Giovanni pulled her over to the sink and began to wipe her hands clean with a rag dipped in turpentine. His touch was firm and sure. He had been working all morning, but his hands had barely a spot of paint on them. He was always so neat and pristine. Save for yesterday, in the attic. Remembered pleasure rippled through her, settling low in her belly. When he had touched her—heavens, the way he had touched her. And then this morning too. She really thought she might melt. He, in contrast, had been so—well, hard, there was no other word for it. Perspiration beaded in the small of her back. Really, really hard. And she had been the one who had made him so.
The turpentine-soaked rag had been replaced with a clean cloth. Giovanni seemed to be taking an unnecessarily long time to dry her hands. She watched him, fascinated by the slender length of his fingers stroking the cloth over her skin. Her heart began to thump as she caught his gaze on her, eyes dark in the dim light, but unmistakably glistening with awareness. He dropped the cloth. He pulled her to him, touched her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, as if he were painting her with his fingers. A wild excitement fluttered through her.
His kiss was darker even than his eyes, drawing her into a sultry, sensual whirlpool of emotions. Desire was sharpened by a hunger she had not known she possessed, made urgent by its newness, strengthened by its illicit nature. Forbidden fruit. She for him, he for her. Cressie dug her fingers into Giovanni’s buttocks and kissed him deeply. Mouth. Tongue. Lips. She drank him in, inhaled him, devoured him.
And he kissed her back as if it were not enough, not nearly enough. He groaned, hauling her so tightly against him that she almost lost her balance, flailing against a wooden door set low into the wall of the scullery. The latch dug painfully into her back. ‘Ouch!’
‘Dio! Every time I kiss you something or someone intrudes—what is that?’ Breathing raggedly, Giovanni pulled her away from the wall. ‘I have not noticed it before. Are you hurt?’
‘No.’ Cressie put her hand up to her hair. As she suspected, it was in a wild tangle, bits of it hanging down over her cheeks. Thank goodness the light was dim. The strength of her response to him was frightening. He would be thinking her one of those women who threw themselves at him, if she was not careful. Which was exactly what she was doing, wasn’t she?
Distracted, confused, she turned her attentions to the door. ‘Where does this lead to?’ she asked, already lifting the latch.
‘I have no idea.’
Giovanni seemed to be having as much difficulty as she in controlling his breathing, Cressie was relieved to notice. His hair was standing up in spikes. The tail of his shirt was hanging out of his trousers. Had she done that? Cressie peered through the open door. A steep set of stone stairs disappeared into the gloom. ‘A cellar of some sort, it must be part of the foundations of the original house. I had no idea it was there.’
‘Shall we take a look?’
Cressie looked doubtfully into the gloom. ‘It’s very dark down there.’
Giovanni picked up the oil lamp. ‘You are surely not afraid?’
She tossed her head back and glared defiantly at him, though she knew it was exactly what he expected her to do.
‘Let me go first,’ Giovanni said. ‘Take your time, these steps look dangerous.’
Not as dangerous as the uncharted waters she was already swimming in, Cressie thought, treading carefully down into the darkness.
They found themselves in a passageway which led, as Cressie had suspected, to the cellars of the original manor house. It was to make sure she did not slip that Giovanni held her close to him, she told herself, the same reason she clung to his arm.
There were several chambers, each with a low vaulted roof forming a shallow dome. It was surprisingly warm. ‘We must be directly below the kitchens,’ Cressie whispered.
Intrigued, Giovanni held the lamp high, inspecting the herringbone brickwork of the ceilings. ‘The family who built this place must have been wealthy. These are almost Roman in style.’
Cressie’s eyes were alight with wonder. ‘I had no idea. The mathematics of the arch are most fascinating, you know. In fact, there is a most excellent work on the subject by another of your countrymen, the Abbé Mascheroni. Our own Robert Hooke explains the specific equations behind the dome at St Paul’s Cathedral. I came across his work at the Royal Society.’
‘The Royal Society? How did you gain entry to that august, and I believe exclusively male, bastion?’
