‘Perhaps. Do you want his heart or his body?’

‘Both,’ Cassandra confessed. ‘I want him to love me and marry me.’

‘Ah,’ Lucia looked thoughtful. ‘This is more difficult. He wants you, that is self-evident.’

‘It is?’ Cassandra’s eyebrows shot up. ‘There have been occasions…’ She blushed. ‘We have been thrown together by circumstance and he is a man of the world.’

‘So he starts to make love to you and then he feels guilty and stops. Oh, the English and their sense of guilt.’ Lucia frowned at her. ‘Silly little virgin, do you think he would be so angry with you if he did not want you?’

‘Perhaps not. But I am a great nuisance to him, I have ruined his Tour and perhaps even his reputation, if we are found out.’

‘You keep making excuses for him, yet you are angry and hurt,’ Lucia remarked shrewdly. ‘Why?’

Cassandra got to her feet and began to fidget around the room. The question was disturbing, forcing her to confront her real feelings. ‘I am jealous,’ she said eventually. ‘I want him to see me, not an irritating child he’s been saddled with or a distracting body he must try and ignore. If he thinks of me at all, it’s either as the little girl I was when he last met me, or as a package he must deliver intact to his mother, because his duty demands it.’

‘So you want him to recognise you are a woman. A woman who can say yes or no to him.’

‘I suppose so.’ Cassandra bit her lip, forcing herself to be honest. ‘But I wouldn’t say no. I want him. I know it is wrong, but I want him to love me – and to make love to me. He has always had everything he wants.’

‘And now there is something you desire?’ Lucia laughed. ‘And you need to learn how to use a woman’s power to make him see you and only you.’

‘But how?’ Cassandra sank down on the sofa, shaken by what she was saying.

‘You go home and go to bed, little one. Sleep. Eat your dinner in your room. Let your Niccolo believe you are not well, and when he goes out to the Turkish Ambassador’s ball this evening, come back here to me.’

‘How do you know where he is going this evening’’ Cassandra asked, although nothing about this amazing woman would surprise her now.

‘All Society goes to the Ambassador’s masque. And so do the courtesans. And for one evening you will be one of us, for your Niccolo only. And then you may love him or not, as you decide. Now go, and take care no one sees you leave.’

Remaining in her room was simpler than Cassandra had feared. The encounter with Lucia seemed some sort of mad dream. How could she even contemplate anything so outrageous as to seduce Nicholas? She sent a message by Antonio that she was feeling unwell and would take her meals alone and received by return a curt note from Nicholas.

It is not to be wondered at that you feel unwell after your behaviour last night, he wrote. For myself I have no wish to set eyes on you until you have had time to reflect on your conduct and make amends. The servants have been informed that you will remain in your room until they receive my orders to the contrary.

It was signed curtly, Lydford.

Cassandra read this missive through twice, unable to believe her eyes. So, he wanted her to confess her faults, while he offered no word of contrition for his conduct in putting her over his knee like a child or losing his temper. All doubts about Lucia’s wanton plan vanished.

Cassandra screwed up the paper and hurled it at the wall. It missed, sailed out of the open casement and into the canal where it sank gently beneath the greenish waters.

Chapter Fifteen

It was nine in the evening when Cassandra watched Nicholas emerge from the front door and make his way down the steps to his waiting boat. He was obviously dining out before the ball. Despite her anger with him, she felt her heartbeat quicken at the sight of him, magnificent in full evening attire. A heavy opera cloak lined with scarlet silk was thrown back over an evening suit of deep blue cloth. His neckcloth was immaculate in its complex folds, a single fob glinted against the dull sheen of soft silver threads in his waistcoat.

The major domo stood with Nicholas’s mask dangling by its strings in his hand. Against the Venetian servants, Nicholas’s rangy height was even more apparent.

More than anything else, Cassandra wanted to be with him, on his arm. To be helped into the boat by him with the solicitude he had shown his companion of the night before. After tonight, perhaps…

With the Earl’s departure, the public rooms of the palazzo rapidly emptied of servants, making it easy for Cassandra to slip out and across the courtyard. The door opened before she even knocked and once again she was conducted silently into Lucia’s presence.

The courtesan was already dressed in evening finery, although without paint. A large bathtub lined with white linen stood in one corner, a manservant filling it with flagons of warm water. Lucia sent him away and p

aused to consider a collection of glass phials.

‘Sandalwood, I think,’ she mused. ‘Heady, but not clinging. You will be able to wash it off later, and that may be important, for you may yet change your mind, little sister. Now, take off your clothes, and into the bath with you.’

An hour later Cassandra was being laced into a corset which produced a figure which she had no idea she possessed. She looked down, startled, at a surprising amount of cleavage but, oiled, warm and faintly light-headed from a glass of sweet wine, she felt no inclination to protest. At least her breasts were not fully on display.

The maid helped her into a gown the colour of crushed raspberries and began to fasten it. ‘But what about my hair?’ The boyish crop, even though it was beginning to grow into soft curls, was ludicrously at odds with the soft folds and low-cut bodice of the silk gown with its gauze overdress.

Tags: Louise Allen Romance
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