Ardor by Lily Prior Read Free Book Online Page B

forward into the light thrownby her lantern but did not cease singing for a second. The song had taken him over, he was its servant, its instrument, and he had no choice but to obey its command.
    Fernanda was not exactly as in his dreams. She was a little older than the maiden he was expecting. So much the better. It would be well if at least one of them knew what they were doing. Though more mature, she was much more beautiful than his imagination could render her. The eyes of his heart had drawn her but imperfectly.
    Her voluptuous body was dazzling; how much better to sink into her softness like whipped cream, like a goose-down-filled mattress, in place of that slight and angular form he had anticipated. She was bigger than him for sure, but he liked big women. More to cuddle up to. More to keep you warm on a winter’s night.
    Without missing a beat he absorbed every detail of her like a sponge. Her eyes were not the green of jade; rather they were darkest shade of brown before you reached black. They glittered in the light of the lamp. Her lips were bee-stung and sumptuous. Her hair, despite the frenzied dreams it had caused him, was not the color of tarnished gold. Instead it was black, thick and full, rich, deep, distracting. How he longed to toy with it. It would be a life’s work just to adjust it every so often and stop its falling into her eyes or straying across her lips. The fingers holding the lamp were not little slender sticks; they were rounded, bejeweled, lovely. He could write a book about them alone. The poetry of her body would fill a thousand volumes. Of course his pitiful imagination had not been capable of picturing all this.
    As she stood there in the lamplight, looking down upon him from the balcony, the bubble of air surrounding them was warm and soft as velvet, although it was only yet the end of April, and the song was filling every spare place in the universe with an unbearable beauty. It was all Arcadio Carnabuci could do to stop himself weeping. But he could weep later. Now he had to sing. Sing now, and then afterward—well, what did the afterward matter? So he sang on, willing her, imploring her, to love him in return. His voice was making love to her, of that there was no doubt. There were contrasting larghetto and allegretto passages, soaring crescendos, followed by the softest diminuendos, which seemed to hang suspended in the air like a feather, during which the enraptured listeners scarcely remembered to breathe.
    On the balcony Fernanda Ponderosa waited, shivering slightly although she was not cold. Eventually she stepped forward and opened her full lips. Was she about to join him in song?
    â€œSignor,” she said calmly although she was furious, “I beg you to cease singing.”
    But Arcadio Carnabuci could not stop. It is likely he had not heard her words for his own voice was filling his ears. So he sang on. And while he did so, he kissed the tips of his huge fingers, fingers that were out of proportion with the rest of his meager body, fingers that made Fernanda Ponderosa shudder and indeed did more to harden her heart against him than anything else. Yet Arcadio Carnabuci could not know that his fingers had already nailed down his coffin in Fernanda Ponderosa’s heart, and he flicked the offending digits toward the balcony as though scattering his kisses like deep-red rose petals over her.
    She responded by retreating inside. Arcadio Carnabuci’s heart performed a somersault within his straining breast. Was she coming down to join him, to clasp his fingers in her own jewel-encrusted ones, to declare her own tender love for him? He was weak, about to faint.
    Instead she reemerged with a pail of water and upended it on Arcadio Carnabuci. What a tragedy it was that of all the people in the region she alone was unmoved by the song. She had never understood music.
    The sudden silence fell like a curtain after a performance that no one wanted to end. Fernanda