Temptation's Song (Kimani Romance)

by Janice Sims

  “Let’s hope it’ll be that easy,” Isobel said.

  Shortly after Elle and Dominic moved in together, she went to Madrid to star in Teatro Real’s production of Temptation. Jaime reprised his role of Cristiano and on opening night it was as if all of Spain had come out to welcome their native son. The next morning, though, Elle got her share of rave reviews in the papers.

  Meanwhile, Dominic was alone in their apartment in Milan, working on Everlasting, which was the new title of the opera he was composing.

  One Saturday at around three in the afternoon, someone rang the bell and he got up from the piano to answer the door. He had on faded Levi’s and a white T-shirt, his favorite lounging-around-the-house clothes, and he was barefooted.

  A glance through the peephole revealed that it was Angelica calling. He had a visceral reaction to seeing her on the other side of his door. What was she doing here? He hadn’t seen or called her in months, not since he had met Elle. What could she want? They had not had an understanding. He had not been expected to phone her and tell her he no longer wanted to see her. At least he didn’t think he was expected to.

  He stood silent at the door, wavering between pretending he wasn’t at home and opening the door and greeting her warmly. After all, they were not enemies.

  Of all the women he had slept with, he had always been sure of Angelica’s detachment. She didn’t love him any more than she loved that shiny sports car she tooled around Milan in. She used both for convenience—the car to get her from one place to another and him to satisfy her sexual needs.

  So why was he hesitating to open the door?

  She knocked this time instead of ringing the bell, and she pounded hard.

  He took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Angelica, all five feet three inches of her, fairly bristled with anger. She was a beautiful, voluptuous woman in her late twenties with long, sleek black hair, dark brown eyes, a full, sensuous mouth and a cute button nose. She exuded sexuality with every movement of her body. She understood the power a woman wielded with just a gesture, a glance, a whispered endearment. It was a practiced sexuality that she had learned in puberty and had been refining ever since. It had never failed her. Never, that is, until she realized Dominic was not ever going to phone her again for their Sunday-afternoon trysts. The first inkling she got was all the photos in the local papers of Dominic and Elle Jones. Then she had heard that they were seeing one another. That had not concerned her. Men often had their women at home and their women on the side. Then when he still didn’t phone, she’d started to wonder—what was wrong with her that he would drop her, and the good thing they’d shared for the past three years, for a woman who wasn’t half the woman she was?

  That’s when she’d started going places where she thought she might run into him, like Teatro alla Scala, in order to follow him home and confront him. For weeks, she had no luck. Then today she had seen him in a restaurant near here, where she had happened to be having a meal with another one of her male friends. She had watched Dominic and, before he had finished his meal, she had ditched the friend she was with in order to be ready to roll when Dominic got up from his table.

  She had been delighted to see he was walking. It might have been difficult to follow him if she’d had to hail a cab and yell, “Follow that car!”

  But, no, he had walked only a few blocks to a well-maintained building and gone inside. At that point she’d lost her nerve and it had taken her two hours to work it up again. Then she had charmed the doorman into letting her come up.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  Dominic stood aside and she flounced into the apartment, her breasts jiggling in the bodice of her minidress. He shut the door but left it unlocked. With his back to the door, he watched as she walked into the apartment, assessing her surroundings. “Nice place,” she said. She turned around and faced him, a false smile painted on her face. “Isn’t that what a friend says when they see your place for the first time, since you never once invited me here?”

  Dominic didn’t crack a smile. He regarded her with narrowed eyes. Why was she so angry at him? “Forgive me, Angelica, but wasn’t that part of the arrangement? I would come to you, you wouldn’t come to me. Those were your stipulations. I saw no reason to give you my address. How did you get my address, anyway?”

  “I have my ways,” she said mysteriously. She walked up to him and stopped two feet away from him. “You could have phoned me and told me you weren’t going to call me anymore. I haven’t heard from you in seven months!”

