Chapter Five #3
“I will take that as a threat,” she threw at him and stepped back, as if that tiny wedge of space could make what he said less true. His mouth shifted, and she thought she’d never seen him look more like a wolf than he did then.
And she didn’t think she’d ever wanted him more.
“You may take it any way you choose,” he told her, all dark intent and certainty. “It is a fact, Lily. As inevitable as the dawn after a long, cold night. And as unavoidable.”
Rafael thought she might run.
He set footmen at the door to her bedchamber and found himself rather more grim than he should have been as he considered what pointless attempt she might make to escape him this time. Yet despite his dark imaginings as the hours crept by, no alarm was raised.
And when the clock struck the appointed hour, Lily appeared at the top of the grand stair inside the palazzo like every last one of the fantasies he’d conjured up over the past five years.
He’d planned this well, he’d thought. He’d had the gown shipped in from Milan, had dispatched servants to tend to her hair and her cosmetics. He’d thought he’d prepared himself for the inevitable result.
But it was one thing to imagine Lily, his Lily, alive and well and dressed like a member of the scrupulously high-class Venetian society they would mix with tonight. It was something else to see her again with his own eyes.
Rafael had never been so glad of that long staircase that swept down from the upper floor of the palazzo to the main level where he stood.
It gave him time to compose himself. Lily moved like water, grace and beauty in every light step, as she made her way toward him.
Her honey-colored hair was piled high on her head, held fast with a series of glittering combs, just as he’d asked.
The dress he’d had crafted to her precise measurements cupped her gorgeous breasts and then swept in a wide arc toward the floor, managing to hint at her lithe figure even as it concealed it in yards upon yards of a deep, mellow blue-green that made her seem to glow a pale, festive gold.
He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
And then she stopped at the foot of the stair, this perfect goddess with her heart-shaped and heart-stopping face that made his own battered heart ache within his chest, and scowled at him.
“I want a mask,” she said.
Rafael blinked. And tried to wrestle his roaring, possessive reaction into some kind of manageable bounds.
It wouldn’t do to throw her down on the stairs, to lick his way into her heat and taste the secrets she still hid from him.
It wouldn’t do to rip that perfect gown into shreds where she stood, the better to worship the curve of her sweet hip and the lily tattoo that he knew danced there, out of sight.
“Why?”
He thought he sounded relatively polite and civilized, all things considered, but her scowl only deepened.
“Do I need a reason? You said people wear them.”
“So they do.” He couldn’t let himself touch her. Not until he was certain he could keep himself in check. “This is Venice. But I want you to tell me why you want one.”
Lily tilted up that marvelous chin of hers and he felt it like a bolt of heat lightning, straight into his aching sex. Soon he would be unable to walk entirely, and those stairs would look that much better. He could pull her astride him, taking the cold floor against his back, and he could—
He shook the vivid images away. Somehow.
“I want to pretend to be one of the great Venetian courtesans,” she told him sharply, as if she’d read his mind. She eyed him, and Rafael was sure she had. “Isn’t that why you brought me here? So I could recreate history?”
“Unless you’d like to recreate our own history right here on the hard marble steps,” he said with a quiet savagery, “I suggest you try again.”
She looked at him, then away, though that proud chin remained high.
“I don’t want to be recognized. I don’t particularly enjoy being treated like a ghost from beyond the grave.” He watched the elegant line of her lovely neck as she swallowed. “Especially when I can’t remember the person they’ll think I am.”
“I will remember for the both of us.”
He didn’t know where that pledge came from, as if he was a good man and this was that kind of situation.
And then she looked back at him, her blue eyes lit with a kind of warm, wry humor that he thought might be the end of him right there.
And she didn’t quite smile, but he felt it as if she did. Like a gift.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said.
And Rafael found he couldn’t speak. He summoned the nearest servant with a lift of his finger and was glad of the few moments it took to produce a golden demimask, the perfect foil for her gown. For her lovely face.
She reached out for it, but he anticipated that and ignored her.
He stepped closer to her than was entirely wise and fit the mask to her face carefully, something like reverently.
He ran his fingers along the edges and smoothed it over the top of her elegant cheekbones, and felt the sweet reward of that catch in her breath and then the shiver of it, just that little bit ragged, against his hands.
“There,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “Now no one will know who you are but me.”
Lily’s eyes met his through the mask, and he thought they were troubled. Too dark. Something like lonely.
Or maybe that was him.
“I thought that was the point,” she whispered, and her voice was as thick as it was accusing, with that undercurrent of something like grief besides. “I thought that was what you’ve been at such pains to show me. That no one but you does.”
“Or ever will,” he agreed, more growl than vow.
And he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, not then and there, so he did the next best thing. He took her hand and led her out into the night.