‘I …’ Cressie hesitated. She had no doubt at all that Giovanni would be intrigued and amused by the story of Mr Brown, but it suddenly struck her how much more astonished he would be by the sudden appearance of Mr Brown in the flesh. He wanted to paint the private Cressie—what better way than to have Mr Brown captured in oils? It was an inspired idea! She shook her head, smiling enigmatically at him. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you later. Trust me.’
‘Trust you. I cannot deny I owe you that.’ Giovanni’s broadest smile, so rarely seen, was all the more delightful when it appeared. It made him seem so much younger. It made her realise how stern his usual expression was. It was not that he lacked humour, but he looked at the world even more darkly than she did.
They were standing at the juncture of two of the domed vaults, by a set of supporting pillars. Giovanni held the oil lamp high, peering up at the stonework. ‘Look at this, Cressie.’
Cressie. Cressie. Cressie. She jumped, startled by the sound. The echo was eerie, bouncing round the vault, as if spirits were whispering her name. ‘Giovanni,’ she said softly, crying out with delight at the result.
Giovanni laughed. ‘It is a whispering gallery. Astonishing. In the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, when I was a child, my father—the man I called—never mind. Let us experiment.’ Leaving the lamp on the floor beside Cressie, he retreated to the next gallery before crouching down in the darkness against a pillar. ‘Cress-i-da,’ he whispered.
She giggled. ‘Gio-vaaa-ni.’ She waited until the echo, which seemed to reverberate for ever, finally died down. ‘Don Giovanni,’ she trilled, completely off-key, following her rendition of the line from Mozart’s opera with a clap of her hands to produce a most satisfactory crack of thunder. She was rewarded with a guffaw of very masculine laughter, followed by an even more off-key rendition of the next line. ‘That was terrible,’ she called.
‘Si. Now you know something else about me that no one else does. I sing like a donkey with haemorrhoids.’
The peals of her laughter rung around the room like church bells. She was becoming accustomed to the strange effect. Cressie settled down on the cellar floor. The whispers, the dark, made the mood intimate without being stifling. Dangerous. And exciting. ‘Tell me something else,’ she said, keeping her voice low.
‘I don’t like dogs.’
‘I am afraid of dogs.’
‘My favourite cheese is pecorino.’
‘I like to eat honey from the comb.’
‘Your lips taste of honey.’
‘Oh.’ His words gave her goose bumps. The whispering gallery brought out Giovanni’s Italian accent. ‘Say that in Italian.’
‘Le tue labbra sanno di miele. You have the most delightful fondoshiena,’ Giovanni said. ‘Last night, I dreamed of your fondoshiena.’
The acoustics of the cellar made it sound as if he had whispered in her ear, as if his words had brushed her skin. ‘Fondo …?’
‘The French word is derrière. The English word …’
‘Is bottom.’ Giovanni thought she had a delightful bottom. It was a shocking thing to say, and Cressie felt intoxicated. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered, tempted by the dark, by the spiralling of tension inside her, tempted by temptation itself. ‘Tell me exactly what it was you dreamt.’
Chapter Six
Cressie heard the sharp intake of Giovanni’s breath as her question swirled around the confined space. She waited, heart pounding, for his answer. When he spoke, soft as a sigh, the words washed over her like a caress. ‘In my dream, I was wa
tching you undressing,’ he said. ‘You knew I was watching. As I watched, you started touching yourself.’
She slumped back against the wall of the cellar. It was cool, but her skin was burning hot. ‘Where? How? What was I touching?’
‘Your breasts at first. When you pulled your chemise down over them, your nipples were budded, hard. As they were when I touched them yesterday. Do you remember?’
‘Yes.’ She closed her eyes. Imagined and remembered. His fingers. His tongue. His lips. She slid her hands inside the neck of her dress, and touched herself, pinched her nipples, stroked them, as he had done.
‘Are you touching them now, Cressie?’
‘Yes.’ Circling them with her thumbs as he had done. Imagining it was him, his hands. ‘Yes,’ she said, and the echo made her voice hoarse and guttural, which she found she liked, for it made her feel like the kind of woman who would enjoy being watched as she touched herself. A shocking, wanton woman. She wanted to know more, and he seemed to be able to read her mind.