  Dominic’s stony facade began to soften at the hurt tone in her voice. “I didn’t think you expected me to say it was over.”

  “You thought I’d take the hint?” she asked.

  “I didn’t think you would care one way or the other. We weren’t anything to each other except sexual partners. You often reminded me of that fact. You said you didn’t want an emotional attachment and I told you I didn’t either. Are you suddenly changing the rules because I stopped calling?”

  Her face crumpled as tears began spilling from her eyes. “I said that because that’s what I thought you wanted me to say!” she cried petulantly. “Even if I didn’t care for you, Dominic, good manners dictate that you should at least send a note explaining why a relationship is being severed. In business or in personal affairs! You could have had the decency to call and leave me a message!”

  Dominic reached out to comfort her by placing his hand on her arm, but she took the opportunity to leap into his arms and kiss him. Even though she was petite she was quite strong and clung to him like a leech.

  Dominic roughly broke off the kiss. “Angelica, it’s over. There, I’m telling you. It’s over and you’ve got to get out of here,” he said angrily. He tried to pry her arms from around his neck. She held on fast.

  “Why?” she pleaded, tears leaving black mascara-laden streaks down her face. “Is she coming home soon? Come on, baby, let me make you feel good one last time and I’ll be satisfied and never darken your door again.”

  Dominic didn’t consider her offer for one second. He was already terrified that his nosy neighbor, Signora Cimino, next door, would tell Elle she’d seen a strange woman going into their apartment. Signora Cimino, an opera purist, wasn’t fond of Temptation, calling his mixture of classical and hip-hop music an abomination, but she allowed that even if the style was lacking, the substance that Elle brought to it had been wonderful. She’d become one of Elle’s biggest fans and routinely plied her with fresh-baked pastries. However, whenever she saw Dominic she would shake her head pityingly and cluck her tongue. “I can’t believe you have fallen so far. You’ve got everybody else fooled, but I know good opera and you, Maestro, have sold out.”

  “Look, Angelica,” Dominic said now in an attempt to placate her, “don’t do this. You deserve much better than I can give you. I’m sorry if I hurt you. It wasn’t my intention. But I’m involved with someone else and I won’t cheat on her.”

  Angelica suddenly screeched and let go of him. Her feet hit the floor with a thud and she pushed him hard against the chest, causing him to stumble backward. “I can’t stand a reformed male whore!” she told him disdainfully. “You make me sick.”

  She walked to the door and looked back at him. “Next time, be careful how you treat people. No matter who we are, we deserve respect. I hope you treat her better than you did me, instead of using her for the next three years and then tossing her aside like so much trash. To hell with you, Dominic Corelli!”

  She let out a breath as though she’d exorcised every bit of poison that she’d swallowed for the past seven months. She smiled as if she was somehow cleansed.

  She pulled the door open and actually smiled at him when she turned back around, her hand on the doorknob. “It would be poetic justice if she broke your heart!”

  She left then.

  Dominic didn’t move. He expected her to turn around and hurl expletives at him. But after two minutes passed,
then three, he realized she’d gotten her feelings off her chest and wasn’t coming back.

  He went and locked the door. In spite of telling himself he hadn’t done anything to deserve Angelica’s wrath, he felt guilty. He strode through the apartment, back to the piano, where he sat down and began to play, but he couldn’t concentrate.

  Was he doing the same thing to Elle? Using her for his pleasure?

  He told himself that was preposterous. He cared for Elle. It might seem cold-blooded, but he had never come close to feeling genuine affection for Angelica. From the moment they’d met in a bar he had known the score with her. Each of them had used the other. Then why had she come here today acting like a spurned lover?

  Could Elle have been right when she had innocently told him that sex had consequences? Reasonably, he had to agree that she was. It was difficult to think of all the women he’d had casual affairs with and never given a second thought to when it was over. Had he left a string of Angelicas in his wake?

