Free His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm

nothing, but seemed reassured. Pulling away from Alfonso, she took a blue damask cloak from the back of another chair and swung it around her shoulders, then kissed him again. The kiss was brief, but arousing: had he not been sorely pressed for time, Alfonso thought, it might well have resulted in his detaining her at the cottage some while longer. Her lips lingered against his for a moment, and then she was gone.
    He looked around the room as he finished dressing. The largest room in the little villetta , it was simply furnished: a wide, canopied bed dominated, but several other charming pieces of furniture gave it an old-fashioned appeal. Alfonso ran his fingers over the carving on a small wooden chest at the foot of the bed. This in particular gave him great pleasure, worked as it was by none other than Filippo di Quercia.
    Alfonso recalled the women with whom he had coupled in this room—over a period of more than ten years, he realised. Some he remembered more clearly than others. Lisabeta, sweet-faced paragon of all the virtues of the bedchamber; the appalling Agnese and now Francesca, his—He stopped himself. He had been about to say “courtesan” but in fact the only word that would serve adequately to describe the redoubtable Signorina Felizzi was “whore.” A seemingly limitless lack of inhibition. A sharp mind, though, to accompany the exquisite body, and a refreshing—though at times disarming—honesty, which Alfonso always found reassuring in a world where sycophancy and flattery were almost universal.
    He shrugged on his coat, gathered up the rest of his things and left the villetta . Collecting his mare from where she had been stabled, he quickly readied her for riding. Folletto yawned, stretched long legs and got lazily to his feet from where he had been curled in the hay, as Alfonso swung up into the saddle. He turned the mare towards the Castello and the wolfhound loped beside the horse, keeping pace with ease.
    The hours he spent with Francesca, Alfonso reflected, were perhaps the most honest he passed anywhere. Her enthusiastic response to his preferences was pleasing: few women seemed genuinely to derive the enjoyment she did from an appetite as demanding as his own. He knew, though, that he had just been considerably less than truthful with her about his new duchess. Hot shame broke over him again, and he saw in his mind an image of Lucrezia back in Mugello in August. He had been enchanted by her naïve charm at the start of that visit, and had begun, he knew, to believe that he was acquiring a truly admirable consort. Despite the worrying evidence of that potentially troublesome streak of inappropriate independence, he had thought his new wife to be someone who might not only bestow prestige upon the House of Este by virtue of the nobility of her own family, but who would—Alfonso searched for the right word—become another conduit for his not inconsiderable energies. Energies he had never before questioned.
    When he lay with Francesca, he was always utterly and completely overwhelmed by a soaring sense of physical abandonment, and for those moments his normally chaotic mind was subsumed by the sensations that invaded his body. He had never expected his whore to meet any but his baser needs, and he knew that Francesca was aware of how effectively she fulfilled those demands. But—he could hardly bear to articulate it, even to himself—something about his new wife had… unmanned him. Alfonso clenched his fists, and the mare snatched at the tightening reins, tossing her head irritably.
    Images of Lucrezia jostled in his mind. He had found her captivating in Mugello. The vivid smile. The boyish figure and the obvious innocence. Her unformed and instinctive responses to the artistic treasures that had surrounded her since childhood—surprisingly impressive. All charming. All adding to the sum of the various elements he had hoped to combine in the