Twice Upon Time

The riders had drawn closer, still riding abreast of each other. She could not see their faces yet, but they were close enough now so that she could recognize the colors. It was as it always was, she reassured herself with a small sigh of relief. This was Bianca, her unbound black curls streaming behind her like a banner, her scarlet dress a dazzling contrast to her mount’s white coat. And this was Alessio, his black clothing blending with the glossy black hide of his stallion so that the man and his mount looked like one fabulously pagan, virile animal.

They drew closer still, the horses’ hooves thundering on the sand as the white horse took the lead by a head. Sarah pressed her hand to her heart, which was echoing the pounding rhythm.

She wanted to warn them to beware. To beware of each other. To beware of their fate. She wanted to stop them. No, she had to stop them. Now that she knew what lay in store for them, she was responsible. She cried out to them, but no sound emerged from her throat.

They were close now, so close that she could see their faces. She saw Bianca turn slightly and send Alessio a smile. A smile perfectly calculated to provoke, to arouse. She saw Alessio’s face, dark with annoyance and the promise of passion, and she remembered the heartbreaking beauty of the letters and sonnets he had written for the woman who had not loved him enough.

How could you do it? Sarah heard her voice in her head, crying out in desperate reproach, but she knew that she remained mute.

How could I do it? She cried out silently again, and even as she wondered at the bizarre tricks her mind was playing on her, she understood. With all the suddenness of a shaft of bright, strong sunlight piercing a fog, she understood.

It was she who had lived as Bianca. It was she who had caused death and destruction and so much suffering by putting ambition and a greed for power before love.

They had almost reached her. Another moment and they would be past. Then it would be too late. The thought shot into her mind like a flaming arrow and quivered there. Too late for what? she cried. And what could she do? What?

Suddenly Sarah remembered that she had stood at the threshold of the shadowy shop and felt the power that had lain waiting for her inside. She reached for it now and it filled her. Her head high, her step sure, she moved squarely into the path of Bianca’s mount.

The world tilted and whirled around Sarah as if a giant, invisible hand had picked her up and spun her head over heels like a toy. Then she crashed against something, the impact robbing her of her senses, but only for a moment.

She lifted her hand to her hair and, instead of a severe bun on the back of her head, she found a mass of wild curls streaming back in the wind. She looked down at her clothing and saw, instead of a threadbare coat of dark wool, a gown of rich scarlet velvet. Beneath her she felt the vibration of the powerful animal as it pounded over the sand.

Even as panic flashed through her, she told herself that it was a dream. Just a dream. She struggled to awaken, but she was held fast, as if she were bound by strong cords.

Gradually comprehension seeped into her and her struggles subsided as she understood—and accepted—that the dream had become reality. She understood that in some mystical way her spirit had merged and melded with Bianca’s. And she understood that she had been given the chance to live her life as Bianca one more time. To live it again, knowing the tragedy, the mistakes. She had been given a second chance to do it right.

In an act that was both surrender and conquest, she let Sarah go, freeing her to pass to some shadowy realm. Sarah slipped away wraithlike, taking her life, her memories with her. But, like a precious gift, she left behind her a vein of knowledge to live in Bianca like the melody of a once heard, never forgotten song.

April 1528

Bianca felt a jolt, as if she had collided with something. It left her breathless, but only for a moment. She turned in the saddle and looked back to where, for a moment, she had thought she had seen a thin woman wearing outlandish dark clothes. The figure was gone, but a pile of what looked like rags lay on the pale sand.

Involuntarily, her hands tightened on the reins. Her mount reared up with an annoyed whinny and, still distracted, Bianca allowed the reins to slip through her fingers. With a cry she tumbled off the saddle onto the sand.

Disoriented, she lay still for a moment, both arms flung outward. The pounding of hooves on the sand caused her to struggle up onto her knees. Frozen with a sudden terror, she watched the black stallion thunder straight at her. Even when the animal reared to a halt several feet away from her, she felt as if her heart had stopped beating.

She watched Alessio, his face dark with rage, leap off his mount. Suddenly, the abject, nameless terror of a moment ago changed to a specific fear of this man. She struggled up and stumbled to a nearby rocky outcrop.

She felt dizzy and helpless. But more than anything else she was annoyed. It wasn’t like her to be so clumsy or to feel such panic as she had a moment ago. She tilted up her chin and turned to face him, bracing her palms against the rocks behind her.

The taste of the panic he had felt when he had seen Bianca fall still lay on Alessio’s tongue, as bitter and metallic as the taste of blood. Because the desire to take her into his arms was so strong, his hands were rough as they closed on her shoulders.

“What were you trying to do, damn you?” He shook her so violently that her teeth clacked together. “Break your neck?”

