Kiss and Tell

by Fiona Walker

  Her ‘procedures’ were booked for ten days’ time, immediately after having her pearly white veneers fitted in a nearby dental clinic, but Faith kept quiet about those because Carly was worried that Mr Ali Khan would object to her having so much work in one day. ‘They’re just ultra-cautious about anaesthetic and stuff. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘He says I shouldn’t muck or ride out for a week after the op,’ Faith said worriedly as they drove back.

  ‘I’ll help you out. All we have to figure out is how to get you away for forty-eight hours without Kurt and Graeme smelling a rat.’

  As Double-D Day approached, Faith became more and more uneasy. Having missed the live television coverage, she leapt on Horse & Hound when it arrived in the Thursday post and read the Burghley report, scouring it a dozen times before she was finally convinced that she wasn’t mistaken. Rory had not been there.

  Her phone had finally dried out enough to work again, but its screen was irreparably water damaged, too white to read or write texts.

  She called him with shaking hands.

  After what felt like for ever, a voice answered.

  ‘Yes?’ A female purr, distinctly foreign.

  ‘Is Rory there?’

  ‘He is in the shower. You want to leave a message, darlink?’

  ‘Tell him Faith says it’s all going tits up,’ she said in a strangled voice, hanging up.

  Chapter 18

  ‘Who was that calling?’ Rory walked into the bedroom of his cottage, towelling his wet hair as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  A moment later he was beyond caring as Sylva lifted her shapely leg, swung it across the firm, muscular expanse in front of her and mounted his half-mast cock with a delighted squeal. It expanded eagerly into her.

  ‘Wow! Oh wowowowowowowowow!’ Rory gasped, rendered inarticulate by the frankly amazing things she could do with her vaginal muscles. He hadn’t been sure he could go again so soon, but she was always guaranteed an encore, it seemed.

  He’d had a great many lovers for such a relatively young stud, yet none had been as skilful as Sylva Frost and her pornographic proficiency. He was frankly very intimidated – rather like riding Heart in front of the Beauchamps – but while it felt this good he was more than grateful for the distraction.

  That afternoon Upper Springlode was swathed in a grumpy grey mist that wiped out the stunning view and permeated everything with its vile, clammy wetness. It was far too cold and damp to ride, so Rory and Sylva had discovered a very fun alternative.

  Rory didn’t care that he was just a passing fancy to her: he was wholly content to be her temporary plaything. He was grateful that that she was bored and lonely in her Cotswold weekend house, that it was damp and old-fashioned and that nobody in the area apart from a few village hoodies, a bunch of paparazzi and Rory seemed remotely interested in her.

  The locals were being killingly snobbish about the new celebrity arrival, clearly thinking that Sylva’s WAG-turned-glamour model status was outclassed by Kates Winslet and Moss, Raffertys junior and senior, Liz Hurley and even the Llewelyn-Bowens. Her recent move to the Cotswolds might have been splashed all over the red-tops and women’s weeklies all month but, as she lamented to Rory whenever he coached her on horseback, filmed by her television crew and snapped by the paps throughout the session, none of her new neighbours read that sort of publication or watched her hit show on the Celebrity Channel. Most of them didn’t even have a satellite dish because it contravened their Grade II listings. Sylva was definitely not feeling at home in the area and, as always when she was low, she sought male attention. Rory was more than gratified to be her warm welcome and country pursuit on a cold, damp autumn afternoon.

  He needed cheering up after forfeiting Burghley and losing Heart as a result. Nell had sent a transporter to collect Cœur d’Or while the Beauchamps were away in Lincolnshire. Hugo was livid, and blamed Rory for handling her badly.

  Now Rory was desperate to post a good result on one of Dillon’s horses to prove his worth. He was pinning his hopes on the final three day event on the UK calendar, the three-star trials at Blenheim, immediately after which he would relocate to Berkshire. But Humpty was still not quite one hundred per cent, and his preparation was being plagued with setbacks, not least the appalling weather. He was struggling more than ever to get all the work done around the yard. His casual helpers were no match for Faith’s efficiency and inexhaustible energy, and he was now spending stupid amounts of time on the phone going through checklists with Jules, Dillon’s caretaker-manager who seemed to know alarmingly little about running a yard. She was taking over at the beginning of next week – another interruption to his Blenheim schedule.

