Tamra wasn’t a typical pageant mom, living through her daughter’s success, letting her own looks fade in order to channel everything into the younger version of herself, willing to sacrifice her daughter’s own wishes ruthlessly on an altar bedecked with crowns and prize money. Tamra had firmly told the many people in Kewanee who’d pushed her to get her adorable little five-year-old into kiddie pageants where they could stick it. Brianna Jade would have as normal a childhood as her mother could manage, though Tamra had to work long days at the feed store and pull night shifts at the local bar, Hogs and Cobs, while she scrabbled to maintain a network of fellow moms who would watch Brianna Jade for her.
No point asking her folks for help: she’d been thrown out of the house when she got knocked up by her boyfriend, Brian Schladdenhouffer, even though he’d swallowed hard, manned up and proposed when he heard the news. And no point looking to the Schladdenhouffers either; they’d blamed her for everything, from ‘trapping’ their son (whose clumsy condom skills had actually been to blame for the pregnancy) to pretty much causing his death in the combine-harvester accident because, according to them, he’d been so distracted by being trapped that he had slipped and fallen from the machine during refuelling. Not a pleasant way to go.
Well, screw them all, the Krantzes and the Schladdenhouffers both, a sixteen-year-old Tamra Jean Krantz with a bellyful of baby had thought, setting her jaw firmly and not looking back. She’d worked her ass off, schemed with everything she had to give her daughter a big break that would take BJ into a better life; what she hadn’t expected was that the break would happen to her, passing through Jacksonville, Florida, pumping gas into her beat-up old Hyundai, which was pretty much held together with duct tape at that point. Ken Maloney, pulling into the gas station in his shiny silver Lexus convertible, had looked over, seen the way Tamra handled that nozzle and fallen in lust on the spot. And after three consecutive nights spent wining, dining but most certainly not bedding Tamra, he had fallen in love as well.
‘I fell for your pretty face, honey, but I stayed for what was behind it,’ he’d always said to her fondly. Tamra wasn’t educated, but she had a brain like a steel trap, and Ken took great pleasure in teaching his new bride all about the intricacies of the fracking industry. Tamra had been thirty-five then, Ken seventy-four; she had been honest with him, had told him that she wasn’t in love with him when he proposed, and Ken had responded that if she’d pretended she was he would have taken back the offer. And of course she was grateful to Ken, not just for his kindness to her but to Brianna Jade, who had been nineteen when Tamra and Ken married.
Ken had saved them just as Tamra was really starting to panic about her and BJ’s future, but he’d always maintained he’d got the best end of the bargain. Tamra had kept him laughing from morning till night, and proved such a natural in the fracking business that he’d brought her in as an equal partner, tearing up the prenup on their second anniversary. By their fifth, he’d dropped dead of a major heart attack, but he’d always said he wanted to go with a smile on his face and Tamra on top of him – and bless him, that’s exactly what happened, his widow thought fondly. His doctor warned him about how much Viagra he was taking, and Ken just said, ‘Hey, Dr Katz, you’ve seen my wife in her bikini at the country club, right?’ and Dr Katz sighed and refilled the prescription.
Tamra had been taken aback at how much she missed Ken. She had come to feel huge affection for her husband, who had adored her and given her so much, and she found herself unwilling to stay in the home that they had shared and in which they had found a surprising amount of marital happiness. So she had decided on a fresh start, even though the highest ranks of West Palm Beach society would still be open to her and BJ as long as Tamra upped her donations to the fundraising charities and benefits: Ken Maloney’s widow might not be liked by the women who ran that world, but her money most certainly was.
Still, Tamra didn’t want to mope around a marble palace in Florida with memories of Ken everywhere she turned and nowhere further to rise in their social circles. She had much bigger ambitions. Why stay in the States to be patronized by would-be ladies when she could go to the UK and meet the real ones? On that TV series Downton Abbey, the whole set-up was based on the American heiress who’d gone to Britain and married an Earl who needed the money to fix up his stately home. Well, Tamra was willing to bet there were plenty of titled guys in the UK whose houses could do with a big cash infusion.
