The Chocolate Lovers' Club

by Carole Matthews

  Nadia flicked the mouse over the screen. Sure enough, the gaudy, flashing site of an online casino sprang to life—the Money Palace. It glittered in front of her. Here was the temple at which her husband worshiped, and where he could ruin their lives without ever leaving the house. Lights sparkled, huge sums of money blinked on the screen—money, cash riches beyond compare. A treasure trove of temptation, luring you in with its promises of wealth, fortune, the easy life. Promises that were never, ever fulfilled.

  Chapter Nine

  CHANTAL SLIPPED INTO THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S car. It was a big, black Mercedes four-wheel drive, sleek and luxurious, loaded up with the very latest in camera gear. She’d worked with this guy once before and he’d been good. She also seemed to remember that they’d enjoyed a mild flirtation. That had been a quick day shoot, so it would be interesting to see if he lived up to the potential she’d seen in him. Now they had a long drive up to the Lake District ahead of them—four, maybe five hours, depending on how much he adhered to the speed limit—and she hoped that he had good taste in music and a sparkling line in repartee to pass the journey. All she’d had to do was bring herself and some chocolate along for the ride. She’d chosen a thick slab from Chocolate Heaven, studded with crushed coffee beans—one of Clive’s many specialities. It smelled divine and the coffee beans would certainly help to keep them both awake.

  She should have phoned Ted to tell him that she was leaving on an assignment and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night, but she was pissed with him. Again. Let him stew. If she wasn’t there, maybe he might, might, just miss her. Fat chance. It had been months since she’d tried to interest him in lovemaking, but last night she’d gone to bed naked and had pressed the length of her warm body against him, circling her fingertips over the fine, soft hair on his tight butt—and he’d stiffened. But not in the way that she’d hoped.

  “Leave it, Chantal,” was all he had said to her, and it had taken her every ounce of willpower not to cry with disappointment, hurt and frustration. They’d been married for fourteen years. Some of them happy. They’d survived the seven-year itch, but Chantal wasn’t sure that they’d survive it the second time around. She still wanted her husband and wanted him to love her—and he, quite clearly, didn’t. If they couldn’t resolve this fundamental difference between them, was it worth keeping on with this loveless marriage? Except that it wasn’t exactly loveless. It was simply sexless. They’d once been the best of friends. They liked the same foods, shared a love of good wine and champagne, enjoyed the same music, both loved the theater, laughed at the same jokes. Ted was handsome, clever, witty and rich. He was a catch. When she’d first met him at a friend’s weekend party at the Hamptons, he’d taken her breath away with his vitality. And virility. She’d slept with him the very first night. They made love time after time, until they were sated, bruised and in love. What had gone wrong in the intervening years? Why did he now find the sight of his naked wife repellent? Why did he recoil from her touch?

  Most of their friends and acquaintances would have no idea that there was anything wrong in their relationship. To the outside world, they had a match made in heaven. Yet sometimes it felt like a living hell. She’d lost count of the nights that she’d lain awake, her body aching with desire, next to a fabulous man who had no urge to satisfy her. Only the girls at the Chocolate Lovers’ Club knew her true situation. If she didn’t have them to talk to, she felt as if the facade of her life would come crashing down around her. They listened to the lurid stories of her infidelities without judging her. They didn’t know Ted, either, so she felt it was part of her life that she could keep separate. A lifeline. If they did meet him, they too would fail to understand why he wasn’t a hot stud in the bedroom. She’d tried to discuss their lack of sex life a million times, but it was something Ted just didn’t want to face; he seemed happy to hide behind lame excuses—too tired, too busy, too much work. Didn’t all couples have these constraints? Somehow, most people seemed to rub along okay—why were they unable to do the same thing? His parents had never been a particularly affectionate couple and she wondered if that had shaped him—but then when they were first together he couldn’t keep his hands off her. So what had gone wrong in the intervening years? Chantal only wished that she knew.

