Bartering Her Innocence

by Trish Morey

  ‘Yes.’ And she was, if only because she was surprised by his concern. It wasn’t one of the things she associated with the man. Arrogance was a given. Lust she expected. But concern hadn’t figured on her list of Luca’s character traits. Then again, maybe he was just worried that his playmate might be too ill to play games tonight. And that sounded so fitting that she even managed to dredge up a smile. ‘Much better, thank you.’

  Through an elegant arched doorway and the hotel lobby opened up like an Aladdin’s Cave. Ceilings soared, magnificently decorated with gold leaf, while pink marble columns stretched high to reach them and a wide red carpeted staircase wound around the walls on its way heavenwards.

  ‘It’s stunning,’ she said.

  ‘You are.’ And when she turned to look at him, he simply gestured around. ‘Every head is turned your way. Hadn’t you noticed?’

  No. ‘If they are, it’s because I’m with you.’

  ‘They’re all wondering who you are, it’s true,’ he told her as he led her towards the magnificent staircase, ‘but every woman in this hotel wishes she looked like you.’

  ‘It’s the dress,’ she countered, needing to change the subject, before she started believing him. ‘However did you know what size to have delivered?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you expect a man like me to know what size his lover wears?’

  She shivered. His lover? That seemed too personal. Too intimate. Theirs was a business arrangement. A deal. So she schooled her features, aiming for cool and unaffected and definitely uncaring. ‘Clearly you’ve had plenty of practice to be so good at it.’

  ‘Clearly.’ His smile widened. ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘Why should it? I don’t care who you sleep with. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Although perhaps I am not so expert as you would like to believe. Aldo found your clothes. The tags were still readable apparently. But only just.’

  Another reminder of her wanton behaviour. Yet another reminder of the age of her clothes. And she had no comeback either, other than to blush. So she concentrated on the stairs beneath her feet and just hoped her face didn’t clash with her dress.

  The restaurant ran the length of the building, half enclosed, half terrace, all understated elegance with red upholstery and cream linen tablecloths, with touches of gilt for highlights around artfully placed mirrors. Heads turned as they passed, men greeted Luca like an old friend, women preened for him and stared openly and questioningly at her. He swept through the room like a rolling wave, refusing to be distracted for longer than a second, even when it was clear that he was being welcomed to share someone’s table for the evening.

  Clearly Luca had other plans.

  Through wide glass doors they were led onto the broad terrace, where Luca’s table stood waiting for them at the far corner, boasting uninterrupted views over the San Marco Basin and the Gulf of Venice. Below them tourists paraded along the Riva degli Shiavoni enjoying the balmy September evening while water craft darted across the basin lit up like fireflies.

  Luca sat back in his seat and smiled. The views from the terrace were sublime, it was true, but then his view was even better. He hadn’t lied. She looked amazing tonight. There was something about the colour of her cat-like eyes. And there was something about the colour of that dress, the way the shadows danced across it in the light whenever she moved. His fingers envied those shifting shadows and itched to dance their own way across her skin. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked as they were handed their menus. He was, but what he wanted to feast upon had nothing to do with his stomach.

  She’d left him hungering for more last night. He’d imagined a second course before leaving for work, but she’d been so deeply asleep this morning that letting her sleep had seemed the far wiser action. He wanted her wide awake when he made love to her again. And this time he wanted her to last all night.

  This night.

  The thought was as delicious as anything offered on the menu, which suddenly seemed too long and filled with far too many courses. He lost interest in the choices, returned to watch her instead, enjoying the tilt of her head and the curl of slim fingers angled around her menu.

  ‘A little,’ she said, her eyes drifting upwards, widening when they caught him watching her. She swallowed and he watched the slight kick of her chin and the movement down her throat. ‘Is there something special you can recommend?’

  Plenty. But if she was talking food—he skipped straight to the main courses, already impatient to be home. Surprised a little by how much. ‘The monkfish is excellent here, or there is always the rabbit.’

