by Lia Lee
Marco snorted, raising an eyebrow slightly. Under her mask, her red lips curved, a sensual thing that he had to keep himself from leaning forward to taste.
"Your last partner did not give way to courtesy and tradition." He snorted. "He gave way because I was bigger than he was and because he did not want to lose to me in a fight."
He had thought she would make some kind of remark about how arrogant he was, but instead, she only shook her head.
"You'll pardon me if I laugh," she said. "The idea that a man might want my company enough to fight for it sounds like the strangest kind of fairy tale."
"Why, do you think you are not worth fighting for?" he teased.
Any other woman he knew would have thrown it right back at him, laughed and made a joke about men and fighting. Instead, the woman's smile dropped briefly before she pulled it up again. She looked up at him for the first time, and he caught a glimpse of intoxicating blue behind the eye holes of her mask.
"I think I am very lucky to be here," she said at last. "I think I am going to ride this story as long as I can, but I won't be so surprised when it's time to wake up and go home..."
Almost against his will, Marco found himself leaning towards his partner as they danced. Perhaps another woman might have found it almost distasteful how close he had come without an invitation, but this one only tilted her face slightly as if considering him.
"And when this is all over, you'll return to your life among the cinders?" Marco asked softly. "Content to gaze on the dancing lights from afar and never approach again?"
"I do believe so," she said immediately. "Believe me when I say this is not my usual Saturday night's entertainment. It's all..."
She struggled for a moment to come up with the right word, shaking her head helplessly.
"Magical," she finally said with a half-laugh, and for some reason, Marco found himself enchanted.
"Tell me what else you have found magical in all your life," he said, spinning her through the motions of the dance. She danced as lightly as a fairy, as quick as a flash of light. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see other men watching her, envying him, and almost without thinking of what he was doing, he drew her closer to him, protective.
"You do ask for a great deal when you became my dance partner," she complained with good nature. "Magic, let me see..."
The dance ended, but Marco kept hold of her hand, guiding her off of the dance floor. He wondered if she would object, but instead she folded herself close to his side, letting him lead as if they had done this for ages. There was an olive grove behind Baldassare's mansion, the delicate, twisting branches holding up multicolored paper lanterns, and Marco led her along the path.
"Magic is waking up one day to discover that it is no longer winter but spring," the mysterious woman said softly. "That moment when you realize the cold is over and things will be well again. Magic is...the first time someone smiles at you, and you realize you have made a friend. Magic is the first breath of baked bread fresh out of the oven..."
"But those are quite ordinary things," Marco teased, and she gazed at him with a solemnity that seemed out of balance with the youthfulness of her features. He could see now that the woman who had enchanted him was young; her face was a perfect heart shape, her mouth as soft and tender as a new strawberry.
"Then I think you have not looked so closely," she said quietly. "What do you think magic is, then?"
The candid question caught Marco off guard.
"I don't believe in it," he admitted. "But if I did, hm. An honest politician? An unselfish cat? A woman of character?"
They had been walking along the path, but now the woman in green stopped short, gazing up at him. In the dimness of the lanterns, her eyes looked black.
"What do you mean by that?"
Marco shrugged, vaguely aware that he had made a mistake but unsure how. "A woman of character, a woman of integrity and respect. I do not mean anything by it..."
"Is it so much easier for a man to have those things than a woman?" she asked softly. "Is there some circumstance where women are lacking such things?"
Marco frowned at her. "You must admit that women are very different from men, yes? The circumstances of the world are different, and women have to develop a very different set of skills just to survive."
"I'm afraid I do not understand what you mean. Are you telling me that, because women have different struggles, there can be no integrity or character in the choices they make?"
"Not in the standards that are used by men." It was perfectly self-evident to him. "If a woman is offended, she cannot strike a man down for the offense if she is so much slighter and less powerful than he. A woman's strength is not so much that she can work endlessly for a career. If a woman falls pregnant unmarried, she must beg the man to become a husband and father, as she cannot provide herself..."
The woman in green took a frosty step back from him. He had thought she was young and sweet before, but now he discovered that sweetness could have a razor edge.
"Despite thinking that you know a great deal of women, I find your conclusions are weak and flawed. I think we have nothing else to say to one another, sir."
Marco started to protest, but she stalked off into the night, her skirts trailing behind her.
Well, that could have gone better, he thought.
He might have been a rich man and a handsome one, but he certainly didn't expect every woman who walked past to fall into his arms. If this one disagreed, there were a dozen more at the party who might not, and his first instinct was to return and find one of them.
Why then did it feel as if his heart had been pulled out of his chest by a woman dressed in green?
Chapter Three
One more thing I could have said about magic, Briony thought, is that it never lasts.
There was a tiny, childish part of her that wondered why he’d had to say all those horrible things about women just then. Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut, let her have the magic of a beautiful night in Florence?
