by Anne Weale
‘I shouldn’t think so. Anyone can lose a bracelet.’
‘You don’t wear them, I notice.’
‘I’ve never had one as a present and I wouldn’t buy one for myself. I prefer earrings and clips.’
‘I must remember that at Christmas.’
‘Do you normally give your PAs a present at Christmas?’
He slanted a mocking glance at her. ‘If they’ve been good girls.’
How was she supposed to take that ambiguous answer?
Sophie averted her face, torn between her pleasure in his company and her dread that the attraction between them was building up to what one of her friends called ‘the proposition point’. A point from which there would be two ways forward, but never any way back to the preproposition situation.
A spoonbill was passing overhead, a familiar sight to her once and now a nostalgic reminder of how much she loved this region and envied the man beside her his power to make himself part of it.
‘I think we’ll be looking for a needle in a haystack,’ he said as they neared Capolavoro. ‘Even the weather’s against us. A sunny afternoon would have helped. In this light the gold parts won’t shine. Anyway, we’ll give it a go.’
They landed at a different place from where the barges would come with all the materials needed for the building of the house next spring. Their arrival disturbed various long-legged wading birds.
For the second time in an hour Sophie felt Marc’s warm, strong grip enclosing her smaller hand as he helped her ashore. But he didn’t prolong the contact.
‘Rowena wandered all over the place the last time I came over with her. I suggest you go in that direction and I’ll go in this.’ He set off by the more overgrown of the diverging tracks.
As they moved away from each other Sophie forced herself to concentrate on the search for the few inches of metal which might perhaps be a souvenir of an equally fraught relationship in Rowena’s past.
She had gone back to London with six rolls of exposed film in her hand luggage. It was possible that in order to capture a view from a better angle she had sometimes moved off the track. The chances of finding the bracelet if it had fallen in grass or low-growing scrub were very small—unless Marc was prepared to have someone go over the island, metre by metre, with a metal detector.
He might go to those lengths for a woman with whom he was having an affair, but Sophie no longer felt that he was interested in Rowena for reasons apart from her professional skills. If that had been the case, he would certainly have gone to the airport with her.
As she searched she was half-consciously aware of the familiar scents carried on the wind from the surrounding barene, the salt flats covered with marshy vegetation only covered at high tide.
The thought of the children who would grow up on the island—Marc’s children—in more luxurious conditions but with the same surroundings she had grown up with, made her ache to tell him how much she loved him.
But how could she do that when she had no idea if his feelings for her went beyond mere physical attraction? If he had been an ordinary man she would have chanced it. But he was anything but ordinary. He was clever, good-looking and rich. He could take his pick. Why should he fall for someone who was neither beautiful, brilliant nor from his own milieu?
She was probing a clump of the sea lavender which, in late summer, coloured the islets with drifts of blue and pink, when a piercing whistle made her straighten. Looking round, she saw Marc waving to her. He was beyond shouting distance but near enough for her to see him point at the sky.
Looking up, Sophie saw that while her attention had been focused on the ground dark clouds had been approaching overhead. Not far away it was already raining. In ten minutes, or less, the first drops would fall on the island.
Marc was moving now, and pointing to a stone hut where they could shelter. He reached it ahead of her.
When she joined him, he said, ‘I don’t think it’ll last long. Rain wasn’t forecast this morning.’
Sophie hadn’t much faith in forecasts. Like islanders the world over, she had grown up relying on experience rather than meteorology to tell her what the weather was going to do. To her eye, the approaching downpour looked likely to last some time.
There was nothing in the hut they could sit on. Marc was wearing a lightweight showerproof blouson over his cashmere sweater. He took it off, spread if on the tamped earth floor and sat down on it, leaving room for her to sit beside him.
Feeling that to remain standing would invite some sardonic comment, Sophie joined him. They sat side by side, each with one hand clasping the other wrist and their arms looped round their knees, watching the rain begin to beat down on the land outside the hut and the lagoon beyond it.
‘Sorry about this. I guess coming over today wasn’t such a good idea,’ Marc said. She felt him looking at her.
‘Your time is more valuable than mine. If I hadn’t mentioned it to you, you wouldn’t be stuck here. What I should have done, in retrospect, was to track down someone with a metal detector. I think that’s the only hope of finding the bracelet.’
‘You’re probably right, but I wouldn’t think metal detecting is as popular a hobby in Venice as it is in some other places. Perhaps we should tell Rowena to bring one with her next time. She who loses an object deserves the backache of finding it, as Confucius may well have said.’
‘You don’t have a bad back, do you?’
He shook his head. ‘Do I look as if I might?’
‘No, but I’ve known extremely fit-looking people who have to take care of their backs because of athletic injuries.’
She spoke with her eyes on the puddles starting to form in the sandy soil outside the shed. Superimposed on that image was another: the powerful wrists and sunburned hands alongside her own.
Her shoulder was less than an inch from the top of his arm, her foot in its navy deck shoe very close to his similar shoe and bare brown masculine ankle.