  Something flared in her eyes, something challenging, as if she could read his thoughts. ‘I think the beef,’ she said, and he smiled.

  ‘Excellent choice,’ he said, thinking she would need it and ordered for them both.

  Sparkling prosecco arrived, poured into glasses spun with gold. ‘A toast,’ he said, lifting his glass to her. ‘To...’ She arched one eyebrow, waiting. He smiled, a long, purposeful smile. ‘...anticipation.’

  Her expression gave nothing away. Only her eyes betrayed the fact she felt it too, this thread between them, as fine as that trace of gold spun in their glasses, pulling inexorably tighter. ‘To anticipation,’ she echoed, a husky quality infusing her voice as she lightly touched her flute to his.

  Giddy.

  She hadn’t even had one sip of the wine and she already felt giddy. But how could she not? The setting was sublime, the view magical and the man opposite was looking at her as if she was more tasty than anything on the menu.

  And no matter what she thought of him, she could not help but like the way he looked at her and what it did to her body. She liked this delicious heat simmering under her skin and the way his eyes warmed her from the inside out. She liked the way he seemed impatient to have this meal over with when he had been the one who had insisted on coming out. There was something empowering about his need, something that meant he didn’t hold all the cards.

  Yes, she had agreed to his deal. She was his for the month, it was true, but did he not realise that by dressing her up and turning her into something worthy of his attention he was handing her a decent measure of his power?

  All she had to do was play her part. It wasn’t hard. Whatever she thought of Luca Barbarigo and his ruthless determination to get his own way, there was no hardship in anticipating the pleasures of the night to come. Just as there was no hardship in anticipating the pleasures of walking away one short month from now.

  Oh yes, she’d drink to anticipation.

  ‘So this is where we make small talk,’ Luca said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Where we sit and converse like two civilised people when there is somewhere we would both rather be and something we would both much prefer to be doing.’

  There was no need to ask what he would rather be doing, not when his dark eyes were thick with desire. But if he wanted small talk... ‘Maybe we could talk about the weather,’ she suggested. ‘It’s a beautiful night.’

  ‘The weather does not interest me.’

  ‘No? Then we could talk about the view. You could point out the places of interest. There seems to be no shortage of those.’

  He shook his head. ‘I could do that. But that would be dull. We would just be marking time. I would rather talk about you. How long is it since that night? Two years? More?’

  That night. What an appropriate way to put it. ‘Three years come January.’

  ‘So many.’ He took a sip of his wine and sat back, his dark eyes searching hers. ‘Which begs the question: what have you been doing all that time?’

  Well, now there was a simple question. How to find a simple answer for all she had been doing?

  Nursing a bruised ego.

  Discovering that she was pregnant.

  Grieving the
loss of that child.

  Hating...

  She picked up her water glass, a tumbler that bore the swirling logo of the restaurant, clearly made locally in Murano, and she wondered that, for all her vast collection, her mother had never managed to find anything near as simple or as beautiful. She studied the piece so that she didn’t have to look at the man sitting opposite. She stared at it so he wouldn’t know how much his questions unsettled her. ‘Working on my father’s property, mostly.’ The mostly was important. She wasn’t about to confess that for the first few months she’d been holed up in a friend’s one-bedroom flat in Sydney while her life lurched from one turmoil to the next.

  ‘What kind of property? Lily said something about wool?’

  She buried the spike of resentment that rose at the mention of Lily and the farm in the same sentence. ‘Yes. Sheep and some cropping. Lucerne mainly.’ She looked around at their watery world, lined with buildings that went back at least five centuries. Some years the farm didn’t see rain, the dams dried up and the sheep turned red with dust. The last drought had lasted so long, some local kids had grown up thinking sheep were supposed to be red. ‘It’s different from here,’ she said, making a massive understatement, ‘that’s for sure.’

  ‘So you’re close to him, then. Your father.’