Besides, she could run the fracking business from the London office perfectly well. Their company had fracked wells successfully in the Ukraine and Poland, which were waiting to be fully exploited; plus there was the European Union to be lobbied with assurances that fracking could be done responsibly and without the horror stories of polluted drinking water and natural gas explosions which were rife in the US. The more Tamra considered it, the more she realized that being based in Europe would be a business as well as a personal advantage.
But Tamra needed to see her daughter settled well. Brianna Jade wasn’t going to follow her mom into the fracking business; she didn’t have the drive or the ambition to run a company, and Tamra was no believer in nepotism. With her sweet nature and domestic tendencies, all Brianna Jade wanted – really, pretty much all she had ever wanted – was to marry a nice guy and start having a home and kids. Fine, but why shouldn’t Tamra get the best husband possible for her daughter? Not just nice, but titled too? Prince Hugo was married, and Prince Toby, his cousin, was famously too wild a playboy to make a good husband, but if she couldn’t get a prince for her Fracking Princess, a Duke or an Earl would do nicely . . .
Tamra’s glass was empty. She refilled it from the bottle resting inside the built-in veneered wine cooler, an addition she had insisted Bentley custom-make, and for which they’d billed her a fortune.
Well, I did it. I snagged my baby an Earl, just like on Downton Abbey, and a lovely one too. He’ll make her a great husband – Lord knows, I know men, and I picked a good one out for Brianna Jade. And all those bitches who ruled West Palm Beach and looked down on me and my daughter for coming from hog country are gonna feel like their stomachs are burning up with acid for the rest of their lives every time they read about the Countess of Respers in the society magazines.
It was the icing on the cake. Tamra would never have insisted Brianna Jade marry an aristocrat simply to spite the West Palm Beach Competitive Starvation League, but hey, if their suffering added whipped cream and cherries to the top of the sundae, Tamra would relish that too. And she sure as hell did. It was time to celebrate.
Let’s go shopping, she thought with an even more cat-got-the-cream smile. Mommy needs some me time.
She set down her glass, used the remote control to bring up the internet on the screen in front of her – the Flying Spur had a built-in Wi-Fi hub – and navigated swiftly to one of her favourite sites, inputting her search criteria and scrolling through the results with considerable interest. After much consideration, she picked two options, placed her order, specified the delivery time and logged off in the happy certainty of a job very well done. She emailed some instructions to her live-in housekeeper, slid out the wireless headphones from their discreet slot, put them on, clicked again with the remote and loaded the audiobook of what most people would consider a bizarrely unlikely suggestion for a Fracking Queen to listen to: Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers.
But, having caught the bug from Downton Abbey, Tamra had become obsessed with biographies of American heiresses who had come to Britain in the nineteenth century to find titled husbands. Consuelo Vanderbilt, with a vast dowry garnered from her father’s US railways, had married the Duke of Marlborough, while his brother, Lord Randolph Churchill, had snapped up Jennie Jerome. May Goelet, the richest American girl of all, had been sponsored into society by the Prince of Wales himself, and had her choice of European royalty and half a dozen British peers before finally settling on the Duke of Roxburghe. Then there was Winnaretta Singer, of the sewing-machine fortune, w
ho went to France and snagged the Prince de Polignac. It turned out it was way easier to find princes on the Continent, but Tamra was very grateful they hadn’t had to cross the Channel to find BJ a nice aristo husband – it was foreign enough for her in Britain sometimes.
And as well as the biographies, there were not only the novels, but the films and TV series adapted from them. The American heroines in fiction all snagged their peers by being bright, sparky, charming and spirited, like Isabel Boncassen in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, who married a Marquis who would be Duke one day. Bettina Vanderpoel in The Shuttle fell for an Earl, Lord Mount Dunstan – unlike her poor sister, who only managed a baronet, and a nasty one into the bargain.
To her own surprise, Tamra, who had barely picked up a book in her life before, was finding all this literature utterly absorbing. She was almost sorry to turn off the audiobook when the Flying Spur pulled to a halt outside the discreet mechanical gate around the corner from her Chelsea mansion. Teodor, the very efficient Slovak chauffeur, pressed the remote that activated the gate, sliding the car down the passageway that led to her own private parking garage below the house.