‘When you bent over to remove your stockings …’ A pause. ‘The line of beauty. I wanted to taste you. To kiss the skin at the top of your thighs. The softest of skin. Touch it, Cressie. Tell me, is it the most delicate of skin?’
She arched back against the wall, rucking up her skirts. She had no thought of where she was or what she was doing, lost in the intimate world of touch and sensation, no room for thinking or questioning. Parting the two halves of her pantalettes, she slid her hand between her legs. ‘Soft,’ she whispered. ‘The softest,’ she said, stroking herself, her fingers sliding of their own volition inside her, where the tension was focused. ‘Wet,’ she whispered, already beginning to lose herself, ‘hot.’
Giovanni’s voice was harsh now. ‘I bent you over. I slid inside you,’ he said, his words and his dream echoing what she was already doing.
She could almost feel him, feel the thick shaft of his manhood, which this morning had pressed so insistently against her. It was easy to imagine him inside her. Cressie’s fingers slid over the damp hot mound of her sex. She was knotted tight. It was not the first time, but it was the first time she had imagined, wished, fantasised, that it was someone else doing the touching. ‘Giovanni. Giovanni. Giovanni.’ Almost unaware, she said his name to a rhythm, stroking and dipping, stroking, not wanting it to be over—another new departure, not wanting it to end. ‘What next?’ she panted. ‘Giovanni, what next?’
‘Slowly. Do not rush. I—I did not rush.’
‘Slowly,’ Cressie repeated but she no longer wanted slow.
‘You tightened around my shaft. So tight.’
‘Hard. Tight. Oh, yes. Oh, please. Oh sweet …’ She climaxed with a violence that threw her, hot pulses raged inside her, twisting her, tossing her up into the air, spinning her from the inside, pulsing and throbbing, until she slumped, panting, breathing hard, cast adrift.
Slowly, she came back to herself. Blinking she saw her legs sprawled, her skirts rucked up, her hand … She peered out into the gloom, but there was no sign of Giovanni. He had not stolen up on her, though he could have. She should have been mortified, but felt only a wafer-thin floating bliss, not a release, but a shifting of her axis, as if she had shed her skin. Or another skin.
Standing up and shaking out her skirts, she called his name tentatively, but there was no reply. She didn’t know whether to be glad or disappointed. What did one say on such an occasion—thank you?
Cressie struggled against a wholly inappropriate and slightly hysterical desire to laugh, but as she picked her way slowly back through the cellars to the stairs which led to the scullery, the strangeness of what had just occurred began to puzzle her. Sitting down on the bottom step, she distractedly picked at her thumb, a habit she had recently managed to cure herself of. Since yesterday, when she had finally faced the truth about herself, since last night when she had confronted her father, since this morning, when Giovanni had made his desire for her quite plain, the things which had been niggling in the back of her mind had begun to solidify. Questions left unanswered. Doors determinedly closed. Giovanni wanted to know all about her, but he gave away little about himself. There were secrets lurking there, and there was definitely pain too, she was sure of it.
Thinking right back to the first time they had met, she counted the occasions when he had deflected a question, the occasions when he had claimed to understand something but refused to explain how. For a mathematician, she had been remarkably remiss in pursuing proofs from him. For one who prided herself on her thirst for knowledge, she had been very easily rebuffed. He told her he wanted to free her, he told her he wanted to help her, but he refused consistently to tell her why.
‘Damn!’ Her thumb was bleeding. Giovanni, it seemed to Cressie, gave her only so much as she needed, and no more. She was grateful, but she was also insulted, for though he had helped her look anew at the world, though he had helped her take pleasure in her own body, he had remained detached even from that.
