Alchemy
Set against sun-drenched Lake Garda, church mouse Tamsin Heriot, an English rose, pairs off with privileged Luca Leopoldo di Monte Valli, who’s half Italian, half Somali. But Luca isn’t what he seems… Orphaned at seven when his childhood in Mogadishu is brutally destroyed, Luca is left emotionally broken. Ragged and starving he seeks refuge in Italy where kindly aristocrats adopt him.
Ever since she was fifteen, Tamsin has had a crush on Luca and the summer before she goes to university, she’s determined to lose her virginity to him.
It’s eight years before their paths reconverge. Tamsin, still lusting after Luca, receives devastating news that triggers her return to the dilapidated family casa, and fate steps in when an unexpected bond develops between her and Luca’s widowed, adoptive mother. But a strange inheritance alters what started as a dalliance. There’s no shortcut to love, and with everything to lose, the relationship between two wounded people, Luca and Tamsin, is pushed to the breaking point.
Genre: Contemporary, Interracial
Length: 44,372 words
ALCHEMY
Serena Fairfax
EROTIC ROMANCE
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Erotic Romance
ALCHEMY
Copyright © 2014 by Serena Fairfax
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62741-726-6
First E-book Publication: May 2014
Cover design by Christine Kirchoff
All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
About the Author
ALCHEMY
SERENA FAIRFAX
Copyright © 2014
Chapter 1
I am eighteen, going on nineteen and have never been fucked. Tamsin morosely hummed her thoughts to the tune of Liesl and Rolf’s duet in “The Sound of Music” as she gazed at her reflection in the lopsided, oval bedroom mirror that scorching August day. The interior walls of La Casa della Fontana sloped, the floors listed, so straightening the mirror, in the crooked little house of the nursery rhyme, was routine. This grandly named, spectacularly moldering house in a picturesque village on Lake Garda had been snapped up by her bohemian parents, Patrick and Eve Heriot, on the back of a legacy from a crusty uncle, and it was from here that, for the past twenty-five years, they ran year-round painting and creative writing courses.
Tamsin’s first year at university beckoned in six weeks’ time. Below bold brows, large, gold-flecked hazel eyes set in a plump, milk-fresh face stared back at her and she sucked in her cheeks. She peeled off her nightie (courtesy of a thrift shop, her wardrobe mainstay) and sighed. Her luscious boobs owed nothing to silicone implants but her tummy was majestically rounded and there was no avoiding it. She was a dumpling who couldn’t afford liposuction.
Her spirits boosted as she brushed her hair. Licorice-dark, thick and glossy, it tumbled to her shoulders in loose curls. He would surely throw her down and lose himself in it. And those deep dimples when she smiled, which she’d almost forgotten how to.
The three graces—her trio of close girlfriends, all lissome and nubile with antelope legs, all clones of the hottest models—had been fucked, or so they bragged. Fucked by their brothers’ buddies, fucked by their fathers’ buddies, fucked by studs in one-night stands. Fucked against library shelves groaning with texts on particle physics, fucked in the swimming pool, fucked knee-deep in mud at Glastonbury, fucked on the hallowed green grass of Glyndebourne to the shrill vocals of Brünhilde wrapping up the immolation scene. There was no doubt they’d fucked and she claimed likewise, although disbelief was palpable and vociferously voiced when, with narrowed eyes, they compared notes. Well, this summer she’d get fucked, by hook or by crook. Her summer of love. The summer Cinderella would go to the ball. She refused to go down in history as the only virgin fresher.
She had a plan. A plan that had simmered gently all night after she’d masturbated whilst poring over “Bonking For Tyros” and munched her way through two bags of prawn-flavored potato crisps. A plan she would implement at once.
A party of five couples was expected that evening on a week’s course. Patrick and Eve with Tamsin’s brother Gareth, six years older than her would, as usual, meet and greet them at the Milan airport, herd them onto a minivan and, after two hours, speed proportionate to vehicle’s decrepitude, puttering down the autostrada, decant them at the casa. Nine-year-old Ruby, Patrick and Eve’s last hurrah, was vacationing in style in Ibiza, with her best friend Isla, at the hip, minimalist beach house owned by Isla’s family.
It was ten a.m. and Tamsin heard a rumble of bickering voices as the Heriots left. The minivan was temperamental, so plenty of time was allowed for mishaps. Tamsin was delegated to stay behind to lay the well-scrubbed, rough-hewn communal refectory table, to ensure the pre-cooked meal was properly defrosted and
heated up and the wine was chambray-ing. That was an affectation of Gareth’s, since the Heriots could afford, and served, what could only be politely categorized as easy drinking.
