by Nora Roberts
Claire was stunned. Distinct rays of gold radiated across the sky, like the background of a Renaissance Madonna and Child. All it lacked was a few angels descending to earth in fluttering robes with garlands of flowers in their hair.
A shock of pleasure rippled through her. There it was: La Serenissima, the most beautiful and mysterious city in the world.
The place where she’d been born almost twenty-six years ago.
It looked like a mirage, a dream of Byzantine domes, fantastic towers, and ice-cream-colored palazzi, shimmering in the liquid light dancing off the waters.
No wonder so many artists and writers have made their home here, she mused.
Claire sometimes dreamed of Venice—or thought she did. One of her plans was to visit the penzione where her parents had their apartment. Her father had been working in Venice when she’d been born. She wondered if she would recognize anything that she hadn’t seen in a thousand pictures and photos and calendars. If there was a little piece of Venice somewhere that was truly hers.
The motor launch swept on toward the molo, the traditional landing place for visitors to Venice before the causeway and train station had been built from the mainland. Black gondolas filled with sightseers, a few launches, and the sleek vaporetti, Venice’s aptly named water taxis, plied the entrance to the Grand Canal.
The air shimmered with the silvery incandescence the city was noted for, making everything seem just a little bit unreal. Slanting sun caught the forest of mooring poles rising from the water, the huge statue-topped columns that guarded the molo, the pale pink and white Gothic facade of the Doge’s Palace, and the Byzantine domes of the Basilica San Marco beyond.
Claire blinked. It was like catching a glimpse of another world.
“I’m here,” she murmured. Full circle. “At last.”
Holding her breath, she waited in vain for the feeling she’d expected, the one that would tell her that she was home. Back in the place where she had begun life. Disappointment filled her.
Venice was beautiful, exotic, beguiling. And it was as alien to her as the moon.
The water had turned a lovely milky green as they entered the Grand Canal. Before she knew it, they were pulling up to the mooring poles at the landing of the Europa e Regina Hotel where she had booked a suite. She stood with her face to the sun as the pilot unloaded her bags.
“Your first visit to Venezia, signorina?” the launch pilot asked in a mix of Italian and English.
“I was born here,” Claire told him. “My father was one of the engineering consultants brought in to help prevent the flooding.”
“Ah!” the man shook his head. “The aqua alta.”
Venice had suffered severe damage back in the sixties and seventies, and the world had responded in an effort to preserve her priceless treasures from the surging tides.
His dark eyes smiled down into hers. “Then you have Venice in your blood, signorina. You must go to see Nona Frascati…she has a shop in the Mercerie. Past the fashionable designers, you understand, and into the older quarter, where she sells old jewelry and reliquaries. If she likes you she might tell you your fortune. Tell her Pietro sent you.”
“I will. Grazie.”
She gave him a generous tip and went into the hotel. After registering in the elegant lobby and handing over her passport, she was taken up to her rooms. It was a fabulous suite with brocade-covered furniture, tall mirrors of Venetian glass, and a marvelous chandelier.
Tish must be out of her mind! Either that, or she’s pretty damned sure I can convince the count to let us handle the auctioning of his entire collection.
Claire wished she felt as confident. She was secure in her knowledge and expertise. It was her persuasive powers that worried her. When she was vetting a painting or examining a piece of furniture, she was sure of herself. It was her people skills, as Tish called them, that were lacking.
Being raised alone on an isolated ranch, with only dogs, books, and a silent grandfather for companions, she’d somehow never learned the knack of talking to people. And if I need any evidence to prove that to me, there’s a divorce decree sitting in my desk back in San Francisco.
Six months, she thought with a pang that might be anger, and not a single word from Val. He’d vanished from her life as if their marriage had been nothing but a remote dream, the kind that started out wonderfully and morphed into a nightmare.
Like the ones she’d been having almost nightly for the past eight weeks.
