Rising Fire Read online

  They ate in the finest restaurants and coziest cafés. They explored the shops, from the most expensive and luxurious to the quaint, hole-in-the-wall establishments that always struck Denny as the slightest bit shady. They visited the great palazzos where the noble families opened their homes so visitors could admire all the beautiful treasures within. The very best of art, music, and fine food, Giovanni laid at Denny’s feet. And in between, the gondolas carried them along the city’s canals as glittering scenery slid smoothly past them.

  She had vowed to herself that no Italian count was going to sweep her off her feet, no matter how handsome and dashing he might be—but that was exactly what Giovanni Malatesta did.

  Poor Louis was left out most of the time, of course, and Denny felt bad about that, but he assured her that he was enjoying the visit and could take care of himself.

  “I hope I can say the same of you,” he commented to her, one day in the hotel as he gave her a meaningful look. “That you can take care of yourself.”

  “I know what you mean. Just because you’re a few minutes older than me doesn’t mean you have to start playing the protective big brother.”

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt, Denny.”

  “I’m not going to,” she said confidently. “Honestly, Giovanni has been a perfect gentleman so far.”

  “Let’s hope that continues.”

  The thing of it was, Denny wasn’t sure she wanted Giovanni’s gentlemanly behavior to continue. She found herself growing more and more curious what it would feel like to have his strong arms around her, to taste the warmth of his mouth with hers . . .

  That evening, they dined again at the Café Top Rosso Elegante, where they’d had dinner for the first time in Venice. The food was as good as ever, the candlelight dim and subdued, the atmosphere romantic. When they left, Giovanni suggested a stroll along the canal before he hailed a gondola and took her back to the Metropole.

  “I think I’d like that,” Denny said.

  Arm in arm, they walked along the cobblestones with the canal at their right. Up ahead, a bridge arched up and over one of the smaller canals.

  “The Bridge of the Roses,” Giovanni told her. “Legend has it that lovers come here, after they have been . . . intimate . . . and each tosses a rose into the canal. If the current carries the roses away together, the couple will stay together forever. If the current separates the roses, so, too, will the lovers drift apart.”

  “So it’s either romantic . . . or terrible.”

  “Such is life,” Giovanni said with an eloquent gesture. “Shall we walk across the bridge?”

  “We have no roses.”

  “Not yet,” he said, smiling.

  Denny hesitated, then said, “I don’t suppose walking across it will hurt anything.”

  “Perhaps we will find someone selling flowers on the street, on the other side.”

  “Perhaps,” Denny said.

  The hour was late enough that the streets and the canals weren’t as busy as they often were. The two of them were the only ones on the bridge, in fact. It was dimly lit by lamps at either end, but at the top of the arch in the middle, thick shadows gathered.

  Giovanni stopped there, turned to her, and said in a husky voice, “Denise . . . Denny, cara mia . . .”

  When he put his hands on her shoulders and bent his head to hers, she didn’t stop him.

  The kiss was long and lingering and started her heart pounding almost painfully in her chest. Her hands clutched at the front of his shirt. He moved his hands down to the swell of her hips and held her close to him.

  Denny felt herself weakening. She already had her hands on his broad chest. She pushed against it, moved her head back to break the kiss, and whispered, “Giovanni, no . . .”

  “My apartment is near, cara mia,” he said. “And I have roses there.”

  She shook her head a little. “We can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  “No one will know. No one will be harmed. And there will be joy for you, joy unlike any you have ever known.”

  She pushed harder against his chest, shook her head more emphatically. “I’ve had a wonderful time with you, these last two weeks,” she said, “and I want to go with you, I really do, but—”

  She didn’t know what he would do next. She was afraid he would try to force her to go with him, and if he did that, she would fight back. And if that happened, he would be surprised just how much of a wildcat he had on his hands.