  She shrugged. ‘Of course. He was the one who brought me up after Lily walked out.’ Whereas Lily, she thought, had been a some time holiday destination—her visit usually coinciding with a wedding. There’d been two more of those before her marriage to Eduardo. One to a Swiss ski school owner. Another to an Argentinian polo player. Neither of them had lasted either.

  Funny, she thought, how life ran in circles sometimes.

  She’d met Luca at her mother’s wedding to Eduardo. By then, aged seventeen, she’d well and truly realised that her mother’s life was as empty and pointless as they came. And by then she was hardly going to fall into bed with someone who happened to be Eduardo’s nephew, even if he was the most perfect male specimen she had ever laid eyes upon and even if he made no bones about his attraction to her...

  Luca snapped a breadstick, jolting her back to the present. ‘I have trouble picturing Lily on a farm.’

  ‘They should never have married. I’m sure she imagined she was going to end up some rich farmer’s wife and play tennis and drink tea all day.’

  ‘But it didn’t turn out that way?’

  She shook her head. ‘She hated it, apparently—the flies, the heat—she left when I was six months old. Just packed up and left Mitch with a baby and a hole where his heart had been.’

  ‘It seems—’ he hesitated a moment, as if searching for the words ‘—an unlikely match. Someone like Lily with someone who works on the land.’

  ‘I think their differences were what attracted them to each other. She was the original English flower, on holidays to visit an old maiden aunt. He was the rugged Australian right down to his leather workman boots and as exotic to her as she was to him. When they met at some charity event in Sydney, it was lust at first sight.’ She sighed. ‘In normal circumstances it would have run its course and they would have both gone back to their separate worlds but Lily ended up pregnant with me and before you know it they were married. Pointlessly as it turned out.’

  ‘You don’t approve?’

  ‘I don’t think an unplanned pregnancy is any reason for a marriage! Do you?’

  Maybe she’d sounded too strident. Maybe her question had sounded too much like a demand because she needed him to agree with her. But across the table from her, Luca merely shrugged instead of agreeing. ‘I am Italian. Family is important to us. Who’s to say if it’s the right or wrong thing to do?’

  ‘Me,’ she said, knowing that if he knew—if he had only known—he would think differently. ‘I’ve lived my life knowing their marriage was futile, a disaster from start to finish. I would never do that to a child of mine. I might be Lily’s daughter, but I am not Lily!’

  ‘And yet here you are, still picking up after her.’

  ‘I’m not doing this for Lily,’ she hissed, with rods of steel underpinning her words, ‘but you threatened to bring my father into this and there is no way on this earth I am going to let you suck him into Lily’s nightmare. He’s worked hard for every cent he has and I won’t let him lose any of it on her account!’

  She was breathless after her outburst. Breathless and breathing fire, but she was glad too, that he had reminded her of all the reasons she hated him, that he thought he could manufacture the result he wanted by manipulating people and using them for his own ends.

  ‘Do you realise,’ Luca asked, leaning forward and cradling his wine glass in his hands, ‘how your eyes glow when you are angry? Did you know they burned like flames in a fire?’

  She sucked in air, blindsided by the change in topic, but more so because she had expected anger back in return. She had been prepared for Luca to fight, expecting him to fight, if only to defend his low actions. Whereas his calm deliberations and an analysis of her eye colour had knocked the wind from her sails.

  ‘I was angry,’ she said, uncomfortable and unnerved that he could find things about her that nobody else had ever told her. Things that she herself didn’t know. ‘I still am.’

  ‘It’s not just when you’re angry though,’ he continued as their meals arrived, the waiter placing their plates with a flourish before disappearing on a bow. ‘They glowed like that last night when you came. I look forward to seeing them burn that way for me again tonight.’

  She wasn’t sure which way was up after that. The meal passed in a blur, she ate and the beef melted in her mouth, but five minutes after her plate was whisked efficiently away, she couldn’t have described how it tasted. Five minutes after he said something, she couldn’t have remembered his words. Not when her whole being seemed focused not on the meal, but on the senses he stirred and by the knowledge of what would come afterwards.