Another part of her was savagely grateful. It was always better to find out about people before you got to know them, before they let you down. Christ, what would have happened if she’d found he thought those things after she had spent a lot of time with him?
Briony was so lost in thought that she wasn't watching where she was going, and though she thought she was headed back to the mansion, she soon realized she was in another part of the gardens entirely. There was still some lighting along the path, but it had changed from the gaily-colored lanterns she had seen before. These lights were dimmed, more to provide illumination on a regular basis than for a party, and there was something menacing about them.
Briony would have turned back the way she’d come, but it occurred to her that if she followed the path, she was bound to return to the mansion, and if she entered through one of the servants' entrances, she wouldn't have to worry about cutting her way through the crowd.
Be honest, you just don't want to run into that man again, she thought, and that was true enough.
She lifted her skirts to keep them free of the entangling brush on either side of the path and pressed forward.
It seemed like such a good idea, and almost fifteen minutes passed before she realized she might have made a miscalculation. The lights had remained the same, suggesting she was still on the producer's property, but there was no sign of the mansion. Just when she was thinking of swallowing her pride and simply tracing her way back, she turned a sharp bend and found herself in the middle of a party of another sort.
There were three rough looking men seated around a small fire, and she could see they were passing around a dark bottle of something unlabeled. There was a moment of frozen surprise on all parts, and then one man rose up, bottle in his hand. He grinned at her, and there was something unsavory in his smile that made her take a step back. He waved the bottle at her, obviously wanting her to take a sip, but Briony took another step back. This seemed t
o make him angry, and he spat something in Italian.
I'm sure it's fine, I'm just being a dumb foreigner, Briony thought, but then her instincts came to her rescue.
When the man with the bottle took another step towards her, she spun on her heel and ran, pelting back along the path she had come from. She expected to hear laughter at her foolishness, but instead, a cry went up and there were three men crashing through the underbrush behind her.
Oh god, oh god, oh god, her mind chanted. Unbidden in her mind came the mysterious man's words that women couldn't protect themselves, that they lacked the power to do so. Well, she was going to show him wrong. She had to.
Briony would never have said that she was particularly in shape, but adrenaline gave her a burst of speed and desperation. She ran along the path, skirts hiked up past her knees, and with every step she took, she could hear her pursuers behind her. It felt as if any moment, they might simply fall upon her, but every moment that they didn't gave her an extra burst of hope.
The air burned her lungs as she gasped. As hard as she was breathing, there was no hope that they would overlook her, and that meant she simply had to keep running.
God, how far did I walk? Am I ever going to get back?
The idea of being trapped in the hell of crashing underbrush followed by men intent on catching her made her ill, but it only redoubled her desperation to get away. One foot in front of the other would get her out of this.
Briony was concentrating so hard on running that she managed to run right into someone without seeing. One moment she was flying headlong through the darkness, and the next she was ploughing face first into the arms of a man who wrapped his arms around her.
"No! No, I will not let you...!" she cried out, ready to squirm and fight, but then she realized it wasn't one of her pursuers. Instead, it was the man who she had walked away from before.
"What's the matter, what's wrong?" he asked, not releasing her, but then he glanced into the grove behind her. She could feel his body tense like a bowstring being pulled taut. To her surprise, he caught her in his arms and then with a gasp, he boosted her up onto a tree branch close by. One moment, she was on the ground, and the next she was seated in the branches of an olive tree, looking down at him.
"Stay still and quiet," he ordered. "I will deal with this."
She wanted to argue, but now that she was not running, her limbs were starting to shake. She had to hang onto the trunk of the tree to keep her balance, but she nodded, her teeth chattering.
Her rescuer stalked out of view, and after a few moments, she heard shouting of a different kind going up. There was some more shouting, and then some yelps of pain, followed by a silence that felt more than a little ominous to her.
What happened to him, she wondered. There were three of them and only one of him. Did he find that he bit off more than he could chew?
As the silence stretched on and on, she grew more certain that she was right.
I can't leave him there like this, she thought. I have to get help, I have to help him.
One plan after another presented itself, of her sneaking around to club one of his attackers, of tripping them and letting her rescuer get away. She knew they were ridiculous, but Briony could no more stay in the tree than she could forget how to swim or ride a bike. He needed help, obviously, and she had to go to him.
With a muttered curse that sounded far braver than she felt, Briony slipped and slithered her way down the tree. She could hear the beautiful velvet ripping as she went, but all that mattered was she get on the ground. She made it down soon enough, and she was just trying to decide which direction to go in when a dark form stepped out from behind another tree.
"If you think I'm going to let you hurt him, you're wrong," she spat, aware that he likely had no English.
The figure paused, and when he laughed, relief flooded through her. She knew that voice.
"Do you have any idea how fierce you look, standing there and ready to take on the world?"
"I know that I look like a shredded pincushion," she retorted. "But are you all right?"
