Behind the Mask

by Linda Winstead Jones

  “It is beautiful, is it not?” he answered.

  Beautiful? No. She looked vulnerable and naive. She had sworn to herself never to be either again, and yet...

  She spun on Giovanni, angry, hurt, wondering if the love she’d seen and felt in him earlier had also been a lie, simply a way of manipulating her emotions. “You used me. You planned this from the moment you saw me sitting by the lion.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  “I’m just another face to you. You saw that I needed you and you used that need against me. You made me want you, all for a painting.” Hot tears sprang to her eyes. “That’s so cruel. I didn’t think... I didn’t think...” Her voice choked, making her unable to finish the thought. She hadn’t believed, until this moment, that so much as a drop of cruelty dwelled in Giovanni’s body.

  She swept past him on her way to the bed to collect her gown, holding back the tears in her eyes and the scream that rose to her lips. He didn’t care about her. He’d seduced her so that he could capture that hungry look, so he could paint what he saw. Their furious lovemaking had been the culmination of too many days spent preparing her, stroking her, using her.

  Like very other man in her life, he had used her. Why had she ever believed that he was different?

  Giovanni grabbed her and spun her around. “I never planned to want you so much that I ached every hour of the day,” he whispered. His hands were firm on her arms, keeping her in place even when she tried to slip away. “I never planned to dream about you every night, to live for your smile and your kiss and your gentle quiver when I touch you.” He looked deep into her tear-filled eyes.

  Audrey searched for the cruelty she knew had to dwell within him. In his face, in his eyes, in his voice. Like all men, Giovanni Valentino did what was necessary to get what he wanted, the rest of the world be damned. Audrey looked hard and deep, with her most cynical eye, but still she saw no hint of the heartless man she knew him to be. She saw, still, tenderness and passion.

  “I never planned to fall in love with you,” he whispered. With that single phrase, her suspicions melted away.

  “You can’t love me.”

  “I should not,” he said softly. “But I do.”

  Vulnerable and naive once more, she accepted his confession quickly and easily. Maybe she needed to believe that he loved her. Maybe she wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything.

  No longer angry, she slipped her arms around Giovanni’s waist and rested her head against his bare chest. She never should’ve been angry with him in the first place! He’d told her all along what he’d wanted to capture in her. It was not his fault that he’d succeeded so very well. It was not his fault that he’d shown her a part of herself that she hadn’t known existed.

  This was impossible. They had no future together. She would return to London in a matter of days, and Giovanni would stay here and paint his pictures and embrace life in a way Audrey Graystone never could.

  They had nothing in common. The silk wrapper fell open so that her flesh met his and her heart beat against his. Nothing in common. But for one, small miracle.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered against his skin. She’d thought, for so long, that she would never know love, that her father and her husband had robbed her of the piece of her soul that makes it possible to love.

  Giovanni took her face in his hands and forced her to look at him. “Then it is settled. You will stay here, in Venice. Always. You will pose for me and I will paint you again and again. I will paint you angry, and happy, and swollen with my child. I will paint our children...”

  “I can’t,” she whispered, stopping him before he broke her heart completely.

  “You can.” Undaunted, he pushed the wrapper off her shoulders. The silk barely brushed her skin as it fell to the floor.

  “There are... difficulties.”

  His answer was to take her hand and kiss it, to feather kisses up her arm to her elbow. “Never argue with me,” he whispered. “You will always lose.”

  “Oh, I will?” she asked breathlessly.

  “You see, I know all your most sensitive places. Here.” He licked the inside of her elbow, then sucked gently. “And here.” He raised his mouth to her neck, to suck beneath her ear. He caressed one nipple, brushing his palm lightly across her flesh. As he moved his mouth to her breast, his hand dropped to her leg, where his fingers brushed lazily against her inner thigh. “And you have already forgotten what we were arguing about.”

  “We were arguing?” Audrey whispered.

  They fell to the bed and Giovanni continued his gentle assault.

