by C. L. Donley
She let out another deep breath as she closed her eyes and slowly, gently, rested her body against him. She tried to let the scent of his costly cologne calm her, rather than send her into a hormonal frenzy.
She imagined that they did this sort of thing, all the time. That he was hers, and she often used him as a cushion. And that he often let her.
Suddenly the car lurched to a stop in front of the hotel and Dario’s heart with it. There was no further excuse to hold her like this anymore. She felt his chin resting against the top of her head.
“Chekhov and his men will be joining us tonight for dinner. Along with Sergei,” he said.
“I suppose I can stay upstairs until the coast is clear?” she suggested in a weak voice.
“Nonsense, you will celebrate with us.”
“Are you sure? Chekhov will know you deceived him.”
“He will understand,” he grinned. “In fact, I think he will enjoy the unveiling.”
Finally, Lark raised herself up with his sport coat still around her shoulders, meeting his gaze with trepidation, her toasty brown eyes a shade slightly darker than her own skin, her bold leopard print dress singing against her body.
Before he knew what he was doing he raised a hand to her face, caressing her smooth jawline.
“I was only joking earlier, you must know,” he began, his low baritone humming across her insides, “I would never, ever let anything happen to you. Ever.”
The trepidation in her eyes only deepened. His speech did not seem to put her at ease. She looked as though she were about to speak. For a moment her eyes were the same as they had been at his mother’s house, when she asked if there was a private place they could go.
He’d been with another woman then too, the night before.
Why did it keep happening? The moment he gave in to shameful lusts was the moment right before Lark unexpectedly landed in his lap. Literally, this time. It must mean something. His thumb gently grazed her bottom lip.
“Get out, Allodola. Before we make love.”
“You’d do that?” she asked, barely above a whisper. Her lashes came down like a veil as she glanced at his lips. Her eyes darted back to his. “Right here? Right now?”
Dio mio, she still wanted him. To the point of madness. Daring him to make a move. To fire her.
He couldn’t. Not just yet. He gave himself another nanosecond, before pretending he hadn’t seen what he saw.
“Have we met?” he joked.
She laughed. He smiled.
And just like that, her eyes returned to normal. The moment passed him by.
Painfully, he watched her pull the handle on the passenger door and flood the back of the car with light and cool air.
“Miss Chambers,” he called out after her. She stuck her head back inside the car.
“Wear something boring tonight,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. De Rossi,” she smiled.
Dario blew a long slow breath out of both cheeks after Lark closed the door, leaving him in the backseat alone.
Ten
Chapter 10
Dario had been right, Chekhov did enjoy the unveiling.
When they met at the hotel to celebrate their new business arrangement, he called for Lark to come downstairs after he and his father had properly broken the ice.
As requested, Lark came down dressed in her boring pencil skirt and crisp white blouse, her chunky black heels click-clacking toward their table. She had blow-dried her hair so that it was extra straight and thin, as it had been the night Dario first saw her.
Chekhov’s eyes widened with recognition. The men around Chekhov at the table laughed and laughed. All except Dario, who only had a sly grin.
Clearly, Dario had already told him what he’d done.
“Tasha… tell me it isn’t true,” Chekhov pleaded dramatically.
Lark scrunched up her face, her shoulders went up in contrition as she winced.
“Please accept my deep apology for deceiving you and your men, but my boss put me up to it because he didn’t know if he could trust you…” Lark continued to backpedal on and on in perfect Russian while Sergei and his men died laughing all over again at Chekhov’s expression.
Chekhov continued to stare at Lark in disbelief periodically through the night, which garnered giggles from her and from his nephew. He shook his head.
“She is beautiful, was I right?” his nephew said in English.
“She is very beautiful. One of a kind,” he said in Russian, echoing Dario’s words about her from earlier that day.
Dario looked over at Lark, trying and failing not to adore her. He had an arm behind her, his posture open as her body pointed towards his. It was their most unprofessional posture to date. But then again, she wasn’t on the clock.
“She has a future as an actress, no?” Dario said. Chekhov laughed.
“Indeed! It’s like night and day,” he replied.
“And it was her idea.”
Lark hid her face with one of her hands while Dario continued to make fun of her.
“This…” Dario said, his free hand moving up and down like a game show model as he showcased what she was wearing, “this is how Miss Chambers chooses to dress.”
His father and Sergei the designer laughed the loudest as Lark smacked him in the chest.
“Criminal. I will make something for you,” Sergei insisted.
“It would be an honor, thank you,” Lark cordially smiled.
“My apologies, Miss Chambers, for what you may have overheard today. If I offended you.”
“No worries,” Lark said.
“Your boss is in love with you,” Chekhov said in his native tongue. “Are you in love with him?”
In the time it took Lark to be taken aback by the statement, take a deep breath, and then let it out, he had his answer.
“You should marry him. You will not do better.”
She looked over at Dario, who returned her gaze fondly. With slight apprehension in her brow, she hesitated. Then continued the stealthy conversation with Chekhov in their hearing, with all except Dario and his father understanding.