‘It’s all wrong!’ Cressie told the oil lamp. ‘Plain wrong. What the devil is he hiding? And as for his claim that he somehow protects his artistic integrity by remaining unengaged by anyone or anything—what is he, some sort of artistic Samson, afraid he’ll lose his ability to paint if he gives up on his vow of determined isolation?’ She scrambled to her feet and picked up the lamp. ‘I have to make him reveal himself, just as he did me. I shall probably have to make him angry, to provoke him into it, just as he did me. Because if I don’t, let me tell you,’ she told the lamp firmly, ‘I doubt very much he will ever be the great artist I believe he is destined to be.’
Alone in the attic studio where he had hastily retreated, Giovanni stared at the portrait of Lady Cressida and tried desperately to focus on the mundane technicalities of his craft. Background. Glaze. The hands needed some rework.
It was useless. The aching throb of his persistent erection demanding release erased any hope of concentrating on work. He had never craved a woman as he did Cressie. Had never, with any of the many women he had made love to, felt such a deep, almost tangible connection as he had felt with her. And he had hardly touched her. Though he had wanted to. How he wanted to.
Giovanni turned his back on the canvas. The existence of those other women in his past, especially the circumstances surrounding those liaisons, made it impossible for him to explain to someone like Cressie. He did not want her to think of him as the kind of man he had been. He wanted her, he wanted her so much, but he would not destroy what existed between them. He would have to find a way, somehow, of explaining how impossible it was for him to make love to her. A way to persuade himself as well as Cressie, without poisoning her with the whole, unpalatable truth.
Posing in her evening gown the next afternoon, Cressie seemed to Giovanni quite distracted. It was as well that all he was painting today was her dress, for she seemed incapable of holding any pose, twitching the folds of velvet and gauze first one way and then the next as she fidgeted constantly.
‘I cannot work unless you sit still!’ He had not meant to sound so harsh, but frustration of every sort had him in its vice-like grip.
Cressie jumped to her feet. ‘I cannot! I cannot sit still. I cannot hold my tongue. I cannot let another moment pass without demanding an explanation.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of everything!’
Under other circumstances, Giovanni would have laughed at this. Cressie had a flair for the dramatic quite at odds with the literal, logical part of her nature. The way she threw back her head, making her breasts tremble, showing off the line of her throat, she was quite magnificent at times like this—though he doubted she would care to be told so. And today, he was in no mood for drama. Yesterday he had come too close to losing his self-control to contemplate any further drama. Since he had decided, quite unfairly, that this was Cressie’s fault, he resorted to icy sarcasm, even though he knew she did not deserve it. ‘I am afraid you overestimate me. Even I do not claim to know everything.
’
‘Do not mock me, Giovanni.’ Cressie stormed over to the window, leaning back against the frame. ‘You have known me—how long?’
‘Several weeks.’
‘It is almost seven since we first met.’
‘I see the mathematician is back.’
She ignored this quite unnecessary jibe. ‘For seven weeks, you have made it your business to point out the error of my ways. No, do not interrupt, Giovanni, for once you will listen to me. I am not complaining. I see that you were right. I did not want to listen, but I did listen eventually. You gave me no option but to listen.’
‘Because I understand. Because I know what it is like. Because I wanted you to learn from my experience. Because I recognise in you, Cressie, a lot of myself,’ Giovanni exclaimed in exasperation. ‘Surely you realised that?’
‘How could I when you’ve never told me that before. Don’t you see? I cannot learn from your experience if you will not share it with me. I cannot recognise our similarities if you will not reveal them to me.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
She sashayed across the room, her train gathering dust, walking just as seductively as the borrowed gown demanded. It made him wary, this abrupt change in her mood, no longer angry but very confident and very determined.
‘It is time for me to know you a little better,’ she said, coming far too close for comfort. ‘We have established the public personas of both Cressida and Giovanni. If you wish to see the private Cressie then you must also reveal a little of the private Giovanni. Quid pro quo, as your ancestors would have said.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Why will you not speak of your father? Why will you not talk of your family? Blood and beauty. It is your credo. Why are you so obsessed by both? Why are you alone? Why are you so scared of the very notion of sharing human contact of any sort? Why do you dismiss my questions? Why do you close yourself off from me? You have helped me see. You have made it possible for me to view the future with hope rather than dread. I want to do the same for you.’
The Beauty Within Page 11