“No.” She was still breathless, but temper was beginning to burn away the confusion in her eyes as she threw back her head. “I just wanted to see how fast Sultana could go. And I was racing you,” she added with a smile. “And I would have won, too, if that woman hadn’t startled me.”

“Woman? What woman?”

Suddenly bewildered again, Bianca glanced toward the spot on the beach where she had thought she had seen the woman. Where she had seen the pile of dark rags. But there was nothing there now but the pale yellow sand.

“I thought I saw a woman standing right in front of me.” Her voice petered out and she frowned, still looking past Alessio down the beach. “I must have imagined her.” She shook her head. She was not someone given to visions and imaginings.

Alessio scowled down at her. He wanted to shake her again for her willful recklessness, but for a moment she, whom he had never seen other than vibrant and proud, looked so lost, so pale that his hands gentled.

Bianca pushed away the odd feeling that still wound through her. The feeling she could not have described if her life had depended on it. But then, it had never been her habit to indulge in introspection.

“It was probably just the mussels I ate giving me indigestion.” She purposely said the prosaic words, needing something ordinary to balance out this—this bizarre apparition.

Alessio looked behind him at the spot Bianca’s gaze had gone to. He saw nothing but the sand, which stretched for miles up the coast. But she had seen something. She was not a woman to pale at some phantom of the mind. He turned back to her.

“What did you see?”

She met Alessio’s eyes. They were the same color as the sunlit sea, which stretched out behind him. The remains of his anger were there. And the desire she recognized because she had seen it often enough in other men’s eyes. But there was something else there that she had never seen before. Was it tenderness? Concern? She was not a woman easily disquieted, but whatever this was, it disquieted her now and made her want to look away. She was not a woman easily touched, but this touched her now and made her want to hold his gaze.

“Nothing.” She shrugged, the gesture meant as much for herself as for him. “Now I suggest you let me go, Messere Alessio.” Her mouth curved in a smile that both mocked and invited. “Or do you wish to mark my skin?”

The look of a little girl lost had faded. Instead the temptress was back. The temptress who had tantalized him months ago and then allowed herself to be betrothed to his brother like a mare sold to the highest bidder. And yet he still wanted her. Despite the rage that churned within him, he wanted her with a desire so hot, so strong that every woman he made love to was but an instrument for his release. A release that brought a slaking of a physical need but no true pleasure.

“If you keep playing your role of Circe, I will do more than mark your skin.” But even as he said the words, his hands eased and began to stroke where they had gripped before.

The linen of her shirt, the velvet of her gown lay between Alessio’s hands and her skin, and yet Bianca could feel his touch as if she were naked beneath it.

The heat his hands generated spread over her skin and spiraled down to her belly. Her young, ripe body grew hungry. So hungry that for a mad, heady moment she could imagine giving in to its demands. Now. Here.

Because a voice she had never heard before seemed to call to her, because the voice spoke of shame and dishonor, she tried to shift away from Alessio’s touch.

“Strega. You are a witch, Bianca.” His hands slid up from her shoulders and into her hair. As they fisted in the wind-tossed strands to hold her, he lowered his mouth to hers.

“No.” She turned her face aside.

Alessio stared down at her. Did she think he was a plaything to bat around like a tennis ball? Did she think she could treat him as if he were a fawning Venetian cicisbeo, content to worship from afar?

Impatience and anger mixed with desire and his hands tightened in her hair.

“No, let me go.” She began to fight him in earnest, not quite understanding why she felt compelled to do so when she wanted to give in to him so badly.

“Why so coy today, madonna?” he demanded. “There have been days when you were more than eager to feel my mouth on yours.”

Bianca said nothing because she did not have an answer to his accusation. His accusation that was nothing less than the truth.

“Let me go, Alessio, I command you.” His grip on her hair was just short of painful—and yet she found that it aroused her. Because she needed distance from him and needed it quickly, she fired off her most powerful weapon. “Do you forget that I belong to your brother?”

“No.” His eyes flashed with blue flames. “You are betrothed to my brother. But you belong to me.”

Alessio felt his fury, which she seemed to provoke so effortlessly, rise another notch. Yes, it troubled him that he so desperately wanted this woman, who would, in a few months’ time, be his older brother’s wife. It troubled him far more than he cared to admit. There was no love lost between Ugo and him. But did a man dishonor his own flesh and blood for a woman?

Perhaps not for any woman, he thought as his gaze traveled over Bianca’s face with its perfect features. The eyes so dark that they were almost black, with their tiny flecks of gold, which made them look like live coals. The lush mouth the color of raspberries, which promised all the pleasures of paradise. Perhaps not for any woman, he repeated, but for this woman he would sell his immortal soul to the devil. Perhaps he already had. An ache wound through him. An ache that had nothing to do with the ache in his loins.

“You know as well as I do that you belonged to me long before I touched you for the first time. Do you remember?”