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.’ And then all too suddenly he was gone, leaving the air swirling in his wake.
She wandered through the apartment alone, stopping to admire a painting or an exquisite detail on one of the many frescoes, admiring the chef’s kitchen with a zillion gleaming utensils hanging from the hooks.
She stopped by the quadrifora, the four beautiful doors that led to the balcony, and on impulse opened them and stepped outside. A breeze tugged at her hair, and on it the scent of cooking from a trattoria she could see along the canal, its tables and chairs spilling out onto a terrace alongside the water. She stood there and listened to a gondolier serenade his passengers and just breathed in the scents and sounds of a city built upon the sea while her tangled thoughts lay elsewhere.
What was it that troubled Raoul? she wondered. That coloured his moods from light to dark in an instant? What was it that drove him to such dark, explosive depths, that turned his eyes unreadable and closed him off to everyone?
She stood there, long after the gondolier’s song had faded along the canal, thinking about the riddle that was Raoul. Finally, finding no answers amongst the stuccoed buildings, the overflowing flowerpots or the slow, eternal slap of water against building, she sighed and thought about unpacking instead so she could go and explore.
She found Natania in her bedroom with the job already half done. ‘Oh, I don’t expect you to do that.’
‘I don’t mind. There is not enough to do otherwise, and anyway—’ she lifted a cashmere sweater and rubbed it against her cheek ‘—you have such beautiful clothes and you wear them so well. Do you know my Marco said you looked like a flower when you arrived? Dewy and fragile and just waiting to be picked.’
Gabriella stilled as she retrieved her toilet bag from the case, heading for the bathroom. ‘Marco said that?’
Natania nodded gravely, slipping tissue paper between the folds of the sweater before reverently placing it in a drawer. ‘Please don’t be offended. It was meant as a compliment. Only he was worried that to put you in this bedroom …’ She waved a hand ‘… well, it might make you unsettled.’
Gabriella was still trying to work out how to answer when the other woman unzipped a compartment in her suitcase, unfolded a dress and laid it on the bed, smoothing the fabric with her hands, almost worshipping the formal gown. ‘So beautiful,’ she said, slipping a cover over the dress before hanging it in the closet. ‘Maybe we could go shopping together while you are here?’
‘I’d love to.’
The other woman’s eyes lit up. ‘You would? Bene. Anyway, I told Marco he was wrong. A woman as beautiful as you, you would know men. You would be no unpicked flower who would become unsettled by a little nudity. Am I right?’
Gabriella looked around the alcove and wondered at the other woman’s definition of ‘a little nudity’, but she wasn’t about to debate that now. For, while it was nobody’s business but her own, she got the impression this was no time to act coy. She was no shy, retiring flower after all, even if she lacked the raw sensuality of this gypsy princess. ‘I’m no virgin, if that’s what you mean.’ Even if she could count the number of times she’d had sex on the fingers of one hand.
The other woman’s eyes opened wide, her lush mouth in a broad self-congratulatory smile as she planted her hands on her hips and nodded. ‘You see? I knew that. A woman senses these things.’ She gestured to the walls around them. ‘Then you will understand this art. You will appreciate it for its true beauty.’ She glanced at her watch and then back at the suitcase. ‘And now I must start dinner, but …’
‘It’s okay,’ Gabriella said. ‘There’s not much to do. I’ll finish the unpacking.’
‘Grazie! And I promise you tonight I will make a feast fit for a king—and his queen, for that matter.’ She gave an abrupt nod, as if she’d just made up her mind about something. ‘Yes, it is good to see Raoul with a woman at last.’
‘Natania, please don’t think … It’s not like that. We’re old friends, that’s all.’
‘Si. Maybe for now.’ And with a toss of her beautiful head she spun on her heel and headed for the kitchen, the bangles on her hand jangling in time to the sway of her hips.
What was that supposed to mean? Was Natania a fortune teller as well as a cook? But, with her spine still tingling from the gypsy’s unsettling prediction, there was no way Gabriella was going to ask.
Not