  But those decisions were taken out of her hands, because at that moment, rapid footsteps slapped against the bridge and Giovanni let go of her so he could whirl around and face the handful of shadowy figures charging toward them. Denny heard the men’s rasping breath and harsh words she thought were Italian curses.

  Then Giovanni exclaimed, “Thieves!”

  They were under attack.

  CHAPTER 6

  Giovanni sprang to meet the would-be robbers. He lashed out with a fist at the man in the lead and slammed a blow to the man’s jaw. The thief flew backward and got tangled up with one of the other men.

  But there were three more of them, and one of them darted in and swung a short club of some sort at Giovanni’s head. Denny thought it was going to smash his brains in, but at the last second, Giovanni ducked his head and twisted aside so that the club caught him on the back of his shoulder instead. It still packed enough power to make him grunt in pain and stagger to the side.

  The other two closed in on him and started hammering him with their fists.

  So far, none of the thieves had paid the least bit of attention to Denny. She would show them that was a mistake. She lunged at the one with the club and leaped onto his back.

  It wasn’t easy in the expensive gown she wore, but she managed to wrap her legs around the man’s waist and hang on with one arm around his neck. An opponent’s ears were often vulnerable, her father had taught her during one of her visits to the Sugarloaf. Sally had chided Smoke for the rough-and-tumble lessons with their daughter, but the things she had learned had come in handy more than once.

  She grabbed the man’s right ear and twisted as hard as she could. He cried out in a mixture of surprise and pain, then lurched back and forth and dropped the club so he could use both hands to reach back at her. She bent her head down to avoid his grasp and kept twisting his ear until she felt something give and hot blood spurted over the back of her hand.

  By now he was writhing around and flailing at her in a crazed fashion. They were near the waist-high stone wall along the side of the bridge, so Denny dropped her feet to the ground and shoved hard as she planted her shoulder in the small of the man’s back. Taken once again by surprise, he stumbled forward and she rammed him against the wall. He said, “Ooof!” as the impact bent him forward over the stone barrier.

  Denny acted almost quicker than the eye could follow, especially in the poor light. She reached down, grabbed the man’s ankles, and heaved upward. Already bent over the wall, he couldn’t stop himself as his weight shifted. He screamed as his head went down, his feet went up, and he flipped right over the wall and plunged the twenty feet or so to the canal. Denny heard the splash as he hit the water.

  She didn’t know how Giovanni was doing with the other attackers. As she whirled around toward the center of the bridge, her foot struck the club the man had dropped. It rolled away with a clatter. Denny pounced on it, snatched it up, and waded into the knot of struggling figures a few yards away.

  In the shadows, it was hard to tell which of the men was Giovanni. She spotted one she definitely knew wasn’t him, though, because he was too tall and thin. She laid into him from behind with the club, whaling away at his head and shoulders, as far up as she could reach, anyway.

  The man yelled and swept out an arm as he turned quickly toward her. His arm struck her wrist and sent the club flying. Snarling and cursing, the man came at her with his arms outstretched.

  Denny stood her ground and kicked him in the groin. Her foot landed hard a
nd on target. The man howled in agony and collapsed as he tried to fold up around himself.

  The sound of running footsteps made her look around. It appeared that the rest of the thieves were fleeing down the slope of the bridge. Giovanni stood at the top of the arch, his hair disarrayed, his expensive suit torn and disheveled, and shook his fist at them as he shouted defiantly in Italian after them.

  He turned sharply as Denny came up to him and said, “Giovanni.” He gripped her arms.

  “Cara mia, you are all right?” he asked anxiously. “Those horrible men, they did not harm you?”

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “A little shaken, that’s all.” She pointed at the man who lay there moaning as he clutched himself. “One of them didn’t get away. You can call the police—”

  “No polizia. This man insulted your honor and dared lay hands on your person! I will deal with him personally!”

  He reached under his coat, and Denny saw starlight glitter on the blade of the dagger he pulled out.

