“How did you find out her real name?”
“One of my guys made a piece of facial recognition software and it took about three weeks for the search to find anything resembling her on the Net, but we picked up a picture of her on an alumni website. She went to Bristol University, graduated with honours in art. She won a raft of awards which was why she was still up on the site years later. I don’t know why she changed her name, why she renounced herself for this life instead of that one. Her parents reported her missing over twenty years ago. She just walked off one day and never came back.”
“So… she was just a fantasist then? What? Self-made enigma.”
I shook my head involuntarily, thinking about her lies, her falsehoods. I still couldn’t believe someone could surround herself so happily with deception, even now. Even now she was dead, her life remained cloaked in secrecy, in lies.
“I think she hated men,” I told him with certainty, “and I have no idea why. Inherent or cultured, who knows?”
“Shouldn’t you have visited her family to find out? Why didn’t you?” He sat forward, imploring me to answer his legitimate question.
Yes, why not?
“I was scared to know the truth about her,” I admitted.
“But I want to know. Don’t you? Deep down, you need to know.”
“She almost demolished me but then Ciara rescued me and rebuilt me brick by brick. I think by the time I began questioning the whys and wherefores of Shay Lawrence, I’d already decided there could be no logic to back up what she was.”
“I want to know, though. I need it, I think.”
“Teddy, listen. She only wanted you because she couldn’t have me. Forget her. She didn’t deserve you.”
The truth hurt, I knew – but I was trying to save his own heart from failure.
“You should’ve gone to her family,” he said, “asked them if there were any problems.”
“It’s a little late for that now.”
“You had it in your power–”
“You need to prepare yourself for the truth. She wasn’t who you think she was.”
He stood and walked to the fire, resting his hand on the mantelpiece, looking down into the flames. “Is anyone born masochistic to that extent?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“We need to know. What about background on her parents, siblings… extended family.”
“I did all that and found nothing. They were all squeaky clean.”
He sniffed. “Nobody is squeaky clean and those that are normally have things to hide.”
“I agree but I even watched their house a couple of times. They all looked like average sorts of people. If you ask me, she backed out of a normal life in favour of living some kind of fantasy. She was an artist after all. Right?”
He turned his head to look at me, his expression highlighted by the flames so he looked slightly demonic – the only other light in the room coming from a couple of dim table lamps.
“She was more than what you’re saying, more than just a liar… a potential killer.”
“She was a born sociopath. That’s what I believe. She just couldn’t… integrate,” I reasoned.
“I don’t agree.”
“Do you want to hear my version, or not? If so, sit down.”
He sat quietly in his chair, avoiding my eyes.
“After the first night she brought me above ground and into this house, she used to bring me up every Saturday night when she knew it would be quiet and there’d be nothing going on the next day, the dungeon always shut on Sunday nights.
“We’d chat about people who’d visited the dungeon in the past, some of them big names from decades before. Barlow had passed on many secrets to her and I felt honoured to be in her confidence. I found her fascinating even though I wasn’t attracted to her in the physical sense, but something about her screamed out at me, and I wanted to know more. I came back Saturday after Saturday, even though it meant me sleeping in the orangery or in here… I came back for the chats, the tête-à-têtes. I’d never really been friends with a woman before, let alone an older woman, and she made me feel as though she could teach me something valuable.”
“So, how did it develop?”
“We got onto talking about the tortures some of the men here liked and she said she enjoyed them too. I asked her who’d performed them on her in the past and she said other women at Pernox. She told me that pain took her out of her own mind and gave her freedom for the periods of time she was under someone else’s command. She knew I was curious but she also knew I wasn’t really kinky. The thing was, it started off slow but quickly got out of hand, and once I got a taste of control, that was it.”
“Go on…”
“So…”
I tried to explain my thirst for control to him, but he didn’t seem to get it. It was about watching the effect I had on her, seeing how she trusted me… how she reacted, in so many different ways. It was about trying to get her to open up. I might have failed there, but I felt that in subtle ways, she’d told me things about her past without articulating them.
