Chapter One #2
She looked up in shock at a bouncer. How had she moved forwards so fast?
She fumbled into her bag and drew out her invitation.
The magnificent emerald-green card, embossed with golden vines fitting the theme of this night, Garden of Earthly Delights, all tied with a blood-red ribbon.
She handed it over, her fingers trembling.
The whole of her prickled, her senses on high alert as if she was being watched.
‘Signora Voight? Password per favore.’
The bouncer looked at the card, at a clipboard, then back at her.
Password? Max hadn’t said anything about a password.
‘I—I don’t know …’
‘Sent to you an hour ago?’
The papier-maché teeth on the bouncer’s mask seemed to glint in the low light. She swallowed. Shook her head. Her stomach cramping like it had been filled with stinging bees. Where was the attitude she’d wanted to muster? The faking it till she made it?
It evaporated when he waved over a man in a dark suit and glasses who looked like security.
‘Signora Voight, you have identification?’
She tried to say something, but any words were trapped in her throat, now dry as dust. She couldn’t even think of a lie to get in. Dull. The word reverberated in her head. They were going to turn her away, for sure. She’d leave in disgrace …
A shadow fell over her.
‘Lei è con me.’
That voice, like silk velvet brushing over her skin. She looked up and up into the dark eyes of the man in black. Her gaze snagged on his mouth, the full lower lip. His top lip a little thinner, slightly curved.
Kissable lips …the words drifted through her consciousness like a butterfly on a spring breeze, before flitting away.
‘She’s with me.’
The enigmatic man’s words were softer than before, as if for her ears alone.
Intent, like a kind of claim. Was that what he’d told the men?
She couldn’t speak Italian, but it must have been.
The bouncers merely nodded in response and stepped back to allow Lily and the stranger through with no argument.
The man crooked his arm and she slid her hand into it.
His muscles hard and unforgiving under the exquisite black brocade of his frock coat.
She didn’t know who her saviour was and she wondered if she should care, whether she’d done a deal with the devil, even though he seemed to be a better ticket into the place than the one Maxine had handed to her mere weeks before.
Yet all thoughts simply evaporated as they strode through a darkened, moody entranceway, burgeoning with plants and glittering string lights.
A rich, earthy scent permeated the space, like stepping into a lush, enchanted forest. They reached a pair of double doors beyond.
Two more people, painted bronze and looking like statues with their expressionless matching masks, grasped a door handle each and pulled the doors in unison.
She gasped in awe then wished she hadn’t, because it was gauche of her. Yet the room ahead was nothing like she’d seen before. It was as if they’d stepped through a portal into a fantastical underworld.
Acrobats hung from hoops on the ceiling.
Naked, and painted sliver, it appeared as if they were performing on half-moons floating in a starry sky.
The walls were draped in ivy. Burgeoning urns of fruit and flowers dotted the space.
People milled in vibrant costumes like peacocks strutting, displaying their finery.
It all swirled round her, the colours. The light and the darkness.
There were alcoves set into the walls. A few curtained.
The open ones held people dressed as nymphs, satyrs.
Some alone, others together and … No. Were they … couples?
Her cheeks burned.
The muscles of a strong, solid arm flexed under her fingers, drawing her from the erotic scenes and back to herself, to him. Here she was, gaping like a fish out of water at everything round her and she hadn’t thanked the man who’d rescued her.
She extricated her arm from the crook of his, the loss of that support seeming immediate, almost brutal as Lily turned to face him. He gazed down at her. Tall, imposing. Silent.
‘Thank you for getting me in,’ she said, holding out her hand as if in a handshake. That was friendly, professional. Wasn’t it?
The man’s hand engulfed hers, yet his touch was gentle, almost reverent.
He turned her hand over, his thumb stroking gently over the flesh on the back of it.
A shiver of pleasure skittered through her.
Then he dropped his head. His breath a seductive whisper across her overheating skin.
She held her own, waiting for the touch of his lips.
It came as the merest of brushes, like the stroke of a feather.
‘Bellissima. Soft. Pale and sweet as an English rose,’ he said. His voice deep and rough, rumbling right through her.
‘I—Lily. My name’s Lily.’ She’d forgotten that tonight she was supposed to be someone else. Yet she could hardly think. This man, he simply obliterated her functioning brain cells, and she hadn’t even seen all of his face.
‘Another flower. The flower of my country no less.’ He bowed over her hand in a courtly kind of way. ‘I’m … Medici.’
His gaze rose to meet hers as he spoke, almost like a challenge. She’d noticed his slight hesitation.
‘You don’t sound certain of that,’ she said.
The corner of his mouth curled into a lazy, yet wicked smirk that set off a kaleidoscope of butterflies in her stomach.
‘You didn’t sound certain either, Signora … Voight, was it?’
The man, Medici, although she wasn’t convinced that was his name, eased his hand from hers.
Lily immediately missed his touch, the way it seemed to ground her.
Yet she shrugged, trying for nonchalant, somewhat bolder behind the mask she wore.
In truth, she could be anyone tonight and what did it matter?
‘That’s what it says on my invitation.’
‘Yet is that who you really are?’ He leaned forwards, as if to murmur in her ear and impart a secret. ‘You were being asked for identification.’
Each of his words stroked whisper light against her skin.
He was so close she caught the scent of him.
Sandalwood, rich spice with an echo of smokiness.
It called to her in an elemental kind of way.
Made her crave to simply breathe him in.
Absorb the man. She swayed into him, before pulling herself back.
Was she …swooning? Maybe her corset was too tight?
‘What’s on your invitation? Medici?’
‘Does it matter?’ he asked.
‘I guess it doesn’t—’ it wasn’t like they were going to see each other again ‘—yet I’m still interested.’
‘I like that you are,’ he said, snagging two champagne flutes from a passing server wearing a deer mask with antlers.
Medici handed her a glass and their fingers touched, the merest of brushes.
The sensation singed through her like an electric shock, sizzling from the inside out.
She took a sip of the delicious drink to cool down.
The delicate bubbles teased her mouth. Every nerve seemed enlivened in his presence. She licked her lips.
Lily was sure his eyes darkened behind his mask.
‘It really is like drinking stars,’ she said.
‘I would kiss the heavens from your lips if I could.’
Her intake of breath was sharp and swift as he gazed down upon her. What would his kiss be like? Hard and taking? Soft and coaxing? Now she hungered for his lips against her skin.
Anywhere. Everywhere.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered.
It was hard to tell much about him in his clothes and mask.
She almost mourned the layers hiding him, although what she could see in the soft light of the room was imposing.
Tall, broad. His skin a warm Mediterranean brown.
The strong, chiselled landscape of his jaw peppered with stubble.
He looked like her dream of an antihero.
The type who might deign to save you but would ruin you at the same time.
All whilst you begged him for more.
‘I’m a patron to some here.’
That surprised her.