Song of Seduction

by Carrie Lofty

  “I need to know.” She touched his shoulder, a simple gesture offering sanctuary and faith—as long as he told the truth. “Try, Arie.”

  Against his will, he traveled to a region of his memory he rarely confronted, yet one that continuously shaded his life. Guilt propelled his words, certainly, but as he began to speak, so too did he feel a sense of relief. The privilege of sharing his history was the gift only Mathilda could have provided.

  “My father was a merchant’s son who fought against the English, and then with the Dutch patriots.”

  Memories of his father burned brightly in his mind: a wide mustache, tight lines around eyes that were Arie’s same color of blue, a voice of surprising expressivity and melody, the scent of stagnant canals and cigars. A pang of sharp remorse and injustice still burned within him, nearly two decades later.

  “The English and the Austrians supported the monarchs, and the attempted revolution only increased their vengefulness. My grandfather lost his business selling glazes to potters.” He paused, a shudder overtaking him. “Both he and my father were hanged for treason when I reached six years.”

  “Arie,” Mathilda whispered, her face ashen. She tightened her arms around her waist, hugging the quilt close. “I’m so sorry.”

  He inhaled, hoping to dispel the tension that always accompanied that image, both beloved men swaying from ropes beneath a hastily erected scaffold in the shadow of the Nieuwe Kerk. Only a breeze laden with the stink of the canals had lent motion to those inert forms, already stiffening in the moments after death.

  “My three sisters died as young children. My mother and I traveled to Bruges in Catholic Flanders where she found work as a maidservant. When she died, I had no one.”

  Mathilda quietly stroked the length of his forearm, staring as if at a distant landmark. She sat in silence, in contemplation, and forced Arie to fill the distraught void.

  “I wanted to be successful, a man to rival the foreign nobles my father had detested…but not to avenge them, not to prove my own worth. No, I thought to escape from my birth and be better than my parents.” His head throbbed—heavy, fat and bursting with malice. “I was a wreck of a boy.”

  “And you began to tour?”

  “Tour. Drink. Nothing mattered.”

  He snorted and shook his head, his hair dipping across his line of sight. He thrust it back. “I performed where I could, no matter the destination. After a year, maybe longer, I arrived in the city of Pest. I had no money, no possessions, just my education and a string of successes in alehouse contests. Maestro Bolyai attended a competition and proposed a partnership.”

  “How so?”

  “He took me in and he completed my education. About music, about the business of music. I learned how to audition musicians, hire halls and print leaflets. I had no idea what performance taxes were, let alone how to pay them.”

  Arie regarded his partner and her engrossed air. He found only sympathy in her hazel depths, an expression that gave him strength. He wanted to push his nose into her hair, breathing, calming himself. But he held fast. He would not touch her yet.

  “In return…I think he was lonely.” He laughed, a manic sound of fatigue and worry. “Imagine that, a lonely composer living on his own. I helped with whatever I could, running errands. And I…I worshiped him. He was father and grandfather and teacher. My friend.”

  He hunched his chest across his knees and threaded both hands through the hair at his temples. “When he grew ill…”

  Throat tight, he could not speak. Seconds passed with the thudding rhythm of heartbeats as Arie worked to regain his composure. When he could not, he spoke past the pain and the building tears. “When he grew ill, I hated him.”

  “Hated him? Arie, why?”

  “For leaving me alone. Again. I was terrified.” His chest ached with an unrelenting heaviness. “I sat with him in that stifling room for weeks, nursing him, taking dictation for Love and Freedom. He ranted like a madman, humming and conducting an invisible orchestra. He waved his hands and the ropes beneath his mattress shook. Near the end, he could no longer speak. I kept working, trusting that some part of him still knew what he wanted to create.”

  Talking threatened to pull him back, back to that foul room. He had wondered which would find satisfaction first: death or his dying maestro’s muse. And he had waited in vain for temptation to pass. Instead, dread and ambition had mingled to form an acid strong enough to erode his principles.