  Every word he spoke stroked her senses. Every heated look stoked the fire burning deep inside her belly. Every single smile had the ability to worm its way under her skin.

  God, but he looked so good when he smiled. Generous lips swept open to reveal white teeth. Not perfect teeth, she noted with some satisfaction, for one eye tooth angled and hugged too close to one of his front teeth to be absolutely perfect. And yet somehow that made him more real than make believe. Somehow that only worked to make him more perfect. And still he looked so good that logic got spun on its head and she might even imagine for one infinitesimal moment that...

  But no.

  She brought herself up with a thump. Took a drink of frizzante water to cool her heated senses. There could be no imagining. Not where Luca Barbarigo was concerned.

  But there could be tonight.

  An entire month of tonights.

  Her body hummed as dessert was short-circuited for coffee.

  Anticipation built to fever pitch in her veins, as lingering to enjoy the view was short-circuited for the promise of pleasure.

  The boats were still darting across the basin like fireflies; most of the tables around them were still full, when Luca had clearly had enough. ‘It’s time,’ he said throatily, and there seemed nothing left to say when the hunger in his eyes told her all she needed to hear.

  He guided her through the restaurant, the touch of his hand at her lower back no more than the graze of his fingertips, and yet every part of her body seemed focused on that spot, as if he’d tied a ribbon between them that kept her close.

  And this time Luca all but ignored the greetings that were called out to him. He ignored the eye contact that would ensure recognition and guarantee acknowledgement. He stopped not once in his quest to get her out of the restaurant and down the stairs and into the waiting water taxi.

  For me, she told herself. He is avoiding them for me, and that know
ledge was as empowering as it was intoxicating.

  All the more empowering given he had forgiven a debt—a massive debt—for the pleasure of her company.

  And a question that had been niggling away at her wanted answering.

  What was this all about?

  Why her? Sure, her mother owed him a fortune, but surely there were plenty of women who would be prepared to grace Luca’s arm and his bed for however long it took without sacrificing a cent of her mother’s debt. Why did he want her? What was his game?

  On the taxi he suggested they stand outside and watch the moving light show along the canal, and he took her hand and led her through to the rear deck. ‘You’re frowning,’ he noticed, wrapping his arms around her as she held onto the rail as the taxi moved away from the dock.

  She stiffened a little. ‘Maybe because I don’t understand you.’

  She felt him shrug against her back. ‘What’s so hard to understand?’

  ‘Why you want me.’

  ‘I’m a man who likes women,’ he said, peeling her away to spin her around to face him. ‘And you are—’ his eyes lowered, raking over her, and they might just as well have been raking hot coals over her skin ‘—unmistakably all woman. Why wouldn’t I want you?’ He leant down closer, his lips drawing closer, and fear the size of a football kicked off in her gut. She turned her head away.

  ‘Don’t do that. Don’t kiss me.’ People who liked each other kissed. People who were in love.

  ‘Why not?’

  Because kisses were dangerous. You could lose yourself in a kiss, and she didn’t want to be lost with Luca Barbarigo.

  ‘Because I hate you and I don’t think you particularly like me that much. It just seems false.’

  ‘And sex doesn’t?’

  ‘Not when it’s just sex.’

  ‘Just sex. Is that what you thought we were having last night—just sex?’

  ‘What would you call it?’

  ‘Mind-blowing. Earth-shattering. Maybe even some of the best I’ve ever had.’

  She gasped, her eyes searching his face for laughter, finding no trace. It had been like that for her...but for him? And whether it was the sudden acceleration of the taxi as it joined the main canal, or because she didn’t want to prevent it, but this time when his mouth came closer—so close that his lips brushed hers—all the air disappeared from her lungs in a rush of heat, leaving a vacuum that could be filled only by him.