  His sex life was also getting in the way of competition preparations, but he didn’t resent that.

  ‘WOWOWOWOwowowoWOW – oh – WOW – WOW – WOW !’

  He came with a delicious explosion that firecrackered his body with shuddering aftershocks. Then he slumped back into the pillows, face high with colour, grinning up at Sylva. ‘You are amazing!’

  She had hardly broken a sweat, her cascade of hair perfectly in place, make-up immaculate, her pink frilly bra still holding her magnificent breasts against her deliciously curvy body.

  Rory marvelled at her sexy, sanguine serenity. It was the same when she rode, never seeming to exert herself, yet showing true ability. At first he’d started her off on Magpie, the resident safe hairy cob, but was now happy to let her ride anything on his yard day or night, most especially himself. She was as consummate in the saddle as she was in bed.

  Dismounting neatly, she half-passed to the dressing table to reach in her Kelly bag and extract a tissue. Three previous lovemaking sessions with Rory had taught her to bring her own supply – he couldn’t be relied upon to have anything absorbent in the house. Toilet paper and kitchen roll were rarities, along with fluffy towels, fresh food, soap and bath plugs. But what he lacked in home comforts, he more than made up for in sex appeal, enthusiasm and charm.

  ‘God, your arse is peachy.’ Rory, lolling half off the bed and watching her upside down with his hair on end, let out a wolf whistle.

  She wiggled it for him as she piaffed into her pink g-string.

  In fact, her arse was veering dangerously towards what the magazines in which she featured on a weekly basis liked to dub ‘Sylva’s Beefy Backside’, ‘Sylva’s Cellulite Horror’ and ‘Sylva Weight Gain Shock!’

  They had already salaciously reported her flit from the Chilterns to the Cotswolds: ‘Heart-broken Sylva Hides Away to dry her Tears after Hollywood Lover Outed!’

  Last week the media had also duly taken her bait when she’d appeared at a celebrity film premiere wearing a too-tight Hervé Léger rainbow dress. She now featured on the front cover of almost every showbiz publication. Teeth freshly bleached, forehead botoxed, hair extensions reweaved and body clay wrapped to taut splendour, she looked good and had the bills to show for it, but she also looked every inch of her size-ten dress label. Printing the most unflattering pictures of the occasion that they could buy, the weekly rags were unable to resist speculating the cause of Sylva’s ‘rocketing weight gain’, her ‘secret junk food binges’, her endless ‘misery eating’ and her ‘piled-on pounds’. With the help of those ubiquitous ‘insider sources’, they blamed everything from the end of her relationship with the Brit actor to her children having health scares, and all of them claimed to have the ‘exclusive’ answer, but none of them knew the real truth – she had gained weight to get column inches.

  It had been a great week. She was IFOP, IFOJ and very, very far IFOKK. The paparazzi were in her pocket. She had them on side again. She had two photoshoots – one with and one without the kids – scheduled for the following week to disprove the depression claims and show how fabulous her life was. She had initially intended these to take place at her new retreat, Le Petit Château in Upper Springlode, but she couldn’t face the idea now that she knew the place better and so had instead hastily rearr
anged one to a swanky country-park hotel, and before that a high-profile family outing to Blenheim Horse Trials, where she intended to publicly establish her connection with the sport Dillon patronised, and privately to support Rory. He was the one upbeat thing about this place, but he was leaving.

