Christmas in Da Conti's Bed

By rights, someone like her shouldn’t have been a pupil at the exclusive all-girls academy, tucked high in the beautiful mountains of Switzerland. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t well-connected. She was just the illegitimate daughter of a single-parent mother who happened to be Matron at the fancy boarding school. And while this meant that Alannah got herself a great education, her ‘charityʼ status meant that most of the girls simply tolerated her.

Michela da Conti was different. She was the only one who had held out the hand of genuine friendship—maybe because they had something in common, despite their rich-girl/poor-girl pairing. Alannah had spent her life rebelling against her super-strict mother while Michela had known real tragedy in her short life, plus she wanted to escape the strictures of her controlling brother, Niccolò.

Their youthful rebellion usually stretched no further than going out for illicit under-age drinks in one of the nearby bars after lights-out, or hanging out of the dormitory window, trying to inhale cigarettes without being sick.

But one night they heard about a party. A glitzy twenty-first birthday celebration for one of Niccolò’s godsons—which was being held in one of the neighbouring mountain valleys.

‘And we’re going!’ declared Michela excitedly.

Alannah remembered frowning. ‘But what about your brother? Won’t he be there?’

‘You’re kidding.’ Michela had given a smile of satisfaction. ‘Apparently, he’s miles away in some obscenely expensive resort in Barbados, with his latest ghastly supermodel girlfriend. So we’re safe.’

Alannah remembered walking into the crowded room, where coloured lights were flashing and music was blaring out loudly. Her borrowed silver minidress was clinging to her body like honey and she was getting lots of requests to dance, but she turned down every one because all the boys seemed too loud and too brash to be interesting.

She did her best to enjoy herself. She sipped a soft drink and admired the snowy view. Found a sleeping kitten on her way back from the loo and spent an enjoyable ten minutes stroking its furry tummy and wishing she could go home. When eventually she went back into the main room to find Michela to suggest they got a cab back to school, she couldn’t find her anywhere. So she went and stood in a quiet corner of the room, losing herself in the shadows while everyone else partied—and that was when she saw him.

Him.

She had never forgotten that moment. It was like being struck by something with no sense of warning that it was coming. As if a velvet sledgehammer had hit her very hard. She was aware that he was tall and his hair was as black as the night sky. His eyes were black too—even from this distance she could see that. He was dressed in a dark suit, which made him look outwardly sophisticated, but she could sense something primitive about him. There was something predatory in the gleam of his eyes, which should have scared her as he began to walk towards her, with a sense of purpose in his step.

But she wasn’t scared.

It was the most illogical thought she’d ever had, but at that moment she felt as if she’d been waiting all her life for him to arrive, and here he was.

Here he was.

He looked her up and down—as if it was his right to study a strange woman as he might study a car he was thinking of buying. But surely no car would make him smile like that—a smile which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, one that pierced her heart and made her knees feel as if they might have difficulty supporting her.

‘I think you need to dance,’ he said.

‘I’m not a very good dancer.’

‘That’s because you’ve never danced with me. So come here and let me teach you how.’

Later, she would remonstrate with herself at the eagerness with which she fell into his arms. At the way she let him slide his hands around her back as if she’d known him for years. His hand moved to her hair and he started stroking it and suddenly she wanted to purr as loudly as that kitten had done earlier.

They said very little. The party was too loud for conversation and, anyway, it didn’t seem to be conversation which was dominating Alannah’s thoughts right then. Or his. Words seemed superfluous as he pulled her closer and, although the music was fast, they danced so slowly that they barely moved. Their bodies felt as if they were glued together and Alannah almost wept with the sheer pleasure of it all. Did he sense her enjoyment? Was that why he dipped his mouth to her ear, so that she could feel the warmth of his breath fanning her skin?

‘You,’ he said, his velvety voice underpinned with an accent which she recognised as Sicilian, ‘are very beautiful.’

Wasn’t it funny how some people you just seemed to spark off? So that she—inexperienced and raw as she was—didn’t respond in a conventional way. She didn’t blush and tell him she wasn’t beautiful at all—but instead came out with something which sounded almost slick.