Every part of his body appealed to her in a way no other man’s had. She had a crazy longing to be on a spacious rug with room to lie back and run her hand down his spine and say, Make love to me, Marc.
But she hadn’t the nerve to do it. She wasn’t that sort of woman. Her inhibitions insisted the first move must come from him.
‘I was never into athletics or organised games,’ said Marc. ‘I prefer sports like skiing and climbing, things one can do on one’s own. I also like games two can play.’ He paused. ‘Chess and backgammon.’
Sophie was sure he hadn’t been thinking about board games in those few seconds of silence. Or was it only her own, overheated imagination which had instantly conjured up a vision of a king-size bed and Marc sitting on the side of it, beckoning her to him?
‘I can’t play either of them,’ she said. ‘Monopoly is my level.’
‘I missed out on Monopoly. Didn’t have that sort of childhood. I expect I’ll get the hang of it when my children are the right age.’
She found it curiously painful to think of him, years hence, holding the bank of paper money for a family game. More than anything she wanted to share that future, to be the mother of the children shaking the dicepot and exchanging gleeful looks when Dad was sent to jail or they cleaned him out in a property deal.
By now the lagoon was invisible, hidden by the curtain of water teeming down from a sky as unrelentingly dark as those she remembered from her first winter in England. It must have rained here as well but she had no memory of it. Her childhood had seemed a time of perpetual sunlight.
The cloudburst slackened eventually, but the rain didn’t let up or show any sign of doing so. They must have been talking for an hour, one subject leading to another, when Marc said, ‘I need to stretch,’ and the next moment was on his feet, offering his hand to her.
Long ago, in her last year at school, she had known a boy who had taught her to clasp the wrist of someone offering a pull-up. She did this now and Marc’s fingers closed round her forearm and drew her up
right.
Still holding her, he said, ‘It looks as if we may have to spend the night here.’
‘I’d rather get drenched than do that.’
She only meant that a wetting seemed preferable to staying in a hut without the makings of a fire, a pile of sacks or any makeshift comforts.
His reaction was startling. About to let go, his fingers became a vice. His brows drew into a scowl she had never seen before.
‘Damn you, Sophie, when are you going to start trusting me? If all I wanted was sex, I could have had you at your flat. You know that as well as I do, but you’re still tensed up like a woman marooned with a crackpot. I’ve had enough.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MARC let go of her arm, as if dropping something repugnant, and bent to snatch up his blouson, flapping it back and forth to dislodge the dirt it had picked up. His tan was suffused with the dark red of rage as he shrugged it on and fumbled to join up the zip, his fingers made clumsy by the force of his anger.
‘Goddammit!’ he said, through set teeth. Then the two sides fitted together and he yanked at the tag and gave her a last furious glare before heading for the doorway.
‘Marc…wait…please don’t leave me.’
The apprehension in her voice seemed to abate his anger.
‘I didn’t intend to,’ he said curtly. ‘There’s a phone in the launch. I’m going to call for the covered launch to come and pick us up.’
She watched him run through the downpour. She was shivering, but not from cold. It was reaction to the flare-up between them.
When he came back his hair was plastered to his head, his clothes to his body, the drenched cloth defining every muscular contour of his tall, strong-boned frame. He was carrying a waterproof kitbag.
Raking his hair off his forehead, he said, ‘Fortunately all the launches are equipped with emergency packs. There’ll be a towel in here and a sweatshirt and pants. I’m going to strip off, but don’t panic. I merely want to get out of these wet things and into something dry.’
Sophie averted her face but could not close her mind’s eye to a vision of what was happening within a few feet of her: the powerful body being stripped of the sodden clothing and given a vigorous rub-down, making the tanned skin glow.
His voice broke into her thoughts. ‘How could you think I would leave you alone here?’
‘I—I thought you were angry…that you wanted to punish me.’
At first he didn’t reply. She could hear the friction of the towel and guessed he was drying his back.
‘Your safety and comfort are very important to me, Sophie,’ he said, in an oddly gruff voice. ‘I was a fool to lose track of you.’
‘Lose track of me…what do you mean?’
‘Are you going to go on pretending you don’t know we’ve met before?’
Her head swung round to face him, but she was too startled by what he had said to notice that he was naked. ‘I didn’t know you knew that.’
Marc wrapped the towel unhurriedly round his hips. ‘I knew when you came to be interviewed that I recognised something about you, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t discover the reason until we had lunch on Torcello with Martha Henderson. We passed the place where your grandfather’s boat had been moored and it all slotted into place. You were that funny child grown-up…grown very beautiful.’ The way he said it made her heart lurch. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it a secret?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered quietly. ‘I suppose I kept putting it off in case it put you off. We weren’t what you’d call respectable, Michael and I. To someone like you we must have seemed almost vagrants.’
‘I did think there was a danger of you ending up on the streets if the old man died and left you unprotected. That worried him too. He told me so. There was no one else he could tell. Fortunately, having come into my inheritance, I was in a position to do something about it. The money to finance your schooling and keep the old man in comfort for the few years left to him was a drop in the ocean of my grandfather’s fortune.’
