The Angels' Share

by Maya Hess

  I shook my head in admission. ‘No, I’m not from the coach tour.’ Perhaps it was the way he had gripped my wrist and dragged me into his den but I found myself opening up and wanting to tell him my entire story. There was something surreal about the situation, something reckless. Of course, had I been caught by Ethan Kinrade himself, then that would have been different. He couldn’t possibly be told of my intentions yet.

  ‘I have to speak with the owner of Creg-ny-Varn.’ I took a large mouthful of the whisky and coughed. I wanted to wipe the tear from my left eye.

  ‘Like I said, he’s not home.’ The man leaned forward, his rigid arms braced against his knees, the shot glass circling between his fingers. Unexpectedly, he grinned, the temporary warmth of his expression equalling the glow of the lamp.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I was sure he was mocking me.

  ‘You,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re not a very good liar and an even worse snoop.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I protested. ‘I came to see Mr Kinrade and –’

  ‘Then why not use the front door like anyone else?’

  He had a point but I could hardly admit to wanting to spy on the man. It seemed that he took my silence to signal defeat.

  ‘Look,’ he said in a much warmer voice. ‘I can probably help you.’ He patted the empty space on the sofa. ‘But you really need to relax first.’

  ‘You mean you can get me into the house?’ My eagerness brought a small frown onto his forehead.

  ‘If that’s what you want, then yes. I doubt Mr Kinrade would mind.’

  Things were looking up already and, to prevent him reneging, I tentatively took the place beside him. ‘You have a key?’

  He nodded. ‘I am in sole charge of the house. The maid comes a couple of times a week and when the boss is away, as he often is, then the place is all mine. Now, tell me your name.’ To my shock, he placed a hand on my rain-soaked thigh and squeezed gently. With those dark eyes to lead me astray, he could have told me anything and I would have believed him.

  ‘Ailey Callister,’ I replied, completely forgetting my covert mission. While I was mentally chastising myself for advertising my name, I failed to notice how pale the gardener became.

  * * *

  The mahogany four-poster was immaculately made up with an antique bedspread in duck-egg blue and an abundance of feather pillows in lace shams. The bed was the centrepiece of the impressive period room, which was filled with Georgian furniture and paintings.

  ‘Mr Kinrade’s room?’

  The gardener, who had reluctantly revealed himself as Dominic before we left the hut, stood in the bedroom doorway, having tailed me as I nervously wandered throughout the deserted house. I was feeling quite strange inside.

  ‘Technically, yes.’ He ventured into the room, perhaps also feeling uneasy that we were prying on its absent owner. ‘Although I don’t think he sleeps in here much.’

  ‘Oh?’

  But Dominic fell silent and when he walked up behind me, so close that I could feel his breath on my neck, I dropped onto the plush bed to avoid another painful grip on my arm. Impulsively, I kicked off my boots and nestled in the mountain of pillows. However temporarily, I was finally home.

  It didn’t occur to me immediately that I had effectively advertised myself for sale. I had no idea how it looked to Dominic, who had already made his own discreet advance by allowing me to feel the brush of his desire on my neck. I simply lay, staring up at the rich curtains of the bed canopy, fantasising about how it would feel when I reclaimed my beautiful family home.

  To my shock, I felt the bed dip as Dominic, whom I had met only forty minutes ago, positioned himself beside me. I risked a glance and saw that he was lying on his side, his head propped on his bent arm and his face unnervingly close. I looked away immediately.

  ‘So, what is it that you want with Mr Kinrade that necessitates snooping around his house and lying on his bed?’

  Should I answer truthfully? I bit my lip and sat upright, kicking myself for having climbed onto the bed. I pushed my hair back and swallowed, easing myself towards the edge of the satin bedspread. I had already let my real name slip so would being honest be such a disaster? Perhaps Dominic would be willing to help me. I took the half-lidded gaze he poured over me to mean that he would have done anything I suggested. I couldn’t move. Instead, I offered a deep stare in return and let my mouth drop open in case a suitable reply should come out.

  ‘Are you a stalker? Do you have a crush on Mr Kinrade?’ Dominic asked, shifting himself closer so that my next move away would be onto the floor.