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen.” Tears blurred his picture of Mathilda. “When he slept, I prayed. I cried. But nothing changed. By the time he died, I thought…I thought I deserved to take it.”

  Whereas Arie tried to hide his tears, Mathilda wept openly. “And now?”

  “I was right to take it—he would have wanted to share his music. But I was a fool to claim it as my own. An ungrateful, scared fool.”

  Her world slipped and spun. Tears fell, wetting her bare forearms.

  Arie. Arie. Arie.

  Mathilda’s brain throbbed with him, absorbing his confession. She wanted to pull his hair as hard as he did, yanking him and demanding more. More contrition. More regret. She wanted to add to his hurt, to punish him for destroying her idol, smashing it beyond repair. She had believed him a hero, someone beyond the realm of human frailty. But no man had ever looked as piteous as Arie did, hunched and hating himself.

  Yet memories remained. Arie at the piano in the Stadttrinkstube. Arie conducting at the Dom, his hands and hair flying. Arie at his studio, coaxing beautiful melodies to life. Beside her and above her and around her—she could not breathe for how she ached for him. For the frightened and lonely boy he had been. For the tormented and lonely man he had become.

  Like Mathilda, he had been thrust into a life without security. But she had depended on Ingrid’s family and on Jürgen. She knew the comfort of their affection and care. She knew companionship and loyalty. Although an orphan, she had always had someone.

  Sitting across from her on the bed, his chest arched over his knees, Arie was still alone. He believed himself beyond understanding. Even now he prepared for the worst, just as he expected the worst from his own musical efforts. Where she heard magic in his newest compositions, he heard only the failure of falling short of his mentor.

  The story explained the curiosities of his character. His contempt for success had little to do with fame, fickle patrons or the difficulties of composition. Instead, guilt haunted him because his best-known work, no matter how many stunning pieces he produced in its wake, had been written by another man.

  Renowned, famous, adored—idols needed no one. But Arie…he needed. He needed forgiveness. He needed to prove his worth.

  He needed her.

  Mathilda sniffed and pushed insistent tears from her cheeks. She reached between them, bridging the chasm with her arms, and patiently unwound his fingers from fistfuls of hair. She petted the distressed brown snarls back, touching, touching again. The quilt dropped from her breasts, but she made no move to replace it.

  He turned to burrow his mouth into her palm, kissing her there. “Mathilda,” he rasped against her skin. “I swear, I will make amends.”

  She caught his face in her hands and tugged against his lingering shame, forcing him to meet her eyes. “And when you do, I’ll be beside you.”

  “I—”

  “You don’t need to explain any more, Arie. Grief makes people act strangely. I know that.” Sitting up, she shook her head. “When Jürgen died, I followed the old customs. I washed his body. I rubbed ashes in my hair and slept in rags. At Sebastiankirche, Father Holtz offered his condolences. Neighbor women looked after me while the men buried him. But all the while, I kept waiting for a dark impulse to take hold of me.”

  He watched her through a narrowed gaze. His knuckles, gripped in a fist in his lap, clenched to a sickly white. “What impulse?”

  “The need to take my own life.”

  “Mathilda!”

/>   “I thought it would be inevitable, because I’m my mother’s daughter. Grief would overtake me and I would feel compelled to follow my husband into death.” The mattress wiggled as she shrugged. “Instead, I lived. I wanted to live, even when all I knew was guilt.”

  “You cannot be like your mother, Tilda. You are stronger.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “I do.” Pulling her arm, gently, he urged Mathilda into his embrace. A grim resolve covered his features, almost obscuring the fear that she would refuse him. But she went willingly, and he tightened his loving hold. “Why did you wait until now to ask? Why not after Frau Schlick’s concert, when you knew?”

  Bunched muscles eased as she petted his forearms. “You want to know why I stayed with you that night, regardless of what I had learned?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid, too.” Her breathing quickened even within the safety of his arms. Although the tension between them had somewhat dispelled, the pain and uncertainty of those days, those thoughts, threatened to resurface. “If I could no longer believe in you, what did I have left? I liked to think I could forgive anything, but it was safer not to ask at all.”

