Alchemy (Siren Publishing Allure) Read online

  * * * *

  Halfway to Verona, Luca and Tamsin plunged into a field for a break, drinking chilled chocolate from Luca’s thermos. Pulling her round to face him on the bike seat, his eyes glistened and darkened to night as he slipped a hand inside her knickers, stroking the warm damp of her valley. Riding peaks of sensation, her nipples hardened and jutted as he pinned her with his gaze, sending desire flittering to her core.

  “Luca.” She half expected an irate farmer to storm by at any moment and cut them down.

  “Sir.”

  “Sir,” she echoed with a ragged breath, her eyes bright as gold as she arched into him. “Keep it coming.”

  He leaned forward and, unzipping his fly, his silky cock sprang free and they fused like two parts of a long separated diptych.

  In Verona, Luca surprised her by splurging on a baroque palace, with a sweeping marble staircase, that had morphed into a twenty-first century hotel, in the centre of the mediaeval quarter only steps away from Juliet’s balcony and the river.

  “But I’m sans toothbrush,” she bleated.

  His thumb caressed the back of her hand as the stately lift juddered upwards like a dowager rising from a chair. “No worries. We’ll send down for anything you need.”

  “Ooh,” Tamsin’s eyes were like saucers as she took in the Empire-style furniture and test-bounced on the king-size bed. Urns of fresh flowers scented the room and through a concealed door lay a spacious pink alabaster bathroom tricked out with large, fluffy towels and top-of-the-range organic toiletries. Taking her cue from Luca, who called housekeeping to launder the clothes he’d come in, she handed over her much-creased dress and they plonked their footwear outside for polishing.

  “What’ll you wear to wander round town this afternoon?”

  “Oh, we’re not,” Luca said with a predatory smile. He ran his eyes down the room service menu and authoritatively placed an order for a selection of food and a bottle of brut Castelveda Franciacorta. “We’re hibernating till it’s time for the opera.” He kissed her. “I know Verona like the back of my hand and you’re no stranger to it, so I reckon there’s no pressure to rubberneck. Or would you prefer that to fucking?”

  “I’m good,” Tamsin broke in. “Tomorrow’s soon enough.” She felt absurdly happy.

  Their eyes met, then Luca loped to the shower and, as she heard him whistling, room service loomed in the doorway with a trolley laden with fresh fruit, an array of cold cuts, marinated artichokes, plump mushrooms in a parsley-and-garlic oil dressing, many salads and a magnum of sparkling wine chilling in a bucket. With a flourish, a white tablecloth, so starched she half expected it to rear up and bow, was thrown over the table, fine china and heavy silverware laid. She signed the bill, added a generous tip and they withdrew, smiling. Well, Luca has deep pockets.

  She gulped as he emerged, a towel slung loosely round his waist, an aroma of something dark and sharp bursting from him.

  “I’ll just nip in.”

  “Don’t be long,” Luca called as he stood at the window, gazing down into the ancient cobbled square, “or I’ll come and scrub your back.”

  However hard he tried, he could not fight those other memories. The screams, the sound of gunfire ripping though the quiet night, the stench of burning flesh that always haunted him on this day, the anniversary of his parents’ slaughter.

  Luca’s mother had defied her disapproving parents to marry her gentle Somali lover and they’d settled in Mogadishu. Luca’s father was a member of the peace-loving Benadir, a minority clan, and feuds between rival clans became rife, dominant groups like the brutal Hawiye going from door to door persecuting vulnerable minorities in a long and sustained reign of terror. Jabril, their house servant, had recognized the danger signs and eighteen months earlier had exiled his wife and two children to England, promising he would follow, where they were granted refugee status. Luca’s idealistic young parents were adamant, despite the tense atmosphere, to stay as long as they could to serve the community. One night as they sat reading Luca a bedtime story, a gang of heavily armed Hawiye stormed the house and at point-blank range put a bullet through their heads. As their bleeding bodies slumped over him, Luca heard a rasp and found himself looking down the barrel of an AK-47. The gang leader snarled, “don’t waste a bullet on the half-breed.” The raiders rampaged through the place, looting practically everything and, as they swept out of the compound sprinkling petrol in their wake, they torched the house. Clambering from the deep, brick well down which Jabril, on hearing the commotion, had flung himself, he darted in to rescue a shrieking Luca and didn’t stop sprinting until they reached the bush.

