‘You look like the cat that got the cream,’ Lady Margaret observed, as Tamra sipped her morning cocktail.
‘Honey, I got the cream about five times in every conceivable place!’ Tamra said naughtily, but at a pitch low enough for none of the staff to hear. Her friend spluttered out cappuccino foam. ‘Dominic turns out to be the biggest stud ever. Honestly, I may never need to pay for it again!’
God, I wish I were still up there in his room, she thought wistfully. It had been so tough to get up at dawn and slip out without waking him. She’d struggled with the temptation to pull back the bedcurtains, to see him in a sliver of the morning light that was filtering in through a crack in the curtains at the high-framed window: but the light might have woken him, and he’d have pulled her back for another bout – mmn, morning sex, slow and sticky and languid – and then Stanclere Hall would be stirring, which meant someone might have seen her sneaking down the corridor, like a teenager coming back from doing her boyfriend under her parents’ roof. Which would be way too humiliating.
I wonder how he felt when he woke up and realized I wasn’t there? I hope he missed me.
She grinned at how pathetic she sounded, like a sixteen-year-old with a mad crush. God, she hadn’t felt like this since she didn’t remember when!
‘Darling, you need to get a grip on yourself,’ Lady Margaret said, her eyebrows raised. ‘You look positively giddy.’
‘I am giddy,’ Tamra said, thanking the waiter bringing her coffee with so beautiful a smile that he almost tripped as he put it in front of her. ‘Which is fabulous. You know I don’t want anything serious – this guy’s perfect. I’ll fuck his brains out for a few weeks or months, see if it burns out or not. Have a lovely time and no expectations. What could be better?’
‘Well, if you put it like that . . .’
Her friend raised her own Bloody Mary and clinked it with Tamra’s.
‘These are delicious, by the way,’ Lady Margaret said approvingly.
‘Good and spicy,’ Tamra said with great satisfaction, extracting a pickled green bean from her glass and biting into it with a snap of her perfect white teeth.
Then she paused, the second half of the bean still between her fingers. Dominic had entered the dining room, and he didn’t look remotely as she had expected. After the night they’d had, the sheer volume of orgasms, the amount of blood rushing to their faces, the sheer delight they’d given each other, he should have looked as glowing as she did: tired, maybe, but also smug, his eyes meeting hers with conspiracy about their shared secret.
But Dominic, instead, just seemed – hungover. His eyes were bloodshot, the bags underneath them were large enough to store bowling balls, and his gait was shambling: not in an I-fucked-a-hot-cougar-all-last-night way, more I-passed-out-in-an-armchair-and-my-back-is-fucking-killing-me. Tamra stared at him in disbelief. His curly hair was plastered to his forehead, damp and unattractively sweaty.
‘My God, what did you do to that poor boy?’ Lady Margaret huffed out a laugh. ‘He looks like a shell of his former self! Honestly, Tamra, he looks like you sucked his brains out through his cock!’
Tamra couldn’t help a giggle at this, even as she stared, bemused, at Dominic. His hair was so curly: surely she’d remember that texture between her fingers? His lips were full, pouty – they hadn’t felt that wide and luscious when she kissed them, bit them, when they fastened between her legs last night and made her scream with pleasure. And the cock he’d pressed her hand against in the corridor, she recalled, had felt considerably smaller than the one that had driven itself, on her orders, up her ass last night as she wailed and bit down on the pillow—
She was on her feet without even realizing it, the heavy dining chair rocking back as she jumped up reflexively, picking up her cup of coffee in one hand, the Bloody Mary in the other, walking swiftly over to Dominic and saying to him: ‘Come outside on the terrace for a moment, okay?’
Close up, he was even more pitiful-looking; the whites of his eyes were pink as an albino rat’s, his skin was greyish with fatigue and he didn’t smell as fresh as he could have done. Tamra’s brow was furrowed in confusion as she led him to the terrace doors, nodded at him abruptly to open them, walked outside, leaning against the balcony in the sunshine, the cool air was a sharp relief to her overheated face. Dominic winced at the sunlight, turning himself with his back to the east, hunching his shoulders against it. Tamra handed him the coffee, saying sharply: ‘Drink that up and tell me what the hell happened last night.’
