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The riders had drawn closer, still riding abreast of each other. She could not see their faces yet, but they were close enough now so that she could recognize the colors. It was as it always was, she reassured herself with a small sigh of relief. This was Bianca, her unbound black curls streaming behind her like a banner, her scarlet dress a dazzling contrast to her mount’s white coat. And this was Alessio, his black clothing blending with the glossy black hide of his stallion so that the man and his mount looked like one fabulously pagan, virile animal.
They drew closer still, the horses’ hooves thundering on the sand as the white horse took the lead by a head. Sarah pressed her hand to her heart, which was echoing the pounding rhythm.
She wanted to warn them to beware. To beware of each other. To beware of their fate. She wanted to stop them. No, she had to stop them. Now that she knew what lay in store for them, she was responsible. She cried out to them, but no sound emerged from her throat.
They were close now, so close that she could see their faces. She saw Bianca turn slightly and send Alessio a smile. A smile perfectly calculated to provoke, to arouse. She saw Alessio’s face, dark with annoyance and the promise of passion, and she remembered the heartbreaking beauty of the letters and sonnets he had written for the woman who had not loved him enough.
How could you do it? Sarah heard her voice in her head, crying out in desperate reproach, but she knew that she remained mute.
How could I do it? She cried out silently again, and even as she wondered at the bizarre tricks her mind was playing on her, she understood. With all the suddenness of a shaft of bright, strong sunlight piercing a fog, she understood.
It was she who had lived as Bianca. It was she who had caused death and destruction and so much suffering by putting ambition and a greed for power before love.
They had almost reached her. Another moment and they would be past. Then it would be too late. The thought shot into her mind like a flaming arrow and quivered there. Too late for what? she cried. And what could she do? What?
Suddenly Sarah remembered that she had stood at the threshold of the shadowy shop and felt the power that had lain waiting for her inside. She reached for it now and it filled her. Her head high, her step sure, she moved squarely into the path of Bianca’s mount.
The world tilted and whirled around Sarah as if a giant, invisible hand had picked her up and spun her head over heels like a toy. Then she crashed against something, the impact robbing her of her senses, but only for a moment.
She lifted her hand to her hair and, instead of a severe bun on the back of her head, she found a mass of wild curls streaming back in the wind. She looked down at her clothing and saw, instead of a threadbare coat of dark wool, a gown of rich scarlet velvet. Beneath her she felt the vibration of the powerful animal as it pounded over the sand.
Even as panic flashed through her, she told herself that it was a dream. Just a dream. She struggled to awaken, but she was held fast, as if she were bound by strong cords.
Gradually comprehension seeped into her and her struggles subsided as she understood—and accepted—that the dream had become reality. She understood that in some mystical way her spirit had merged and melded with Bianca’s. And she understood that she had been given the chance to live her life as Bianca one more time. To live it again, knowing the tragedy, the mistakes. She had been given a second chance to do it right.
In an act that was both surrender and conquest, she let Sarah go, freeing her to pass to some shadowy realm. Sarah slipped away wraithlike, taking her life, her memories with her. But, like a precious gift, she left behind her a vein of knowledge to live in Bianca like the melody of a once heard, never forgotten song.
April 1528
Bianca felt a jolt, as if she had collided with something. It left her breathless, but only for a moment. She turned in the saddle and looked back to where, for a moment, she had thought she had seen a thin woman wearing outlandish dark clothes. The figure was gone, but a pile of what looked like rags lay on the pale sand.
Involuntarily, her hands tightened on the reins. Her mount reared up with an annoyed whinny and, still distracted, Bianca allowed the reins to slip through her fingers. With a cry she tumbled off the saddle onto the sand.
Disoriented, she lay still for a moment, both arms flung outward. The pounding of hooves on the sand caused her to struggle up onto her knees. Frozen with a sudden terror, she watched the black stallion thunder straight at her. Even when the animal reared to a halt several feet away from her, she felt as if her heart had stopped beating.
She watched Alessio, his face dark with rage, leap off his mount. Suddenly, the abject, nameless terror of a moment ago changed to a specific fear of this man. She struggled up and stumbled to a nearby rocky outcrop.
She felt dizzy and helpless. But more than anything else she was annoyed. It wasn’t like her to be so clumsy or to feel such panic as she had a moment ago. She tilted up her chin and turned to face him, bracing her palms against the rocks behind her.