  “You have done much of that, forgiving me.”

  She pinched the back of his hand. “Don’t make a martyr of me. I did so out of necessity. To discover your flaws would’ve pulled down all of my fantasies. I would’ve lost the picture of you that had sustained me, needing to grieve all over again.”

  “And now?”

  “You’re a mess. And so am I. We are doomed, but we are together.”

  She turned in his arms and traced the curve of Arie’s cheekbones, down to his mouth. His smile vanished, stealing her pulse.

  “Arie, what is it?”

  “I want to marry you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mathilda’s heart fluttered with a weightless zeal. She giggled, and she laughed all the harder when his face fell. “Wanting is not having, Maestro. Nor is it wooing.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he replied theatrically. “I am a brutish lout.”

  “Don’t be absurd. The more rudely you behave, the easier it might be to dismiss your genuine feeling should I reject you.”

  The muscles of Arie’s torso and upper arms constricted. “Will you reject me?”

  “I know not,” she said. “I won’t be able to show my face in society beside a man who sits a horse as poorly as you do.”

  “You vex me.”

  “Becoming your wife will not change that.” She pulled him close for a deep kiss, taking his lower lip in her teeth. He groaned and gripped her thighs. “Will you love me? Always?”

  With a conquered sigh, he leaned back and dragged her across him. He smoothed long strands of hair away from her face. “I will love you always.”

  Her heart thumped in a crazy rhythm at his words, his touch, his loving desperation. “Say it again.”

  “Ik zal altijd van je blijven houden.”

  “Yes.”

  “To what?”

  “Anything you ask.”

  “You will marry me?”

  She marveled at the near frantic tone of his rumbling voice. That he loved her so deeply, that he could still be so uncertain of her response, amazed her. Her single, breathless word was a vow. “Yes.”

  “Goed.”

  He arched her body and took a bare nipple into his mouth. She gasped. He groaned. With restless hands, she clenched the flesh of his buttocks, pulling his hips toward hers as they sank into the mattress. Arie hardened in moments, pressed against her thighs. He teased and suckled, and she squirmed against him in mindless response.

  Opening her legs, letting him enter—nothing had ever been so effortless.

  She lost herself in the drowsy rhythm of his thrusts. Feeling wanton and feline, secure, she sighed. Returning to each other, feeling cleansed of ghosts and pains, revealed a happiness she had never known. Their passion had been a torture of insecurities and hesitancy, but this…this was easy and deep. Unhurried.

  Enchanted by the calm, resonant emotion intensifying her desire, she floated on gathering waves. She twisted toward the sources of her delicious torment: his lunging shaft and his mouth at her breast. He surrounded her, invaded her. His rumbling whispers danced in her ears. He nipped and tugged, his teeth at her nipple, until jagged sparks raced through her veins.

  When Arie lifted his head, she groaned in frustration.

  His knowing laugh mocked her need. “I am not the only one who likes biting.”

  In retaliation, she bit down on his shoulder. He bucked into her, deeply, his breath a spiky exhale of rough pleasure. She bit again, and he pushed her into the pillow, imprisoning her with a harsh kiss. His hips accelerated, the edge of his desire becoming sharp and forceful.

  She recognized the change in his tempo. His hips beat in a building, frantic rhythm. His hands became demanding, clutching, possessing. “Easy,” she whispered.

  “God, Tilda, I love you.”

  She laughed softly. “You still do not trust that I will stay. You cannot believe you are worth this. Being happy.”

  “I will. Give me time.”

  “My point exactly. We have time.”

  She stroked his hips, his lower back. When he kissed her mouth, he tasted of the berries they had shared upon waking. She sighed and wondered at the seductress who sounded so much like Mathilda Heidel. “I do like the biting, I think. Makes me wonder if you like touching yourself.”

  His hips stilled entirely. He collapsed against her on the mattress, his body shaking. He was laughing.

  Mathilda transformed from a seductress into a silly innocent in the span of two sentences. She smacked him on the shoulder. “What?”

