Ardor Read Online Free Page B

perhaps because he knew he shouldn’t be looking at them. Perfect, that was all.
    After a night of delirious dreams, her legs entangled with his, the clinging, rich perfume of warm salt bodies released with every rise and fall of the quilt, the air outside the bed cold, strands of her hair lay across his face, stray hairs in his mouth, his arm forming a pillow for her neck. Her almost imperceptible breathing, the only sound in the world just then, made him hold his own breath so terrified was he of waking her and disturbing her. Her mouth, slightly open in repose, plucked a string that connected straight and deep to his loins and set them twanging with pleasure.
    Yes, on the morning directly after he had seen this dream, the morning of Easter Sunday, Arcadio Carnabuci, dredging himself reluctantly from the slow, deep, burning sultry beauty of the night, and the heavy fug of sleep, was jarred to reality and shocked to discover miniature fruit dangling from slender tendrils beneath the leaves of his saplings. It was incredible. There had been no hint of them the night before. And here they were. Three of them. Triplets.
    They were unlike any fruit he had ever seen. They were the shape of eggplants, only small, so small, and sweet, with a creamy-colored flesh splotched irregularly but charmingly with brown, like the markings of a Friesian cow. And literallyas he watched, the fruit swelled. Their little bellies grew rounded and sleek. He couldn’t resist touching them ever so gently with the pad of a finger, a touch as light as a blade of grass bowing to the breeze. He was almost certain he heard a giggle coming from the tickled fruit.
    Impatiently he waited for the public library to open after Holy Week, for he wanted to find out all he could about the love seeds (the peddler had been cryptically vague when questioned about cultivation, but had made elaborate promises for his seeds and sworn Arcadio Carnabuci wouldn’t be disappointed). The first morning of reopening, he was loitering on the steps as Speranza Patti, the church organist who was also the town librarian, arrived at work. She ignored him, hoping he would slink away again, but Arcadio Carnabuci was a persistent man. Although she attempted to shut the heavy door against him, he followed her inside and spent several hours rummaging among the shelves in the section on agronomy and horticulture.
    All the while, in some discomfort, Speranza Patti tried to perform her duties while keeping a trembling finger close to the panic button. What on earth could Arcadio Carnabuci want in the public library? He wasn’t even a member. She shivered at the thought that they were alone together in the building. Who knew what he was capable of? Anything could happen. Unbeknown to her, Arcadio Carnabuci had his head buried in Lucentini’s aged volume of Exotic Fruits . He was not a fast reader, and painstakingly he examined each and every pagelooking for something that resembled his own precious fruits, but when he reached the end, he had found nothing even remotely similar.
    With equal care he ploughed his way through every other volume in the section: treatises on beans, encyclopedias of plants, compendiums, digests, dictionaries, directories, handbooks. None bore fruit. His fruit were unique: of a type unknown to botanists and husbandmen. This confirmed what he had already himself suspected: they were little miracles, all his own. His slight feelings of disappointment at his fruitless search were outbalanced by his secret joy at his own fruits’ uniqueness and he left the library singing.
    At last Speranza Patti was able to relax and enjoy her bread and cheese in peace behind the counter, but she had developed a cramp in her forefinger that took a long time to ease. Word that Arcadio Carnabuci had been skulking in the town library soon circulated, and Speranza Patti was besieged by citizens who demanded to know what he had been doing in there. The library had