  “This isn’t fair,” she breathed.

  He lifted his head from her neck. “Not fair?”

  “I don’t know where your most sensitive places are.”

  “Tesoro mio,” he said huskily. “You will have to find them yourself.”

  She rolled Giovanni onto his back and began her search, kissing the indentation at the base of his throat, flicking her tongue against his warm, salty skin. She felt his deep tremor, his response to her touch. She kissed his chest, licked a flat nipple and nibbled tenderly, before taking his hand in hers to kiss the soft flesh of his inner elbow, to suck at his wrist, to kiss the palm of his hand. He had such beautiful fingers, long and strong and occasionally stained with paint. She took one finger, kissed it, nipped at the end, put the tip in her mouth to suck gently. She suckled harder when Giovanni moaned.

  She moved her search lower, trailing her fingers along his firm belly, her fingers circling his navel before slipping downward to unfasten the buttons at the front closure of his breeches. His manhood sprang free, and without hesitation she closed her fingers around it, stroking the length with tentative fingers. He was long and impossibly hard, warm and rigid. Had she really taken this into her body?

  “I never knew l could feel this way,” she whispered.

  Giovanni’s only response was a low moan from deep in his throat, a lovely rumbling sound she felt herself as if it worked through her in unseen waves. After all the days he’d teased and touched and enflamed her, it seemed only fair that she should have a chance to return the favor.

  Moving slowly, she slid his breeches down and off. He had such a lovely body, long and hard and lean. Muscled and slightly hairy, his body looked and felt so different from hers, so utterly masculine.

  “I should paint you,” she said, running her hands over his thighs, slipping her fingertips over his inner thighs until she felt his shudder. When he closed his eyes she smiled. “Yes, I should definitely paint you.”

  She slipped from the bed. The hand Giovanni reached out to stop her was too slow; she shot past him.

  “Now, where did I see that...” She glanced over her shoulder just as Giovanni languidly rose to a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Lie down,” she ordered amiably. “I’ll be right back.”

  He did as she asked, reclined on the bed with his hands behind his head and his long legs spread.

  Audrey collected the necessary supplies and returned to the bed, the sable brush in one hand, a small jar of honey in the other. She knelt on the mattress beside Giovanni, who raised his eyebrows but did not move.

  “What do you think you are doing, tesoro mio?”

  “Painting you,” she said, reaching out to sweep the soft sable hair of the paintbrush over his flat nipple.

  He smiled, sinful and satisfied, tempting and beautiful. As she feathered the dry brush over his skin, his eyes darkened and his smile faded.

  With a wicked grin of her own, she dipped the brush into the jar of honey and dribbled a small amount onto his chest. “I thought, briefly, of using your paints, but I know it would be difficult to remove afterwards, and besides...” She painted honey back and forth on his chest, touching his nipples, following the progress of the brush with her eyes. “I am aware that some of them are poisonous.”

  She lowered her head and licked honey from one nipple and then the other, kissed a
nd tongued the sticky line she’d painted on his chest. He tasted good, salty and sweet, warm and wonderfully alive. She savored the rise and fall of his chest against her mouth, the pounding beat of his heart she felt on her lips.

  Her body throbbed, perhaps in time with his heart. Every flick of her tongue, every brush of her lips against his skin, pulled her deeper and deeper under the influence of that primal, driving pulsation. She dabbed a honey-coated paintbrush around his navel and then kissed the sweetness away, her cheek brushing his engorged flesh, her lips dragging lazily across his skin.

  When she painted a line along the inside of his thigh, he nearly leapt off the bed. When she laid her lips there and flickered her tongue along the painted flesh, he shuddered, deep and completely. Oh, she liked this. She liked making Giovanni shudder, making him lose control. Most of all, she cherished the certainty in her heart that he needed her.

  She straddled him, placing her knees on either side of his thighs, and crept forward to continue her seductive game. She’d tasted him almost everywhere. Almost. Moving languidly, she lowered her head and laid her lips over his shaft, flicked her tongue, still sweet with honey, up and down its length.