“His wife died many years ago. He will never get married again,” she explained back to them.
“Before the year is over, he will ask you.”
Lark giggled nervously, and finally, Dario could not hold back his curiosity.
“What are they saying about me?” he grinned.
Lark turned to him then, still high off of their brief interlude in the limo, close enough to him now to feel his warmth and smell his scent that lingered underneath his expensive shirt.
“They are deeply saddened by how ugly you are,” she answered him in Italian, her tongue quickly advancing from the back of the mouth to the front, as she went from rounded flowing Russian to the sharp, poetic jabs of Italian.
She returned his adoring gaze as the language danced on her tongue like graceful razorblades, and then she took a drink.
“Slushay, if he doesn’t, you come find me. I will break both his legs for you,” Chekhov vowed to her in English. Lark burrowed her face in Dario’s chest in embarrassment.
“Cazzo, if I don’t do what??” Dario asked, having only understood the last half of the threat. The table laughed again.
* * *
Two days later, they landed in Paris for what Dario called a “pit stop.”
It wasn’t on the itinerary. But he wanted to make a personal appeal to a client who’d severed long relationship ties with Di Rossi textiles. A bespoke tailor’s shop that used Di Rossi’s cotton and wool for suits.
Lark fell asleep on the plane and had one of those horrible dreams of hers where her mouth was full of unrecognizable gunk.
Dario was there, sitting next to her, and they seemed to be at some sort of stadium, like one for a baseball game.
She knew she was supposed to be translating, and instead of excusing herself as she obviously would have in real life, she simply sat in her stadium folding chai
r, her right hand pulling and pulling this gelatinous, flopping mass from her mouth that wouldn’t end. It was so severe that she was gagging, in the dream at least. She had no idea if it was happening at all in the real world, though she’d soaked part of her pillow.
She hadn’t had one of those dreams in a long time.
The first and only meeting that day she merely sat and watched. They couldn’t seem to reach a consensus on pricing. Lark was pretty sure they were just keeping her around for decoration at this point. Or out of pity. Everyone spoke English.
They went out to a modest dinner afterward. Dario took them to a small street-food vendor, famed for his roasted chickens. They split a freshly baked baguette with butter and used their fingers like French peasants.
Lark tracked down her friend Teresa as soon as she learned they were going to be in the city. They managed to carve out a single hour to get together in the three days Lark was in town. She’d caught the ladies up to speed a few times via Skype, and Teresa had been the least surprised. Or helpful. They met at a cafe just outside Lark’s hotel the following rainy afternoon.
“So? Has he crossed the line, yet?” Teresa tried to catch up on the latest.
“Not yet. In New York… almost. Which may have been my fault, I can’t tell.”
“Details?”
“Um, well… I can’t tell you all of it, but… I don’t know. Something happened that sort of shook me up a little and he was… comforting me.”
“Zut alors! I don’t understand you. I still can’t believe how he looked at you that night. You are with him every day and you’ve already forgotten.”
“I still can’t believe how unhelpful you were that night.”
“That I didn’t recognize him? What, we never went to the factory. I just made the clothes, I pick the fabrics like.”
Lark sighed, rubbing her forehead, reliving the beginning of this disastrous life trajectory.
“He looked familiar,” she reminisced.
“No shit.”
“He looks a bit like his father I suppose, but…” Teresa shrugged.
Lark mimicked her shrug with a rolling of the eyes.
“Honestly, would it have mattered? If he would’ve gone up to you and said, ‘I’m your boss and I want you tonight,’ would you have said, ‘no’?”
“Probably wouldn’t have fucked him at his mother’s house.”
“Then I know something about you that you don’t,” Teresa grinned before giving her cigarette another drag. “How many more days left?”
“Two.”
“You know each other well now. You must sleep with him while you still can, while he is still your boss. It would be intoxicating.”
“Teresa, you are a slut, and also, you forget. I did the boss thing already. And it was horrible.”
“Because you picked a troll, Alouette. This man is not some bureaucrat, looking to be a big shot. He is a big shot. He’s a self-made man, from a line of self-made men. A true boss. He is Italian and beautiful. He wants you.”
“He’s a rich, powerful man-whore, who hires interpreters he only sort of needs, and flies them around while he bleeds money. How is that rare?”
“I cannot believe my ears. What has he done to you?”
“Nothing,” she lied.
“Then you are trying not to be in love with him. Why?”
Lark sighed as she sat back in her chair, stirring her cafe au lait.
“That’s why,” Lark said with a nod of her head, drawing attention to whatever was over Teresa’s shoulder.
She turned around to see Dario arm in arm with a blonde, walking hurriedly past the cafe as they fought the rainy wind with their collars upturned.
“Honestly, I think he’s doing it on purpose.”
“You are jealous.”
“Of course, I’m jealous.”
“What can the man do? He is your boss now, and he respects that. You’re in such close quarters, perhaps you torture him. He wants to sleep with you and he cannot.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that? Of course, he can.”
“Does ‘everyone’ keep saying that?”
