At Paradise, a gentlemen's resort where anything can be had--for a price, Lord Dering gets a surprise . . .
The silence in the audience held. The men's appetites were whetted, their curiosity on edge. The light had slowly dimmed, and once again, the theater lay in darkness, waiting.
On fire!
No. Another illusion from behind the transparent curtain. Flames licked up a backdrop of some sort, too flat to be real. And a violin began to play, picking up the melancholy tenor of the first song and transforming it into a dance. Another violin joined, and from behind the screen came the metallic clang of finger-cymbals.
This time a swing descended, bearing a female with her skirts flaring out and her long legs crossed at the ankles. She counterpointed the violins with the cymbals, her arms and hands shimmying in the air, her body illuminated from behind by red-gold flames.
Gaetana, and before she had so much as shown her face, a hundred men were entirely in her power. When the swing was still too high for safety, she sprang free of it and landed barefoot on the wooden stage with scarcely a thump. The rhythm changed. Became slow, deliberate, like the tide moving in.
Like the blood pulsing through his veins. Jarrett's hands fisted. Sweat gathered hot on his nape. A gypsy at the campfire, fire-lit and untamed, she writhed in an ecstasy of her own as the tempo inexorably picked up speed. His heart pumped in concert with it. So did his breathing. Passion cut loose and spun out of control. In the enthralled imaginations of the men, she twirled and leaped in the demanding frenzy of a woman driving to climax.
And then the fire appeared to engulf her. With another theatrical trick, she was gone.
But still no applause, Jarrett noticed when his heartbeat, breathing, and selected portions of his anatomy had began to subside. Perhaps even the most drunken and idiotic of the guests understood that silence was the greater tribute.
Or perhaps it wasn't over. No one had raised the wick on a lamp or ignited a candle. The theater, like a church on Good Friday, waited dark and sacrilegiously expectant.
When the music struck up again, lively and piquant, so did lights from both sides of the stage. From where he was sitting, he could see the vertical strips of lights in the wings focused on the transparent curtain, now opaque because it was lit from the front. And where the two halves of the screen met, a gloriously long leg with a scarlet ribbon encircling its upper thigh made itself visible.
A war could be fought over a leg like that.
"I have everything I need," she sang in French, "save a vegetable for my pot au feu."
Her fire pot. He knew immediately where this song was going.
"A long vegetable. A firm vegetable, one that can endure the heat and keep its form. A king among vegetables. Nothing else will satisfy me."
"I've got one," called a slurred voice from the back.
She feigned interest, moving downstage, striking a pose, pretending to search the audience.
Shields flipped back from the winglights, now intensified by polished reflectors, giving Jarrett a close look at Gaetana's sable hair, loose and rippling down her back, and her smooth complexion above a neck of surpassing beauty. Her eyes, fringed with long black lashes, were blue as polished lapis lazuli.
She sang another flirtatious verse about the object of her desire and what she meant to do with it, the lines clever and the rhymes inventive. He noticed that her accent was not that of an Englishwoman speaking French.
None of his concern. He settled back, enjoying the way she manipulated the audience. Her gypsy costume was modestly designed, but the slit in the long ruffled skirt provided teasing glimpses of those glorious legs.
Which began of a sudden to move, seemingly midair, across the orchestra pit. Another illusion. Tilting his head, he saw the narrow bridge of glass on which she stepped before reaching the narrow forestage and jumping lithely onto the floor not six feet from where he sat. Still singing her ribald song, she went the other direction, flirting with the men she passed, eluding their hands, ruffling their hair.
Jarrett turned on his chair to watch her. Perfectly in control, she planted her hands on her hips and leaned back to evaluate this chap's cucumber, that one's carrot, or the other's string bean. She wove among asparagus and celery, leeks and parsnips and squash. By now the men had caught onto the refrain and were joining in.
He knew most of these chaps, by reputation if not personally. In no case did she single out for teasing a man whose pride outpaced his sense of humor, or one who was too shy to welcome the attention. She had chosen her targets with care, meaning that information about the guests had been provided her. Paradise left nothing to chance.
She was moving in his direction now, slipping past outreached arms, brushing her fingers against a shoulder or a cheek. Pausing at the box nearest him, she sang to the men seated there what appeared to be the last verse. In all the market, no vegetable would do.
Then she spun around, lifted her hands in pretended surprise, and flounced directly up to him. Her knees touched his--she was that close--while she began another verse, more scurrilous than the others.
All the women, she sang, recommended him, but that only meant he was woefully shopworn. Yesterday's goods. Could anything of worth remain in him now? She must find out.
Next he knew, she had planted herself on his lap. The chair wobbled. Instinct sent his hands to her waist. But she caught his wrists and pushed them down, so that his arms dangled beside him like wet cravats.
She wriggled, and he responded predictably. She squirmed, his breathing picked up, and he wondered if he could finish his part in this scene without embarrassing himself. It occurred to him she was still singing . . . something about rising to the occasion. Yes, indeed.
Then she leaned forward, her hands on the back of the chair behind his neck, and as laughter erupted after a particularly witty line, he heard an urgent whisper at his ear. "When I stand, come after me. Seize hold of my breasts."
A role he was willing to play, of course, along with a few others she hadn't cast him for. But if she didn't hold still, dammit, the consequences would be left to nature. He felt her body tense, poised to move, and prepared himself. Heard her sing something about a fine souffle, expanding to fill its container, and more, and then . . . and then . . . collapsing like a pricked sheep's bladder.
A roar of laughter. A sharp pinch on his neck and she was up. The pain drew his attention from where it had been. He remembered his task, lurched after her, closed his hands on full, firm breasts.
"Salaud!"
Something sharp struck his calves. At the same time, she pushed with both hands at his chest. Off balance, he lost his hold on her and toppled backward, landing hard on the chair.
Except that the chair had begun to drop shortly before he did. So while he was, in a fashion, seated, he'd ended up with the ladderback and his own back flat on the floor. The fall, he was quite sure, had hurt him a damn sight more than it affected the chair.
Hoots and derision from the audience for him, mingled with cheers for the triumphant Gaetana. Through a haze of pain and sexual frustration, he saw her curtsying from the stage, blowing kisses, and dancing off to music from the pit.
The stage lights abruptly shut down.