  The next day Jabril crept back and, digging a grave in the shadow of the tree Luca’s parents had planted to celebrate his birth, wrapped their charred remains in simple white shrouds and lowered their bodies to the ground. Then, grabbing what he could find of a few scorched photos and blistered mementoes, he and Luca, still trembling, crushed themselves onto a rickety bus on a hazardous road journey to Kenya, where they bribed their passage onto a coffin of a boat crammed with illegal migrants bound on a perilous odyssey to Europe. In the hostile, churning seas of southern Italy, the boat capsized. Jabril, with a petrified Luca clinging to his back, managed to flounder ashore lit only by the faint light of a waning moon. There were few survivors. Eventually, dodging the authorities, the two made it to the relative calm of the Italian Lakes.

  “A penny for them,” Tamsin said, coming up to stand beside him enveloped in a toweling robe. The color seemed to have faded rather suddenly from his face.

  It wasn’t the sort of tale with which you’d entertain a date on a night out. Some monsters were best buried deep inside a locked drawer. He made a slight gesture with his left hand and she noticed for the first time a long, puckered scar etched across it.

  “How did that happen?”

  He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I’ve had it a long time. I got…too close to a fire and…was burned.” Then, kissing her fingers, he led her to the table where, under a frescoed ceiling festooned with azure stars and writhing nudes, they set about eating with gusto.

  Tamsin’s eyes sparkled. “Mmm, it’s the height of decadence,” then remembering Eve dimly, decided in a gesture of defiance against telling her she was overnighting until after the opera.

  He made as though a Pink Lady had slid from his hand and rolled under the bed. Swiftly he bent and, peering underneath, sweeping wide with an arm, retrieved it. She wouldn’t understand the need for the checking-under-the bed ritual.

  “Come over here,” Luca said softly as they sipped the last of the sparkling wine.

  He felt his cock stiffen, hauled her against him, and kissed her.

  “You’re fucking with my head. Did you know that?”

  Low down inside her something rippled hotly, streaking through her in a dark, urgent arousal. She ran her fingers through his thick, silky hair.

  “Ditto.” She opened her legs and pulled him down, wanting him inside her swelling cunt. “I’m exploding”

  “Not so fast.” He leaned in and brushed her nipples with his tongue, eliciting from her a whimper of need.

  “Your cunt belongs to me. We’re going to fuck every which way, babe. My cock’s going to swamp your pussy and fill your ass. You’re going to taste my juice and swallow me down.”

  Tamsin gasped and arched, feeling his fevered arousal, and then he was thrusting like a speeding bullet, branding her with his essence until, sated, they fell apart into each other’s arms.

  The next thing Tamsin remembered was the sound of shutters being folded back. For a moment she couldn’t move, helplessly tangled in bed sheets, until Luca wickedly murmuring something about rehearsing for BDSM laughingly tore her free.

  “The performance starts at eight so we’d better put a spurt on it.”

  Tamsin rubbed body lotion into her cheeks, put on a slick of lipstick and a thick coat of mascara, slid the kaftan over her head—what magic had the hotel performed to
render it so soignée?—and her feet into the high stiletto-heeled sandals. And, looking intently in the mirror, she liked what she saw.

  “Sure you can walk in those?” Luca sounded doubtful. He exuded an animal virility in the newly washed blue shirt open at the neck, blue trousers and banana cream jacket.

  “I can dance all night in them,” she boasted, and pirouetted around. She hunted in her clutch bag for the small phial of sample perfume and dabbed it on behind her knees, on the wrists, behind her ears, inside her knickers.

  “We’d better head off before we get side-tracked,” he murmured and, taking her hand, they caught up with a wash of chattering people flaring though the narrow streets.

  As they emerged from the entrance tunnel into the ellipse of the two-thousand-year-old Roman amphitheater, the air crackled with the expectant energy of a fourteen-thousand-strong audience.

  “It’s awe-inspiring,” she whispered as he led her to the stalls and the deeply cushioned poltronissime that she realized, from the bejeweled women surrounding her, must have been pricey.