  She hated her Cotswolds retreat. On paper, Le Petit Château had seemed the ideal base, an eccentric folly of a house perfect for a princess, with its French-inspired turrets and towers hidden in a wonderful walled garden on the outskirts of the pretty little village. But in reality it wasn’t much of a fairytale. What had looked like the mellow gold of locally quarried stone on the glossy brochure photographs was in fact Bradstone and on close inspection almost as ugly as the Duckworths’ Coronation Street cladding. The house was not the historic mini castle she and Mama had imagined: it was more of a theatre set, an eighties fabrication designed with no eye for practicality or light. Inside, it was a rabbit warren of small, dark rooms that smelled of mildew. The big open fireplaces were fake, the mullions were fake and the beams were fake. It had originally been custom-built for eccentric seventies glam-rock star Barry Bullion, who was now a tax exile living with a posse of alarmingly young housemaids on an island off the coast of Sumatra. It was only after she’d moved in that Sylva discovered Barry’s reputation was as tarnished as his fake gold taps. Rumour had it that the now-empty, ivy-clad pool house had once housed orgies of rent boys and cocaine-snorting schoolgirls, and that the house was said to be haunted by Barry’s depressive stalker Queenie, a transsexual who’d hung herself from the fake Japanese pergola shortly after he emigrated.

  Brought up on the twofold superstitions of high-grade Slovak folklore and devout religion, Sylva took the restless souls of the undead very seriously indeed.

  She refused to stay in the house alone for more than a few minutes at the time, grateful that she had, as usual, travelled with as many members of her entourage as custom-made baby blue Louis Vuitton suitcases. Along with two PAs, her cook and her stylist, she had brought three burly Slovakian cousins with her from Buckinghamshire to clear up the place and redecorate, leaving Mama, the boys and the army of nannies at home in Amersham until the Château was more family friendly.

  Her first fortnight in Upper Springlode had brought her no closer to Dillon Rafferty, apart from by her proximity to his home. He was overseas and Sylva had been trapped in her house with just his farm shop, their snooty neighbours, a few rides around his neighbourhood and his playboy eventing protégé to distract her. She felt she would have more chance of bumping into him if she had spent the fortnight hanging around the VIP lounge at Heathrow.

  This Cotswold recce had been designed by Mama to be a path-building exercise profiled by her TV crew, with Sylva seen to be chatting up the locals, hacking prettily around the leafy lanes, buying organic veggies and designer cheese from Dillon’s farm shop, maintaining a high media profile as the Lodes Valley’s loveliest new resident and generally establishing herself as the perfect future wife for the heartthrob rock star turned farmer. Instead, she had got wet, scared and saddle sore, and had largely been overlooked. Rory’s obvious desire and admiration was in refreshing contrast to local snobbery.

  ‘You’ll have to come and see me in Berkshire,’ he said now, head still upside down as he watched her dress, sleepy pewter eyes crinkling appreciatively.

  She flashed a non-committal smile, knowing that dabbling with Rory at all was very risky indeed – Mama would have a fit if she knew that her girl was bedding Dillon’s sporting interest. But Sylva had always enjoyed dangerous sports. She felt confident that Rory was far too focused on his competitive career to get clingy or committed. Nor would he be indiscreet, too wary of the nature of her fame to want that sort of press attention; it would blow his concentration and his competition prospects. Sylva trusted him. He was a lovely, flirty plaything overflowing with energy that was perfectly suited to converting into sexual endeavour. Sylva’s mindset had been much the same when she had been travelling through Europe to compete as a part of the Slovakian modern pentathlon youth squad. Her sexual awakening had come with fellow team members, most of them strappingly good-looking army boys who fell in love with her and fought each other over her. The black eyes and broken noses on the medal podium had been the cause of great speculation when Sylva was among Slovakia’s elite junior pentathletes. Like Rory, she’d known no shame or restraint, but she had also been far too selfish and focused upon her sport for real relationships, making her short, passing affairs very discreet. Her taste for sportsmen dated back to those days, although experience had since taught her they made better bedmates than soulmates. As was the case with Rory.

  He was a pleasant pick-me-up and very good for the ego while she was carrying so much surplus weight, but her main target was Dillon and she knew that she could not let Mama down by getting distracted. It was good that Rory was moving away from the village. Sylva had to concentrate on the Cheese-maker, as she now thought of her future husband, both musically and as a farmer. Having had a brief pop career herself, Sylva was more of a Madonna fan and found all that guitar-heavy sentiment a bit embarrassing. But Dillon’s edible as opposed to audible cheese was certainly delicious and one of the reasons for her continued mysterious weight gain.

  Inadvertently forewarned by Rory, Sylva was on full alert for Dillon’s only trip home during her stay in the area. He had flown in with daughters Pom and Berry and brought them straight to the farm for a long weekend, disappearing behind the high gates and not coming out.