Her rescuer laughed again, shaking his head. "Seriously, that's the first thing you ask me?"
She looked at him, and to her relief, though he looked a little rumpled, he was otherwise unhurt.
"Why wouldn't I?" she retorted. "You stuck me up in a tree and then went looking for trouble."
He shrugged. "Less trouble than you might think. After I taught the one in the lead a lesson in manners, the other two caved. I got a hold of Baldassare fairly quickly, and he was shocked by everything. He might be a bit of a blowhard, but he'll do the right thing, and he'll do it discreetly. I have a feeling that most people at the party won't even notice there's something amiss."
The thought of the party summoned up an entirely new fear in Briony's mind.
"It's a launch party!" she gasped. "They—they can't have any scandal, or maybe it'll hurt the market..."
Her rescuer cut off her panic by drawing her into his arms. It should have been condescending, but instead it simply felt right. She tilted her head against his chest, sighing a little as she felt a great deal of the stress and strain simply melt out of her.
"Hush. I promise you, I'm an old hand at this sort of thing, and Baldassare is too. Nothing unflattering or damaging will get into the papers, and those men will still be punished for their crimes."
Briony breathed a little easier, and she was finally able to glance up at the man who held her in his arms.
"What's your name?" she asked softly.
Under his dark mask, he grinned at her. "Marco. What's yours?"
She hesitated, torn. She wanted to tell him her name, but right now, she didn't even know who he was. What if this night's events got out, what if it somehow hurt Seanan's career?
Marco looked as if he understood her reluctance, and he reached out to touch the collar of her dress.
"Shall I call you Velvet? It suits you, as lovely as you are."
"I think I'm far less lovely than this dress," she said with a giggle. "But I suppose that works as well as anything else does."
"Well, that's something I would want to judge fairly," Marco said gravely. "I would have to have the two of you side-by-side so that I could make a proper assessment."
When Briony realized he meant to compare her dress with her own naked form, she couldn't stop herself from giggling again.
"You're awful," she said finally, and he grinned as if she had paid him a compliment.
"Very. Come, let me bring you indoors by the back route."
She followed him gratefully, and it occurred to her that he never once said he had told her so.
Chapter Four
Marco escorted her to the guest wing, but when they arrived, Briony felt a strange sense of apprehension looking down the long, dim hallway. She thought of the dimness of the grove and the men crashing behind her, and she shivered.
I can't be a baby about this, he's done more than enough, she scolded herself.
When she started down the passageway towards her room, however, Marco touched her elbow with a gentle hand.
"Are you sure you are ready to be alone?" he murmured. "If I were in your position, I think I would still be quite shaken."
"I want to be brave about it," she admitted. "But I don't think I'm quite there. Maybe I should go back and join the party..."
It wasn't even midnight yet, and the party was still in full swing. As much as she might want to go find Seanan, she knew her sister was making those contacts and networking like mad. Though Seanan would drop it all for Briony, she didn't want to do that to her sister when her star had finally started to shine.
The idea of going back to a loud party made her flinch, however, and Marco nodded.
"I will certainly not stop you from going back to the crowd if you like, little Velvet, but perhaps I can offer you another solution. Come with me."
Marco's solution ended up being Baldassare's library. He marched through
the producer's house with ease, casually unhooking the velvet rope that closed the private part off from party guests.
"Should we really be doing this?" Briony asked. "Wouldn't Signore Baldassare mind?"
"He would mind very much if it weren't me," Marco said, tipping her a wink. "Since it's me, he'll mind and pretend not to."
"You must be very important," Briony said, and then she shook her head. "No, don't tell me. I...I want this magic to last a little longer."
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she could have slapped herself. She must be incredibly stressed out if she was saying such daft things.
However, Marco only laughed kindly. "After the night that you've had, I think you should be given all the magic you like. In here."
The library was an elegant room of dark wood and high ceilings, the books tall leather sentinels that lined their shelves like the best soldiers. There were a desk and a few chairs, of course, but Marco led her to a small alcove that was slightly hidden from view. There was a large, antique couch nestled in the alcove, nearly as large as a double bed, and Briony noticed that all of the books in this section were far humbler. She could see adventures and romances, paperbacks jumbled in with best-selling hardbacks.
"Ah, what people actually read," she said with a giggle, and Marco grinned at her.
"Very much so. I think it's my favorite part of Baldassare's collection."
As she reclined on the couch, her mask somehow still on, Briony watched through lowered lashes as Marco lit two of the dim-burning lamps and dropped a gauzy curtain over the mouth of the alcove. It turned the cozy space into something perfectly intimate and safe, a small bubble in time and space where nothing could interrupt them.
"Oh, it's so beautiful here," she said, and Marco came to rest next to her.
It seemed like the simplest thing in the world to lay her head on his shoulder, their legs stretched out to the other end of the couch. She kicked off her light slippers, and giggling, she tapped at his shoes until he removed them as well.