“The honor bar, signorina.” The bellman unlocked an elegant gilt cabinet to show the rows of bottles behind the carved doors. Claire was glad he hadn’t noticed how abstracted she’d become.
He showed her briefly where everything was, then left her. Once she was alone, her first thought was to flop on the bed in the other room and sleep for hours. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the terrace beyond the open double doors, and the splendid view.
Across the canal, the frosted white marble church of Santa Maria della Salute dominated the horizon. It was breathtaking. Although supported by more than a million wooden pilings sunk deep into the clay beneath the water, it seemed to sail upon its own reflection in the Grand Canal, like an enormous floating pearl.
The scene was familiar to her, not just from movies and travel books. The Salute was featured in several of the paintings in Count Ludovici’s collection. She’d seen several fine reproductions of them. Oh, but the reality of it was so much more lovely!
As she took it all in, a black gondola filled with happy tourists was overtaken by a vaporetto filled with even more. It left a foaming wake and a waft of engine fumes on the canal. Otherwise, she thought, surely nothing had changed in decades.
Or centuries.
All thoughts of a nap vanished. Claire wanted to step out through the ivory curtains stirring in the breeze, relax in the chaise longue on the small terrace, and drink in the view as if it were a glass of sparkling wine.
She took two steps past the doors and stopped short. The chaise was already occupied. She could just see gleaming dark hair above the back cushion and the tips of a man’s butter-soft Italian shoes.
“Oh! I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “There must be a mistake…er, ah…mi dispiache!”
The figure on the chaise rose with sleek-muscled grace. “Good God, Claire!” said a deep, masculine voice layered with laughter. “Your accent is as bad as your cooking!”
She stiffened. The man who stood there wasn’t wearing shoes with his khakis after all, just a pair of handmade cowboy boots. The boots, like the voice, were every bit as familiar to her as the man wearing them.
“What the hell are you doing in my hotel suite, Val?”
Eyes bluer than the Venice sky smiled down at her. “Is that any way to greet your husband?”
“Ex-husband. The divorce was final in May.”
He shrugged lightly. “They don’t deliver U.S. mail in the jungle.”
“You don’t need a mailbox to be divorced, Val. I’m sure your attorney has all the proper papers.”
He strolled over to her, his tanned face suddenly somber. He tipped her chin up with a strong, nicely shaped hand. “Is it, Claire? Is it really over?”
Her breath caught in her throat. His cologne was as familiar to her as the scent of her own skin, the warmth of his hand as enticing as she remembered. He looked older, though, and even more handsome. There were new sun creases at the corners of his eyes, and the lines of his face were leaner. And he was still the only man who’d ever made her knees turn to jelly and her brain to cotton wool.
Damn him and his pheromones!
“Don’t try that cowboy charm on me. It doesn’t work,” she lied. Jerking her head away, she stepped sideways to avoid him. That was a mistake. The balcony was small and there was no place to go.
She slanted a look from beneath her gold-tipped lashes. “One of us is going to go over the railing, Val. It won’t be me.”
He didn’t answer but took her hands and drew her away fr
om the railing. Claire felt the magnetism between them, as strong and as dangerous as it ever was.
Damn him! She couldn’t think when he was so near. Memories slammed into her like the waves of the Adriatic Sea, beating against the sands of the Lido. If she wasn’t careful she’d be swept away again—and left floating alone, out in the middle of nowhere, while he jaunted off to the latest hot spot for Time or Newsweek.
“Let me go, Val,” she said quietly.
His mouth turned up in an odd little smile. “Never. You’re mine, Claire. And I’m yours. We belong together.”
“I see. And that’s why I spent our honeymoon alone, painting our apartment and playing Solitaire on my laptop, while you were in the Middle East.” She tried to sound cool and was surprised to hear her own voice so harsh.
So bitter.
“I also spent Christmas by myself,” she added, “while you went off to Egypt or Africa or some remote Balkan village.”