The taste of the panic he had felt when he had seen Bianca fall still lay on Alessio’s tongue, as bitter and metallic as the taste of blood. Because the desire to take her into his arms was so strong, his hands were rough as they closed on her shoulders.
“What were you trying to do, damn you?” He shook her so violently that her teeth clacked together. “Break your neck?”
“No.” She was still breathless, but temper was beginning to burn away the confusion in her eyes as she threw back her head. “I just wanted to see how fast Sultana could go. And I was racing you,” she added with a smile. “And I would have won, too, if that woman hadn’t startled me.”
“Woman? What woman?”
Suddenly bewildered again, Bianca glanced toward the spot on the beach where she had thought she had seen the woman. Where she had seen the pile of dark rags. But there was nothing there now but the pale yellow sand.
“I thought I saw a woman standing right in front of me.” Her voice petered out and she frowned, still looking past Alessio down the beach. “I must have imagined her.” She shook her head. She was not someone given to visions and imaginings.
Alessio scowled down at her. He wanted to shake her again for her willful recklessness, but for a moment she, whom he had never seen other than vibrant and proud, looked so lost, so pale that his hands gentled.
Bianca pushed away the odd feeling that still wound through her. The feeling she could not have described if her life had depended on it. But then, it had never been her habit to indulge in introspection.
“It was probably just the mussels I ate giving me indigestion.” She purposely said the prosaic words, needing something ordinary to balance out this—this bizarre apparition.
Alessio looked behind him at the spot Bianca’s gaze had gone to. He saw nothing but the sand, which stretched for miles up the coast. But she had seen something. She was not a woman to pale at some phantom of the mind. He turned back to her.
“What did you see?”
She met Alessio’s eyes. They were the same color as the sunlit sea, which stretched out behind him. The remains of his anger were there. And the desire she recognized because she had seen it often enough in other men’s eyes. But there was something else there that she had never seen before. Was it tenderness? Concern? She was not a woman easily disquieted, but whatever this was, it disquieted her now and made her want to look away. She was not a woman easily touched, but this touched her now and made her want to hold his gaze.
“Nothing.” She shrugged, the gesture meant as much for herself as for him. “Now I suggest you let me go, Messere Alessio.” Her mouth curved in a smile that both mocked and invited. “Or do you wish to mark my skin?”
The look of a little girl lost had faded. Instead the temptress was back. The temptress who had tantalized him months ago and then allowed herself to be betrothed to his brother like a mare sold to the highest bidder. And yet he still wanted her. Despite the rage that churned within him, he wanted her with a desire so hot, so strong that every woman he made love to was but an instrument for his release. A release that brought a slaking of a physical need but no true pleasure.
“If you keep playing your role of Circe, I will do more than mark your skin.” But even as he said the words, his hands eased and began to stroke where they had gripped before.
The linen of her shirt, the velvet of her gown lay between Alessio’s hands and her skin, and yet Bianca could feel his touch as if she were naked beneath it.
The heat his hands generated spread over her skin and spiraled down to her belly. Her young, ripe body grew hungry. So hungry that for a mad, heady moment she could imagine giving in to its demands. Now. Here.
Because a voice she had never heard before seemed to call to her, because the voice spoke of shame and dishonor, she tried to shift away from Alessio’s touch.
“Strega. You are a witch, Bianca.” His hands slid up from her shoulders and into her hair. As they fisted in the wind-tossed strands to hold her, he lowered his mouth to hers.
“No.” She turned her face aside.
Alessio stared down at her. Did she think he was a plaything to bat around like a tennis ball? Did she think she could treat him as if he were a fawning Venetian cicisbeo, content to worship from afar?
Impatience and anger mixed with desire and his hands tightened in her hair.
“No, let me go.” She began to fight him in earnest, not quite understanding why she felt compelled to do so when she wanted to give in to him so badly.
“Why so coy today, madonna?” he demanded. “There have been days when you were more than eager to feel my mouth on yours.”
Bianca said nothing because she did not have an answer to his accusation. His accusation that was nothing less than the truth.
“Let me go, Alessio, I command you.” His grip on her hair was just short of painful—and yet she found that it aroused her. Because she needed distance from him and needed it quickly, she fired off her most powerful weapon. “Do you forget that I belong to your brother?”
“No.” His eyes flashed with blue flames. “You are betrothed to my brother. But you belong to me.”
Alessio felt his fury, which she seemed to provoke so effortlessly, rise another notch. Yes, it troubled him that he so desperately wanted this woman, who would, in a few months’ time, be his older brother’s wife. It troubled him far more than he cared to admit. There was no love lost between Ugo and him. But did a man dishonor his own flesh and blood for a woman?
