Did that make my little fantasy at all incestuous? I shuddered, and just then he looked up. He had a phone pressed to his right ear, and damn it but I was blushing again, all because of that stupid fantasy and the look in his eyes as he saw me, recognized me.
Why did he have this effect on me? Why did he make me feel like some stupid college kid, just out in the big world?
I turned away from him, and hurried up the stairs, muttering to myself about how arrogant he was, that he had a phone call more important than his own sister’s wedding, and what could a spoilt rich brat like him have that was so important?
Upstairs... I don’t know what I’d expected. When I first came to England I did my fair share of sight-seeing: guided tours of country mansions run by the National Trust or English Heritage, inside views of some of the Cambridge colleges that the public wouldn’t normally see, all the touristy things in London – the galleries and museums, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and a dozen places whose names escape me now.
But this wasn’t a historical mansion; it was someone’s home.
And yet... the stairs branched, to left and right, off an intermediate landing that was about twice the size of my living room. The wood-paneled walls were heavy with paintings in ornate, heavy frames, and I was reminded again of some of the galleries I’d visited in London. And then–
Surely not?
One of the paintings, not the large Victorian family portrait at the centre of that wall... a smaller one, just above the righthand flight of stairs... Dark, gloomy atmosphere, lots of murky shadows, a single sitter, a man in semi-profile with a strange floppy hat perched on his head. I couldn’t quite make out the signature, but damn me if that didn’t look like a Rembrandt, and one that I’d seen somewhere before – in a book, or on a postcard or something. Or maybe it was just a reproduction of one I’d seen in a real gallery; that was probably it.
I ascended the second sweep of stairs and pushed at a heavy door, and I was in another large room, an enormous claw-footed bath occupying one corner. I pushed the door shut behind me and leaned back against it.
Pull yourself together, Trudie. Do what you need to do and then get back to the champagne!
I freshened up, thinking again about the way Neil and Ahmed had descended on me in the orangery. Had it really been that obvious, the air of sex about me when I’d arrived? Like bees to honey...
Back on the stairs, I paused before that painting once again.
“He’s about my ten greats-grandfather, on the Dutch side.”
Will. Somehow he’d stolen up quietly to stand behind me while I studied the painting. I was by no means an expert, but it looked genuine to me. The frame alone looked centuries old and you could see the brush-strokes.
Then Will’s words sunk in.
Rembrandt had painted this family. Will’s family. The family Ethan had married into. We’d grown up in a well to do New York family living in Connecticut; we were accustomed to big cars and big houses, but this was another world entirely.
“Wow,” I said softly, my best effort to fill the silence. Hell, I felt myself coloring up again, and I resented him then for making me feel like that.
“You like?” he said, a sudden light coming into those dark eyes. “Art’s been a bit of a thing in the family. You want to see more? Come on. Come have a look.”
With that, he took my hand and we were hurrying back up the stairs and onto a corridor that led off a kind of mezzanine area. There were paintings all along this passage, but we barely paused. As we rushed, I tried to take them in: lots of pastoral miniatures... landscapes, horses, hunting. I was suddenly convinced that I was being led past a collection that would take pride of place in any big city museum.
Will burst through a set of double doors, dragging me in his wake. His grip on my hand was tight, almost painfully so, but I didn’t want it to stop, and so I felt cheated when he released me and swung his arms wide, taking in the whole of the bedroom we’d just entered.
A four-poster bed occupied one side of the room, draped with wispy white fabric, and the whole room was flooded with light from a wall of south-facing windows.
I turned, and gasped. A single, massive canvas occupied the wall opposite the bed, the only color in the room, a wash of vivid orange and yellow daubs.
I looked at Will, and then, pointedly, at the bed. “You think you’re going to get me into bed so easily, you’re going to have to do a whole lot better than a measly Van Gogh, sunflowers or not. You got that?”
Those eyes briefly clouded, and I thought he was pissed with me, and then he tipped his head back and laughed, and we were rushing back out into that long corridor once again.
The next bedroom was darker, largely because the walls were heavy with paintings of rural scenes. I didn’t recognize the artist, but I was sure I should have been able to.
The next room had another single large canvas opposite the bed: rolling fields, a band of dark trees, a country mansion added almost as an afterthought, a mere element of the broader landscape. It was Yeadham Hall, seen from the chapel.
“Constable,” said Will. “Friend of the family. We have a few more of his in the vaults, but we keep this one out for obvious reasons.”
“It’s going to take more than that. Where do you keep the Gauguins? Anything more modern? A bit of Warhol, perhaps? Some Jackson Pollock?”
You and your big mouth, girl . I could tell from the look on his face that he could rise to that challenge.
“Is there anything you don’t have?” I asked softly.
He shrugged, spread his hands wide. “We have everything,” he said, simply. “We’re a wealthy family.”
“And you?” The spoilt son... his family owns all this, but what did he do, apart from brag and try to look important? Tough life.
“Me? I run it all. I have power of attorney.” A broad sweep of the arm. “All this... it’s mine.”