  ‘Good heavens, no! That thief is the last person I’d want to –’

  And it was done. Dominic’s mouth was on mine. I was being kissed by a virtual stranger in Ethan Kinrade’s bedroom. I pushed away and stood up, grabbing onto the bedpost for support because my legs wouldn’t work.

  He followed the advance with information that skittled my mind almost as much as his lips. ‘I know everything about the man. I could tell you his innermost thoughts, his desires, his intentions. I can tell you his favourite food, what car he drives, where he went to school and who his friends are. I could even tell you what aftershave he uses.’

  Dominic wasn’t at all affronted by my withdrawal. In fact, my reluctance to return his kiss seemed to fuel him more. For the third time in less than an hour, he gripped my wrist, pulling me back onto the bed.

  ‘You know him that well?’ I asked nervously, allowing Dominic to lay me down on the pillows again.

  ‘Better than you can imagine.’ The gardener’s lips nipped at mine but didn’t deliver the forceful kiss I had expected. My heart jammed against my ribs and a voice screamed in my head to run back to the beach cottage. A mild waft of whisky coupled with the tang of rain and bonfires drifted from his body, instantly annihilating my senses. Looming above me, Dominic coaxed me with his mouth, nuzzling, biting and nipping at my face and neck until he thought I was ready to hear his offer. I was too busy coping with his teasings to initially absorb what he said.

  ‘If you take your clothes off, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Ethan Kinrade.’ His mouth stopped work and his eyes narrowed, assessing my reaction.

  I was stunned. Dominic had verbally clouted me on the side of the head. Everything I had travelled so far to learn was being offered to me in a convenient package and all I had to do was strip and give Creg-ny-Varn’s gardener a glimpse of what lay beneath my drenched layers. Momentarily, I was keen to shed my uncomfortable clothes but the idea of prostituting myself to gain the upper hand over Ethan Kinrade was not something I had anticipated in my mission. I was prepared to stoop pretty low: to rummage through waste bins, to intercept mail, to eavesdrop telephone conversations, to peer through windows. But to offer my body, to lay myself vulnerable in the heart of the enemy’s domain for a virtual stranger – even if he was paying in a currency that would wipe out the need to delve further – was a tough deal to make.

  ‘Well?’ Dominic brushed a finger under my chin as if he had known me for years.

  Absurdly, I thought of my lost diary and how I could fill many pages with the day’s events. I mentally skimmed over the reams I had already written about ridiculous and unlikely fantasies, many touching on situations uncannily similar to the one I was currently in. Attractive strangers forced themselves upon me; faceless and nameless men whom I would never encounter again stole an hour of my life to cram me with a lifetime of sexual memories. And here it was. On a plate.

  ‘Well?’ I protested. ‘Well, I think you’re a shameful man without morals or a scrap of decency and if your employer knew what you were up to behind his back, he’d sack you for sure.’ It helped my conscience to put up a little struggle, made it seem not quite as painful as I unfastened my jacket.

  ‘I think Mr Kinrade would understand.’ Dominic watched intently as I stood beside the bed and allowed my wet coat to fall to the floor. ‘In my situation, I’m sure he’d do the same.’ His undeniabl
y attractive smile broadened his face and it was then that I noticed the intent in his eyes. Before, there had been duty stored in the deep suede of his pupils, possibly a matter-of-fact dullness when he escorted me to the brick shed. Now, in a place where he should feel uneasy, another man’s domain, his eyes drooled and spread over me as if he was unwrapping a chocolate bar. Quite simply, the man was filled with lust.

  I stood in my sweatshirt and jeans. ‘Everything?’ I asked. I didn’t like it that it felt as easy as being at the doctor’s for a medical check. A part of my mind had shut down temporarily, or was it that a new part, a yet unused section of my personality, was awakening? I felt wicked, almost forgetting the prize of information I would gain for my trouble. I was enjoying it and it didn’t feel in the least bit troublesome.

  ‘Everything.’

  I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and stepped out of my jeans and thick socks. I unbuttoned my shirt and removed that along with the two T-shirts I had layered on for warmth. Dominic laughed at how much I was wearing but was quiet when he saw the very core of me standing in front of him in nothing but a shell-pink camisole and knickers.

