Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries (The Crystal Fragments Trilogy)

by M. J. Lawless

  Chapter Two

  It was not Filipe who came to collect her the next morning, though that didn’t particularly surprise her. He would be at the airport to meet Daniel. Since his accident a decade or so before, the one that had killed his wife, Karen, he had never driven again and there were very few people that he trusted behind a wheel. Filipe was one of them.

  Her driver was someone Kris hadn’t seen before, an older man with curly grey hair and a pleasant face, chubby and smiling. “You’re English?” he asked, his voice heavily accented but his enunciation clear.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Well, part-Portuguese, on my father’s side.”

  He nodded. “I’d heard that.” Despite the hint, he continued to speak in English and soon she realised why. “So, you’ve decided to return to Lisbon. I don’t blame you. I was in England for nearly ten years. I don’t think I ever saw a week without rain.”

  “And that’s where you met Mister Stone?” she asked. At this, the driver laughed.

  “No, I’ve never met him. But I knew Filipe’s father, and when I said I wanted to return home he found this job for me.” They were driving west, passing Madragoa and following the coastal road towards Belem. “Thank God. With things how they are, I’ve no idea what I would do otherwise.”

  During the half hour drive, Kris discovered that the driver, Jorge, had been in the merchant navy for a while, travelling the world before settling in London. After one brief exchange in Portuguese (more to test her assertion as to her parentage than anything else, she suspected), for the rest of the journey they spoke in English. Or, rather, Jorge mainly spoke and she mainly listened. He asked a few questions as to her relationship with Daniel: her reserve on that matter made her hesitant to reply, but it largely didn’t matter as he filled in what he thought were most of the necessary details.

  Kris felt a little more exhausted than she had expected when they finally arrived at the villa on the edges of Cascais. She could not help but feel trepidation mixed with her excitement at seeing Daniel after a week apart as they drove into the white-walled perimeter of his home from home when he was in Portugal. This, after all, had been a site of emotional humiliation (not on Daniel’s part, admittedly) as well as a variety of pleasures.

  She had returned since, of course. Ironically, for all that she loved the shambling, easygoing chaos of the old part of Lisbon, Daniel preferred the wealthier calm of the small Atlantic resort. The villa itself was large though not overtly ostentatious and by no means the most expensive place that Daniel Stone could afford. He had originally purchased the building as somewhere to stay when he came to this part of the world to play on his yacht, and its pleasant, discrete comfort was in some ways little more than standard fare for the rich who stayed for their allotted time on the coast.

  Entering the large hallway, Jorge placed her bag on the cool, marble floor. She had brought little with her—much of what she needed was already here, and in any case she understood that before long they would return to London or perhaps to New York. Anna, Daniel’s longest-serving maid in the residence, came up to greet her.

  “You are looking very well, Miss Avelar.”

  “Thank you. Is Daniel here yet?” she asked in Portuguese, eager to see him.

  “No, not yet,” the maid replied. As with most of Daniel’s employees, Kris’s sometimes stilted Portuguese made them accept her more easily than, she gathered, the other visitors he had occasionally brought here. She was more than a passing whim, and more than once it had occurred to her that she could live very easily without a care in the world in such luxury. Nonetheless, she had Alfama.

  “The plane was delayed—or he missed it and needs to catch a later one. I forget which.” Anna waved her hands in front of her lined face. “So much to do, so thank heavens we have a few more hours. Make yourself at home, Senhora Avelar. I’ll send through Joana with a drink for you.”

  Thanking Jorge, Kris let Anna take her bag up to the room and wandered across the tiled floor, staring at the whitewashed walls of the rooms to her left and right. Beyond she could see the wooded area, with its cypresses and maritime pines, as well as the swimming pool which was one of her favourite parts of the house.

