Once upon a Dream (27 page)

“Oh! I'm so sorry,” she stammered. “There must be a mistake…er, ah…
mi dispiache!
”

The figure on the chaise rose with sleek-muscled grace. “Good God, Claire!” said a deep, masculine voice layered with laughter. “Your accent is as bad as your cooking!”

She stiffened. The man who stood there wasn't wearing
shoes with his khakis after all, just a pair of handmade cowboy boots. The boots, like the voice, were every bit as familiar to her as the man wearing them.

“What the
hell
are you doing in my hotel suite, Val?”

Eyes bluer than the Venice sky smiled down at her. “Is that any way to greet your husband?”

“
Ex
-husband. The divorce was final in May.”

He shrugged lightly. “They don't deliver U.S. mail in the jungle.”

“You don't need a mailbox to be divorced, Val. I'm sure your attorney has all the proper papers.”

He strolled over to her, his tanned face suddenly somber. He tipped her chin up with a strong, nicely shaped hand. “Is it, Claire? Is it really over?”

Her breath caught in her throat. His cologne was as familiar to her as the scent of her own skin, the warmth of his hand as enticing as she remembered. He looked older, though, and even more handsome. There were new sun creases at the corners of his eyes, and the lines of his face were leaner. And he was still the only man who'd ever made her knees turn to jelly and her brain to cotton wool.

Damn him and his pheromones!

“Don't try that cowboy charm on me. It doesn't work,” she lied. Jerking her head away, she stepped sideways to avoid him. That was a mistake. The balcony was small and there was no place to go.

She slanted a look from beneath her gold-tipped lashes. “One of us is going to go over the railing, Val. It won't be me.”

He didn't answer but took her hands and drew her away from the railing. Claire felt the magnetism between them, as strong and as dangerous as it ever was.

Damn him! She couldn't think when he was so near. Memories slammed into her like the waves of the Adriatic Sea, beating against the sands of the Lido. If she wasn't careful she'd be swept away again—and left floating alone, out in the middle of nowhere, while he jaunted off
to the latest hot spot for
Time
or
Newsweek.

“Let me go, Val,” she said quietly.

His mouth turned up in an odd little smile. “Never. You're mine, Claire. And I'm yours. We belong together.”

“I see. And that's why I spent our honeymoon alone, painting our apartment and playing Solitaire on my laptop, while you were in the Middle East.” She tried to sound cool and was surprised to hear her own voice so harsh.

So bitter.

“I also spent Christmas by myself,” she added, “while you went off to Egypt or Africa or some remote Balkan village.”

His mouth hardened. “You knew what you were getting into when we married,” he said, a spark of heat in his voice. “It was part of the deal. I told you I had to take the assignments that no one else wanted while I got established and that it would lead to more reasonable ones in time. You agreed.”

Claire felt a surge of guilt, but shrugged. “I didn't know you'd be gone for weeks on end. I suppose I was very young and stupid.”

She left the balcony with its watery Renaissance views and went back into the high-ceilinged room. Reflected light made the pale yellow walls luminous, dappled them in shifting, liquid patterns.

Val came after her and grasped her arm, whirling her about. “Yes,” he said harshly. “You were.”

Her angry gasp didn't stop him. His fingers closed over her flesh. “Or at least you pretended to be. Now I wonder if I was the stupid one. I thought you understood. I thought we had a bargain of sorts.”

“That was the problem,” she snapped. “I thought we had a marriage!”

“We did, damn it.” His eyes blazed with anger. “We could have made it work, too. But from the moment the wedding ring was on your finger, you tried to change me. To take everything that makes me who I am and turn it inside out.”

“Was it wrong to expect to see something besides a potted plant looking back at me across the dinner table? To expect to warm my cold feet on a winter night with something a little more personal than an electric heating pad?”

His mouth was hard as flint. “If you wanted a desk jockey, you should have married a clerk instead of a photojournalist. If you wanted a house pet, you should have gotten a canary. I can be lured to hand, Claire—but I can't be caged.”

She held out her left hand, where a pale circle showed where the diamond band been removed, and was furious to see it shaking.