She glanced down at the plan, although she’d no need to as she’d memorized it by heart.
1.Change bed linen and sprinkle lavender water.
2.Flash the flesh.
3.Buy condoms and new knickers.
4.Rehearse Luca pretext.
Ah Luca! Ever since she was fifteen, she’d had a crush on him. Her head swarmed with fantasies of the scion of Il Principe Salvatore Leopoldo di Monte Valla and Principessa Catarina. He, godlike, was sole heir to the noble title and extensive agricultural land holdings, to the sumptuous Leopoldo palazzo in Milan where masterpieces in oils by Titian, Raphael, Caravaggio and El Greco hung in proximity to canvases by Impressionists, Cubists and Fauvists. Comprising one of the most fabulous private art collections in the world, it was on loan to the Italian government. And few dynastic families in Italy possessed the twenty-four carat pedigree of the Leopoldos, who counted among their ancestors the Chief Treasurer to the Emperor Barbarossa, a Pope, a composer, two saints and Renaissance Ambassadors.
Yes! Tamsin swiftly executed items one and two, painted her finger and toenails a shimmering Chinese red, slapped a flash of azure on her eyelids and whirled down to make breakfast. Contemplating the third homemade roll with lashings of salty butter and gooseberry jam coursing through her arteries, she hesitated. Her diet started today. She dusted and vacuumed whilst pondering a range of scenarios for item four and checked that the guest rooms were ready. The mattresses were lumpy, the plumbing was dodgy, furniture wobbled but that was the genuine rural experience, Eve explained airily, in the best traditions of her early stage roles, when the inevitable whingeing surfaced.
A brisk pick-me-up was afforded by the consumption of a box of after-dinner mints that had passed its sell-by date. The diet started tomorrow.
It was almost midday when Tamsin, wafting fumes of Eve’s “Miss Dior,” emerged into dazzling sunshine with Dusty, their St Bernard, at her heels and half jogged down a maze of cobbled alleyways past a tumble of stone houses new and old, to the village general store where, tucked away in a surprisingly well-endowed side aisle labeled “Staircase to the Heavens” she purchased item 3. Like Heinz there were so many varieties. What is a girl to do? Snug fit, featherlite, XL, glow-in-the-dark, flavored (vanilla ice cream sounded yummy), gently tingling, gently mingling, hooded and veiled, ribbed and dotted. They’d be peddling singing ones next like “Stay Stay Stay.”
How many should she get? Glancing quickly round to see if she was being observed, she decided to play safe and bought a fistful of everything. Her heart thudded like a drum and she felt herself sweating. Then she sidled across to underwear and, snatching the best, which wasn’t saying much, from a rather staid selection of panties, set down the exact amount of Euros on the counter, stuffed the cargo in her tasseled shoulder bag and shot out with a sense of “cometh the hour, cometh the wo-man.” Belting out “Rolling In The Deep” she changed into the new undies behind a cluster of pine trees smelling spicy under the hot morning sun. She let Dusty off the leash and he bounded ahead.
* * * *
“Luca’s at home. He’s by the pool.” Suspending her berating of the carpenter for some perceived shortcoming, Maria, warm and motherly, smiled at Tamsin, her favorite of the Heriots. Cook and housekeeper at the Villa Leopoldo, she shared domestic duties with her son, Maurizio, gardener, driver, odd-job man, who’d succeeded his father Maurizio Sr., now arthritically confined to a wheelchair. In the service of the aristocratic Salvatore and Catarina for many years, Maria had witnessed their three daughters marry well and fly the nest to settle in New York with their stonkingly wealthy Italian American husbands. Witnessed, too, Il Principe’s adoption of Luca, now twenty-four. Half-Italian, half-Somali, he was orphaned as a seven-year-old when his parents—an Italian midwife and an Italian-trained Somali doctor who’d fallen in love in an Italian hospital—were gunned down in Mogadishu.
“Oh, thanks.” But Tamsin already knew that, having called ahead on the landline, hanging up when he was put through. She was about to head off in his direction when Maria inquired if there was anything else she wanted. She was accustomed to being called into the breach by the chaotic Heriots in ever-increasing emergencies when Eve ran out of supplies, at one time even prevailing on Father Fabio, the parish priest, to accommodate Patrick and Eve in sleeping bags in his garage when they’d had to vacate their bedroom for double-booked guests.