  Kris had to admit that she was feeling a little frustrated. It did not take a great deal of imagination to work out why: although Jorge had warned her that Daniel had not been at the villa when he left to collect her, her fantasies about Daniel, his large body, his large... She wanted him. Dammit. She wanted to be fucked. And to see him, of course, but she wanted to be taken, to throw herself at him, and he to lift her up in his arms and penetrate her deeply.

  The thought of him made her somewhat flushed, and she unconsciously fanned herself to cool her ardour a little. Pausing in one of the reception rooms, she stopped to look at the large, chromatic painting hanging on the wall. The abstract blues, whites and reds, merging in blurred shadows, appealed to her. She remembered him buying this one—indeed, in contrast to many of the other paintings and sculptures in the villa, the work by Irazabal was one of the few that felt it had been bought more for reasons of taste rather than investment. It wasn’t quite his Leda and the Swan, but whenever she looked at it she thought of that large, acrylic canvas and could not help but smile.

  Joana brought her a fresh lemonade and Kris sat down on the white sofa facing the Irazabal. Though the painting attracted her eye, she could not settle and it took a few moments for her to realise what was causing her discomfort.

  She had never been here without Daniel. With his presence, the villa could—just—feel like home. It would never be as appealing to her as her own apartment, but at least with him there she had a sense of someone living in the place. Without him, it was more like a museum, a show home that was elegant, tasteful, incredibly expensive, but also somehow empty and cold. It was something she had often thought about his penthouse in Chelsea where she had often stayed: that also was tasteful and rich but equally sterile. Daniel allowed no chaos into his life, and that thought made her frown a little.

  Though she had not yet visited the house he owned in the Algarve, nor his other properties elsewhere in Europe or New York, she had a sense that this sense of elegant alienation would be a feature of them all. The few times thus far she had travelled with Daniel they had always stayed in the very best hotels, and she suspected that as far as luxury was concerned it was all pretty much of a muchness to the founder of Stone Enterprises. Cleanliness. Tastefulness. Elegance. Emptiness.

  There was one exception, of course. They had never returned to Comrie where those first, fateful days had been sealed, but that rough cottage was very different to anything else of Daniel’s that she had seen. Indeed, it was so unlike him that he had asked her never to speak of it—though the threat was unspoken, she was sure that to reveal Comrie in the western part of Scotland would be a betrayal that he could never really forgive. Comrie had his mark, literally in that he was rebuilding and renovating it all by himself. Or, more accurately, it had the mark of Daniel Logan—irascible, difficult, misanthropic even. Daniel Logan was a much more awkward man to live with than Daniel Stone, but Kris had to admit that she missed him from time to time. She often wondered who was the real man.

  She shook her head. Such thoughts made her want to drink something stronger than the lemonade, but she knew that her lover would not approve. She generally tried not to drink alcohol around him—another legacy of the crash that had taken his wife. It was not something that he forbade, not at all, and he was as generous in that regard as he was with anything, but she knew it was something that could bring back dangerous memories. Not that she needed him for that. There was the example of her own father, after all.

  Edward Avelar, Karen Stone. This house was not a museum without Daniel around, it was a mausoleum, a tomb to dead memories. The thought made Kris shudder. All she needed to do now was to summon up the ghost of her mother—a more tenuous presence in Kris’s mind than her father, having herself died when Kris was very young—and s
he would sink into a complete funk.

  This was no good, she told herself. Although it was autumn, the day was still warm and bright. Placing the unfinished lemonade on a glass table, she climbed the stairs to the room where her clothes were stored. She would sleep with Daniel whenever she stayed at the villa, of course, but the sense of a small haven for her own belongings was always important to her.

  When there, she rummaged through drawers and found what she was looking for. Stripping out of the skirt and blouse that she had been wearing, she also took off her underwear and stared at herself for a moment in the mirror. Unbidden, a comment came back to her that someone had once told her with regard to Daniel: he usually prefers them taller and skinnier. She shook her head at the thought. There was no place for such a lack of confidence here—he may have preferred others to be different, but she knew why he loved her.