  To her it was a fundamental part of being a woman, a wife. To be loved, desired. Could Ted truly love her if he never wanted to be intimate with her? She wasn’t sure when the rot had set in. Over the years she’d given up a lot to be with him. Chantal had been an ambitious young magazine journalist. If she’d stayed in the U.S. she could have been Anna “Nuclear” Wintour or her equivalent by now, heading up one of the major glossies. Instead, she’d given up her career for his. Ted, a thrusting, financial whiz, had been promoted to head up a division of Grenfell Martin investment bankers. The downside was that his post was in London. So, saying goodbye to friends and family and a glitzy career, she’d willingly followed. The job she now had on Style USA magazine wasn’t nearly as high-powered as she was used to, but with the decline of her sex life it had provided her with a certain number of perks over the years—which were almost a compensation now that Ted’s desire to thrust had all but died and her marriage had gone ass up.

  This shoot was of a sprawling pile nestled on the edge of Lake Coniston. It was owned by a couple who’d moved over to England from Boston twenty years ago. He was a well-known travel writer. She was an accomplished horsewoman. According to Chantal’s brief, they’d spent the time restoring the home to its traditional Georgian splendor. Her fellow Yanks would go wild for it. Chantal could see the pages already—sumptuous colors, mellow lighting … the article would write itself. Giving her time for plenty of other distractions. The magazine was generous, both with its salaries and its expense accounts. Tonight she and the photographer would be staying in a swish country-house hotel, complete with four-poster beds, jacuzzis and Dom Pérignon chilling in the mini-bar. All the things you needed for a romantic tryst. Chantal grinned to herself.

  She pulled down the vanity mirror in the car and checked that her dark bob was sitting smoothly in place. There was no way that she looked all of her thirty-nine years. Her makeup was immaculate and her most seductive smile was in place. If her husband didn’t want her, there were still men who did.

  The photographer, Jeremy Wade, slid his long frame into the driver’s seat next to her. “I think we’re all set,” he said.

  “Great,” she said, flashing her colleague a warm smile. “Let’s go check out all the delights the Lake District has to offer.”

  Chapter Ten

  “NIGHT,AUTUMN.”ADDISON PUT HIS head through the open door and gave her a wave as she was tidying away the remnants of colored glass for the day.

  “Oh,” she said. “Good night. Nice to see you again.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, trying in vain to smooth it down. Why did she suddenly wish that she was wearing something nicer today?

  Addison Deacon was an enterprise development officer who’d recently started to come into the Stolford Centre, where she worked, to help the center’s clients get involved with local businesses and, hopefully, find a way of breaking the cycle of crime that most of the kids found themselves in. It was an uphill struggle for him, but he never lost the wide, white-toothed grin from his black, beaming face. He was tall and handsome, and muscular— certainly no one could ignore Addison when he came into the room, herself included. His head was shaved and he permanently wore sunglasses—it made him look more like the kind of guy that their clients would deal with rather than someone from social services trying to help them. But it was his kind, easy way with the damaged kids that she admired most of all.

  “Working late again?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You know how it is.” Autumn didn’t like to tell him that there was no reason for her to go home and that she was happier here among the rejects of society and their artistic efforts than she was alone in her comfortable flat.

  “Maybe one night you’ll
let me take you out for dinner?”

  “I … er,” she said. “I … er.”

  “Think about it,” Addison said with a smile. “No pressure.” Then he glanced at his watch. “I have to dash. Funding meeting with the Council.”

  She managed to spit out, “Good luck.”

  “I’ll need it.” Addison waved again and ducked back out of the door.

  “Bye,” Autumn shouted after him. She sighed to herself and forced her attention back to her chores. “You idiot! You complete idiot!” she muttered to herself as she put the glass back into the relevant boxes. “Why didn’t you just say, Yes, dinner would be nice’?” Why did she always have to be so ridiculously shy in his presence? This is why you don’t have a boyfriend, she thought. This is why you’re going to be a sad and lonely spinster when everyone else is happily married with children, and all you’ll have is a box of bloody chocolates for company.