Too sharply: Dominic coughed on his mouthful of coffee, dribbling it down his shirt front.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said, when he finally managed to swallow some. ‘What d’you want from me? I drank too much and passed out. I’ve got the most hellish hangover, if you must know. I woke up in a room reeking of the smell of my own puke.’
Tamra blinked frantically, trying to process this information. The glass in her hand was shaking; she looked down at it as if she had no idea what she was even holding.
‘What room?’ she heard herself say. ‘What room did you wake up in?’
‘Why is this even a question? Why does it matter? Fuck, my head hurts like buggery,’ Dominic whined.
Tamra took the coffee cup from him and handed him the Bloody Mary instead.
‘Try that,’ she snapped.
‘Oh, hair of the dog.’ Dominic cheered up a little as he took a long pull on the cocktail. ‘Nice one.’
‘What room did you pass out in?’ Tamra hissed at him. Through the French doors, she saw her daughter come in for breakfast, sitting down next to Lady Margaret.
‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss about this,’ Dominic said fretfully. ‘It’s not like I put a rotting fish in your bed, is it? Look, I’ll leave something extra for the maids if that’s the problem here. Did one of them come and complain to you? Bloody sneaking if she did. It’s Ed’s house, when all’s said and done, and if I put a fish in my host’s bed as a joke, that’s between him and me.’
‘A fish?’ Tamra repeated blankly.
‘Bit of a traditional thing here when someone gets engaged,’ Dominic said. ‘Going to have a fish in your bed for the rest of your life – see how that works? Jolly funny, really. Bastard couldn’t take it like a man, though, complained about the stink and made me swap rooms with him—’
His face convulsed suddenly and he thrust the glass back at Tamra as if it were burning him.
‘Feel a bit sick – that fish smell was really strong when I woke up,’ he muttered, and turned to dash down the stone steps to the lawn, where he could be heard gagging.
Tamra actually envied him: she wanted to throw up too. Wordlessly, she lifted the glass to her lips and drained it, then she walked like a zombie back to the terrace doors, a footman coming forward to open them for her, since both her hands were full. She handed the glass and coffee cup to him and sank into a seat at the table opposite Brianna Jade and Lady Margaret, her face as frozen as Brianna Jade’s had been yesterday.
‘Mom?’ Brianna Jade said, worried. ‘Are you okay?’
Say something, you have to say something – everyone’s staring at you.
‘Uh, I’m pretty grossed out by Dominic,’ Tamra managed to say. ‘He just told me he put a rotten fish in Edmund’s bed last night as part of some disgusting British tradition for when men get engaged.’
‘Oh yuk!’ Brianna Jade exclaimed, her lovely eyes widening with shock. ‘That’s totally gross – why would anyone do that?’
Lady Margaret was frowning deeply as she looked at Tamra, but she was too intelligent to say a word until she had worked out exactly what was happening.
‘Good morning!’ came a very cheerful, ringing masculine voice from the doorway, and in strode the Earl of Respers, his face lit up like a hundred-watt bulb, his grey eyes glowing as they lighted on the face of his fiancée. ‘Hello, darling!’
A few swift paces brought him to Brianna Jade’s side, and he bent to plant a pas
sionate kiss on her mouth: she let out a little yelp, a hand rising to her lips, and Edmund looked briefly embarrassed as he pulled up the chair on her other side and sat down.
‘Sorry,’ he said. He lifted her hand and brought it to his lips as Mrs Hurley sighed fondly by the buffet table. Brianna Jade looked at him in great confusion as he kissed it, staring deeply into her eyes, then he jumped up, saying: ‘God, I think I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been in my life! I’m absolutely starving!’ He winked at his fiancée. ‘I can’t think why I’ve worked up such an appetite!’
For a moment, Tamra and Lady Margaret’s eyes met across the table in outright, horrified understanding. Tamra bit her lip so deeply she tasted blood.
‘Oh, good morning!’ trilled Milly, flitting into the dining room on a cloud of Anaïs Anaïs; she had decided that the perfume was so out it was in again, and that it would give her an extra, trendsetting edge to be the one to bring it back into fashion. ‘How’s everyone doing? Brianna Jade, sweetie, are you feeling better? Such a shame you weren’t feeling well last night!’ She leant in towards her victim. ‘Maybe you should have taken a nice stroll outside and got some fresh air? That seems to, um, pick you up, doesn’t it?’
