“David, it can wait for a few hours. She was doing all right the last time you called, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then stop thinking about it just for one night. Think about yourself,” she said, drawing closer. “Think about us.”
She reached up with one hand and took off his glasses. She laid them on the bedside table and turned the lamp off. The only light in the room filtered through a crack in the curtains, which opened onto the street … and the boating park beyond.
“Can you still see me?” she joked.
“Sort of.”
She leaned forward, kissing him. “Now do you know where I am?”
“I have a very good idea.”
She laughed and slunk down into the bed.
“Come find me.”
David lifted the duvet enough to scoot himself under it and felt the warmth of Olivia’s body against him. Her eyes were shining in the dark, her black hair was spread out on the plump white pillow. Propped on one elbow, he bent his head to kiss her.
“Umm,” she said, “you taste like hot chocolate.”
“I thought that was you.” He kissed her again. “Yep, it’s you.” He reached around her slender waist, pulling her closer. Her own arms went up and around his neck.
“Maybe that day, when you wandered into the piazza?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Maybe that was fate.”
David, who would never have even considered such a thing a few weeks earlier, did not dismiss it. His world had been cracked wide open and suddenly allowed for a million possibilities.
If Olivia was his fate, he thought, as their bodies came together under the coverlet with a natural but urgent ease, he was all for it.
Chapter 33
Alone at last, the marquis threw another log into the fireplace and stared into the rising fire.
Was it possible? Could Caterina still be alive? Could she have been alive all these centuries?
He felt at once an agony in his heart, the agony of all those lost years, and a kindling of hope, a kindling like nothing else he had felt for ages. The expression on David Franco’s face had conveyed the truth more eloquently than any words could do.
While Sant’Angelo could see now that the public accounts of his own death and burial must have persuaded her that he had indeed left this world, how could he have been so misled himself?
What foolishness, what insanity, what melancholy dolor had allowed him to believe the accounts of her demise? He could see that the sources of the story had all had their own reasons to say what they had said, to swear to what they averred. And he lambasted himself for his gullibility, his blindness, his despair. Had he believed in her death because he could not bear the thought that he had condemned her to the destiny he had endured?
And now, she wanted the mirror back. She wanted La Medusa back, at all costs. But why? To work its magic on someone else? Or, to see if, in its destruction, she could undo the curse she had brought on herself that fateful night in his studio?
He drew a chair closer to the fire—it was at that time of night that his legs always gave him the most trouble—and sat down. He must think, he must make a plan. He must rouse himself to fight for a future. Tonight he had learned that there was more than a reason to exist—there was a reason to live.
He put his head back, his eyes closed, and felt the heat from the fire wash over him.