He stepped towards me, but I was having none of it. All that college girl stuff – the blushing, the getting flustered, the idle daydreaming – all that was over with. He was an annoying, self-centered jerk. Yes, that semi-slept-in look might be carefully engineered, with his carefully tended stubble and his – I could see now – very expensive tailored suit, but he was arrogant and he thought phone-calls were more important than his sister’s wedding and he thought he could get me into bed just by flashing his wallet and his Van Gogh, as if I was some up-market hooker.
His hand was at the back of my neck, suddenly, his strike like a viper’s.
His lips were hard against mine. Clumsy. Hungry.
I put my hands to his chest and pushed, sharply, and he staggered back, caught as much by surprise as by the force of my push.
I stepped back, found the door, turned, and then I was running back along that corridor, tottering in my Jimmy Choos and intensely aware that I was in this stranger’s vast home, running from him, in very high shoes and no panties.
7.
“You okay, Trude?”
Ethan.
I found him on the terrace outside the orangery, standing on his own and looking down the lawn to where his bride stood with a small knot of people.
Ethan.
“Sure. Sure,” I said, gathering myself. “Hey, bro’. It’s been far too long.” We hugged, and then Will emerged from the house. He paused, and looked pointedly at us, and then joined Neil and a couple of others.
“He bothering you?” asked Ethan.
“I can handle him,” I said.
“You be careful,” said Ethan. “Nobody messes lightly with Willem Bentinck-Stanley. He’s used to power. He’s used to having what he wants, you know?”
I shrugged, and Ethan continued: “No, really, he is. All this? It’s effectively his. His pop still sits in the House of Lords once or twice a year, but it’s Will who keeps the family empire going. They own all this, and far more. The estate. The church. You’d have to drive for miles to get away from land they own. Did you see the village? Tha
t’s theirs too. They own it all.”
I’d passed through the village of Yeadham on my way here. All flint-walled buildings, with the woodwork painted a single shade of dark green. I’d thought it was probably done that way because of some local by-law, not because it was all owned by a single family.
“All of it?” I asked. Then I grinned, and punched Ethan on the arm. “Hell, boy, you done good! Didn’t you do well?”
He paused for a second, and then that Dunkin’ Donuts grin broke out across his face and he laughed, and said, “Hell yeah, sis’. I done good!”
§
I steered clear of Will after that, but couldn’t help but notice that he kept looking at me. It was hard to tell if he was amused or pissed at me.
I had another glass of champagne with Charlie, but no more, mindful that I was driving. I really should have booked a hotel up here for the night, but even after a couple of years I had trouble gauging the distances in England. Everywhere seemed so close together, and yet somehow I had at least a three-hour drive home ahead of me tonight. Maybe I’d just drive off and find somewhere. Once I had a good signal I could Google local hotels on my phone. That seemed like a plan.
Then, wandering back through the orangery to find more drinks, I heard him, Will, talking in a too-loud voice to a small group of men. The atmosphere there was suddenly loud and leery. I turned away, but not before he’d seen me, and said something in a lower voice that I couldn’t quite make out.
Laughter. Stares.
I glared back, not sure why I was suddenly in this kind of stand-off with a bunch of toffee-nosed drunks.
The guy to Will’s left laughed louder than the others, his face flushed pink with drink. “Really?” he said to Will. “She did what? She hit you...?”
Will shrugged, and smiled a steely smile. “That was only the first round,” he said, as I started to back away. “But you wait and see. I’m going to have that one, just you wait and see.”
I turned and rushed out of the orangery to the terrace.
Down across the lawn, I could see Charlie talking to the musicians in the open-sided marquee. Ethan and Eleanor were there too, lost in conversation and smiles.
I turned and strode in the opposite direction, round to the side of the Hall where red-coated stewards were waiting to park and return the cars. Before I’d even reached them, my Mini was waiting for me, the engine purring softly, and then I was away, heading down the long, tree-lined drive, away from Yeadham Hall.
I’d text Ethan later, make my excuses, my apologies for leaving so abruptly.
Struggling to remember the way, I turned left, and soon I’d passed the chapel and was following the narrow road through that flint-walled, green-painted village that was owned by my brother’s new family.
That look in Will’s eye. The drunken, arrogant look.
It was like when he’d shown me that Van Gogh, when he’d shown me the Constable...
I remembered Charlie’s words, and Ethan’s from later.
Will was a man who always got what he wanted. A man who appeared to own half the country, and who always had his way.
And now, it was quite clear, he wanted me.
It was a heady, intoxicating feeling.
I felt like a princess in a fairy tale. Would everything be different in the morning, all back to normal?
And if he did really want me, would I even have a say in the matter?
§
I drove home, the late-night journey far easier than the drive up.
I pulled up, parked in my permit-holders’ space in the street outside, and went up to the front door, and there I found a single red rose, a card attached to it with a ribbon.
The card was plain, creamy white, and all it said was a big, hand-written ‘W’.
The message was clear.
He knew where I lived.
He wanted me.
And if he wanted to, he would have me.
Part two: Pursued
8.
So...
Let’s recap, shall we?
Late that night, the night after my estranged brother Ethan’s wedding, I drove home and found a red rose on my doorstep. The single bloom was accompanied by a card bearing the initial ‘W’.