  In any case, she had her own special beauty. Small like so many of her father’s kin, her body was sleek enough with curves to her hips and breasts neither too large nor too small, voluptuous enough for her lover and smooth enough for her own pleasures. In addition, since she had moved to Lisbon her skin had taken on a delicious golden brown hue. She was enough for him, and that was what mattered.

  With the bikini on, she descended the stairs barefoot and went outside to the pool. It was amusing to her that, half a year before, she would have been more concerned about what the house staff would have thought of her, but now that did not concern her in the slightest.

  Dipping one foot into the water, she felt its warmth extending silkily up her toes and, as she began to climb in, feathering her calves and then thighs with its seductive touch. Good. The heating was on, else it would have been just a touch too cold for such a day although even now the weather would have made a good summer’s day in England. This simple display of ostentatious wealth, or squander, was one of many that sometimes made her feel a little awkward around Daniel, but she was determined simply to enjoy it today.

  The water embraced her, its fingers rising to her neck and shoulders, spreading out her dark hair as she lay backwards and cast off from the side of the pool, the sun shining high above her in the blue sky and all around her the warm pool. Her arms rose and fell in supple back strokes, and her slender legs kicked, toes breaking through the surface as she swam to the other side.

  She did not know how long she had been there, had lost all track of time, when she heard footsteps on the patio beside the pool and looked up. She could not make out his features at first—a tall shadow in the beads of the sunlight that shone from behind him—but she knew that giant of a man.

  “Daniel!” she cried out, standing on the bottom of the pool and lifting her hands to her hair, sluicing the water from her dark locks. Her face was dry, but liquid poured from her neck and shoulders, down the sodden panels of her bikini top and between her breasts. Looking at her, Daniel, dressed in light trousers and a shirt, smiled. She loved his smile: for her it was warm and open, whereas what everyone else saw was a guarded secret. His face, more handsome to her than anyone else’s, was actually finely lined with scars, two particularly prominent on his brow and cheek. He gazed at her with his hazel eyes, the pupil of one visibly larger than the other even halfway across the pool. Without his scars and strange eyes, he would have had conventional magazine-style looks, not exactly bland and anonymous but not far off: with them, he was hers.

  “I can see you’re enjoying yourself,” he said, dipping his fingers into the pool. “Good, it’s warm.”

  “It’s lovely,” she told him. “Why don’t you come in and try?”

  For a moment he simply watched her, admiring her as she came closer and closer to him. Then suddenly he stood and began to undo the buttons on his shirt. “I might just do that,” he said.

  “Oh!” Her mock cry of surprise did not disguise her delight, and barely suppressed a leer as he pulled off his shirt to reveal his broad shoulders, the arms and chest finely muscled. Daniel Stone was a tall man and, as she had found very quickly, one who was determined to keep himself in shape. It was less a factor of his vanity as a mark of his self-control. The weakling had been pushed around when a young lad: as a man, no-one would ever push him around again.

  She felt her own legs trembling as he removed his shoes and trousers, his thighs thick and solid, and then his briefs came down. Oh God! She had missed him. He was still swaying from side to side a little, heavy and long, but the fact that he was stiffening also made the movements less fluid, more cumbersome.

  As he lowered himself into the pool, the muscles of his buttocks tightening and releasing as one leg and then another moved, she felt that the dampness between her own thighs had less to do with the water now than with her own internal ocean. When he turned to walk towards her, the water at this end barely came up to his waist and, as he moved forward, miniature waves and swells travelling before him, so his cock bobbed and swayed on the surface.

  The moment his hand came up to touch her arm she was trembling all over. Standing like this, he towered over her, the water reaching up to her midriff. For a second, all her senses were focussed on his hand, the warmth of his fingers as he gripped her gently. Then they reached outwards, sight and sound and smell, away from just his touch and towards the rest of him.

  “Did you miss me?” he asked quietly.

  “More than you can possible imagine.”