  She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall—the one that some of her students had made that was bordered by colorful pansies and a slightly cross-eyed cat. Sometimes the truth could hurt.

  WHEN AUTUMN GOT HOME FROM the rehabilitation center she was exhausted. All she wanted to do was sink into a nice hot bath with a bar of her favorite dark chocolate and let the water and the sugar hit soothe her cares away. It wasn’t difficult teaching the young people the basic crafts such as mosaic or stained-glass techniques that formed part of the KICK IT! program. It was mainly girls who attended the sessions, and most of them grasped the craft quite readily, grateful for a few hours of normality when they didn’t have to think about the horrors of their daily lives. But some days it was difficult to look at their hardened, careworn faces—faces that showed how emotionally scarred most of them were. Their bodies were marked with cuts, sometimes from self-harm, and bruises from fights that had occurred while under the influence of drugs, along with the scars from needles that were the legacy of their addiction. And those were only the marks that showed.

  It distressed Autumn to see the capacity that human beings had to be cruel to each other and to themselves. Most of the youngsters who came through their doors had managed to escape from their difficult domestic situations, the situations that helped to keep them hooked—but she knew that some of them would go right back to the men or the families that they had fled from, just as soon as their marks faded, the memories of why they’d left disappearing as soon as the drugs left their systems. She’d been working here at the center for four years now, and saw the same faces return time and time again. It seemed that, no matter how hard they tried to extract themselves, the kids’ lives somehow stayed the same. That was the really difficult part. It was mentally draining to watch teenagers she had grown to like and care for get repeatedly burned, drawn to their addictions like moths to a flame. She knew that Addison felt the same too.

  Autumn chained her bike to the railings outside her apartment building. It was always slightly incongruous, seeing her scuffed old cycle amid the Mercedes and the Porsches that were the more usual mode of transport in this area. She climbed the stairs. When she got to the door of her flat, she saw that her brother was sitting outside, two large holdalls at his feet.

  “Hi, sis,” he said.

  “Richard? What are you doing here? Is something wrong?”

  “A temporary embarrassment,” Richard said ruefully. “I was wondering if I could camp out here for a while.”

  “Here?” She unlocked the door and he followed her inside. “What’s wrong with your own place?”

  “Gone,” he said flatly.

  Autumn threw her bag down on the sofa and turned to her brother. “Gone? How can it be gone?”

  Richard kicked his bags to one side and sank into a chair. “I owed a man some money and … well, let’s say he took the apartment as a down payment.”

  “Your flat has got to be worth half a million pounds, Rich! That’s one hell of a debt.” She felt wide-eyed with shock and yet her brother was sitting there apparently unconcerned about his situation. “Technically, you don’t even own it.” Like she didn’t own this place. All of it was bought and paid for by her parents. How else would she live just off Sloane Square on the salary they paid to a part-time arts and crafts teacher? She might be uncomfortable with her parents’ rather obvious form of wealth, but there were times when it came in extraordinarily handy.

  “So? Can I move in?” her brother asked.

  There was no reason why Richard couldn’t stay here for a while. She didn’t have a boyfriend to consider—more’s the pity. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to bag herself a great dinner date when it was on offer. The flat had two bedrooms, albeit small ones. All she’d need to do was move her clothes around to find him some wardrobe space. Though judging by his sparse luggage, he hadn’t actually brought that much with him. He looked for all the world like a man who was running away.

  She sighed. “Are you in trouble again?” She knew that he’d indulged in drugs in the past. Two expensive sojourns in an upscale rehabilitation clinic were supposed to have cured Richard’s dependence on recreational drugs; it was a world away from the center she worked in. Richard didn’t know just how lucky he was. He’d owed money to shadowy men then—often resulting in black eyes and broken limbs. Autumn wondered if he was using the hard stuff again. A bit of marijuana was hardly going to cost him his flat, and she was concerned about what Rich had got himself involved in this time.