‘Thank you, Teodor,’ Tamra said as he held the door open for her. ‘Once you’ve cleared the drink and food from the car and taken it to the kitchen, you and Marta can have the night off.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Maloney,’ Teodor said politely, and stood waiting, hands folded, as Tamra walked over to the garage lift; he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing anything so crass as beginning to clean out the Bentley until his employer was on her way up to her three-floor, thirty-room mansion.
The opulent master suite – mistress suite, Tamra liked to call it – of the Chelsea mansion which Lady Margaret McArdle, Tamra’s newly made British friend, had nicknamed the White House, spread across a large part of the third floor. Like Tamra, Lady Margaret was perpetually irreverent, one of the many common factors that had made them fast friends. When Tamra had first come to London, she had, in true nineteenth-century style, hired an indigent aristocrat, a divorcée who had manoeuvred her short marriage to a baronet into writing puff interviews for Hello!, Tatler and Majesty magazine, and was regularly engaged to chaperone rich Americans around London, introducing them into society.
But as soon as Tamra and Lady Margaret had met, at the bar at the House of Lords reception after the Berkeley Dress Show, the first official event of the London débutante season, the two women had bonded instantly, snapping together like magnets. The American newly minted multi-millionairess from Kewanee, Illinois and the Duke’s daughter with the bluest Anglo-Irish blood running in her veins were sisters under the skin, bawdy women who could drink most men under the table without blinking an eye. They could have run a bar in the heyday of the Wild West as a team, and managed the brothel upstairs too.
So the baronet’s divorcée was now distant history, and Lady Margaret McArdle was Tamra’s BFF: they were practically joined at the hip. Tamra had been very amused by the ‘White House’ comment, and it was never more apt than in the ‘mistress suite’, which comprised not just the huge, pristine white bedroom, but two walk-in dressing rooms for summer and winter wardrobes, a fur closet, and two bathrooms – because it could certainly not be assumed that a couple who shared a bed would ever want to share a bathroom. Both were walled and floored in almost-translucent Tuscan grey-veined marble, with walk-in rainforest showers, gigantic travertine sinks and, to Tamra’s great pleasure, sunken jacuzzis: she loathed the fashion for freestanding baths in the middle of the room. Where did you put your soap? Your body brush? Your glass of champagne? Your waterproof vibrator? Even your book?
Because Tamra was genuinely surprised by how much pleasure she was taking in reading ever since she had come to London. She had never had time before to stop and smell the roses, had been way too busy driving from one pageant to another, coaching her daughter, calculating strategies by which they could save a buck or two; and then, after marriage to Ken, she had thrown herself into learning the ropes of the cut-throat world of the fracking industry, Ken her enthusiastic guide. There had barely been a book in the whole sprawl of their entire Florida home, apart from maybe Warren Buffet’s authorized biography and a couple of Tom Clancys.
But now, I really love books. Who the hell saw that coming? I honestly think folks in Kewanee would be as surprised to see me reading a big English novel with tons of long words in it as they would Brianna Jade getting married to an Earl, Tamra reflected as she stepped out of the lift and turned into the opulent surroundings of her own private heaven. She exhaled in sheer bliss, not only at having so much space, but at being able to be alone in it.
Mine. All mine. For the first time in my life, a home I don’t have to share with a single living soul.
She’d always totally got the appeal of white interiors. They told people, straight away, that you were dripping in money, because you could afford the whole squad of cleaners it took to keep every surface free of the tiniest little stain or imperfection. The stately homes she’d visited, Tamra had noticed, were the opposite: they had dark wooden floors, elaborate rugs, tapestries, chintz upholsteries, tons of prints and patterns and stuff that hid the dirt. They kept the warmth in too, all those rugs and hangings, because the Dukes and Earls couldn’t afford to heat their stone walls any more – well, if they ever could.
But when you were new-money rich, you didn’t need to worry about that. You had underfloor heating beneath the marble expanses, so that you could walk around naked all day if you wanted and still feel deliciously warm in your glittering white ice palace. Which was precisely what Tamra did; entering her summer dressing room, she kicked off her shoes and stripped off her clothes, posting the latter down the built-in laundry chute to the utility room where Marta would sort out hand-wash from dry cleaning, unfastened her big rose-gold necklace, pinned up her matching red-gold hair and, naked as the day she was born but considerably more decorative, turned slowly in a full circle, examining her body in the array of angled mirrors in the hexagonal room.