  ‘I’d never have guessed that such a pretty thing was tucked away under all those clothes.’ It seemed that he didn’t know what to do with his hands. They clamped together, kneaded a pillow – perhaps pretending it was my flesh – pushed through his still damp hair, toyed with his own clothing briefly before reaching out and sliding down my naked thighs.

  ‘You never said anything about touching,’ I said. The sensible part of me had finally found a voice although it was slammed by the new, adventurous me. His large hands hadn’t only brushed against my skin. It was as if he had taken hold of a long-hidden emotion and squeezed it gently to release a deluge of need that quickly saturated every part of me.

  ‘I couldn’t resist.’ Dominic’s words were choked, as if he too were struggling with an inner demon that was intent on doing everything it shouldn’t. ‘Just undress. That will be fine.’

  ‘And you promise to tell me everything I want to know about Ethan Kinrade?’ I paused, hands on the hem of my camisole.

  ‘Anything you ask,’ he confirmed. I was reassured that he must know the wretched man very well indeed and so stripped my body of its remaining garments as quickly as possible. The sensible part of me screamed at me to get this over and done with.

  There was suddenly a palpable stiffness in the air. The situation appeared, to both of us I think, ridiculous. My nakedness caused me to notice things I hadn’t given a thought to when I first entered the room, such as a chill in the air comparable to that outside, and the slight musty smell as if the room hadn’t been used for the entire winter. The dimness alerted me that the heavy damask drapes were closed and several pieces of furniture had been covered with sheets, forming bulky ghosts around the room’s perimeter. And while I absorbed the minute details that my raw state rendered me notice, Dominic gorged not on my nakedness but more, I think, on my neediness.

  Strangely, breathlessly, he viewed me as if studying an oil painting.

  ‘Is this OK?’ I was asking him for approval, a compliment even, and my body responded by gathering my tan circles of nipple and tightening them into points. Perhaps it was the chill, too.

  ‘Very fine.’ Dominic spoke slowly and cleared his throat, his voice sounding as if he had consumed a cocktail of sand and seawater. ‘Beautiful, in fact.’ He sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. ‘Turn around. Let me see you from behind.’

  I was for sale. I was delivering my body for knowledge and when my back was turned, I couldn’t help the grin that cut across my face. I couldn’t wait either to find my diary so that I could write it all up in a flurry of frantic scrawl that such a thing had happened. To me!

  ‘I like this bit of you.’ An express train of warmth and tingling drove up my spine as I felt the broadness of Dominic’s hands settle on the small of my back, just where the flesh of my buttocks flared gently from my hips. ‘You have a dimple.’

  I turned around, preparing to defend myself. I didn’t want him pulling me off balance and getting me back onto the bed. The deal was a look, nothing more. But as I faced him again, his hands remained in the same position and were now gently resting either side of my pubic mound. I should have moved but I didn’t, and neither did he, making him appear to be warming his hands by a fire. And indeed he was. My fire.

  ‘So where is Kinrade now?’ I locked eyes with him. A deal was a deal, even if he did have his fingers a breath away from me neglecting to ask any useful questions at all. To my horror, Dominic shrugged.

  ‘Not sure, to be honest.’

  ‘Well, when’s he back?’ The quiver in my voice reflected the tiny waves that amplified between my legs. I pressed my knees together in an attempt to keep him out.

  ‘Not sure of that either.’ Dominic slid his hands together by an inch. Several of his fingers now nestled in the fine triangle of hair at the top of my legs, preventing me from delivering the indignant reply he deserved.

  ‘Do you know anything about him?’ I bored hard into his eyes, determined to get some kind of an answer for such risk.

  I was kept waiting as he frowned and allowed his thumbs to drift into the furrow that led to my sex. His touch was preceded by an electrical force field that acted as an early warning to my body. Useless, however, in that it caused meltdown rather than retreat. I tried to concentrate in order to remember the details that Dominic would hopefully reveal but it took all my willpower to stop my hips rocking as his thumbs eased slowly to where they shouldn’t.