This was a catastrophic misjudgement on Milly’s part. Emboldened by her success at the photo- and videoshoots the day before, she had quite lost sight of the fact that her target was sitting with her mother and Lady Margaret. Tamra’s head rose slowly to look at Milly, her eyes two dark dead black holes in a pale face, the high blonde ponytail bouncing, the very image of a psychotic Barbie.
‘Oh goodness,’ Lady Margaret breathed, setting down her coffee cup as Tamra rose slowly to her feet, pushing back her chair.
Milly blanched as white as her floaty shirt-dress. Tamra’s expression was as terrifying as if she’d actually been the cougar Dominic called her: all her protective, tiger-mother instincts for her daughter surged to the fore, propelled by the rush of absolute, burning horror at the realization of what she had done the night before with her daughter’s fiancé. Her own sense of the terrible betrayal she had committed made her shiver from head to toe as it sank in. She leaned forward, her palms on the table for support.
To Milly, it looked as if Tamra’s fury was caused entirely by her own words, and she flinched back in fear as Tamra hissed at her across the width of the table.
‘Get. Out.’
‘I – I—’ Milly stammered. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Oh yes you did,’ Tamra breathed. ‘I know exactly what you meant! Get out of this house – now, before I throw you out! How dare you come in here as a guest and deliberately try to upset my daughter? You’ve already done enough damage – get out without saying another word, or I’ll tear your face off!’
Milly was used to actresses throwing tantrums, make-up artists being bitchy, directors yelling in frustration or trying to seduce her. But she was a sheltered girl brought up in an upper-middle-class household, and never, ever, had she been confronted by a working-class woman used to scrapping down and dirty. Milly couldn’t move: she stood there, paralysed, as Edmund turned from the buffet table with the baffled expression of a man who’s suddenly found himself in the middle of a catfight.
‘Wait, what’s all this about?’ he said.
‘Let Tamra deal with this, Ed,’ Lady Margaret said quickly to him, seeing how Tamra’s eyes darkened even more at the sound of Edmund’s voice. ‘Stay out of it.’
Taking Milly’s inability to budge as a sign not of fear but of defiance, Tamra stormed around the head of the table, and Milly actually squealed in panic and darted behind Edmund, thinking that Tamra was coming for her. Instead, Tamra swept magnificently out of the room and could be heard tearing up the staircase. It sounded as if she were taking the treads two at a time. Irresistibly, drawn as if by a powerful magnet, every guest and most of the staff present in the dining room filtered outside into the Great Hall. No one dared to follow Tamra upstairs, but a degree of crashing and banging could be heard from the unrenovated guest wing, and in just a couple of minutes, Tamra emerged on the long balcony that led to the staircase, clasping an armful of clothes, two terrified-looking maids following her, laden with more clothes and Milly’s luggage.
‘Here!’ Tamra screamed, opening her arms and dropping Milly’s clothes theatrically down the two-storeys-high well of the staircase. ‘Take all your boho hippy-dippy crap and get the hell out of here!’
Underwear, tights, blouses, jeans tumbled down onto the polished wood floor. Tamra reached for the second bundle the maid was carrying and grabbed a pair of shoes in one hand, at which everyone shrieked and ducked back against the wall.
‘Mom, no!’ Brianna Jade yelled.
Tamra was breathing so hard that everyone could hear her panting: apart from her daughter, the rest of the spectators were keeping as silent as they could to avoid drawing down her wrath on their own heads. Courageously, Brianna Jade stepped out into the hallway, directly into Tamra’s line of fire, crossing her fingers that Tamra wouldn’t see a blonde head and start chucking shoes at it before she realized her target was her own daughter.
‘Mom, stop!’ she called. ‘You’ve made your point, okay? She’ll go! Don’t throw any shoes! Or Jesus – Mom, put down the curling tongs! Put them down!’
‘I think you should probably nip out the back to the garages,’ Lady Margaret said to Milly in an undertone. ‘No point staying here now, is there? We’ll find Tarquin and send him out to you. I’ll get a maid to, er, re-pack your cases.’