  “Long ago we would have witnessed the spectacle of gladiators pitting themselves against wild beasts and death penalty criminals, their motto being to fight well or to die well.” He flicked a match and, handing her a lighted taper, lit one for himself. “And for quite some years contestants included bare-breasted, spear-wielding female Ethiopians locked in mortal combat.”

  “So equal opportunity knocked for ladies in ancient Rome,” she mused. “How long would bouts last?”

  “Let me see.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Got it. Not long. On average, about ten to fifteen minutes, and seldom more than twenty and, what’s interesting, the night before the games, gladiators were treated to a spectacular banquet and urged to make their wills and put their personal affairs in order.”

  Tamsin shuddered. “Gruesome. Sounds like the condemned man eating a hearty breakfast.”

  The sunlight had faded, the last flight of birds, wings fluttering in the air, had flown home to roost. The floodlights went down, the dusky sky pricked by points of light rising from a forest of flickering candles. In the night filled with the scent of summer jasmine, there was a hushed stillness. The conductor raised his baton.

  The poignant music soared, the passionate arias dramatic, the stagecraft and costumes spectacular as the eternal love triangle drew to its tragic close. Tamsin couldn’t remember experiencing a more epic evening. Luca had opened a window to a new world.

  Hand in hand, they picked their way back to the hotel, curving down streets still heavy with the frenzy of an Italian summer evening.

  “What an emotional piece.” Tamsin, still on an adrenaline high, felt like a ship coming into a port. The curtains had been drawn, the bed turned down, chocolates lay strewn on the pillows and pink rose petals on the floor.

  “Just like you,” Luca remarked with a smile, and his balls tightened. He twisted the light kaftan bra and knickers into a coil and pulled her close into him. Their bodies molded, every inch in visceral arousal, diamond inside thistledown, heat and damp, shuddering, melting, riding to bliss.

  What does he mean by that? Tamsin pondered as she reached for a post-coital chocolate. She wondered how she’d survive the first year at university without the taste of his cock in her mouth.

  * * * *

  “When does England beckon?” Luca hauled himself into a sitting position and placed his hands behind his head.

  Tamsin wrinkled her nose and gave a deep sigh. “Must you? In a fortnight. I’ve signed on for a job at a call centre for three weeks and if I haven’t thrown myself over Tower Bridge by the end of it, I’ll have to show up at the European Languages faculty.” She laced her fingers. “I need to put by savings to see me through to the winter vac.”

  “Then we’ll have to make the most of it, won’t we?” Luca pushed back the hair from her face and surprised her with a sudden, fierce embrace, and proceeded to do just that.

  As, flushed with pleasure, she lay in his arms, a thought suddenly crossed her mind. “Oh hell, I forgot to call Mum.” In a panic, she fumbled in the number and Luca heard her tell Eve that as the performance had finished so late, they’d checked into a B&B for the night.

  “If you must.” Over the loudspeaker, switched on at Luca’s signal, Eve sounded sour as if she begrudged Tamsin time out. “Oh and before I forget, we’re out of garlic and olive oil and…” It was like she was reciting an Ikea catalogue. “Would you do the needful?”

  “Can’t Gareth?” Luca interposed. Gareth’s hopes to sponge off Isla’s parents in Ibiza had been thwarted, having been firmly told it was house full.

  His voice stopped Eve in her tracks as she registered the unexpected hit. Gareth could wind his mother round his little finger.

  “No. Gareth’s unwell.” From somewhere, Eve rustled up a lame excuse. “It’s cruel to expect him to go out in his state.” It was clear he had the sulks and had no intention of pulling his weight.

  Tamsin killed the call and pulled a face. “Ouch.”

  “We aren’t here for ruddy grocery shopping.” Luca’s dark eyes came back to rest on her and he gave a tight smile. “Leave it with me.”

  Chapter 3

  Legs entwined, they’d fallen asleep.

  “Did you hear that?” Tamsin sat bolt upright, woken by several deep groans like that from a wounded animal. No, it hadn’t been a dream. “Luca,” she reached out for him only to find his side of the bed empty and damp with sweat. “Where are you?” Dimly, she made out a figure huddled in a chair near the window. “What’s up?”

  He was clutching a glass of water. He didn’t reply and she hesitated, studying him for a moment, then slid out of bed and went across and bent and kissed his neck.

  “What is it?”