  He didn’t know. What he did know was that kind of behavior wouldn’t be a part of his life anymore. He was happy with Elle. She was his equal in every way. It was easy to be faithful to her because all he wanted was her.

  Fear suddenly clutched at him. That last invective Angelica had hurled at him—“It would be poetic justice if she broke your heart!” Was it possible that Elle would cheat on him? He didn’t think so, but Angelica’s words had put doubts in his mind.

  Suddenly, he needed to get out of the apartment. He hurried into a pair of athletic shoes and grabbed his leather jacket from the closet near the door. He almost collided with Signora Cimino as she was walking to her apartment, her arms full of grocery bags.

  “Here, let me help you,” he said and held the bags for her while she rummaged in her voluminous purse for her apartment key.

  She smiled at him and said, “Having Elle in your life has turned you into a gentleman, Signor Corelli. Don’t do anything to mess it up.”

  She then took her bags and went inside without saying thank you.

  Dominic laughed shortly, his mind momentarily off his paranoia. At least she hadn’t been home when Angelica had visited. He didn’t have her big mouth to worry about.

  In December, Elle was home from a triumph in Madrid. They had learned that the cast album had been nominated for a Grammy Award and were planning to attend the ceremony in February.

  They had just moved into their new house on the outskirts of Milan, not too far from Natalie and Carlo. Elle had been surprised by the swiftness with which Dominic had decided it was time to move from his old apartment. Dominic was glad that when Angelica had paid him a visit that day he and Elle hadn’t already moved into their new home. Angelica wouldn’t know where they lived now.

  The house was what Dominic called a little villa. More than three thousand square feet of living space with marble floors, high ceilings, large rooms, a pool and a pool house in the back. Elle immediately fell in love with the kitchen because it was homey yet airy and opened onto the back garden, which was well kept and already had a vegetable garden that she was looking forward to replanting in the spring.

  Upon her return from Madrid, Dominic couldn’t help noticing that Elle looked somewhat fuller. He didn’t know exactly how to describe it, but her breasts, already wonderful as far as he was concerned, were even more wonderful—rounder perhaps?

  Her belly looked a bit rounder, too. He liked the way the extra weight made her look and he told her one day as they were showering together in the master bath.

  Elle’s eyes widened when he said it, which surprised him. But in an instant, she was smiling, so he put it out of his mind. “I guess I put on a few pounds in Madrid,” she said lightly. She put her head under the shower’s spray. She had tired of getting her naturally curly hair straightened and was back to her wavy style, which Dominic preferred.

  Now he squeezed shampoo into his hand, rubbed it between his palms, then applied it gently to Elle’s hair. He liked this part of their ritual. He loved her hair.

  Elle luxuriated in the feel of his hands on her scalp. She’d never known a man who seemed to enjoy the sense of touch as much as Dominic did.

  After she rinsed, he grabbed a towel and wrapped it turban-style around her head.

  They got out of the shower, dried their bodies and Elle went to the mirror to start drying her hair, with the diffuser on the hair dryer.

  Dominic, a towel wrapped around his waist, stood in the doorway and watched her. He’d missed her when she had been in Madrid, but he had flown there to see her only once due to having to work himself. Besides, he didn’t want to be a distraction to her when she was working. In almost a year, Elle had become a highly sought-after performer. She was solidly booked for the foreseeable future. He was proud of her.

  She looked up and met his eyes in the mirror. “I love it when you watch me do mundane things like this,” she told him, smiling. “It makes me think you must really, really like me to stand there and watch me dry my hair.”

  Finished, she bent and put the hairdryer under the sink, and before she could straighten back up, Dominic had her in his arms. “I do really like you.” He crushed Elle to his chest and she winced. Dominic noticed and said, “What’s wrong?”

  Elle smiled, but it was forced, as he was well aware. “What?” she asked softly.

  Dominic put a little space between them, but continued to firmly hold on to her. “Don’t try to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Cara.”