‘W’ for Will, AKA Willem Bentinck-Stanley, the brother of Ethan’s new wife, and scion of an old English family that owned half of the county of Norfolk and almost certainly much, much more.
Will. Near-black hair, dark, penetrating eyes, the kind of casual strength in his touch, the strength that said ‘Push me and I’ll crush you’. An athletic kind of guy, rough-looking, bordering on unkempt. The kind of man who turns up to his own sister’s wedding looking like he’s come straight from another party and then spends most of his time talking on his cell phone. A man I’d never met before Ethan’s wedding and yet who had the unsettling knack of making me blush at the most trivial prompt.
A man accustomed to getting whatever he wants, or so I’d been told.
What had led up to that single red rose?
Well there had been my Jane Austen moment, for starters. That thing when you catch a stranger’s eye across a gathered room. Or, in this case, across a crowd of guests waiting to squeeze into a tiny rural chapel for a wedding. He’d paused in the doorway to get everyone’s attention and usher them into the chapel. Our eyes had met, held, moved on, then skipped back.
That kind of thing.
Just a look, a rushed fluttering of the heart. Nothing more than that.
The ‘more than that’ came later, when he showed me round the family home, the stately mansion known as Yeadham Hall, where the wedding reception was being held. The kind of place where they hang family portraits painted by Rembrandt, a Constable landscape of the Hall and its grounds; a van Gogh sunflower displayed with no fanfare in a bedroom, would you believe? Art was something of a thing for the family, Will told me, as if it was barely worth comment.
Everything was very casual, matter of fact, as he showed me around the Hall with the paintings in the hallways and on the bedroom walls. It was like a museum, this mansion where he and my new sister-in-law Eleanor had grown up. That whistlestop tour of privately owned art was one of the oddest experiences of my life, being shown round this place and realizing it was someone’s family home.
Almost as odd as finding myself running away along those corridors, fleeing from Will after he had taken me by surprise and kissed me. Up to that point there had been a tension in the air, a definite sexual buzz between us, but I'd played down its significance. I should have known what was going to happen, and maybe I did. I should have known he would take me in his arms, a firm hand at the back of my head, that when he took me like this I would melt into his embrace, forget myself, give in to that kiss, before coming to my senses, pushing him away, staggering backwards. And then running away from him, in my new Jimmy Choos and no knickers.
No knickers? That’s another story entirely. That was all down to Charlie.
§
“Just because... just because of what happened,” I said, over a cappuccino in a Caffe Nero just around the corner from my Covent Garden office. “Just because of that... well, don’t you start thinking that anything has changed, okay, Charlie? Don’t you start thinking there’s an ‘us’ again, okay? That’s over. That’s thirteen months over, okay?”
Charlie. I’d lived with Charlie for close to twelve months, in the small Islington apartment I still called home a little over a year later. The last I’d seen of him as he was leaving was that nimble sidestep and duck as the ashtray hurtled past his ear and made a nasty hole in the inner wood panel of the door.
Charlie. Honey-blond hair, sharp blue eyes, and, as I discovered when I bumped into him again at Ethan’s wedding, a man who still had the easy knack of being able to wrap me around his posh little English finger. A man who knew all the buttons to press, all the vulnerabilities, all the weaknesses.
A man who could spend an hour seducing me and I’d only worked out that was
what he was doing when he had me up against the church wall, his thigh hard between my legs, his hand crushing my left breast.
That was where the knickers came in, or rather where they left.
I’m a professional woman, a commissioning editor at a venerable British publishing imprint. I have a Yale education, I come from a respectable New York family that had moved out to a large Connecticut home when I was little. I had been brought up to be strong, and to know my place in the world.
So why was my self-esteem at such a low ebb that when I went to Ethan’s wedding I wore suck-me-in Magic Knickers to keep everything slim and firm? I’d felt safe wearing them because I just knew nobody would ever get to see them.
So... that grinding, the leg between the thigh, the rush round to the back of the church where we were out of sight, the wandering hands, the pressing bodies... that thing that happens when two people realize just how desperate they are for rude, raw sex...
That.
Well suck-me-in knickers that go up to at least your second rib simply aren’t made for rude, raw sex. Too much beige, for starters.
So I did what any resourceful girl with a good education would do. I pinned him to a gravestone, blindfolded him with his tie, then whipped off the Magic Knickers and hurled them as far away from us as I could manage.
And so it was that, some time later at the stately home where my brother’s wedding reception was being held, I found myself running away from the heir to the family estate in high heels and no knickers (not that Will knew that – I’d stopped his wandering hands before that point), feeling incredibly vulnerable and more than a little confused by the rush of events.
And now, a few days later, I found myself sitting in a Covent Garden coffee shop gently explaining to my ex-boyfriend that just because we’d got it on like wild animals at the weekend– “...don’t you start thinking that anything has changed, okay, Charlie? Don’t you start thinking there’s an ‘us’ again, okay? That’s over. That’s thirteen months over, okay?”
Shades of Submission: Fifty by Fifty #1: Billionaire Romance Boxed Set Page 34