She was a knockout still. Her skin was pale-golden tanned from Florida, topped up with spray treatments in London, and almost as smooth as Brianna Jade’s. Tamra had put on a few pounds during her marriage and she had settled into them. There was a slight rounding of the hips and buttocks, even a little convexity to her stomach. But fuck it, who cares? I’m forty, I look better than most twenty-year-olds and I don’t ever need to worry again about whether a man wants to fuck me, she thought with a wicked smile of anticipation. Her boobs, since the reduction, were perky and full but in proportion with the curves of her lower body, and you could barely see the scars below their round swell; she’d rubbed rosehip oil into them every day for two years, and now you had to go looking to even try to find them.
Tamra glanced up at the clock: only twenty minutes to go! I can’t wait! Strolling through the huge bedroom, over the white soft-as-snow alpaca rugs, she relished again the fact that all of this space was hers. That no one would or could come in without her say-so, even her beloved daughter. She adored Brianna Jade more than life itself, would put BJ’s welfare over her own in a heartbeat, but she had shared a bedroom with her daughter ever since she was born, until Tamra moved into Ken’s California King bed. Ken, bless him, had been uxorious, a word he had taught her; he’d wanted to fall asleep every night with his heavy, old-man, liver-spotted arm across the slender, chiffon-and-lace-clad waist of his miracle younger wife, a woman who had the body of an expensive hooker and the brain of a CEO.
But boy, that arm was real heavy sometimes, Tamra thought now. I’d lie awake and listen to him snore and think how lucky I was to be with him, and still sometimes it was all I could do to wait till I was a hundred per cent sure he wouldn’t wake up before I slid out from under and ran down to the water’s edge and walked into the ocean naked and just stood there, staring at the stars and the lights of the boats on the water, telling myself to suck it up, that it wouldn’t be for ever.
She smiled,
remembering.
And then sometimes, God help me, I’d go back upstairs, pull back the covers, suck Ken’s dick till it got hard and climb on top of him to give him another ride to weaken his heart just that little bit more, tip him over to the other side. Till finally, bless him, he got there.
He was a real good husband, Ken. He gave me everything I wanted, left it all to me with no strings attached, and all he asked was that I stay faithful to him. He said I’d have plenty of time to fool around after he was gone.
And boy, was he ever right!
In the bathroom that Tamra preferred, because it overlooked the gardens behind the house, Marta had done everything she had been asked to do in the email. A bottle of Cristal rested in one of the chilled wine coolers, a bottle of Ketel One vodka in the other: Tamra had had the coolers built into a travertine slab beside the curved, upholstered window seat, just as she’d added them to the specs for her Bentley. She liked her drink chilled and within easy access at all times. Frosted glasses, fresh from the freezer, were lined up in the wine fridge next to the coolers: on a silver plate lay a range of Charbonnel et Walker Marc de Champagne truffles, pink, milk and dark, displayed around a mound of hulled strawberries.
Just a couple more things to do . . .
From one of the opaque glass-fronted cupboards, Tamra extracted a sheet of black slate and a small suede case, both of which she placed on the marble next to the wine coolers. Then she pulled the Ketel One from its silver sheath, poured herself a shot, and sank it in one swift, practised go, staring at herself in the huge oval mirror above the sink. The ice-cold spirit burnt deliciously down the back of her throat; it would be the first of many.
Me time, dammit all! My daughter’s finally settled and out of the house, my own life can start. Wow, I’ve waited a long time for this . . .
Sliding open a drawer beneath the sink, she studied its contents before pulling out a ribbed purple finger-stall vibrator. Start small and build up. We’ve got a way to go tonight. In a couple of seconds, it was between her parted legs; she leant forward, gripping the marble edge of the sink surround with one hand, the other working on herself, never taking her eyes off her face and upper body, reflected back at her by the large mirror, refracted behind her by several others set around the bathroom to give her views of every angle. Her red-gold hair, piled on top of her head, her big dark eyes with their thick lashes, her parted lips, her perfect teeth, her perfect smooth pale golden skin . . .
Bad Brides Page 7