Perhaps not for any woman, he thought as his gaze traveled over Bianca’s face with its perfect features. The eyes so dark that they were almost black, with their tiny flecks of gold, which made them look like live coals. The lush mouth the color of raspberries, which promised all the pleasures of paradise. Perhaps not for any woman, he repeated, but for this woman he would sell his immortal soul to the devil. Perhaps he already had. An ache wound through him. An ache that had nothing to do with the ache in his loins.
“You know as well as I do that you belonged to me long before I touched you for the first time. Do you remember?”
Her mouth sullen, Bianca remained silent. Because her pride demanded it, she kept her gaze steady on his.
Her silence goaded him, and Alessio’s grip tightened and remained so, even when her barely perceptible wince told him that he was hurting her.
“Do you remember how you looked down from the tribunal as I was awarded the victor’s wreath after the tournament?” His body sprang to life at the memory. “You looked at me and we both knew that you were mine, as if you had already spread your legs for my body.”
In counterpoint to his crude words, his hands released her hair and cupped her head, his fingers rubbing her scalp lightly, as if to soothe the discomfort that he himself had caused. He lowered his head, and instead of taking her mouth as his body demanded, he brushed his lips over hers once and then again. For some reason it seemed important that she give him what he could so easily take.
“Open your mouth for me now, Bianca,” he murmured. “Open for me and let me kiss you.”
His hands were gentle where they had been rough before. His lips coaxed where they had demanded. Drawing in a deep breath, she inhaled his scent with it — horseflesh and leather and aroused male. Her senses began to swim. Surely there would be no harm in one kiss. Just one kiss. She could feel her lips slackening, parting of their own volition. No, she thought. If she gave her mouth to him, she would give it.
She opened her mouth and slid the tip of her tongue between Alessio’s lips.
Alessio felt her warm, wet tongue slip into his mouth, and for a moment he remained as motionless as if he had been struck by lightning.
She watched him as she moved her tongue against his in erotic invitation. Then she retreated and, in a final siren’s call, brushed her open mouth against his. When she let her head fall back in ostensible surrender, triumph was in her eyes.
Because his needs were coursing through him with an urgency that was just short of uncontrollable, Alessio lowered his mouth to hers slowly, half inch by half inch. His lips hovered over hers, then descended until they were separated by no more than a breath.
Her mouth, as sweet and lush as a ripe peach, beckoned. And still he did not take. Instead he touched his mouth to her full lower lip. Then, his eyes on hers, he drew it into his mouth.
For a moment Bianca stopped breathing with the sheer pleasure of it. She would beg now, she thought as the last rational thought fled her mind. She would make a fool of herself and beg, and she cared not. Because she could not speak, she moaned.
Alessio stilled. Then, knowing that now they were both the vanquished, both the victors, he plunged into her mouth.
They feasted on each other until they were full of each other’s taste. They drank from each other until they were drunk with pleasure.
Their nerves humming, their breathing ragged, they pulled apart, the terrible knowledge in their eyes. They had shared much more than a kiss. They had possessed each other. Possessed each other as surely, as completely as if they had shared the ultimate embrace.
“And you dare to say that you do not belong to me?”
His breath was hot on her face, and Bianca leaned back, uncaring that the rocks bit into her back. She was trembling, but not with weakness. And she needed all her control not to reach for Alessio again. To taste him. To experience the wild surge of his arousal—and hers.
She would never be the same again, she thought as she let her eyes fall closed. Never.
“Answer me, damn you.”
Bianca pulled herself back from the sensual whirlwird where he had flung her. She wanted him so badly that her body ached with the wanting. But could she give up the wealth and power this marriage was offering her for a blaze of passion? How long would it take for the passion to burn itself out and then she would have nothing? All she had to do was look around her to see how transitory passion was.
“No.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “I can never belong to you.” Her heart rent in two and began to bleed as she spoke the words, but unused to giving heed to her heart, she did not notice. “And you and I both know it.”
“You dare to deny it?”
“What would you have me do? Break a betrothal signed and sealed?”
“Why did you agree to this accursed betrothal in the first place?” His voice carried both anger and pain. “You knew that we belonged together.” He gripped her shoulders and pulled her against him. “You knew.”
“Agree?” she repeated in a barely audible whisper. “Agree?” The word broke out of her throat in a cry.