  She grasped his wrist and said, “No! You don’t have to kill him. I’m all right, Giovanni, really. Let’s just . . . let’s just get out of here.”

  He hesitated but finally said with obvious reluctance, “All right.” He slipped the knife back in its hidden sheath under his coat. “Come with me.”

  He took her hand and led her down from the bridge. Denny was surprised that the encounter hadn’t attracted any attention, but the street seemed to be deserted. Giovanni took her to an elegant building that appeared to have been a palazzo belonging to one of Venice’s old families at some time in the past. It had been turned into apartments, and Giovanni led her to one.

  Denny recalled what he had been saying before the would-be thieves attacked them. Giovanni had gotten her into his apartment after all, but under the circumstances, he couldn’t have anything amorous in mind. Both of them were too shaken by the attack.

  And Giovanni was hurt, too, Denny saw as he lit an oil lamp sitting on an elaborately carved sideboard. Crimson trickled down the side of his face from a cut on his forehead.

  “You’re bleeding!” she exclaimed.

  “It is nothing,” he said with a dismissive wave. “A wound suffered in the defense of a woman is a badge of honor. Especially when the woman is as lovely as you, cara mia.”

  “This is no time for flattery,” she snapped at him. “I need to clean that up. Where can I get some hot water and a cloth?”

  “The kitchen is there,” he said, pointing. “There should be some embers in the stove.”

  Denny nodded. She always felt better when she had a task to accomplish. She went into the kitchen, stirred up the fire in the stove, and added some wood to it from a bin in the corner. On the other side of the room was a basin with a pump. She put some water in a pot and set it on the stove to heat, then began opening cabinets in search of a cloth she could use to clean Giovanni’s injury.

  When she came back into the other room, carrying a tray with a porcelain bowl of hot water and a clean cloth on it, she saw that he had taken off his coat and vest and cravat and stood there in shirtsleeves. And he was unbuttoning the shirt as well. It was already open enough to reveal a muscular chest thickly furred with dark hair.

  “My apologies for the indecency,” he said. “The lady who does my laundry, she would be very upset if she had to clean bloodstains from my garments.”

  “You don’t need to get blood on such fine clothes, anyway,” Denny said as she set the tray on the sideboard next to the lamp.

  He peeled off the shirt and tossed it onto a claw-footed divan with the other things he had taken off. Denny got the cloth wet and stepped close to him. Since there wasn’t a great difference in their height, she had no trouble reaching the cut on his forehead. He winced as she began dabbing at it.

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” she said.

  “It is a pain I suffer willingly, even gladly,” he assured her. “All in a good cause.”

  “Defending me?”

  “That is what gentlemen are born to do, defend noble and beautiful ladies.” He cocked his head a little to the side. “Although, from what I saw while engaged in my own combat, you gave a good account of yourself. I never would have dreamed you would leap into the fray like that.”

  “I’ve always been a fighter. You can ask my brother.”

  Giovanni gave her a dubious smile. “Eh, I am not sure I will mention this affair to Louis. It is over, no harm was done, and there is no reason to worry him.”

  Denny just about had the blood cleaned off his face. She pressed the cloth to the cut to stop any further bleeding and said, “No harm done?”

  “Not to you, and this . . . this is nothing. It will be a scar well earned.”

  “You never even hesitated when those men jumped us. You went right after them, even though the odds were five to one.”

  “They gave me no choice,” he said quietly. “And I never paused to think about my own safety.”

  “No,” Denny said, “I don’t believe you did.”

  “All I thought about, cara mia . . . was you.”

  She took the cloth away from the cut and said softly, “I think it’s stopped bleeding now. And I don’t believe . . .” She was getting a little breathless and found it difficult to talk. “I don’t believe you’ll need any stitches . . .”

  He took her wrist in his left hand, gently plucked the cloth from her fingers with his right, and tossed it onto the tray.

