Bartering Her Innocence

by Trish Morey

  And she cursed the combination of a velvet voice and an evocative scent; cursed that she remembered in way too much detail and the fact that he still looked as good as he always had and hadn’t put on twenty kilos and lost his hair since she had last seen him.

  Cursed the fact that there was clearly no justice in this world.

  For instead he was as beautiful as she remembered, a linen jacket over a white shirt that clung to his lean muscled chest as if it were a second skin, and camel-coloured linen trousers bound low over his hips by a wide leather belt.

  He looked every bit the urbane Italian male, as polished and sleek as the streamlined water taxis that prowled the canals, the powerful aristocrats of this watery world. And she was suddenly aware of the disparity between them, with her raw-faced from her shower and dressed in faded jeans and a chain-store jade-coloured vest that was perfectly at home on the farm or even in town but here and now in his presence felt tired and cheap.

  ‘But of course it is you. My apologies, I almost didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.’

  And a velvet voice turned to sandpaper, to scrape across senses already reeling from the shock of their meeting and leaving them raw and stinging.

  ‘Luca,’ she managed in an ice-laden voice designed to slice straight through his smugness, ‘I’d like to say it’s good to see you again, but right now I just want you to let me go.’

  His smile only widened, but he did let her go then, even if his hands lingered at her shoulders just a fraction longer than necessary, the shudder as his thumbs swept an arc across her skin as they departed and left her shivery just as unwelcome. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry? I understood you had only now arrived.’

  There was no point being surprised or asking how he knew. Her mother had been making calls when she’d arrived. One of them was to her father, her mother had said, but was another to Luca Barbarigo, sorting out the next instalment of her loan so she could purchase a new bargeful of glassware? She wouldn’t be surprised. For all her mother’s protests about the unfair actions of the man, she needed him for her supply of funds like a drug addict needed their supply of crack cocaine. She didn’t waste time being polite. ‘What’s it to you where I am going?’

  ‘Only that I might have missed you. I was coming to pay my respects.’

  ‘Why? So you could gloat to my face about my mother’s pathetic money management skills? Don’t bother, I’ve known about them for ever. It’s hardly news to me. I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time but I’ll be heading back to Australia the first flight I can get. And now, if you’ll excuse me...’ She made to move past him but it wasn’t easy. In the busy calle he was too tall, too broad across the shoulders. His very presence seemed to absorb what little space there was. But as soon as this next group of tourists passed...

  He shifted to the right, blocking her escape. ‘You’re leaving Venice so soon?’

  She tried to ignore what his presence was doing to her blood pressure. Tried to pretend it was anger with her mother that was setting her skin to burn and her senses to overload. ‘What would be the point of staying? I’m sure you’re not as naive as my mother, Signore Barbarigo. You must know there is nothing I can do to save her from financial ruin. Not after the way you’ve so neatly stitched her up.’

  His eyes glinted in the thin light, and Tina had no doubt the heated spark came not from what was left of the sun, but from a place deep inside.

  ‘So combatative, Valentina? Surely we can talk like reasonable people.’

  ‘But that would require you to be a reasonable person, Signore Barbarigo and, having met you in the past, and having examined my mother’s accounts, I would hazard the opinion that you have not one reasonable bone in your body.’

  He laughed out loud, a sound that reverberated between the brick walls and bounced all the way up to the fading sky, grinding on her senses. ‘Perhaps you are right, Valentina. But that does not stop your mother from believing that you will rescue her from the brink of ruin.’

  ‘Then she is more of a fool than I thought. You have no intention of letting her off the hook, do you? You won’t be happy until you have thrown her out of the palazzo!’

  Heads turned in their direction, ears of passing tourists pricking up at her raised voice, eager to happen upon a possible conflict to add colour and local spice to their Venetian experience.

  ‘Please, Valentina,’ he said, pushing her back towards the wall and leaning in close, as if they were having no more than a lovers’ tiff. ‘Do you wish to discuss your mother’s financial affairs in a public street as if it is fodder for so many tourists’ ears? What will they think of us Venetians? That we are not civilised enough to conduct our affairs in private?’

  Once again he was too close—so close that she could feel his warm breath fanning her face—too close to be able to ignore his scent or not feel the heat emanating from his firm chest or to be able to think rationally, other than to rebut the obvious.

  ‘I am no Venetian.’

  ‘No. You are Australian and very forthright. I admire that in you. But now, perhaps it is time to take this conversation somewhere more private.’ He indicated back in the direction she had come. ‘Please. We can discuss this in your mother’s house. Or, if you prefer, you can come with me to mine. I assure you, it is only a short walk.’

  And meet him on his territory? No way in the world. She might have been trying to escape her mother’s house, but it was still the lesser of two evils. Besides, if there were going to be some home truths flying around, maybe it was better her mother was there to hear them. ‘Then the palazzo. But only because I have a few more things I want to tell you before I leave.’

  ‘I can hardly wait,’ she heard him mutter as she wheeled around and headed back in the direction she had come. So smug, she thought, wishing there was something she could do or say to wipe the expression from his face. Was he so sure of Lily’s hopelessness that he had known her trip here was futile from the start? Was he laughing at her—at the pointlessness of it all?