“It's gone now, Val. You're free. And so am I! So get out of my hotel room right now. Don't come back. I don't want to see you again. I thought I'd already made that clear!”

His jaw squared, but he reined in his own temper. “Oh, you have. But I'm afraid that will prove a little difficult. I've taken a sabbatical from the magazine. Tish Sterling hired me to do some freelance work for Sterling Galleries.”

“I don't believe you!”

His eyes darkened. “I've never lied to you, Claire. I won't start now. I'm doing the auction catalog, and a photo spread on the Ludovici Collection.”

As he turned away, her eyes stung with tears. It always ended this way, both of them hurt and angry, neither of them giving an inch.

Val strode to the door, then turned back with a hard smile. “If you need anything, sweetheart, just rap on the wall. My suite is right on the other side.”

He went out, shutting the door.

C
LAIRE LOCKED THE
door, went into the adjoining room, and threw herself across the wide bed. Lying on the luxurious spread, she watched the water lights dance on the walls. It was so lovely. So soothing.

God knew, she needed comfort!

She couldn't believe how much it had upset her to see Val again. At first she tried to convince herself it was because their parting had been so bitter, their meeting today so completely unexpected. She'd been so
damned
sure that she could will herself not to love Val. That she'd bolted away the memories and emotions—both good and bad—in the locked steel box of the past.

Yet it had taken only one look from those devastating blue eyes, one touch of his tanned hand against her skin, and she was a bundle of raw nerve endings, jangling with loss and anger. With yearning and emptiness, and a deep, aching need.

She brushed the hair from the nape of her neck with one hand and kneaded the tension knots. “You can't chain
an eagle,” her grandfather had warned her when she and Val had gotten engaged. “You'll break his wings.”

She remembered that moment, the soft twilight sifting down around the narrow porch, the Idaho hills stretching away by starlight. “And if you build a nest with one, you'd better know how to fly.”

It was the longest conversation she had ever had with her grandfather. He'd been a man of the land, not one of words.

Claire punched the pillow into an even more uncomfortable shape. She hadn't known how to fly and hadn't wanted to learn. Her dream had been of relaxed, firelit evenings, intimate dinners with friends, discussing art and life over wine and pasta. Hard to accomplish with your husband 10,000 miles away. She'd tried to be patient, to face the loneliness. She really had.

They'd managed to stumble on long after they should have called it quits. The marriage might have drifted along for years, their problems unresolved, one of those long-distance marriages that ended up as nothing more than two names on a marriage license and an album of neglected photos.

But then came that desperate time when she needed him. She hadn't even known what country he was in, much less how to reach him. The memory was still painful. To be fair, she hadn't told him that she was pregnant. She'd been only six weeks along. But oh, how she'd wanted that baby!

Claire watched the ripples of light weave glowing patterns around the room. She felt too jet-lagged and too edgy to relax. The iced-marble dome of the Salute was captured in the mirror over a console table, backed by an incredible turquoise sky. The beauty of it calmed her, and her rapid breathing slowed. Within minutes she slipped into an uneasy sleep.

…The hinges sighed, and the door in the garden wall clicked to behind her. There was no going back now. The
door had no handle and could only be opened from inside the garden.

Her green eyes looked warily through the eyeholes in the silver mask, and her heart was like an iron hammer beating against the fragile glass of her ribs. Tucking a stray blond curl beneath the hood of her cloak, she gathered her courage. He would be waiting for her at the bridge.

Her father had locked away her jewelry casque, with its precious heirlooms of pearls and emeralds and rubies that had formed part of her dowry. But her lover's pendant lay against her skin, cool as water from the courtyard fountain on a summer's day; she imagined the ruby pendant and ring warming her blood, like flames.

Except for the clothes upon her back, they were the only items she had taken with her when she fled the house.

She glided along the
calle.
Through the slits of her silver
Carnivale
mask she made out the sides of the blank, three-storied buildings. To her right was the
Palazzo D'Oro
, where her fiancé lived. Like the homes of other wealthy merchants, the street level was given over to business, but the rest was opulent, filled with treasures from the four corners of the earth.

