The Girl Behind the Mask (3 page)

‘You’re mine,’ he said. ‘You’ll always be mine.’

I lifted my face towards his and waited for his kiss.

Together we sank onto the bed we’d bought together when I thought we had a future and Steven began to undress me, kissing me all the while. I kissed him back, greedy to have more of him. His tongue flickered against mine. I sucked on it as he pulled away. Released from my mouth, he dipped his head to kiss his way down my neck. He unbuttoned my blouse, revealing my nakedness beneath. I twisted my fingers in his thick dark hair and sighed with pleasure as he moved his attention further down my body, kissing a trail from my throat down to my eager, aching breasts.

Cupping my breasts, Steven kissed each one in turn. He always joked that they must be treated equally and he always kept his word. I let out a groan of delight as he moved to tongue my waiting nipples into hardness. He traced the curves where the soft mounds met my ribcage and I arched my back to be closer to him. Steven instinctively knew how to get the best response from me. After seven years, he knew my body almost as well as I knew it myself.

Moving down the bed to start again from my feet, Steven slid his hands along my calves, following close behind them with his mouth. He kissed a damp path along the inside of my legs until his hot lips reached the tops of my thighs, leaving me breathless with anticipation. Coyly, I rested my hands on my pubic bone. Steven moved my hands away with his lightly stubbled chin. He planted kisses on the newly denuded skin above my bikini line and nuzzled my small neat triangle of hair. He looked up at me, catching my eye to smile his approval. Steven liked me almost bare.

I knew what would happen next. It wasn’t long before his darting tongue found my clitoris, already swollen and quietly aching for his attention. He flicked the little nub from side to side with his strong pink tongue. He sucked it between his lips. He nipped at it gently with his perfect teeth. The mix of pleasure with just a salt sprinkle of pain drew a sharp breath from me but I begged him to go on. That little sliver of pain was what made it so good.

I twisted luxuriously in the ecstasy of Steven’s warm mouth upon me. I could feel myself growing wet, wet enough to take him in easily in one deliciously welcome stroke. Moving his attention from my clitoris, Steven stretched out his tongue and probed deep inside me, pulling my legs apart and holding them steady so I couldn’t roll away and escape. Not that I ever wanted to escape when he was making love to me. I wanted to feel myself pinioned beneath him, unable to do anything but give in to his desires.

‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘I need you inside.’

‘Not yet,’ he told me.

‘Please.’

He ignored my pleading and continued to work hard with his mouth. Every stroke of his tongue brought me closer to an orgasm. I felt my thighs growing tense as I braced myself against him. I kept pushing up, up towards him. My legs were beginning to shake. My breath grew shallow. I felt his fingernails digging harder into my flesh as he tried to keep me still. To stay in control.

‘Please be inside me!’ I cried.

This time, he would let me have my way. Steven was more than ready. He moved up the bed until he was lying directly on top of me, then slid his hand down between our hot bodies and guided his stone-hard penis between my legs. I drew breath sharply at the first thrust, quickly relaxing again when I felt his pelvis touch mine. Holding himself high above my body, Steven gazed at my face steadily as he began to move. My eyes wandered over the taut planes of his chest. His veins bound his rock-hard muscles like tightly wrapped cord. His pectorals flexed powerfully as he swayed forward and took all his weight on his beautiful arms, and I thrilled to the utter delight of being so expertly and completely filled by the man I loved.

My eyes drifted lower. The sight of Steven’s long smooth shaft plunging into me was every bit as good as the feeling it gave me inside. To see his prick glistening with my juices as he pulled nearly all the way out was almost too much. I felt the walls of my vagina begin to pulse in appreciation. It was a steady, rhythmic pulse that began to spread slowly throughout my limbs like a single drop of red ink colouring a whole glass of water like blood.