  With this, he bent down, his lips touching hers and a shock passing between them for a split instant before the flesh made contact. Now to the other four senses was added taste, his mouth sweet and slightly salty as her tongue slid into him, the two hot creatures of their mouths seeking each other out, hungry and avid.

  She lifted her fingers to his cheek, feeling the ridge of bone in his jaw and beneath the eye, her tips even more sensitive to every minute scar along the way. Pulling him towards her as his own hands slid around her waist, lifting her up slightly from the water and making her gasp with his power, she let her hands run through his hair. She had no other thoughts now. She was open to him.

  When her hand fell beneath the water’s surface, grasped him, small fingers circling his width, she did groan then. He was so huge. Sometimes at first she had thought he would split her—indeed, in their maddest passions, she had wanted to be split, to be broken. Now she simply wished to be filled, to be made whole.

  His own fingers were pushing beneath her bikini, squeezing nipples and pinching her breasts lightly, making her gasp again both at his attentions and simply the feeling of him in her hands. She didn’t care about anything or anyone now, and as he bent his head to kiss her and bite her gently on her soft flesh, she dug her nails into his back, holding him there as with the other hand she chafed him, made him harder.

  As he led her to the side of the pool, she eagerly followed. He lifted her up slightly against the edge so that her buttocks were pushed up, her thighs out of the water and her breasts hanging down towards the marble tiled patio.

  The fabric of her bottoms was slippery, resisted his fumblings at first, but then he hooked strong fingers beneath their sides and pulled them down. He kissed her between her thighs and buttocks first, exploring her, tasting her, savouring her after her time apart. Then he came behind her and, as she felt the smooth, large head of him press against her sex, her breath came in short, excited bursts.

  “Yes!” she hissed between her teeth. “Yessss!”

  When he penetrated her, the world went black as her eyes screwed shut. This stretching, this entering the holy of holies, this was what she wanted, desired so much—more than anything else right now. She could feel his body strong and powerful against her, his one hand on hers as she struggled with wet fingers to grasp the tiles beneath her. Slowly, with determined strokes, he moved back and forth inside her.

  When her orgasm, which had been rising slowly since the moment she had first seen him, finally exploded for a moment the world truly went dark.

  Chapter Three

  As Daniel lifted himse
lf from the bed, Kris stretched out, her body a lazily aching animal, and stared towards him. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, his muscled back criss-crossed with a new network of temporary scars and marks from her nails. The night had been one of pleasant interruptions—explosions of passion between fitful rest, and now the morning sun was starting to filter through the blinds of the window.

  “What time is it?” she asked. As she moved, her breasts shifted across her chest and her belly rose and fell with her breath. Lying flat like this was good, she decided. Her skin looked soft and smooth—and flat. Daniel himself never seemed to mind, quite the opposite in fact, but when her small frame was next to his, so hard and well-defined she felt that her softness was too much of a vulnerability. Perhaps that was why he loved her, however, because she was indeed so open in her vulnerability.

  He lifted his watch, a Patek Philippe, and stared at it a little groggily. “Just after seven,” he told her, yawning as he did so. “Get some sleep.”

  “Oh, it’s far too early,” she whispered, rolling over to where he sat and snaking one arm indolently around his waist, her hand encountering his own soft snake and teasing it with her fingertips.

  He half turned and leaned over her, kissing her and letting his tongue slide into her willing mouth. When he pulled back, hovering a few inches above her, those strange, delightful eyes of his watching her, the merest shadow of growth evident on his strong chin, and the angles of his face criss-crossed by fainter but more permanent scars, she stared up at him, her own blue eyes glistening slightly in the morning light.

  “Did you miss me?” It was her turn to ask.

  “More than you can possibly imagine.” It was her reply on his lips, and she believed him as much as she hoped he had when she had given that answer.

  “So come back to bed,” she said quietly. Her hand was fondling him between his legs, stroking him gently, enjoying the flexing sensation of his flesh in her hand. “He wants to.”