His mouth hardened. “You knew what you were getting into when we married,” he said, a spark of heat in his voice. “It was part of the deal. I told you I had to take the assignments that no one else wanted while I got established and that it would lead to more reasonable ones in time. You agreed.”
Claire felt a surge of guilt, but shrugged. “I didn’t know you’d be gone for weeks on end. I suppose I was very young and stupid.”
She left the balcony with its watery Renaissance views and went back into the high-ceilinged room. Reflected light made the pale yellow walls luminous, dappled them in shifting, liquid patterns.
Val came after her and grasped her arm, whirling her about. “Yes,” he said harshly. “You were.”
Her angry gasp didn’t stop him. His fingers closed over her flesh. “Or at least you pretended to be. Now I wonder if I was the stupid one. I thought you understood. I thought we had a bargain of sorts.”
“That was the problem,” she snapped. “I thought we had a marriage!”
“We did, damn it.” His eyes blazed with anger. “We could have made it work, too. But from the moment the wedding ring was on your finger, you tried to change me. To take everything that makes me who I am and turn it inside out.”
“Was it wrong to expect to see something besides a potted plant looking back at me across the dinner table? To expect to warm my cold feet on a winter night with something a little more personal than an electric heating pad?”
His mouth was hard as flint. “If you wanted a desk jockey, you should have married a clerk instead of a photojournalist. If you wanted a house pet, you should have gotten a canary. I can be lured to hand, Claire—but I can’t be caged.”
She held out her left hand, where a pale circle showed where the diamond band been removed, and was furious to see it shaking.
“It’s gone now, Val. You’re free. And so am I! So get out of my hotel room right now. Don’t come back. I don’t want to see you again. I thought I’d already made that clear!”
His jaw squared, but he reined in his own temper. “Oh, you have. But I’m afraid that will prove a little difficult. I’ve taken a sabbatical from the magazine. Tish Sterling hired me to do some freelance work for Sterling Galleries.”
“I don’t believe you!”
His eyes darkened. “I’ve never lied to you, Claire. I won’t start now. I’m doing the auction catalog, and a photo spread on the Ludovici Collection.”
As he turned away, her eyes stung with tears. It always ended this way, both of them hurt and angry, neither of them giving an inch.
Val strode to the door, then turned back with a hard smile. “If you need anything, sweetheart, just rap on the wall. My suite is right on the other side.”
He went out, shutting the door.
2
CLAIRE LOCKED THE door, went into the adjoining room, and threw herself across the wide bed. Lying on the luxurious spread, she watched the water lights dance on the walls. It was so lovely. So soothing.
God knew, she needed comfort!
She couldn’t believe how much it had upset her to see Val again. At first she tried to convince herself it was because their parting had been so bitter, their meeting today so completely unexpected. She’d been so damned sure that she could will herself not to love Val. That she’d bolted away the memories and emotions—both good and bad—in the locked steel box of the past.
Yet it had taken only one look from those devastating blue eyes, one touch of his tanned hand against her skin, and she was a bundle of raw nerve endings, jangling with loss and anger. With yearning and emptiness, and a deep, aching need.
She brushed the hair from the nape of her neck with one hand and kneaded the tension knots. “You can’t chain an eagle,” her grandfather had warned her when she and Val had gotten engaged. “You’ll break his wings.”
She remembered that moment, the soft twilight sifting down around the narrow porch, the Idaho hills stretching away by starlight. “And if you build a nest with one, you’d better know how to fly.”
It was the longest conversation she had ever had with her grandfather. He’d been a man of the land, not one of words.
Claire punched the pillow into an even more uncomfortable shape. She hadn’t known how to fly and hadn’t wanted to learn. Her dream had been of relaxed, firelit evenings, intimate dinners with friends, discussing art and life over wine and pasta. Hard to accomplish with your husband 10,000 miles away. She’d tried to be patient, to face the loneliness. She really had.