  “Let us have no more talk of blood and stitches, of robbers and danger. Fate had brought us here, Denny, and there . . . there are the roses I promised you.”

  He nodded toward a vase containing a dozen beautiful roses. It was on a table next to an open door, and through that door Denny could see part of an elegant old four-poster bed. The light from the lamp didn’t reach very far into the room, and most of the bed was in shadow—but she knew it was there.

  “Giovanni,” she whispered, “I . . . I never . . .”

  “Shhh,” he told her. “All is well. Follow your heart, and you will know happiness unlike any you have ever known.” His fingers moved over the bare skin of her forearm, strayed up to her shoulder and then behind her neck as he leaned in and kissed her. She felt the heat from his body, bare from the waist up, and couldn’t resist the temptation to reach out and touch it. A tingle like the shock of electricity went through her as she rested her fingers on his chest. She opened her lips to his.

  He had risked his life to save her. If she’d ever had any doubt about the genuineness of his feelings for her, it had vanished now. And her own feelings were calling out to her stronger than she had ever experienced. All of that together, combined with the nearness of that bed, was more temptation than Denny could stand.

  So she stopped fighting it and whispered, “Yes.”

  To Giovanni, and to herself...

  CHAPTER 7

  Without opening her eyes, Denny stretched and yawned, luxuriating in the sensation of bare skin against smooth silken sheets. A warm breeze blew through the room, moving a curling strand of blond hair against her cheek. That touch tickled. She lifted a hand to push the hair away. The movement made the sheet fall away from her, and that finally alerted her consciousness to her state of undress.

  Her eyes popped open and widened in alarm as she realized she was lying in Count Giovanni Malatesta’s bed.

  She grabbed the sheet and pulled it over her again as she sat up and hurriedly looked around. The lamp still burned in the other room. Enough light spilled into the bedroom for her to see that she was alone. She swung her legs off the soft mattress and stood up, taking the sheet with her. She wrapped it around her as she stepped to the door between rooms and called softly, “Giovanni?”

  When there was no response, she called his name twice more before deciding she was alone in the apartment. She leaned against the doorjamb, closed her eyes, and tried to gather her scattered thoughts.

  The knowledge that her life had changed and would never be the sa
me again clamored in the back of her mind. She wasn’t upset about that fact, necessarily; she had known that sooner or later she would meet the right man and take the step she had taken tonight.

  She had never expected that man to be an Italian count, however. She had figured that she would be married, or at the very least, her first experience would be with a man she intended to marry.

  Try as she might, she just couldn’t imagine Giovanni living on a ranch in Colorado, and she had decided several years earlier that she intended to return to the Sugarloaf and make her permanent home there, probably in the fairly near future.

  The medical advances to be had in Europe may well have saved Louis’s life, but during the past year, more than one doctor had told him that they had done all they could for him. Their best advice, in fact, had been for Louis to spend more time in the open air and try to make himself more robust that way. There was no better place to do that than the Colorado valley where the vast Jensen ranch was located.

  When Louis went home to stay, Denny intended to, as well. She and her brother had both spent too much time away from their parents. It was time for the Jensen family to be together again.

  If she came home with a husband, Smoke and Sally would welcome him and do their best to make him feel right at home at Sugarloaf. Denny had no doubt of that. But would Giovanni ever consider such a thing? Venice had become home to him, after he’d come here from Sicily.

  “Oh, Denny, you’re such an impulsive fool,” she whispered to herself. Passion had welled up so strongly and unexpectedly inside her that she hadn’t been able to withstand it. She had allowed Giovanni to ruin her.

  “Stop that,” she told herself, louder and more firmly this time. She wasn’t ruined. This was the twentieth century, after all. Morality wasn’t as strict and stringent as it had been in the past. Anyway, she knew good and well that a lot of the so-called rules regarding proper behavior were more honored in theory than they were in practice. Plenty of western brides had walked down the aisle already in the family way.