She had wept bitterly when her father announced her engagement to Giovanni Gambello. He was vain, arrogant. The ugly rumors of his reputation as a libertine had reached Bianca, even as sheltered as she was within the walls of her father's house. Venice was a city given to scandal and vice: to make a name for oneself among the most notorious was something indeed!

Worst of all, from her innocent young perspective, was that she did not love him, nor he her. He wanted only to possess her. And to cement the banking and import business between himself and her father.

Bianca shivered. But now, thank the Virgin and all the saints, she would never be his wife. Soon, very soon, she would be safe in her lover's arms!

Suddenly the plaintive cry of a gondolier drifted on the
breeze, and another picked it up in the distance, like an echo. The sound was so lonely, so wrenching, she felt as if her heart might break.

She paused when she reached the bridge, almost overcome by fright. What if she was discovered? What if her lover wasn't there?

What if she waited through the dark hours until morning lit the sky, and still he never came?

It would be a fitting punishment for her, she thought in misery. After all, she had failed him twice. Then someone moved out of the shadows on the far side of the canal, the
Rio di San Moise.
She gave a shaky laugh. Her fears were groundless. There he was, waiting for her in his dark cloak on the other side, his hand outstretched. Taking a deep breath, she hastened toward the arcing bridge. Only a few more steps to freedom and the beginning of her new life.

Then why was she so afraid—?

Claire awakened to the drumming of her heart. The thick evening shadows of narrow
calle
faded to a splendid room flooded with sunlight, the gondoliers' cry to the plaintive call of seabirds from beyond the open window. She sat up abruptly, disoriented, as jumbled impressions of past and present sorted themselves out.

Then she remembered where she was, and why. Venice. Count Ludovici.

Val, damn him.

And the dream.

The dream always began in the same way: the frightened girl, crossing the marble floor and hurrying out the door to the courtyard. This time it seemed different somehow. But the more she tried to grasp it, the faster it slipped away.

Still, even now, she could almost feel the brush of the velvet cloak against her cheek, the weight of the heavy key in her hand, the smooth, cool kiss of the beads and pendant against her throat.

She never saw them in the dream, but she knew exactly
what they looked like. The necklace was formed of long Venetian beads as clear as water, but with shimmers of real gold leaf trapped inside the glass. They were interspersed with tiny beads of granulated gold. The pendant that hung from it was a delicate ruby, set in a thin gold rim.

Claire tried to shake off the dream. It had been recurring more frequently and each time there was something more, something new. Each time the sensation of fear deepened. And she always awakened with the feeling that something terrible, something tragic and inevitable, was about to happen.

She swung her legs off the bed and sat up, afraid to fall asleep again.

The dreams had begun after she'd unpacked the crate of delicately tinted drawings that Count Ludovici had sent through an intermediary for a private auction: Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto, Giorgione, Caravaggio. Claire would never forget the thrill of holding them in her hands, of feeling a sense of the artists who had drawn them, across the centuries.

Her favorite had been the
Carnivale
scene: revelers celebrating the holiday in fanciful costume, their faces disguised with paint or elaborate papier-maˆché masks. It was the best of the lot, attributed to Titian, and had been expected to be the high point of the private auction. Oddly, it hadn't met the reserve price and had been withdrawn.

Among the colorful throng was the figure of a young girl. She stood in the shadows of the foreground beneath an airy balcony, blond curls peeping out beneath the hood of a wine-colored cloak, her oval face covered by a silver mask. She wore a necklace of Murano beads, with a small ruby pendant in the shape of a heart.

From the moment she'd first spotted the girl in the drawing, Claire had had the uncanny feeling that she knew her. Or that the face, forever hidden behind that painted silver mask, resembled her own.

She rose, shaking off a little shiver. Her first meeting
with the count wasn't until dinner at the Ca' Ludovici this evening. There was an entire afternoon to kill. “I'll walk off some of this energy,” she told herself. “Do a little shopping.”

She dressed casually in a two-piece blue silk outfit, grabbed an ivory jacket and her purse from the sofa, and left. She wanted to put some distance between herself and the dream.

Her stomach rumbled as she went out through the gardens, but she didn't want to run into Val in one of the hotel's gilded restaurants. Claire decided she'd walk to the piazza and have a gelato, the heavenly Italian version of ice cream, and then stroll along the Mercerie, the main shopping thoroughfare, where many of the most exclusive shops were located.