  ‘I think it’s only fair that you give me details,’ I said. ‘I’ve more than lived up to my side of the deal.’

  ‘He’s a lonely man,’ Dominic replied. His hands paused in a moment of thought. ‘He lives here by himself and, well,’ he looked to the fireplace, a bleak tinge to his eyes, ‘I think he resents it.’ Dominic withdrew his hands from my body as if I was in the way of a sudden rush of feelings and then he gestured around the room to indicate, I supposed, Creg-ny-Varn.

  ‘He doesn’t like the Manor?’ My delight was hard to conceal.

  ‘The emptiness of it, rather than the place itself.’ Dominic sighed.

  ‘You must know him very well.’ I almost felt guilty at digging up an obviously emotive subject. ‘But he’s lucky to have you as a friend. You obviously care about him.’ But my guilt passed quickly. I was standing naked, allowing a virtual stranger to prise between my legs. My own emotions rose and I reached for my clothes.

  ‘No, don’t. Please.’ There was seriousness in the gardener’s voice. ‘There’s more I can tell you.’

  I clutched my camisole to my breasts, not sure I could hear this naked. I wanted to learn everything about the man who had obviously conned his way into the estate but more than that, way more, I wanted to ease Dominic back onto the bed and allow him to become my living fantasy. The push-pull force was too great so I stood dumbly before him with my thoughts behaving as if I was drunk and my body teased to unbearable dizziness by Dominic’s gaze and brief touch.

  ‘Mr Kinrade understands his responsibility to the estate. He manages the place impeccably. The distillery exports whisky all over the world and Glen Broath has made quite a name for itself in the States.’

  ‘But?’ I didn’t want this although knew I had to dig for information. What I really wanted was Dominic delving into me.

  ‘But he never asked for the role. You have to know him to understand that.’

  It was my own fault for accepting such a deal. Whoever said ‘never mix business and pleasure’ was right. The line between information and potential bliss was blurring fast and I had to decide on which side of it I was standing. I breathed in and closed my eyes briefly.

  ‘That’s my problem. I don’t know him. I do know, however, that he is an impostor.’ Then I stepped forward and allowed the weight of my body to topple Dominic the gardener back onto the antique bedspread before silencing my own mouth by investigating
the hard line of his jaw with my lips. He didn’t slacken as I had expected but tensed as my words ricocheted between us. I could only deduce that he knew and cared for Ethan Kinrade very much. And it was the ignition between my legs, however tentatively it had been applied, and the crazy situation in which I found myself, that caused me to unravel Dominic and coax his surprisingly unwilling body to respond.

  I curled my fingers inside the top of his checked shirt and prised the buttons open to reveal a grey T-shirt that clung to the blocks of muscle on his chest. He lay still and allowed me to precisely kiss his face and neck. My body was draped half over his, my legs entwined around the roughness of his jeans, and I had all but forgotten that I was naked and responding loudly to my new-found assertiveness. As my desire for the virtual stranger increased, my actions became more urgent, to the point where I wrestled him out of his clothing so that he was lying on the quilt in his shorts and wearing nothing but a blank expression with only the tiniest breeze of a smile.

  ‘You don’t seem so keen to learn about Mr Kinrade any more.’

  Was he telling me or asking me? I didn’t care. I was awash with an exceptional craving: the need for danger, frivolity and the compulsion to pleasure him senseless. I sanctioned my behaviour on the grounds that I need never see him again. It was all in my diary, which, for now, I tried to forget was lost.

  ‘I want to learn about you.’ It was half true although I didn’t want his life story. But I did want to know what lay beneath his cotton shorts. ‘Are you going to let me find out?’

  Dominic nodded in a way I hadn’t expected. He was a gardener, a man used to heavy work and the outdoors, his body covered in skin that had seen many summers working without a shirt and muscle that was lean and honed, and I would have expected him to demonstrate his acceptance with more vigor. Instead, he simply gave a tentative bob of his head and quickly averted his heavy, doleful eyes, like a naughty eighteen-year-old boy caught with his pants down. My heart slammed against my ribs and my lungs vied for space as my breathing quickened.