I lifted my legs from the bed and wound them tightly around Steven’s waist, at the same time grasping his buttocks with my hands and using them to bring him further inside me still. My fingers dug hard into his firm warm flesh as I grew more and more excited, forcing him to increase the pace of his movement to keep time with my racing heart.

‘Harder,’ I told him and he responded instantly. His teeth were gritted in ecstatic determination as he thrust into me powerfully with strokes that hammered against my swollen clitoris and drove me to the edge. Deep down inside, I had the sensation of standing on a ledge with arms stretched wide. I could hear the rush of my own blood in my ears. Now for the jump. I felt perfectly weightless as my orgasm set in and quickly took hold of every nerve in my body. There was no going back.

I was coming long before him. My vagina contracted and throbbed around his penis as though trying to pull him inside me for always. Steven continued to thrust, his face smiling down on me. I shut my eyes as though to lessen the intensity, but my mouth was spread in a wide, wide smile.

As my climax subsided, Steven pushed against me once more and this time he stayed there, holding himself tight against my body as his own orgasm took off. I opened my eyes again just in time to see him coming. Just in time to see his composure lost completely as his thrusts became uncontrolled and a cry he could no longer hold inside exploded from his lips.

Lying in his arms as we recovered ourselves, I felt happier than I had done in a long while.

Until I woke up, that is.

My short sleep had been profound, in the way a slightly drunken nap often can be, and it was a struggle to open my eyes. When I did, the first thing I saw were the heavy deep-red drapes of the bedcurtains, casting strange shadows that seemed to be falling towards me. The window I had left open was letting in a bitter chill. It was dark already and, now the sun had gone down, the winter reasserted itself in earnest. For just a moment, I didn’t have a clue where I was. The haunting sound of bells nearby added to my disorientation.

Sitting upright against the unforgiving oak headboard, I remembered the day’s events. I was in Venice for the very first time. I was alone. I looked at my watch. Though it was pitch-black outside, it was still only six in the evening. Five o’clock back home in the UK. I needed to get up, get unpacked and start to sort out this new life of mine. But something kept me on the bed. I pulled my knees up to my chin and wrapped my arms around them, self-comforting like a lonely child, making myself small.

The sense of adventure I’d felt when I stood on the quay that morning seemed to have deserted me in the dark. I fumbled around to find a switch for the bedside lamp. In the feeble glow of an energy-saving bulb, the animal carvings on the bed seemed to undulate until I could have sworn they were actually breathing. I squeezed myself tighter. It was just wood. Nothing alive. But there is something about Venice, something about its timelessness, that automatically makes one think of ghosts. And wasn’t a ghost exactly what I had come in search of?? Luciana Giordano, born 1736. Died . . . Well, no one knew exactly when Luciana died, but it had certainly been a long while ago.

I knew I should probably unpack my suitcase and hang my clothes in the mothball-scented wardrobe, but I chose instead to pull out my laptop. I needed the bright modern glow of the screen to link me firmly to the present and remind me that London was just an email away. Plus I had such a short time in this new city to find out about Luciana’s life, I might as well start right now.

As Nick had warned me, the Internet connection in my new apartment was patchy to say the least, but it was enough to enable me to pick up my emails. And there it was: an email I’d been awaiting for a very long time. At last I had a response to my request to visit a private library in a palazzo on the Grand Canal that held what remained of Luciana’s correspondence.

Yes,

it said.

By all means. Please email to arrange a time.

In a more enthusiastic moment, I might have punched the air. It had taken months to track down Luciana’s letters. It had taken even longer to persuade the owner I should be allowed to see them
in situ
. Now I had received my answer. It was brief, but it was definitely positive.

Squashing my feelings of loneliness and trepidation for the moment, I concentrated instead on my reply to Marco Donato, owner of the most extraordinary private library in Venice. This was what I had come for.

I wrote:

Thank you for your kind agreement to let me see Luciana Giordano’s letters. I would be delighted to visit them at your earliest convenience. I can come to the library any day you prefer.

I was astonished to receive another email in response just three minutes later.