  Giovanni had been silent throughout her sweet exploration, but he muttered low in his own beautiful Italian as he reached down to take her head in his hands and pull her up, to stop her intimate caress. “Slow down,” he whispered. “I am not ready for this to be finished.”

  He took the paintbrush and honey from her, and tossed her gently onto her back. Audrey closed her eyes and smiled as he applied a brush laden with honey to one nipple and then the other, and then slowly, carefully, thoroughly licked the honey away with his warm tongue. As he raked the hairs of the sable brush over one breast’s rosy tip, he drew the other deep into his mouth. A new, more demanding pulse began deep inside her.

  He painted a jagged line from the center of her breasts to her navel, and then kissed the honey away. Kissed, and licked, and sucked until she felt as if her body had taken on a life of its own, independent of her brain or her heart. She arched against him, gently, and threaded her fingers through his long hair, needing something, someone, to hold on to.

  Heaven above, no wonder he hadn’t spoken as she’d painted him. She was incapable of speech as Giovanni teased her with the soft brush and tantalized her with his mouth.

  Slipping his hand beneath her knee, he lifted one leg slightly to dab at her inner thigh with the brush, and then to kiss the honey away, to flutter his tongue higher and higher, licking and sucking at the tender flesh until he tasted her intimately, laying his mouth over her throbbing, waiting flesh, flicking his tongue over her, inside her.

  Audrey clutched the sheet beneath her, arching her back as Giovanni brought her to the brink of completion and then backed away, flicked his tongue against her until she was ready to explode and then withdrew.

  She could barely breathe; her body was on fire. She reached down and impatiently took the jar of honey and paintbrush from his hands and dropped them over the side of the bed.

  Giovanni crawled up and over her, moving slowly, the muscles in his arms and chest working with every sensuous, feral move he made. Audrey’s legs spread further apart, her knees cocked up instinctively. Her whole body trembled and ached and anticipated the moment when he’d finish his tortuously slow journey.

  When he was stretched above her, his face close to hers, his thighs caught between hers, he kissed her—slow and long, deep and completely—and with a single thrust he surged to enter her. He loved her fast and hard, fierce and demanding, stretching and filling her until she knew nothing but this moment and the way she and Giovanni fit together. Completion came fiercely moments later, with cries and whispers as they clutched one another tight, honeyed chests pressed tightly together.

  Audrey kept her eyes closed as she held Giovanni. She’d never felt so wonderful, so satisfied and so loved. There was no doubt about it; she would gladly give up everything for this man.

  He relaxed atop her, gently and heavily, so that she felt the rise and fall of his chest against hers. “Ti amo,” he whispered breathlessly into her ear.

  Audrey wrapped an arm around his neck and draped a leg over his, entangling them completely. “I love you, too.”

  9

  Audrey knew, without a doubt, that Giovanni would adore her costume. Tonight she was a medieval princess, her white and gold dress flowing, her hair loose, her only head-covering a circlet of gold. Her mask was a brilliant gold. For the first time in her life she truly felt like a princess. Giovanni loved her. She loved him. Yes, there were still secrets between them, lies to make amends for, explanations to be made. But in her heart she knew none of that mattered, because he loved her.

  She spotted Giovanni across the room, and practically ran to him. Her gown floated around her, the full skirt whipping in the breeze she created as she cut in and out of the crowd, as she made her way around revelers who were so engrossed in their own pleasures that they didn’t even notice that the world had changed. Beneath his half-mask he smiled, and offered his arms to her. She gladly fell into those arms.

  “You are more beautiful than ever, tesoro mio,” he said softly.

  “Because I love you,” she whispered.

  He moved her into a corner, away from the crowd. “Did you tell your lady that she would have to find herself another companion?”