‘And you,’ she cooed back, looking straight into his black eyes, ‘are very handsome.’

He smiled. ‘A perfect match, then?’

She tipped her head back. ‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?’

‘Probably.’ He leaned forward, so that her face was bathed in the dark spotlight of his gaze. ‘Especially as we haven’t even kissed. Don’t you think that’s a shocking omission, my beauty? So shocking that I think we ought to remedy it right now.’

She remembered the way her heart had crashed loudly against her ribcage. The way her mouth had dried with anticipation and the words had just come tumbling out of her mouth. ‘Who says I’m going to kiss you?’

‘I do.’

And he did.

In that shadowy corner of some anonymous house in the Swiss mountains, while outside flakes of snow floated past the window like big, white feathers, he kissed her.

He kissed her so intensely that Alannah thought she might faint. He kissed her for so long that she wanted him never to stop. It was like that pile of bone-dry sticks she’d once built on a long-ago holiday to Ireland—she remembered the way they’d combusted into flames the moment her aunt had put a match to them. Well, it was a bit like that now.

She was on fire.

His thumb brushed over her breast and Alannah wriggled with excitement. Because surely this was what she had been made for—to stand in this man’s arms and be touched by him. To have him look at her as if she were the most beautiful woman in the world. He deepened the kiss to one of added intimacy and as he pushed his thigh between hers the atmosphere suddenly changed. It became charged. She could feel the flood of liquid heat to her groin and the sudden, almost painful hardening of her nipples as they pushed insistently against his chest. His breath was unsteady as he pulled away from her and there was a primitive emotion on his face which she didn’t recognise.

‘We’d better think about moving somewhere more comfortable,’ he said roughly. ‘Somewhere with a bed.’

Alannah never had a chance to reply because suddenly the mood was broken by some kind of commotion at the door. She felt him tense as Michela burst into the room with snow melting on her raven hair, and the guilty look on her friend’s face when she saw Niccolò told its own story.

It was unfortunate that Michela was surrounded by the miasma of sickly-sweet marijuana smoke—and even more unfortunate when Niccolò’s discreet enquiries the next day yielded up the information that both girls were already on a formal warning from the school. A small matter of the building’s elaborate fire-alarm system having been set off by the two of them hanging out of a dormitory window, smoking.

Alannah would never forget the look of passion dying on Niccolò’s face, only to see it being replaced with one of disgust as he looked at her. She remembered wanting to wither beneath it.

‘You are my sister’s friend?’ he questioned incredulously. ‘Her school friend?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen.’

All the colour drained from his face and he looked as if she’d hit him. ‘So Michela associates with a puttana, does she?’ he hissed. ‘A cheap little tart who puts out for strangers at parties.’

‘I d-don’t remember you objecting,’ she stammered, stung into defending herself, even if deep down she felt she had no real defence to offer.

‘No man objects when a woman offers herself to him on a plate like that,’ he snapped.

The following day he had withdrawn Michela from the school and shortly afterwards the head teacher had summoned Alannah and her mother to her office. The head had clearly been furious at the prospect of having to say goodbye to Niccolò da Conti’s generous donations to the school. She had told Alannah that her behaviour was unacceptable and her mother had pre-empted the inevitable expulsion by offering up her resignation.

‘I’m not having my girl scapegoated by some rich financier,’ she’d said fiercely. ‘If you’re going to heap all the blame on her, then this is not the kind of school for her.’

Of course, that was not an end to it—merely the beginning of a nightmare which put the whole Niccolò incident to the back of her mind.

But she’d never grassed up Michela and Michela had remained loyal to her ever since.

Her thoughts cleared and she saw her friend looking at her in the dressing-table mirror, her face still glowing from her pre-wedding facial, and Alannah sighed as she met Michela’s questioning gaze. ‘Maybe it would be better if I just bowed out, if it’s going to cause a massive row between you and your brother. I’ll just stand at the back like everyone else and throw rose petals. I can live with that.’

Michela glared as she put her hairbrush down.