Really, Miss Thomson, you should play much harder to get. But ten o’clock on Tuesday morning will be fine.  Sincerely, M. Donato

Chapter 4

November, 1752

Luciana Giordano was her father’s favourite. In many ways, this was an ideal situation for a girl to find herself in. In other ways, it was a disaster. Never had a girl been so closely guarded as Gaetano Giordano’s beloved only daughter.

Gaetano had not wanted to move to Venice, but his growing export/import business demanded he move his family from respectable Turin to the sinful city on the sea. Venice was still at the centre of the eighteenth-century universe, with links to the whole of the Mediterranean, Constantinople and the world beyond. However, Gaetano feared for the moral purity of his good Catholic children in such a hotbed of turpitude and debauchery. His prejudices about the city were only intensified when his wife succumbed to a fever and died just a year after they arrived there. It was exactly as he had suspected. The very air of Venice was foul with pestilence.

After the loss of his angelic wife, Gaetano was determined that his only daughter would not suffer the same fate. But how do you protect a young girl from a whole city? Well, for the most part she was kept in the house: a grand Gothic palazzo in Cannaregio. On those rare occasions when she was allowed out, Luciana was forced to wear an ugly mask with a hooked nose filled with purifying herbs. Wearing such a mask hadn’t saved the plague doctors of the seventeenth century and it wouldn’t prove any more effective in keeping Luciana safe from the common cold, but Gaetano insisted Luciana wear it until she was thirteen years old and – according to the physician – her lungs could be considered fully formed. Her childhood nurse called her ‘the pigeon’ for her black cloak and her pointlessly pointed beak.

But that was far from the worst of it. Desperate in what seemed like unending grief for his late wife, Gaetano went to great lengths not only to keep Luciana’s lungs healthy but to keep her mind pure as well. To that effect, he took an even more old-fashioned step than having the poor child wear a plague mask when venturing outside the house. It was Gaetano Giordano’s opinion that beyond rudimentary reading, writing and arithmetic, education for women led only to trouble. To keep Luciana from discovering something that might set her on the path to certain ruin, Gaetano banned his daughter from reading anything but the Bible.

‘Maria, what exactly does it mean when it says that Onan spilled his seed upon the ground?’

Maria the chaperone snapped the Bible shut on Luciana’s fingers.

‘You wicked girl. You know you’re not to read that.’

‘But it’s in the Bible,’ Luciana protested. ‘What can possibly be wrong in my reading God’s word?’

‘You evil child! You know exactly what’s wrong with it.’

Luciana shook her head, eyes wide and innocent.

‘Oh!’ Maria snatched the Bible away altogether. ‘Do some sewing instead.’

Luciana delighted in tormenting her chaperone. The woman was an idiot, chosen specifically for her inability to stretch the boundaries of Luciana’s little world beyond showing her new stitches. She didn’t know enough to be dangerous, though she was very good at making sure that Luciana went no further than the tiny courtyard at the heart of the palazzo – unless they were going to church.

Maria could not, however, stop Luciana looking out of her bedroom window at the front of the house when the rest of the household was asleep. Once everyone was quiet, Luciana would sit on the sill, imagining herself as a princess in the tales her mother used to tell her at bedtime, before she died and all the happiness drained out of the house like the colour leaching out of badly dyed cloth in a downpour. Luciana’s father had covered the house with mourning drapes and they hadn’t been taken down since. He was trying to keep Luciana’s mind covered with mourning drapes too.

Like her father, Luciana thought she would never stop missing her mother, but eight years after their bereavement she felt equally sure that her mother would not have wanted the house in the Cannaregio to stay mired in the darkness of mourning for ever. As much as her father was serious, Luciana’s mother had been rather frivolous. She had enjoyed music, adored dancing and liked to wear beautiful clothes. She liked to laugh and to gossip. She had loved her brief sojourn in Venice. She would never have blamed the city for her illness.