wouldn’t blush like that over a mere dinner party. What had she been doing last night? And with whom? Nico found himself interested in the questions, even more so in the answers.
‘You are going to sit for me, aren’t you?’ he asked, his brain busy with suggestions and conclusions. How involved was she with Sebastian? Newspaper gossip had reached them here, but how much fire was there behind all that smoke? ‘I have an idea for a piece. It’s vague at the moment, and I’m not sure how it will go when I actually start work, but I was thinking of doing you as David.’
She stared blankly at him. ‘What?’
‘A female David – you know, Michelangelo’s statue in Florence.’
Still baffled, she nodded slowly. ‘Of course.’
‘And there are many others, of course.’
‘Many other what?’ She was watching him as if he was talking in riddles.
‘Davids. He was always a popular subject for artists through the Middle Ages, the little man who takes on a giant and wins. And it occurred to me that this is the age of feminism, of women taking on every aspect of man’s world so it seems to me time to have a female David, a very young David taking on the world of men in what appears to be a hopeless struggle. What do you think? Now, be honest! If you think the idea is crazy, say so.’
‘Oh, no! I didn’t get what you meant at first, but I love it,’ she said, as the lift stopped and they got out. ‘What a brilliant idea! It’s amazing that nobody’s thought of it before. What would I wear?’
He laughed – every woman who ever sat for him asked that question. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to pose in the nude.’
Her colour deepened to a lovely glowing rose. ‘I didn’t think you would!’
‘No?’ His eyes were faintly cynical, a little mocking. ‘Most women think of that right away. They assume artists always want to get their clothes off! But, actually, I’d ask you to wear more or less what you’re wearing now. A simple tunic ending above the knees, and your hair just like it is today. Those curls are oddly similar to the way Donatello’s David wears his hair, you know.’
> ‘I only know Michelangelo’s.’
‘You’ll find Donatello’s David in Florence, too, but in bronze not stone, a slender boy, very camp, with a lot of curves, wearing a hat over long hair.’
‘A hat? What sort of hat?’
‘Just like one you would see at Ascot today.’ He grinned. ‘A charming little hat, you’ll love it. Women always do. The Donatello is very different from the Michelangelo statue – that David is stern and frowning, with a lot of muscle, very grave, very masculine. Donatello’s has one hand on his hip in a provocative pose – yet he’s holding a massive sword in one hand – you can’t believe he could ever lift it to cut off Goliath’s head!’
They walked along the corridor and paused to ring the doorbell of Sebastian’s suite. Nico propped himself against the wall, arms folded.
‘I see you in exactly the same position as the Donatello, but holding out the head of Goliath.’
She shuddered. ‘How horrible! No, I couldn’t do that, don’t ask!’
‘You wouldn’t really be holding a head – I’d need you to hold something, to give me the muscular contraction, but I could work on the head itself later without needing you to be there.’ He caught her hands, moved closer. ‘Say you’ll do it! Don’t stop to think – say yes!’
The door of the suite opened. Sebastian looked from one to the other of them, eyes razor-sharp as he took in their linked hands.
In what she knew to be a defensive voice Laura said quickly, ‘We met in the lift coming up here,’ and pulled her hands free.
Nico shot her an alert glance; she avoided his eyes. He saw too much, was far too aware, and she had things she wanted to hide, from him as well as from Sebastian. Her heart was awash with terrifying memories; the note she had found on her pillow this morning and which could only have been put there by Sebastian, the intensity of their love-making last night, Clea plunging to her death from a high window, his tenderness, the warmth of his body as he held her all night, close and secure, as if he loved her, the kitten that had somehow died in the Grand Canal after she had left it on a cushion in Ca’ d’Angeli.
Deep and Silent Waters Page 12