“Just how much do you think I had to say about it when Messere Ugo Cornaro sent his go-between to my father? When he not only offered for me despite the paltry dowry but offered my father enough money to rebuild our company to what it was before the pestilence killed the silkworms and almost ruined us?”
Bianca flung up her arms, thrusting Alessio away. “Just how do you think I could have guarded myself against that? What do you think my father would have said if I had told him, ‘I want Alessio Cornaro instead because his body is straight and his face beautiful and I care nothing that he is a pauper and his brother rich as Croesus’? ”
Alessio looked into her eyes for a long time before he spoke. “And you would have agreed to this marriage even if you had had a choice, wouldn’t you?”
Bianca stared back at him in silence.
The rage took him as he recognized the truth. “Wouldn’t you?” he shouted.
Alessio reached for her again, but she shoved him back with a blow to his breastbone that took his breath away.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me again.”
Alessio went very still. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.” Because the incredulous, wounded look in his eyes tore at her, she stiffened her back, “Yes, I am,”
“So.” His beautiful mouth curled in contempt. “For wealth and power you are willing to let yourself be ridden by a man deformed in body and spirit?”
“You speak so of your brother?”
“I speak the truth whether I speak of my brother or a stranger.” His eyes turned dull as they rested on her. “And you will marry him.”
Bianca shivered, as if icy fingers had traced their way up her spine, but she raised her head in defiance. “Yes. I will marry Ugo Cornaro, and the wealth and power I will have to help my family and others will sustain me.”
“Forza, madonna, e buona fortuna. Go to it and good luck.” He sketched a bow and extended his arm to her as coolly as he would have to a stranger. “Come, madonna, I will take you back.”
In silence they returned to their mounts. In silence they rode back to the villa.
And, her heart cold and desolate, Bianca wondered how she would bear it.
Chapter Four
By the time they had reached the steep, cypress-lined road that led to the villa, Bianca had managed to turn the bleak desolation that lay upon her soul like a mourning cloak into a bracing anger. Just who did Alessio think he was to treat her like a leper for consciously making the decision to marry Ugo when she would have been forced to accept the marriage whether she wanted it or not? Who did he think he was to make her want him so badly that she would have given herself to him on the beach? Who did he think he was to touch her soul as it had never been touched before with the wounded look in his eyes?
She stole a look at Alessio, who rode beside her in stony silence. What would it have been like, she wondered, to look forward to marriage with this man instead of with his brother? What would it have been like to have a husband whose back was straight, whose face was unmarred? A husband who sent a fevered heat coursing through her blood instead of cold revulsion?
There would be scant difference between the two, she reminded herself grimly, remembering the confidences her friend Cecilia Sandrini had shared with her. The only difference, Cecilia had said, was that the young lover who had seduced her and planted a child in her belly had dragged out the painful ritual of coupling for hours, while her aged husband came to her bed seldom and, when he did, was done in minutes.
But Alessio would have been different, a secret voice inside her whispered. For all his callous words, for all the violence that was as much a part of him as his skin, he had touched her with tenderness. He had coaxed when he simply could have taken. No, she thought as the yearning drifted through her like a beautiful, melancholy song. Alessio would not be a rough or uncaring lover.
Her carefully constructed armor of anger was disintegrating, she realized with a start. And this longing that surfaced from beneath it was something she had never felt before. A longing that had nothing to do with the physical desire that still had her body tingling. The desolation she had felt on the beach crept back, and she fought against it, impatient with this sudden surge of emotions and sensibilities that had never plagued her before today. Emotions and sensibilities that made her vulnerable.
Before today, life had always been simple for her. She’d wanted. She’d taken. It had been as basic as that. And since she had been a small child she’d understood very clearly that power was something she coveted. Yes, for what she could do with it—she thought of the foundlings’ hospital where she had left Cecilia’s baby—but also for its heady taste alone. And she would have power once she became Ugo Cornaro’s wife.
Despite her attraction for Alessio, up until today she had never once doubted that this was what she wanted above all else. Where, then, did this sudden confusion come from? She’d had enough encounters with power to know that it had a taste she would relish. So why this sudden dread that she would find the taste stale and bitter?
A wayward, eerie thought pushed its way into her consciousness, suddenly clamoring for attention. Had that woman on the beach, who had appeared out of nowhere in her odd, dark clothes and disappeared just as quickly, been a kind of avenging angel come to strike her with these emotions, these doubts, as one is struck by pestilence? Had she been sent to punish her for the ruthless selfishness with which she had always taken everything she wanted?
