The Dark Heart of Florence: Number 6 in series (Michele Ferrara) Read Online Free PDF Page A

empty of everything else – objects, thoughts, worries – and they alone were left, with the love that had thrown them into each other’s arms and the unstoppable desire to embrace and caress and melt into each other until they became a single body and a single soul.
    When they both felt fully satisfied, they moved apart and lay side by side, exhausted. Only their fingers remained locked together, an afterglow of the desire they had just experienced. The deep silence of the room was disturbed only by their breathing.
    An hour later, Angelica brought in the breakfast on a tray. Guendalina, who was still lying on top of the sheets, sat up and propped herself against the headboard. And when her friend turned to go, she watched her as she walked back to the kitchen. With her enviable physique, tall and slim with small breasts and a flat, firm stomach, she was truly beautiful and sensual, enough to take your breath away.
     
    Angelica had been her social worker for two years. But actually she was more than that: she was her confidante, her safety valve. It was Angelica who had arranged for her to be assigned a single cell, following the first attempt by another lesbian inmate to take advantage of her.
    Guendalina had told her about her sad childhood, the suffering experienced by her mother, who had died of stomach cancer while she was in prison. Her grandmother had had the same disease, and she was scared that one day she too might be struck down by that terrible monster.
    Angelica was the only person she had told her true motive for killing her stepfather. He was a brute who would return home in a drunken rage and beat her mother, who, either out of fear or to avoid a scandal, had never called the police. One day, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, unable to stand yet another act of violence, she had steeled herself, taken a long, sharp knife from the kitchen, gone to his bed while he was asleep and cut his throat. The memory of his hot blood spattering her hand and face had stayed with her for years, haunting her dreams.
    But she had never felt any remorse. Why should she? The man had also tried to abuse her. And it was that attempted assault that had reinforced her lack of interest in men.
    Angelica was also the only person to whom she had dared reveal what had become her obsession: to live in such a way as to make up for lost time.
    And it had been Angelica, in her role as social worker, who had written a report assessing her character that had contributed in no small measure to her sentence being reduced:…
the detainee seems genuinely repentant for the act she committed and does not demonstrate any criminal impulses. On this basis, the possibility that she would commit further criminal acts once released can be ruled out. Her reintegration into society seems a foregone conclusion.
    Now, at last, Guendalina felt happy.
    For the first time she felt comfortable in the world, the real world. And comfortable with love too, perhaps. She closed her eyes, and was unaware that Angelica had come back into the bedroom until she felt her lean over the bed and received her passionate kiss and heard her sweet, languid voice: ‘I want to make love to you again.’ She felt Angelica’s lips at her ear and the warmth of her tanned body as she embraced her.
    ‘You’re so damn sexy, Angi, with these little hearts and flowers tattooed on your back. In prison I always looked forward to our meetings. Every time you left it seemed like an endless wait until I saw you again. I was always really sad.’
    ‘And I couldn’t wait to have you here with me. Just the two of us, alone.’
    They took up just where they had left off, with an urgency even greater than last time, if such a thing were possible. It wasn’t just desire, it was also anticipation, the hope that Guendalina’s world could be rebuilt – with all the things she thought she had lost for ever, but which she now wanted more than ever.
    They consummated their passion