  Audrey shook her head. “Let’s not talk about that tonight.” She laid her hand on his chest and looked up, catching his eyes with hers. “I want to dance and kiss.” She came up on her toes to bring her mouth closer to his. “I want to make love to you again, in the garden, in a dark alley, floating down the canal in a gondola. The fog will be our blanket, and we will protect one another against the cold. Nothing else matters.”

  He moaned softly. “I can see that arguing with you is going to be more difficult than I ever imagined.”

  She smiled. “First, we dance.” She took his hand and led him from the corner, into the throng that danced wildly to joyous music. Giovanni spun her around several times, each revolution faster, more frenzied than the last. The world was a colorful blur filled with music and new sensations and a happiness she had not known could ever exist for her. When they stopped, he had to hold her against the dizziness that assaulted her.

  “Enough dancing,” he rasped. “Time to move on to other endeavors.” Ah, she saw the light of desire and love in his eyes, the glint of pure passion. That love and passion touched her so deeply, so completely, that when she heard someone call her name, when she heard a gruff voice call, “Lady Graystone,” she turned about without a second thought.

  “Yes?” She faced a handsome young man. She didn’t realize what she’d done until Giovanni’s hands dropped abruptly from her arms.

  The young man continued as if nothing was wrong. “Is Isabel with you?” he asked anxiously. “Isabel Penrose?” Audrey ignored the question and turned to Giovanni, who stared at her with accusation and hurt and fury in his eyes.

  “Lady Graystone,” he repeated softly.

  “I can explain,” Audrey said, her voice low and uncertain, a lump in her throat and a sudden unpleasant chill in her blood.

  “Can you?” he whispered.

  The young man questioned her about Isabel again, but she ignored him as Giovanni grasped her wrist and pulled her toward the door. His steps were naturally longer than hers, angry strides which carried him past revelers and to the open entryway of the grand palazzo. Audrey had to practically run to keep up with him, half-afraid that in spite of the grip on her wrist Giovanni would somehow leave her behind if she didn’t. The crowd of brightly costumed people parted for them.

  “Giovanni!” she called to his back, not caring that people turned to watch her undignified departure from the masked ball. Moments after the young man had called her Lady Graystone and she’d foolishly answered, she and Giovanni broke from the stifling warmth of the crowded palazzo to the narrow walkway before the water steps and the
waiting gondolas beyond.

  Once they were outside and alone, Giovanni dropped his hand from her wrist and took two long strides away from her. And then he stopped just a few feet from the palazzo’s entrance, his back to her.

  Audrey felt as if her heart would stop beating if Giovanni didn’t turn to look at her. Her greatest fear was that he would simply walk away, that he would dismiss her and her love for him without so much as a backward glance.

  “I was going to tell you,” she said softly, creeping uncertainly up behind him, knowing that she had to be the one to find the words to make things right. “I just... I didn’t know how.”

  He turned to face her. The mask and the night covered his face. “Lady Graystone,” he said. “The Black Widow. I suppose I should feel fortunate that I have escaped with only the loss of my heart.”

  “Giovanni, please.”

  “A bit of carnival fun for the lady, that is all this affair ever was,” he said coldly. “An interlude to tell the other fine ladies about when you return to London. A bit of lusty entertainment for the bored lady.”

  “No,” she breathed, afraid move closer, afraid to reach out and touch him.

  He stood very still for a long moment, as if he didn’t even breathe. The air was icy cold, the fog danced around them.

  “But you were a virgin,” he whispered darkly. “How?” He lifted a hand, long, elegant fingers tapping against his chin. Impossibly, he smiled. This was not Giovanni’s warm, wonderful smile, but a leering grin. “So the old man was not able to fulfill his husbandly duties. Were you curious, tesoro mio? Wondering what you had missed by marrying the old man for his fortune? Who better to serve you than a poor, stupid painter who finds himself taken with your beautiful face.”

  She took a deep breath of the cold, cold air. “Do you want to know the truth?” she whispered, terrified that he would say yes. More terrified that he didn’t care enough to listen.