  “Not really,” he said, massaging his temples. He avoided her gaze. “Nothing I can’t sort out. Just don’t tell Mater and Pater that I’m here.”

  That wouldn’t be difficult. Her parents had such busy lives that neither she nor Richard saw that much of them. They weren’t the sort of people who would drop in unannounced. Their parents were both barristers in very busy chambers. Their parental duty ran to remembering their offspring’s birthdays and Christmas, and picking up the tab for everything else in between. Not that Autumn had anything to complain about. Both she and Richard had enjoyed a privileged upbringing. She’d excelled at the viola and dressage. Richard had played rugby and polo. Every year they’d gone on exotic holidays round the globe with their parents—to Monte Carlo, Montser-rat, Mustique. Compared to the desperate teenagers she worked with, she had so much to be thankful for.

  She and Richard had both gone to the same boarding school—a strict and outmoded place where boys and girls still wore frock coats—but they’d had each other, and as the elder by two years, she’d made sure that her little brother had gone through his years there relatively untroubled. She was the one who’d always looked after him, and it seemed as if that wasn’t going to change as they grew older. Richard had always been the wild child, while she’d been the sensible one. But no matter what he did, he was her little brother and she loved him. It was a closeness she hoped they’d maintain, but there were areas of Richard’s life that she knew he kept secret from her. Autumn knew very few of his friends. She wasn’t even sure that he had any. He had a constant parade of well-heeled girlfriends, but again she rarely met any of them. Not that they lasted long.

  “You would tell me if it was bad, Rich?”

  “Of course I would. You’re my darling sister.”

  “You’re my pain-in-the-neck brother and I worry about you.”

  “I love you. And I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

  If he was fine, why was he here and homeless? Autumn sighed to herself. No doubt she’d find out in due course. When Richard was ready to tell her, he would, and not before. “I’ll make up the spare bed for you.”

  “I promise I won’t be a nuisance, Autumn. You’ll hardly know that I’m here.”

  “Do you need money?”

  “Well …” He gave a shrug of his shoulders. “A few quid wouldn’t go amiss. If you can spare it.”

  “I’ll see what I’ve got.” Autumn always had a few hundred pounds put away for a rainy day.

  She glanced over at her brother and he gave her one of his charming, sheepish
smiles. Looked like that rainy day was here.

  Chapter Eleven

  WHEN I FINALLY TURN UP at the office at lunchtime, Crush immediately comes out of his cubbyhole to talk to me. “Everything okay, Gorgeous?”

  “Not that you’d notice,” I sigh.

  He waits patiently while I huff about a bit, taking off my coat and opening and closing my desk drawers for no good reason. Even a glimpse of the stash of chocolate I have in there fails to lift my spirits. It doesn’t go unnoticed by Crush either. “Mmm,” he says, smacking his lips together. “Double Deckers.”

  “Hands off,” I warn him. “They’re mine and I’m going to need them all to myself today.”

  “Give me a bite,” he pleads. “You know you want to.”

  I reluctantly hand over a Double Decker. “If I run out of chocolate later and go all funny, it will be your fault.”

  He takes the chocolate anyway, unwrapping it straight away. I have no choice but to join him and unpeel the other Double Decker so that we take our first bite in unison. “Sorry I was late in today,” I mumble.

  As he chews, Crush does have the good grace to look concerned. “Problems?”

  “Man trouble,” I explain. “I’m having a crisis. Last night I had a traumatic experience with Marcus.”

  “Mmm. Kinky?”

  “No, not kinky. Horrible. Very horrible.” I get a hideous flashback of Marcus’s new love breezing through his door with her beautiful smile and her perky tits. Grrr. I bang papers about on my desk. It took me half an hour in the ladies’ loo at Chocolate Heaven to patch up my face enough to disguise my puffy crying-induced eye bags before I was fit to face the world.