  She almost growled as she headed back down the calle, her senses prickling with the knowledge he was right behind her, prickling with the sensation of his eyes burning into her back. She had to fight the impulse to turn and stare him down but then he would know that she felt his heated gaze and his smugness would escalate from unbearable to insufferable, so she kept her eyes rigidly ahead and tried to pretend she didn’t care.

  Carmela met them at the palazzo door, smiling uncertainly as she looked from one to the other. But then Luca smiled and turned on the charm as he greeted her in their own language and even though Carmela knew that her future in this place was held by little more than a gossamer thread this man could sever at any time, Tina would swear the older woman actually blushed. She hated him all the more for it in that moment, hated him for this power to make women melt under the sheer onslaught of his smile.

  ‘Your mother has taken to her bed,’ Carmela said, apologising for her absence. ‘She said she has a headache.’

  Luca arched an eyebrow in Tina’s direction. She ignored him as Carmela showed them upstairs to the main reception room, promising to bring coffee and refreshments. It was a massive room with high ceilings and pastel-decorated walls that should have been airy and bright but was rendered small by the countless cabinets and tables piled high with glass ornaments, figurines and crystal goblets and lamps of every shape and description, glass that now glinted ruby-red as the setting sunlight streamed in through the wide four-door windows.

  It was almost pretty, she thought, a glittering world of glass and illusion, if you could forget about what it had cost.

  ‘You’ve lost weight, Valentina,’ came his voice behind her. ‘You’ve been working too hard.’

  And it rankled with her that all the time he’d been following her he’d been sizing her up. Comparing her to how she’d bee
n three years ago and finding her wanting. No doubt comparing her to all his other women and finding her wanting. Damn it, she didn’t want to think about his other women! They were welcome to him. She spun around. ‘We’ve all changed, Luca. We’re all a few years older. Hopefully a bit wiser into the deal. I know I am.’

  He smiled and picked up a paperweight that glowed red from a collection from a side table, resting it in the palm of his big hand. ‘Some things I see haven’t changed. You are still as beautiful as ever, Valentina.’ He smiled and examined the glass in his hand before replacing it with the others and moving on, finding a slow path around the cluttered room and around her, pausing to examine a tiny crystal animal here, a gilt-edged glass plate there, touching just a fingertip to it before looking up at her again. ‘Perhaps, you are a little more prickly than I remember. Perhaps there is a little more spice. But then I recall you were always very...passionate.’

  He lingered over the word as if he were donning that velvet glove to stroke her memories and warm her senses. She swallowed, fighting back the tide of the past and a surge of heat low in her belly. ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ she said, turning on the spot as he continued to circle the room, touching a hand to the head of a glass boy holding a lantern aloft as if the golden-skinned child was real and not just another of her mother’s follies. ‘Instead, I want to tell you that I know what you’re doing.’

  He tilted his head. ‘And what, exactly, am I doing?’

  ‘I’ve been through Lily’s accounts. You keep lending her money, advance after advance. Money that she turns straight around to purchase more of this—’ she waved her hand around the room ‘—from your own cousin’s glass factory on Murano.’

  He shrugged. ‘What can I say? I am a banker. Lending people money is an occupational hazard. But surely it is not my responsibility how they see fit to use those funds.’

  ‘But you know she has no income to speak of to pay you back, and still you loan her more.’

  He smiled and held up his index finger. ‘Ah. But income is only one consideration a banker must take into account when evaluating a loan risk. You are forgetting that your mother has, what we call in the business, exceptional assets.’

  She snorted. ‘You’ve noticed her assets then.’ The words were out before she could snatch them back, and now they hung in the space like crystal drops from a chandelier, heavy and fat and waiting to be inspected in the light.

  He raised an eyebrow in question. ‘I was talking about the palazzo.’

  ‘So was I,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking about.’

  He laughed a little and ran the tips of his fingers across the rim of a fluted glass bowl on a mantelpiece as he passed, continuing his circuit of the room. Such long fingers, she couldn’t help but notice, such a feather-light touch. A touch she remembered on her skin. A touch she had thought about so often in the dark of night when sleep had eluded her and she had felt so painfully alone.

  ‘Your mother is a very beautiful woman, Valentina. Does it bother you that I might notice?’

  She blinked, trying to get a grip back on the conversation, tilting her head higher as he came closer. ‘Why should it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Unless you’re worried that I have slept with Lily. That maybe I am sleeping with her?’ He stopped before her and smiled. ‘Does that bother you, cara?’

  ‘I don’t want to know! I don’t care! It’s no business of mine who you sleep with.’

  ‘Of course not. And, of course, she is a very beautiful woman.’

  ‘So you said.’ The words were ground out through her teeth.

  ‘Although nowhere—nowhere—near as beautiful as her daughter.’

  He touched those fingers to her brow, smoothing back a wayward strand of hair. She gasped, shivering at the touch, thinking she should stop him—that she should step away—when in truth she could feel herself leaning closer.