  Sylva spent a frustrating, rain-lashed afternoon on one of Rory’s horses trying to get close enough to West Oddford Farm to encounter the family, but the boundaries were impenetrable. Her rather vague, fanciful plan to fall (very carefully) off her horse and land prettily at his feet in Restoration heroine fashion was thwarted.

  Instead, she decided to ride back to the stables via Fox Oddfield Abbey, knowing that there was a big bridle path there known locally as God’s Corridor, which ran almost past the front door of Pete Rafferty’s new stately playpen. She figured that rather than have an entirely wasted morning, she might as well check out the in-laws. Sylva had always thought Mask’s former frontman wildly sexy, having grown up with all the band’s albums that could be bought on the black market reverently stacked beside the hi-fi in her parents’ apartment and a poster of that iconic Warhol image of Pete’s wild-haired, laser-eyed face pinned to their kitchen wall.

  But her horse had barely trotted twenty yards beneath the dripping branches of the oak trees along the unmarked byway when a flat-capped man in a pick-up brimming with barking dogs, gun racks and halogen lights roared up behind her and ordered her away.

  ‘This is surely a public right of way?’ She laid on the Slovak glamourpuss charm but he was impervious, his cap pulled so low over his wide-jawed face that he was unable to see above her booted ankle.

  ‘S’not a bridlepath no more, misses, so youz best go back the way you come.’

  Sylva tilted her head winningly. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Castigates, they call me. New boss don’t want trespassers.’ He jerked a big thumb in the direction of the Abbey.

  ‘Is your boss Pete Rafferty?’

  ‘None your business, missus, with respect.’

  Apologising politely, Sylva trotted away to drop the horse back at Overlodes and consulted a map in Rory’s cottage while her clothes dried over the Rayburn and Rory set about warming her up.

  Soon she was lying back across the map with her legs around Rory’s waist, but she already had no doubt that she’d taken the correct path marked with the green dashes. Father and son both liked their privacy, it seemed. She would struggle to get anywhere near their inner circle without a personal introduction. Rory might be far from ideal on that front but, being a great gossip, he was at least a superb fount of information and had already told her that the only time Dillon Rafferty was guaranteed to be at home these days was when his two pony-mad little girls visited from the States. Her own sons
were frustratingly too young to befriend them, but she was certain there was a way in.

  By the time she was dressed again, Sylva had figured out exactly what the password to his inner circle might be, and who might say it best.

  Zuzi.

  As she walked back from Rory’s yard across the little village green known to all as the Prattle, she pulled her mobile from her pocket and called her older sister in Slovakia, her mother tongue sounding curiously out of place in this mist-laced corner of a quintessentially English parish. ‘It is time you joined us here, Hana.’

  ‘I cannot leave my family!’ Hana’s soft voice was strangled with fear as the day she had long dreaded suddenly arrived without warning.

  ‘We are your family. Mama is here, and all your cousins,’ Sylva insisted. ‘I want you here with us. And Zuzi.’

  ‘But … but …’

  ‘She must come to this country. Think of her education and her future. You cannot deny her any longer. My PA will book a flight for you both. She will email you details.’

  ‘What about Pavol?’ Hana asked about her husband in a tiny voice.

  ‘He will stay behind. He has a job.’

  ‘I have a job, Sylva. I am a classroom assistant. I have never left my husband’s side in ten years.’ She was barely able to whisper for the encroaching tears. ‘Zuzi will be heartbroken to leave her friends, her school, her home.’

  ‘She has a new home now.’

  The sobs had reached her sister’s voice. ‘The press will find out, Sylva. The secret will get out. It will ruin your career.’

  Sylva stared at a fat Mallard duck waddling towards the pond pursued by several ducklings. ‘Perhaps it is time for that too, Hana. Our sad little story would not affect my career now, I think. They may even see this as a happy ending. You will come and then I will decide whether we tell the truth at last.’

  There was a small gasp of horror, but Hana knew better than to protest further. Sylva financially supported everything that she and her husband held dear – their home, their holidays, their car and their only, beloved daughter.