  “How do you think I survived these months?” His wicked grin could have set the room alight. “Music can sustain me only so long.”

  The heat of a vicious blush covered her face and bosom, but she refused to be intimidated. In fact, the idea of Arie touching himself sparked her imagination.

  “Show me.”

  The mirth drained from his face. His breathing roughened, quickened. Flexing within her, he said, “I have no thought to leave you right now.”

  “You’ll be allowed to return.” She pushed harder against the lanky wall of his body. His expression remained dubious—intrigued, but dubious. “Do this for me.”

  Arie pulled away. The depths he had filled with such magnificent completion were left hollow and wanting. But kneeling astride her, above her—blatant and immodest—he grinned. His mischievous, watchful eyes challenged her to break the hold of his gaze and feast, instead, on his brazen display.

  Mathilda accepted his unspoken dare. She lowered her lids until every thought centered on his hand rubbing up and down the hard length of his arousal. Steam replaced blood in her veins. Hips thrust slightly forward, Arie’s stance was one of such intense male eroticism that a dizzy heat twirled through her body. He captivated her, tugging and clenching his rigid shaft, circling his palm over the head and tightening his buttocks in time with his strokes.

  Arrogant. Hard. Shameless.

  His lips turned up in an arrogant smirk. “Is this what you want to see?”

  She mumbled something, its meaning inarticulate even to her own distracted mind. Yes…hypnotized.

  “Now you,” Arie said. “Knees up.”

  Complying, impatient to join him in their adventurous game, Mathilda bent her knees. She found her slippery apex and matched his tempo. With her free hand, she flicked and pulled her nipples, teasing them both until Arie relented first. He abandoned their torturous sport. With a guttural curse, he hooked her knee in the crook of his elbow and plunged. His thrusts neared cruelty, but he gave as much as he claimed.

  And greedy, she wanted more. She was his. Her body became his domain. The pure, free delight of their union overwhelmed her doubts. She flew past the obstacles that had bound and frustrated her. No thought. No hesitation. When she came, the surprise and r
uthless joy of her climax shuddered over and around her.

  At Mathilda’s gasp, Arie surged and thumped, taking what he needed from her willing depths. A last, potent thrust coincided with a groan that broke in his throat. His body convulsed and sagged atop hers, limp and sated.

  She shifted slightly, stretching her legs along either side of his as he withdrew. She hugged him fiercely, utterly overcome by the pleasure of her discovery. Disbelieving, she giggled. “Number ten.”

  Propping on an elbow, only inches above her, he looked at her with an expression of happy awe. “You will get used to that.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Three nights later, Mathilda watched the sun sink below the horizon. Its rays painted red and gold across the tranquil waters of Wallersee at the northern edge of Henndorf. She stood transfixed, marveling at the sight. Village fishermen stowed their boats and nets for the night. Their rough laughter and the cadence of their speech blended with the sounds of the countryside to create a pastiche of a whole other sort of existence.

  Through Mathilda’s entire life, dusk began when the sun dipped below the ever-watchful cliffs of Mönchsberg. Her sequestered existence within the Altstadt—at first accidental and then, following Jürgen’s death, voluntary—had pressed her against the heights of mountains and buildings. Her seclusion kept her from enjoying the simple beauty of a sunset.

  Among other things.

  Although her heart still ached at the memory of his flight to the country, Mathilda had to admit that Arie had inadvertently introduced her to the world beyond Salzburg. Only twelve tiny miles from her city, she acknowledged the extent of her immobilizing fears and how isolated she had been.

  She glanced at where Arie drowsed, fully clothed, in the tall grasses surrounding their cabin. He needed rest after the sleepless, blissful nights they had shared. The deep gold of the sun’s diminishing power bronzed his skin. Gone was his sickly pallor, and after another few days of Frau Schindler’s meals, his unhealthy thinness would reverse as well.

  Contentment swelled in her breast until she could hardly stand to look at his relaxed face. Unrivaled happiness empowered her with a sense of liberation and strength.