‘You paid my school fees? But Michael said it was a legacy.’
‘A windfall,’ Marc said drily. ‘A quixotic gesture I didn’t follow through because that would have been too much trouble. It didn’t involve any effort to transfer some funds to a bank account in his name. To keep an eye on you afterwards was too much bother. It’s a selfish age, twenty-two. Perhaps it was just as well you were only eleven. If you’d been seventeen, I might have seduced you myself. I had no morals to speak of.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘You saved Michael’s life. You knew the right thing to do. You came to the hospital afterwards. He thought you a fine young man.’
‘He didn’t know me long enough to see behind the facade. I haven’t deceived you, have I? You’ve never trusted me.’ He thrust his arms through the sleeves of a scarlet sweatshirt and pulled it over his head.
With his black hair damp and dishevelled, he looked younger and somehow less formidable. Or was that because he was revealing a side of himself she had never seen before?
She decided to tell him the truth. ‘It’s not a trustful situation…falling in love with someone so different from yourself that there doesn’t seem to be any possible future in it.’
Marc pulled the sweatshirt down over his ribs. It was stretched by the breadth of his shoulders and inches too short in the arms.
‘Are you telling me you love me?’
‘I’ve tried not to but I can’t help it. If you want me, I’m yours. I know it may end in tears, but it will be lovely while it lasts.’
‘What are you proposing? That we live together?’
‘That’s what most people do.’
‘We aren’t “most people”. You and I make our own rules. I want you to be my woman, my friend, my companion for the rest of my life. In my book that means being my wife—with no conditions, no safeguards, only total commitment to a lifetime of happiness.’
Sophie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Marc…are you really saying this or am I dreaming?’
He came to where she was standing and put his arms lightly round her. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you many times, but the moment was never quite right. The night of your birthday was the nearest I came to it. If it hadn’t been for your friend ringing up from New York…As soon as you put the phone down I could see you were backing off—afraid I would take advantage of what your body wanted but your mind had begun to deny.’
He brought a hand up to her cheek, stroking it lightly with the back of his knuckles. ‘Leaving you…saying goodnight…was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But I knew if I went ahead it might be the first and last time for us. In the morning you’d feel I’d coerced you.’
Her feelings no longer masked, Sophie said softly, ‘You coerce me every time you look at me. Something inside me melts. I’m no longer in charge of myself. It’s a frightening feeling when you aren’t sure the other person feels the same way.’
‘I felt this way before you did…when it was still a mystery why you seemed so familiar. To love a woman before I knew her properly went against all my instincts. I’d seen too many disasters resulting from “love at first sight”. The world is littered with failed relationships based on that fatal premise…’
His fingers caressed her neck, sliding upwards into her hair as he bent his head to kiss her.
The difference between this kiss and the kisses exchanged at her flat was that now her mind could surrender as eagerly as her body. She slipped her arms round his neck, delighting in the strength of the arms holding her close, the wide shoulders forming a shield between her and the world.
His ears were the first to catch the distant drone of an engine. Bringing their kisses to a reluctant conclusion, he said huskily, ‘This isn’t the time or the place anyway. One day this will be our home and we’ll make love here many times. But tonight we’ll find somewhere else…’ His eyes smiled into hers. ‘Somewhere a little more comfortable.’
>
Sophie had stopped pretending. She said, ‘After you’ve picked up some dry clothes, you could come to my place.’
‘“Two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.” Meanwhile I’d better put some pants on.’
Like the sweatshirt, the black sports pants were not a good fit, being too large at the waist and too short in the leg. But Marc had the physique and presence to carry off any clothing. It crossed her mind that when Carnival came he would look magnificent in the black tricorne hat and silk cloak, as worn by his mother’s ancestors. Until now she hadn’t been certain she would be here for Carnival. But now the future, this morning an unknown territory, had changed to a clearly marked map of a golden world they would journey through together.
The boatman who came for them brought an umbrella for himself and two more for them.
Marc said, ‘One is enough.’ And when he had opened it he drew her into its shelter with an arm round her waist. Aboard the launch, he kept her in the circle of his arm.
‘What will your aunts say?’ she said as the boat moved away from the landing stage. ‘I’m sure they’ll think me most unsuitable.’
‘They’ll think me far luckier than I deserve to be. They like everything about you.’
‘They don’t know everything about me. When they find out I’m the granddaughter of the old man who used to draw tourists on the Riva…’
‘I had the impression he was someone rather special…perhaps an important artist before he lost his arm.’
Sophie explained about Michael’s career in the fashion world. ‘But not many people appreciate what wonderful draughtsmen the great fashion artists were.’
When they were nearly back to Venice, Marc instructed the boatman to take them to Sophie’s flat rather than the palazzo.
‘There is something I have to tell you before we announce our engagement,’ he said. ‘Something discreditable about me.’
‘There’s nothing you can tell me that would change the way I feel.’
‘I hope not,’ he said gravely. ‘But I’m afraid it may hurt you.’