They’d managed to stumble on long after they should have called it quits. The marriage might have drifted along for years, their problems unresolved, one of those long-distance marriages that ended up as nothing more than two names on a marriage license and an album of neglected photos.
But then came that desperate time when she needed him. She hadn’t even known what country he was in, much less how to reach him. The memory was still painful. To be fair, she hadn’t told him that she was pregnant. She’d been only six weeks along. But oh, how she’d wanted that baby!
Claire watched the ripples of light weave glowing patterns around the room. She felt too jet-lagged and too edgy to relax. The iced-marble dome of the Salute was captured in the mirror over a console table, backed by an incredible turquoise sky. The beauty of it calmed her, and her rapid breathing slowed. Within minutes she slipped into an uneasy sleep.
…The hinges sighed, and the door in the garden wall clicked to behind her. There was no going back now. The door had no handle and could only be opened from inside the garden.
Her green eyes looked warily through the eyeholes in the silver mask, and her heart was like an iron hammer beating against the fragile glass of her ribs. Tucking a stray blond curl beneath the hood of her cloak, she gathered her courage. He would be waiting for her at the bridge.
Her father had locked away her jewelry casque, with its precious heirlooms of pearls and emeralds and rubies that had formed part of her dowry. But her lover’s pendant lay against her skin, cool as water from the courtyard fountain on a summer’s day; she imagined the ruby pendant and ring warming her blood, like flames.
Except for the clothes upon her back, they were the only items she had taken with her when she fled the house.
She glided along the calle. Through the slits of her silver Carnivale mask she made out the sides of the blank, three-storied buildings. To her right was the Palazzo D’Oro, where her fiancé lived. Like the homes of other wealthy merchants, the street level was given over to business, but the rest was opulent, filled with treasures from the four corners of the earth.
She had wept bitterly when her father announced her engagement to Giovanni Gambello. He was vain, arrogant. The ugly rumors of his reputation as a libertine had reached Bianca, even as sheltered as she was within the walls of her father’s house. Venice was a city given to scandal and vice: to make a name for oneself among the most notorious was something indeed!
Worst of all, from her innocent young perspective, was that she did not love him, nor he he
r. He wanted only to possess her. And to cement the banking and import business between himself and her father.
Bianca shivered. But now, thank the Virgin and all the saints, she would never be his wife. Soon, very soon, she would be safe in her lover’s arms!
Suddenly the plaintive cry of a gondolier drifted on the breeze, and another picked it up in the distance, like an echo. The sound was so lonely, so wrenching, she felt as if her heart might break.
She paused when she reached the bridge, almost overcome by fright. What if she was discovered? What if her lover wasn’t there?
What if she waited through the dark hours until morning lit the sky, and still he never came?
It would be a fitting punishment for her, she thought in misery. After all, she had failed him twice. Then someone moved out of the shadows on the far side of the canal, the Rio di San Moise. She gave a shaky laugh. Her fears were groundless. There he was, waiting for her in his dark cloak on the other side, his hand outstretched. Taking a deep breath, she hastened toward the arcing bridge. Only a few more steps to freedom and the beginning of her new life.
Then why was she so afraid—?
Claire awakened to the drumming of her heart. The thick evening shadows of narrow calle faded to a splendid room flooded with sunlight, the gondoliers’ cry to the plaintive call of seabirds from beyond the open window. She sat up abruptly, disoriented, as jumbled impressions of past and present sorted themselves out.
Then she remembered where she was, and why. Venice. Count Ludovici.
Val, damn him.
And the dream.
The dream always began in the same way: the frightened girl, crossing the marble floor and hurrying out the door to the courtyard. This time it seemed different somehow. But the more she tried to grasp it, the faster it slipped away.
Still, even now, she could almost feel the brush of the velvet cloak against her cheek, the weight of the heavy key in her hand, the smooth, cool kiss of the beads and pendant against her throat.
