‘Why not? It was no risk for me because it meant nothing to me. Maybe that’s why I was lucky enough to keep it. Anyway,’ he said without bothering to explain as he pushed open the door to the apartment, ‘Come inside.’
It wasn’t a living room or even a lobby the suite opened on to, it was a library, lining four walls of the long, narrow room, bookshelves stacked high, even over doorways to the impossibly high ceilings. Gabriella did a double take, blinking with disbelief as she took in the titles, some of them recognisable treasures.
‘You have a library?’ she said, suddenly spinning around, a smile lighting up her face, illuminating her features with a child-like delight that twisted his gut.
So much enthusiasm.
So much life.
Such a waste.
And then she stopped spinning and stood there, almost incandescent with wonderment as she inhaled deeply, as if she could breathe in the collective wisdom contained in a room filled with old books. ‘It’s wonderful.’
He could not bear it. First her excitement at the vaporetto as they’d approached the water-borne city, an excitement that had made it impossible not to want to wrap her in his arms and feel that excitement first hand.
And now here. But this time he resisted the urge to collect her into his arms and feel first-hand the excitement in the shape of her feminine curves.
Did she always see the joy in everything?
Did she not realise it couldn’t last?
‘This way,’ he said gruffly, almost rigid with control as he pulled open a set of double doors, unable or unwilling to stay in the room a moment longer with her. ‘The living room.’
She’d done something wrong. One moment, Raoul had been warm and welcoming—even, she thought, remembering the warmth of his touch pressing against her back and the iron-like feel of his arms around her waist, more like a lover than a friend. His touch had been filled with both tenderness and desire.
Had she been the only one to feel that desire?
But now, it seemed as she watched him both physically and mentally retreat from her, there was nothing warm about him. His back was ramrod straight, the air about him frosty. Yet all she’d done was express her delight at the unexpected discovery of his library.
Had she been too easily impressed? Too gauche? Raoul was more than a decade older than her. She must seem so young and unsophisticated compared to the women he was probably used to, even if they weren’t permitted here. But there would have to be women …
With a heavy heart, she followed him through the doors and into a long, richly decorated room with two long blood-red velvet sofas lining the richly frescoed walls. Four arched doors opposite led to the balcony she had seen from the sea-door landing, she assumed. But it was the chandelier that hung from the decorated ceiling that was the pièce de résistance. It was so exquisite that she stopped following Raoul for a moment to simply absorb its beauty. From its base swept long white plumes tipped with red, all swaying and curving, like the necks of peacocks dancing and craning their heads this way and that. The artist had captured the motion so well, it could almost have been alive.
‘This is the dining room,’ she heard him say. And then he must have turned, looking for her. ‘It’s Murano glass—an original.’
‘It’s exquisite,’ she said, cautious, conscious of not gushing over every last thing in case she further aggravated him.
‘Have you been there? To the island, I mean, to see the glass factories?’
‘Yes, my class did a tour, but I don’t remember seeing anything this beautiful then.’ Probably because they’d all been too fascinated with the tiny animals, the dolphins, fish and the millefiore—the tiny coloured flowers and hearts set in the glass—to take note of any of the more spectacular work.
‘I will take you again, in that case.’
‘You will?’ Then she remembered not to look so excited and schooled her face into something she hoped looked far more sophisticated and calm. ‘Thank you. If it’s not too much trouble, that would be lovely.’
Something scudded across his eyes, and just as quickly disappeared. ‘I will organise it.’ Once again, he pointed to the room off one side of the living room. ‘The kitchen is behind the dining room. Natania cooks most nights. And this,’ he said, crossing to the other side of the living room and opening another door, ‘is your room.’
She followed him into another long room, as large as the living room they had just left, with more large sofas and an amazing red Persian rug splashing colour and depth into the furnishings. But it was the king-sized bed to which her eyes were drawn. It was set into an arched alcove at the end of the room, columns at its entrance, the walls decorated with a mediaeval mural featuring nymphs and satyrs along with gods and goddesses engaged in various acts of love. It was an orgy of colour, passion and sex—the perfect lover’s retreat. And he expected her to sleep there? Surrounded by that?
‘Surely this is the master suite?’ she said, trying not to blush and knowing she was failing miserably. She was no prude, and the art was sublime, but the images were not exactly easy to look at, not if the last thing you needed to think about was sex.
‘You are my guest. And this is the most comfortable room.’
Comfortable, maybe. Confronting, definitely.
‘There is a bathroom through here,’ he said, his arm reaching for a door handle past the buttocks of a god engaged in an activity that was clearly giving him and the recipient great pleasure.
‘You’re blushing,’ he said. ‘Are you shocked by what you see?’
It wasn’t that. It wasn’t the sight of the images that shocked her, exactly. It was that she didn’t want such thoughts put in her head when she was with Raoul. She didn’t need them. It was like her every night-time dream had been captured by a mediaeval artist five-hundred years ago and had been splattered across these bedroom walls. Raoul’s bedroom walls.
‘I wasn’t expecting such unique decor, it’s true. But it’s a beautiful room. In fact …’ she said, fleeing for the safety of the bathroom, before realising there was no sanctuary in a place where she could just as easily imagine Raoul naked and soaping himself in the wide marble shower. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to blot out those images too—but how did you blot out the image of a perfect male specimen, naked under the cascading water, droplets beading on the ends of his hair, rivulets sluicing down his long, hard body?
She swallowed hard and slapped on a too-bright smile as she turned. ‘It’s a fabulous apartment. How old is it?’ As an attempt to find something safer to talk about, even if maybe it was groan-worthy, it was the best she could come up with. The fact she hadn’t used the word ‘naked’ was something to be proud of.
‘At least seven hundred years,’ he said as he showed her through the rest of the apartment: the second bathroom, a small room given over to an office and a still-generous but much more modest and unassuming second bedroom. With no lovers’ alcove, she noted wryly, and with which she would have been perfectly happy. ‘Originally it was built on a Byzantine design, and then redesigned during the fourteenth century to what you see today.’
‘It’s magnificent, Raoul,’ she said, no stranger to luxury herself. But there was something special about this place. It spoke of a time of both massive wealth and an unprecedented interest in the arts and all things beautiful. The palazzo was a temple to the beautiful, the fine, the rich and sensual.
And Raoul was like a beautiful, tortured dark angel in its midst.
‘I must leave you now,’ he said when they had finished the tour and he once again stood stiffly before her in the library. ‘I have something I must see to. Please make yourself at home.’