Tamsin smiled and shook her head. If the plan went according to plan, she’d be curled up in bed with Luca. Then a horrible thought struck her, a thought she’d not factored into her machinations. Suppose he was with one of those “divinely tall and most divinely fair” she’d seen him fooling around with when he was at Bologna University? There’d been a trail of A-listers he’d brought home in the vacation all of whom, sickeningly enough, had got on famously with Salvatore and Catarina. She’d not had a look in.
“Is he…er…er, alone?”
“Si, si.” Maria nodded and smiled broadly. Much encouraged, Tamsin almost skipped to the pool on the far side of the gracious lake-view villa set in stunningly engineered flowering terraces amidst centuries-old cedars.
Lowering his Wayfarer glasses by the merest fraction, Luca watched the orgy of color advancing purposefully and wondered what she wanted. She looked as though she was on a mission. He’d played with Gareth as a small boy but hadn’t liked him, as he was a bully and had to be squared up to. He suspected he’d supplanted Gareth, once a favorite of the Leopoldos, in their affections and Gareth, whose expectations of a lifetime’s freeloading and ultimately a sizeable bequest vanished when they adopted Luca, hadn’t accepted playing second fiddle, the envy and jealousy like a simmering volcano.
Tamsin had registered with him as a podgy, rather solemn little girl who was eager to please. Like her siblings, she’d been parked with relatives in England, coming out to Lake Garda during the school holidays when Patrick, a former art teacher and Eve, forced to abandon an acting career when she could secure nothing but low-paid bit parts, for teaching English literature and drama in high school, decided to abandon their humdrum English life to settle there.
“Ciao!”
Tamsin swallowed, drinking in the sight of him, overwhelmed by that sexy voice, by that vital-looking, hard-muscled six foot two in those designer swimming trunks, by those searing espresso-black eyes, that raw energy. With the typical lean features of a Somali, Luca’s Italian heritage was reflected in his burnished honey-gold skin tone and tousled, thick, silky hair the color of polished mahogany that expensive cutting hadn’t managed to tame.
“Fancy a dip? I’ll dig out a swim suit for you.” His attractively accented English was fluent.
Fizzing with nerves, Tamsin’s tongue seemed to stick to the roof of her mouth. “Er, er, not at the moment.” A quick glance suggested Salvatore and Catarina were at home because their gleaming, classic Lancia was berthed in the shadow of a clump of trees. A few yards away lay what she suspected was Luca’s brand new Honda Blackbird, a powerful beast of a motorbike. A clutch of workmen milled around installing new drains whilst indoors Maurizio, high on a ladder, toiled to clean a Murano glass chandelier.
“Well, what about having a spot of lunch with us?” Luca raised an eyebrow.
The plan’s going to fail, she thought, unless she established a few more facts.
“Are you here for good?” She blurted out, subtlety not being her strong point. According to Eve, he’d graduated with a first class honors degree in Economics and Finance. Well he would, wouldn’t he?
Luca smiled. Tamsin was not exactly sex on legs. “For sure, all summer and then…”
“Yes?” prompted Tamsin anxiously, tilting her head. Pray God, he isn’t going to say he’s tying the knot. Marrying young was pretty much a Leopoldo family tradition, with Salvatore and Catarina, like forbears,
having exchanged marriage vows when they were both aged twenty.
“In the fall I’m heading Stateside to do an MBA at an east coast business school.”
“That sounds…interesting.” Tamsin’s heart plummeted at being dealt this unexpected blow. “I expect it’s one of those fancy ones that train you to manage the world and encourage Lear-jet aspirations. All that blue-sky thinking, thinking outside the box, you’re never fired but transitioned, business is re-sized…”
Luca threw back his head and laughed. “Hey, that’s pretty insightful! I must remember to put you on my payroll when I’m done.”
“So, you’re bent on entrepreneurship. Although,” she added optimistically, hoping for re-arrangement, “I expect you’ll be back often, won’t you?”
“Salvatore and Catarina are comfortably into their seventies now and my sisters,” Luca’s tone warmed affectionately as he spoke of his adoptive siblings and their husbands and numerous offspring, “are desperate for them to visit for an extended period, so it looks as though the house will be largely vacant over the next few years.”
“You’ll have to watch out for squatters then,” Tamsin said, with a pang of resignation.
His mouth quirked. “Are you saying Patrick and Eve have designs on it and that I ought to bolt the furniture to the floor?”
He towel-dried his hair, unfazed by Tamsin’s gaze fixed on him. She was an odd girl, not unattractive, certainly no competition for the pitch-perfect specimens he’d dated, but there was something about those spaniel eyes, those dimples, that explosion of shining hair that could explain the hotly ripening bulge between his legs.
Alchemy (Siren Publishing Allure) Page 1