“Never mind. Supposedly I’m the only one that knows about his little lady habit, but he’s been terribly indiscreet as long as I’ve known him.”
“He is simply on a bender I’m sure. He will go home soon, where he is just an overworked single father.”
“You’re doing a very good job of defending him. You sure you don’t want to sleep with him yourself?”
“If I didn’t think it would come between our friendship, I would throw myself directly at him,” Teresa admitted. Lark chuckled.
“I’m sure he has gathered how relationship phobic you are by now,” Teresa reasoned.
“He didn’t have to. I’ve made mention of it many times.”
“Then you have no right to be angry with him,” Teresa said.
“Maybe. That doesn’t mean that I have to approve. Honestly, it’s a little… disturbing.”
Teresa laughed and shook her head at her hypocritical sentiment.
“What?”
“Do you remember the day we met?” Teresa asked. “You and Channing on the train to Siena?”
“Of course.”
“Remember we saw those two gorgeous men in the gift shop on the way home?”
“'Fuckable Mario and Luigi?’ How could I forget? The short one was the most beautiful, I’d never seen such a thing.”
“You went straight up to them and said ‘che bello.’ They followed us all the way out to where our train was waiting and ran after it until they couldn’t keep up.”
Lark adopted a far off goofy grin in rememberance.
“I only do that sort of stuff when you’re around, did you know that?”
“You told me as much that day. It’s what you love about me.”
“It is. What can I say? You make me feel like a natural woman, Teresa,” Lark mused.
“Give it up, Lark. You are powerless. The moment he said ‘this one.’ It was over.”
She thought about the first time she saw Dario see her, when they were two strangers about to forge a connection out of thin air, and then tried in vain to destroy the evidence.
Lark’s face crumpled as though her dutiful facade was being pressed under the weight of her emotions and fears.
She shook her head, running a hand slowly across her smooth hair until it returned thoughtful under her chin. She sniffed. Where to start? She looked at her friend with watery, reddening eyes.
“I’m glad I inspire you to let your hair down, Alouette. You deserve to feel ecstasy, you deserve to have love.”
“Love? I’ve never seen it done. Not once,” Lark rattled off in French.
“And yet you are afraid. And yet you know that it exists,” Teresa said. “Tell him how his affairs make you feel.”
“They don’t make me feel anything,” she lied.
“Honestly, Lark. You know a dozen languages. There is nowhere in the world you can go where you cannot communicate. You are valuable beyond measure, and there is nothing a man can do to take that away from you.”
“So?”
“So, what do you have to lose? What else do you have to do that’s more pressing in your miserably lonely life?”
“Teresa, that’s cold. And yet… oddly motivating. As ususal.”
“I have to go. I’ll be late,” Teresa lamented.
Lark stopped her when she attempted to summon the waiter for the check. She excused herself with a kiss on Lark’s cheek, returning her leather bag to her shoulder.
“Tell him who you are. Tell him how you feel. You can afford to take the risk. You will never forgive yourself if you don’t.”
* * *
Dario tried to snap himself out of it as the beautiful blonde woman, known to him as “Eloise,” began to undress in front of him.
Not only could he not think about sex, but he could also only picture Lark’s disapproval of the whole thing. And his
mind was busy thinking of defensive rebuttals to her questioning of him.
It was a hell of a thing to be distracted by while looking at a woman’s bare tits.
“Ti piace?” she said in Italian. She didn’t wait for him to answer. Otherwise, she would’ve known that he wasn’t paying attention.
She got on her knees in front of him, unbuttoning his trousers, and he was beginning to doubt his ability to go through with this.
He had a problem. Lark would be leaving him soon. And he was going to miss her. He needed to drown his sorrowful dread in pussy.
But judging by his lackluster erection, moving on was going to be a bitch.
“You are too tense, mon ami,” Eloise tactfully deduced. “Come, let me help you,” she said peeling back her Chanel dress. Lark could kill in a Chanel dress, he thought.
Did he have to move on, his mind wandered? When he imagined trying to pursue Lark, to woo her, he saw himself successful, but only for a time. She would try to resist, and he would refuse to let her leave. But the moment she was out of his sight, she would be dressed, pressed, her hair pulled back without a strand out of place, insisting that she must be going. He saw it as plain as he saw this strange woman’s red lips around his cock.
Unless he planned on perpetually flying around to exotic locations in order to retain Lark’s permanent employment— which he was considering— there wasn’t a single thing about her that made him think he could keep her from running as she’d promised.
She’s doing a good job, Dario’s cock brought the message to the forefront of his brain. His brain considered it a waste of an opportunity to let the moment go unused. It started feeding Dario images and his body responded, sending his soul on a gently rippling tide of pleasure. He liked to resurrect old images of his wife when he wanted to pity himself, but those weren’t working today. He’d positively worn out every image he still had left of Lark.
Wanna bet? His brain challenged. His mind perused the catalog and landed on the two of them in the back of the limo, where he threatened to make love to her there. But instead of helping, the memory jarred him.
“Basta, Eloise,” he said to her.