  Elle smiled. “Okay, my breasts are a little sore.”

  Concern knitted Dominic’s brows together. “Was I too rough last night?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s that. Don’t worry so much,” Elle said dismissively. “Nothing is wrong with me that being with you won’t fix.” She tiptoed and briefly kissed his mouth. “Come on, now, we don’t want to keep everybody waiting.”

  It was Sunday and they were due at his parents’ villa for lunch.

  When they got to his parents’ home, Sophia and Matteo, who were newly engaged, were already there. Gianni and Francesca with little Gianni and his infant sister, Mia, arrived shortly after Dominic and Elle.

  As it always happened, the small family behaved as if they hadn’t seen each other in a very long time. There were warm hugs and kisses and delight expressed at small changes in each other.

  Gianni, who hadn’t seen Elle in a while, immediately noticed the change in her. He kept this observation to himself, though, and waited, thinking that there might be an announcement later on in the day.

  After everyone had eaten and the ladies separated from the men as they usually did, he pulled Dominic aside in the study and asked, “How are you and Elle doing?”

  Dominic smiled broadly. “Does this tell you anything?” he asked, referring to the wattage of his grin.

  Yes, Gianni thought, it tells me you are a fool, and what you don’t know about women could fill the Colosseum in Rome.

  “It’s going that well, huh?” Gianni said. He frowned. “If everything is so wonderful, why don’t you marry her?”

  Dominic, who was used to joking around with Gianni about his confirmed bachelorhood, laughed. “Why spoil a good thing? Elle and I are happy just the way things are.”

  Gianni wasn’t smiling but Dominic was oblivious to this fact. “Are you sure Elle is happy the way things are?”

  Dominic finally recognized the seriousness with which his cousin was regarding him. “You’re actually advising me to marry Elle?”

  Gianni nodded gravely. “I am. I don’t see why you won’t. For all intents and purposes you’re already married, except for making it legal.” He sighed. “No, cousin, I’m going to be brutally honest with you—living together is nothing like marriage. When you live with someone you can leave whenever you want with no strings attached, least of all emotional ties. That’s not love. With marriage, you make a commitment to stay together through bad times and good times. When you marry someone you’re telling the
world that you love and respect this person and you will do everything in your power to be there for her always. Living together is just a convenience. And I think you care more for Elle than to make her a convenience!”

  To hear his cousin, whom he loved as a fratello, refer to him as little more than a user upset Dominic. Especially on top of the things Angelica had said to him a few weeks ago. To his shame, though, he stubbornly clung to the belief that he and Elle were fine and what had happened between him and Angelica could never happen between him and Elle.

  He was angry with his cousin for trying to tell him how to live his life. “How dare you accuse me of using Elle?” he shouted, standing up and pacing the room.

  His cousin looked hurt by his tone of voice, but Dominic didn’t care. Gianni had hurt him, too, by speaking so frankly about a touchy subject.

  “I’m actually happy for the first time in a long time. Why do you begrudge me my happiness?” Dominic asked angrily.

  Gianni was not one to back down from a fight. He faced him, his dark eyes defiant and his stance belligerent. “You’re behaving like your actions have no consequences. That’s blindly irresponsible. Be a man, Dominic. Grow up!”

  “Don’t tell me to grow up,” Dominic ground out between clenched teeth. “It was Elle’s choice to live with me. I’m not forcing her to stay.”

  “No,” Gianni agreed. “All you used was gentle persuasion on a young woman whose experience in these things is far less than yours!”

  “Keep your voice down!”

  “I will not keep my voice down!”

  Dominic hit him on the jaw. Gianni stumbled backward but didn’t fall. He and Dominic were fairly equally matched in height and weight, although Dominic had more muscle mass due to his weightlifting regimen.

  Gianni hit him back, harder.

  Dominic’s hand went to his split lip. He looked down at the blood on his hand. “What’s gotten into you? You’re acting crazy.”