Chapter 49: The Going Rate for a Barozzi

Vito took the raised eyebrow for an invitation, mostly because there was no sensible reason to take it for anything else.

He hauled himself halfway out of his chair, cup in hand.

"The business of the Most Serene Republic is concluded for the evening, effective at once."

It came like some decree from a duke, by the jurisdiction he was reasonably certain nobody had ever given him.

"As if you ever had authority over anything in your life, Vitale."

"I hold authority over this cup."

He took a drink to establish the fact. "That’s practically a magistracy."

Her lips tried to hold back a smile and failed immediately. She raised her own cup and drank without any ceremony, but kept watching him over the rim a moment longer than the drink called for.

Mutual understanding passed between them in that look, like a wager neither had thought it necessary to name. Not tonight, at least, certainly not aloud.

Vito rolled his cup slowly between two fingers. "As I recall, you’ve never once mentioned a husband, mia cara. I’ve begun to suspect you keep him locked in a chest somewhere with the rest of the family silver."

"I take considerably better care of my silver than I would any man."

"Then where is he? Some poor bastard sent off to a monastery, sitting there with an abacus, adding up what you cost him every time he goes to confession?"

She popped her tongue with a haughty smile. "If the cost was a man’s complaint about me, he wasn’t going to survive the marriage in any case. Try again."

"A scandal, then. Some engagement you ruined so thoroughly that Venezia still whispers about it behind its hands."

"In that case, Vitale, you’d have heard the song they wrote about it before you finished stepping off your boat."

Her mouth curled. "No scandal, nor monk hiding in a corner somewhere, nursing a grudge against my accounts. The truth is simple, if you want it."

"Enlighten me."

She raised her cup and looked him straight in the eye over it. "I am far too valuable to sell cheaply to some poor stricken house from Venezia, while my own branch of the family never had enough influence in Constantinople to find me a match worth the price. So I remained precisely what I was."

"Unmarried. Which is considerably better than being married badly."

"And you?"

She laughed sharply, studying him over it.

"What family in Venice has failed to catch a Barozzi this charming?"

Vito threw both hands wide, delighted that she had handed him the subject. "Cazzo, mia cara, where do you want me to start? There was a Ca’ Balbi girl once, her father sat me down over wine sweet enough to shame a nun."

If only to reinforce it, he drank from his own wine. "And by the second cup he was ready to book up some chapel that would have the pleasure of marrying us. By the third, it was mentioned the crusade, then the particular quality of my judgment, and the poor bastard went purple as a fresh bruise and suddenly remembered a previous engagement."

"Do you fancy scaring grown men with your reputation alone?"

"If only it was for battle and not marriage. There is a distinction, though I’ll admit it is a very small one."

He went on with another family and another catastrophe, each story larger than the last, until the joke slipped underneath it before he could catch it.

Vito simply shrugged. "Truth is, nobody in my house ever thought I was worth the wager. Save the prospects for men who stay home and behave themselves, not a reckless cadet that will get himself killed out in some gambit."

Caterina’s teasing softened, though only a little.

"Vitale."

"Ah, ah."

He raised his cup, grinning again, and shut that door as neatly as he’d opened it.

"That’s quite enough honesty for one night. I’ll spoil my reputation as entertaining company."

More wine disappeared after that, and the talk went with it, loosening into the sort of nonsense when nobody has anything left to prove.

Old gossip about a Rialto merchant with a ruinous weakness for mistresses, some shared memory of Venezia buried under snow.

One of Caterina’s complaints about a supplier who had tried weighing his own thumb along with the pepper.

The lamp sank lower.

Vito laughed more freely with every cup, and so did she, until neither of them was taking quite the same care with their words as they had at the start of the evening.

Then Vito put his cup down and looked at her warmly. "You know, mia cara, I’ve crossed half this sea for less fortune than what’s sitting in front of me now. Makes a man wonder why he bothers with trade at all when the best thing in the room is keeping the accounts."

Caterina didn’t shy away from his gaze. "Careful, Vitale. You keep looking at me like that and I’ll start believing every rumor about your mouth."

"Every rumor’s true. I checked personally."

Her lips curved, sharp and pleased with itself. "So I’ve heard, along with several complaints about your delivery."

"Delivery’s never been the problem, mia cara. Just ask..."

He let the pause hang there.

"Actually, don’t ask anyone. Discretion is the one virtue I truly practice."

"Do you really?"

"Everybody has to begin somewhere."

Caterina put her cup down first and rose from her chair. She came around the table and closed the distance between them.

The lamplight slid over her lean, hourglass figure, catching the narrowness of her waist before following the generous sweep of her hips and the soft fullness of her thighs beneath the linen.

Her chemise had loosened enough that her plump breasts pressed against the thin fabric, the deep cleavage between them left plainly visible. Between them sat the little beauty mark, made all the more striking by the warm skin surrounding it.

Her catlike eyes locked with his amusedly, while her thin lips curved into the smallest hint of a smile. Beneath the chemise, every curve of her body seemed to show itself in the lamplight, be the rise of her breasts, the dip of her waist, the generous roundness of her hips, until the linen looked less like clothing than a particularly cruel suggestion of it.

Vito’s considerable supply of wit deserted him without so much as a farewell.

She leaned toward him.

Whatever clever remark prepared died behind his teeth.

For one torturous second, the only wine he wanted was whatever she had just poured into between them.

She put her lips beside his ear.

"It’s late, Vitale."

Her voice was soft and warm, and there was no hurry in it. "And I need my rest. Whatever you’ve got in mind can wait until you’ve come back from Chania in one piece."

She breathed a warm, lingering breath against his ear, the heat of it curling over his skin before she finally drew away.

Then she straightened, turned, and walked away, leaving him exactly where she had found him. The door closed behind her with a little click that sounded, to Vito, like an explosion.

He sat there for a while with the nearly empty bottle and her account books for company.

Then he laughed.

He considered the matter in his head as one hand of cards he had just lost and somehow enjoyed.

One point for her tonight. By his reckoning, that put them exactly even.

He poured himself one last cup, raised it toward the closed door, and drank alone, grinning at the discovery that losing to her was becoming more enjoyable than winning against anybody else.