  It was Luca who stepped away, dropping his hand, and she blinked, a little stunned, feeling as if she had conceded a point to him, knowing that she had to regain the high ground.

  ‘You told my mother we were old friends.’

  He shrugged and sat down on a red velvet armchair, his long legs lazily sprawled out wide, his elbows resting on the arms. ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘We were never friends.’

  ‘Come now, Valentina.’ Something about the way he said her name seemed almost as if he were stroking her again with that velvet glove and she crossed her arms over her chest to hide an instinctive and unwanted reaction. ‘Surely, given what we have shared...’

  ‘We shared nothing! We spent one night together, one night that I have regretted ever since.’ And not only because of the things you said and the way we parted.

  ‘I don’t remember it being quite so unpleasant.’

  ‘Perhaps you recall another night. Another woman. I’m sure there have been so many, it must get quite confusing. But I’m not confused. You are no friend of mine. You are nothing to me. You never were, and you never will be.’

  She thought he might leave then. She was hoping he might realise they had nothing more to say to each other and just go. But while he pulled his long legs in and sat up higher in the chair, he did not get up. His eyes lost all hint of laughter and took on a focus—a hard-edged gleam—that, coupled with his pose, with his legs poised like springs beneath him, felt almost predatory. If she turned and ran, she thought, even if there was a way to run in this cluttered showroom, he would be out of his chair and upon her in a heartbeat. Her own heart kicked up a notch, tripping inside her chest like a frightened gazelle.

  ‘When your mother first came to me for a loan,’ he said in a voice that dared her not to pay attention to each and every syllable, ‘I was going to turn her down. I had no intention of lending her the money.’

  She didn’t say anything. She sensed there was no point in asking him what had changed his mind—that he intended telling her anyway—even if she didn’t want to know. On some very primal level, she recognised that she did not want to know, that, whatever it was, she was not going to want to hear this.

  ‘I should see about that coffee—’ she said, making a move for the stairs.

  ‘No,’ he said, standing and barring her exit in one fluid movement, leaving her wondering how such a big man could move with such economy and grace. ‘Coffee can wait until I’ve finished. Until you’ve heard this.’

  She looked up at him, at the angles and planes of his face that were both so beautiful and so cruel, looked at the place where a tiny crease betrayed a rarely seen dimple in his cheek, studied the shallow cleft in his chin, and she wondered that she remembered every part of him so vividly and in such detail, that nothing of his features came as a surprise but more as a vindication of her memory.

  And only then she realised he was studying her just as intently, just as studiously, and she turned her eyes away. Because she had stared at him too long, she told herself, not because she was worried what he might be remembering about her.

  ‘I didn’t have to lend that money to your mother,’ he continued. ‘But then I remembered one long night in a room warmed by an open fire, with sheepskin rugs on the floor and a feather quilt to warm the wide bed. And I remembered a woman with skin the colour of cream with amber eyes and golden hair and who left too angry and much too soon.’

  She glared at him, clamping her fists and her thighs and refusing to let his words bury themselves in the places they wanted to go. ‘You lent my mother money to get back at me? Because I slapped you? You really are mad!’

  ‘You’re right. I can’t give you all the credit. Because in lending your mother money, I saw the opportunity to take back Eduardo’s home—this palazzo—before it collapsed into the canal from neglect. I owed Eduardo that, even if I wanted nothing to do with his wife. But that wasn’t the only reas
on. I also wanted to give you a second chance.’

  ‘To slap you again? You make it sound so tempting.’ Right now her curling fist ached to lash out at something. Why not his smug face?

  He laughed at that. ‘Some say a banker’s life must be dull: days filled with endless meetings and boring conversations about corporate finance and interest rate margins. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Sometimes it can be much more rewarding.’

  ‘By dreaming up fantasies? Look, I don’t care how you while away your hours—I really don’t want to know—just leave me out of them.’

  ‘Then you are more selfish than I thought—’ his voice turned serious ‘—your mother is in serious financial trouble. She could lose the palazzo. In fact she will lose the palazzo. Don’t you care that your mother could be homeless?’

  ‘That will be on your head, not on mine. I’m not the one threatening to throw her out.’

  ‘And yet you could still save her.’

  ‘How? I don’t have access to the kind of funds my mother owes you, even if I did want to help.’

  ‘Who said anything about wanting your money?’

  There was a chilling note to his delivery, as if she should indeed know exactly what kind of currency he was considering. But no, surely he could not mean that?

  ‘I have nothing that would interest any banker and convince them to forgive a debt.’

  ‘You underestimate yourself, cara. You have something that might encourage this banker to forgive your mother’s debt.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so!’

  ‘Listen to what I offer, Valentina. I am not a beast, whatever you may think. I do not want your mother to suffer the indignity of being thrown out of her home. Indeed, I have an apartment overlooking the Grand Canal ready and waiting for your mother to move into. She will own it free of any encumbrance and she will draw a monthly pension. All that stands in the way is you.’ He smiled, the smile of a crocodile, the predator back in residence under his skin.