  He fought down the old fears. These flashbacks and recurring nightmares of that horrific incident in Mogadishu had been diagnosed as classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d undergone counseling and been shown how to deal with it, but rogue attacks still clobbered him when he least expected it. He didn’t want anyone to know he still suffered, that he was, as he felt, too weak to conquer it, that it left him, always so strong and driven, crushed under foot and isolated, without hope.

  His eyes met Tamsin and she caught a bleak expression, a muttered oath.

  “It’s so hot I kept waking up. Then some guys got into a drunken brawl right outside the window that didn’t help. I was just about to empty a bottle of icy mineral water over them when the night manager emerged and sent them packing.”

  “It sounded rather more than a dustup—almost as if someone were in pain.”

  “I expect he was.” He shrugged. “But that’s not our problem.” He smiled, but the smile did not reach his tired eyes. “Let’s cozy up together.”

  She couldn’t put her finger on it but there was something deeply unconvincing about what he’d said, the way she’d glimpsed him rocking himself. “Let’s have some fat ass kisses then.”

  After breakfast in bed, feeding each other buttery, apricot crostata, cream-filled brioches and plump, purple figs, smearing each other with jam and honey and licking it off with lots of giggling, they roamed round Verona re-visiting old haunts, checking out the ones that Tamsin had never got around to, like Juliet’s mellow brick house in the Via Cappello, where kissing couples thronged the tiny balcony, vividly bringing to life the famous love story. Polishing dim memories, in the manner of “i veronesi” of antiquity, they strolled along old paved courtyards, ducked through arched doorways, crossed ancient stone bridges, lingered by lively market stalls shaded by giant umbrellas, squatted cross-legged in Renaissance gardens and, after a welcome gelato, ended up in a ancient monastery where, descending into its shadowed crypt, Tamsin felt a frisson as a sarcophagus, the reputed, disputed tomb of Juliet, loomed.

  Footsore, they fortified and lubricated themselves sitting on the hotel’s roof terrace overlooking the burnished, bewitching city, and then they were po
wering home, Tamsin getting more jittery as the bike ate up the miles.

  Eve flew out in a panic. “At last! I was beginning to think you’d eloped.” Her glance flicked between Luca and Tamsin.

  If only! Tamsin thought. She wondered if Gareth had ratted on her to Eve about her fucking with Luca. She wouldn’t put it past him.

  “Let’s get the stuff sorted,” continued Eve imperiously. “Tamsin, give me a hand. Patrick,” she trilled in a voice trained to reach the back of the balcony, “get out here.”

  Luca bowled a low shot. “Hi Eve! We ran out of time, so I’ll give Gareth a ride to the grocer’s.”

  “But…” Eve started, then curbed herself. That she was floundering was plain. If she quibbled, Luca might simply instruct the Leopoldos’ ever-loyal Maria, who did exactly as she was told, not to lower the lifeboat. That was a danger zone she could ill afford to stray into and Luca had a flinty, sealed-off look in his eyes that brooked no argument. She swallowed hard.

  “Ah, here’s Gareth. Hop on man. There’s exactly half an hour before the alimentari closes for the day. You can get a taxi back.”

  As Eve hurried indoors to fetch a shopping bag, Gareth stood, mutinous. The look he was flashing Luca would have leveled the Statue of Liberty. “Oily bastard.”

  Luca’s mouth twitched as he suppressed the urge to strike him. Reluctantly and v-e-r-y slowly, Gareth seated himself and once they’d streaked away, Patrick exchanged a small smile with Tamsin at the little victory as she scuttled to her room.

  * * * *

  The guests’ routine was no algorithmic formula. In the company of Patrick, those who’d come to paint ambled every morning with their gear to scenic spots, being driven by Gareth if the distance was too far. Those who’d come for creative writing traipsed after Eve to a distant, less bedraggled corner of the garden. There, in large sun specs and even larger sun hats, they gathered round a circular olivewood table while she held forth on whatever was the topic of the day. Her lectures, like her jokes, seldom varied from one batch of guests to another. Aspiring writers were expected to read out pieces they’d written and feedback was invited. This was invariably spiteful, if not downright cruel, and Eve, even after all these years, still hadn’t mastered the art of dealing with that. Standoffs would result, factions sprang up and resentments seethed that would color the rest of the stay.