It would be a sin against her femininity, she assured herself, not to buy some exquisite and comfortable shoes—a combination that seemed to be unique to the Italians. Something sexy and strappy.

Taking the Calle Barrozzi past the church of San Moise, she worked her way back around to the waterfront. The cafe in the Hotel Monaco tempted her, as did the famous Harry's Bar, but she didn't give it to either. She wanted to feel the pulse of Venice and knew she should begin her explorations at its beating heart: the Piazza San Marco.

A few minutes more and she crossed the lovely bridge over Rio del Giardinetti, the canal that surrounded the gardens Napoleon had built on the waterfront after Venice had surrendered her thousand years of independence to him. Claire stood on the
molo,
with the former Mint building on her left and the fanciful pink and white arches of the ducal palace to her right. She headed toward the open space between the tall pillars topped with statues that she'd seen from the launch. One held Saint Teodoro with his crocodile—there's a story there, she decided—and the other with the winged Lion of Saint Mark, the city's emblem.

It was amazing to see tourists in shorts and baseball caps, with cameras and shopping bags, mingling with fashionable Italian women, suited bureaucrats, and colorful souvenir vendors in front of the graceful, ancient buildings.

It was unsettling, Claire thought. As if time had collided with itself and been violently twisted about in the process.

A shadow fell across her, and she froze when a hand gripped her shoulder. It was Val, his dazzling eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “Don't go between the pillars,” he told her. “It's bad luck to walk there.”

“Dozens of people are doing it right now,” she said curtly, “and I don't see lightning bolts blazing down from the sky.”

“Executions used to take place between the pillars. Hangings and beheadings,” he said cheerfully. He knew how superstitious she was. “Just thought you'd want to know.”

She ignored him, threading through the throng of tourists snapping photos and locals on their way to meet friends for drinks at Florian's or Quadri's. He was still there, just a few feet behind her. She knew the sound of his footsteps as well as she knew her own.

She threw a quick glance over her shoulder. “Go away! You're spoiling Venice for me.”

His eyebrows raised. “I didn't think you'd take it so personally.”

“There are few things more personal than a divorce,” she told him and walked a little faster.

Val kept pace with his easy cowboy stride. “You can't avoid me forever,” he said casually. “We're both dining tonight with Count Ludovici.”

Claire stopped dead in her tracks. “I didn't know you were included in the invitation.”

“I wasn't. But I paid a courtesy call on the old gentleman earlier and made arrangements to photograph the collection. One thing led to another, and when I mentioned
knowing you, he thoughtfully asked me to join the two of you for dinner.”

She ground her teeth. She'd come to Venice hoping to put Val behind her. It wasn't going to be easy, but she had might as well be gracious about it. “I'll see you at eight, then.”

Val shoved his hands in his pockets. “We could share a gondola.”

“They're overpriced.”

“Not if you know how to haggle with the gondoliers.” He smiled down at her. “And think how romantic it would be, lying back on the cushions as we glide silently past the glowing palazzi by moonlight.”

She shot him a glance of disgust. “And maybe I could push you over the side while we glide silently under a bridge, on some particularly dank and smelly canal.”

His smile wasn't dented a bit. “Ah, now, that's the spirit, Claire. A little passionate wrestling while the gondolier serenades us home.”

“Look!” She stopped and faced him, her arms braced on her hips. “This isn't going to work. It's bad enough that we'll be thrown together on this assignment. I won't have you following me around the rest of the time, trying to lure me back for a nostalgic romp between the sheets. I'm immune to your charm now. It's like catching the measles: a one-time event—then never again.”

He just grinned at her, as if her lie was as transparent as glass. Claire felt her temper rising. “Go practice throwing out lures to some beautiful
signorina
and stop following me around.”

Val rocked back on the heels of his boots and considered. “Do you really think that's a good idea?”

“I'm sure of it.”

He turned his head. The arches of the piazza were reflected in the dark lenses of his sunglasses. “Hmmmm. What about that dark-haired beauty with the wide hat sitting outside Florian's?”