‘Clearly, this is a terribly awkward situation, but even with my duty as a host to guests under my roof, I have to second Tamra’s decision,’ Edmund said gravely, walking out to stand next to Brianna Jade, his deeper voice and his quiet authority drawing every eye. Even Tamra, who had snatched Milly’s curling tongs from the pile the maid was carrying, and was poised with one arm back, rather like the statue of the discus thrower in the gazebo, still panting as loudly as an athlete in the middle of a race, stared down at him, his serious grey eyes meeting hers for a moment before he turned to encircle her daughter with one arm, regarding Brianna Jade with great devotion.
‘My fiancée comes first,’ Edmund continued, as Lady Margaret hustled Milly away before Tamra could send the tongs or the shoes hurtling down towards her target’s blonde head. ‘I can’t permit anyone, even an invited guest, to treat Brianna Jade with anything less than the respect she deserves. I did notice how upset you were yesterday,’ he added to Brianna Jade more quietly, ‘but I didn’t realize it was Milly causing it. I do apologize for not asking you about it yesterday, but I’m so glad you came to find me last night.’ He squeezed her tightly.
‘I don’t understand—’ Brianna Jade started to say, looking up at him in puzzlement.
‘What’s going on?’ Sophie’s voice came from up above them, and they both craned back to look at her. ‘I heard screaming – is everything all right?’
‘Tamra’s chucking Milly out for winding up Brianna Jade,’ Dominic said, strolling out from the dining room. He had a full glass of Bloody Mary in one hand, a cheese muffin in the other, and looked a little better: after his last retching fit had proved abortive, with practically nothing left to come up, he was proceeding to re-line his stomach.
‘Oh, fair enough,’ Sophie said, leaning on the balcony and heaving a long yawn. She was wearing a towelling robe, and her feet were in fluffy mules. ‘Milly was being pretty vile yesterday. Did she finally go too far?’
‘Clearly,’ Dominic said, shrugging his shoulders.
Behind Sophie, down the corridor, the footman who had brought the breakfast she had requested to have served in her suite slipped out, tucking his shirt into his trousers and buttoning his waistcoat, heading down towards the service stairs with a very self-satisfied smile on his face: Sophie had always had a taste for working-class men in uniform.
‘Oh, breakfast was delicious, by the way,’ Sophie added with an equally satisfied smile, checking out of the corner of her
eye that the footman had made his escape discreetly. ‘Thank you so much, Tamra. I must say, your hospitality is first-rate in every respect ...’
‘Dom, would you go and roust out Tarquin?’ Edmund asked. ‘Tell him I’m sorry and all that, but one simply can’t have this kind of thing going on.’
‘Absolutely,’ Dominic said, starting to climb the stairs, leaving a muffin crumb trail scattered behind him as he went. He winked at Tamra as he passed her. ‘Look, sorry about last night,’ he muttered, reaching out to give her a discreet pat on the bottom. ‘I’ll make it up to you tonight, eh? Believe me, when I’m not completely blotto, I know how to give a girl a good time. Got a lot of tricks up my sleeve. This time tomorrow you’ll be telling everyone that was the best shag you ever had – trust me on that.’
Tamra made such an awful choking sound that everyone down in the Hall looked up, concerned that she was having a fit. The shoes and curling tongs fell from her hands. One high heel nearly tumbled through the open balustrade and down onto the maid who was now, under Mrs Hurley’s instructions, on her knees swiftly gathering up Milly’s scattered clothes; the maid screeched in fear, but Dominic, showing great aplomb, punted the shoe aside just in time, knocking it back onto the hallway carpet.
‘Nicely done, if I do say so myself,’ he observed complacently.
Tamra turned and ran. Down the balcony and into the corridor that led to the main wing of Stanclere Hall, heading with a sprinter’s speed for her rooms, slamming the door behind her and, her whole body shaking, grabbing the tasselled cord on the wall of her living room and tugging on it so hard that if it had been one of the old bell-pulls it would have come straight out of the ceiling in a cloud of dust and plaster. But this had been one of her innovations when this wing had been remodelled, to keep the idea of old-fashioned bell-pulls, so familiar to everyone from Downton Abbey, and she had organized the rewiring of the ancient system so that it was now electrically operated: a tug on the cord rang pagers clipped to the waist of three maids who, between them, were responsible for the main wing on a shift system, two on duty at any time during the day.
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