“What… so… I don’t… I mean… and you didn’t shag?” He couldn’t fathom my words.
So I explained it to him another way…
“What if,” I said to him, “my desire for control was like her desire for pain? If she liked what I did for her, but she was frightened Daltrey was going to somehow take me away… do you think she’d kill to keep me close?”
“No,” he said, “no. Never. She wasn’t a killer.”
I kept his eye and didn’t say it, but I was beginning to realise I shared the same opinion.
It didn’t seem to fit anymore that she’d killed Daltrey.
For some reason, it didn’t fit at all.
“Anyway, why did he get a bee in his bonnet over her?”
I tapped my knee, thinking back. “He knew I was hung up on someone and eventually, I told him I was sort of seeing the Madam of Pernox and he went ape shit. He wanted an invite to the dungeon to meet her. I refused him but he followed me and turned up here anyway.”
“Don’t you think he was just a little bit overprotective?”
“He was,” I said, pursing my lips.
I thought back to why he was so overprotective and though I’d never told anyone this before, it seemed a good time to confess…
“I once caught Dad in bed with one of his floozies. Mum was away… and we’d run out of milk. The housekeeper had taken her sleeping ill. Anyway, I ran into his bedroom thinking nobody but him would be there, when I found him fucking some strange woman in the arse… in the middle of Mum and Dad’s bed. I was only ten.”
“That’s rough,” said Teddy.
“Daltrey used to say to me, ‘that’s not how people really are’… stuff like that… but I’d buy dirty mags off the boys at school and it looked like that was what people did all the time, you know?”
“Those dirty mags we wanked off to? Well, before you got kicked out of Eton for having them.”
“The very ones.”
Teddy smirked at first, but then his eyes darkened. “I guess what must have been worst was the shock of seeing him in his marital bed, with another woman.”
“Nope,” I revealed, “the worst thing was the sounds he made, and the sounds she made, not even the sights or the smells. It was like neither of them were really enjoying it… and it made me wonder why people would do something they don’t really enjoy. For a kid that was hard to understand. It’s only as an adult you realise why people push and push for more… even when it’s not always good, not always enjoyable. They just want nullification, and that’s what Dad wanted while his wife was away being sociable and popular, and he was left behind the grump and the philanderer, filling a role.”
“So Daltrey worried about you?”
“He worried about me, a lot. Worried I’d taken it badly. Worried I was going to turn into Dad. I could never turn into Dad, I knew that already because I had a consc
ience whereas he didn’t. The problem was, I didn’t see that people were killing themselves while fucking around, buried beneath alcohol and sex. I thought it was all normal and I did it too because it seemed normal. I didn’t realise only broken people do those things to excess, and in one respect, I made myself broken to fit in alongside other people… when if I’d just listened to Daltrey, I would’ve seen that he was right. He used to say some people are happy together their whole lives, it’s just that the ones who aren’t happy make a hell of a lot more noise.”
“Maybe he was right. Maybe he’s better off where he is. Maybe he was needed up there, you know? Maybe he was too good for this world.”
“He was too good. Far too good,” I said, shaking my head. “Perhaps I could’ve saved him, but… I don’t know.”
“Perhaps. We can’t bring him back, though. Only honour his memory.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, “as much as it pains me to admit, you are right. Like him.”
“He was right about when everyone else around you is fucking about, lying and cheating and being adulterous, you think you need to do it too. For some reason I let myself believe that love is so rare, I gave up on it. I married for convenience… to get my inheritance so I could buy a house with a London postcode. I gave up love for a fucking postcode!”
We both laughed at the simultaneous lunacy and logic of it all.
“The quiet scares me, doesn’t it you?” he said.
“More than anything.”
“I only used to come here for some drama, maybe even some horror, and I’d go back home to the normal world satisfied for a while, but not entirely. I just needed some danger.”
“Well, Shay was always willing to offer danger.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Did she let you dominate her?”
“Never,” he said.
“Did she dominate you?”
“Yes.”
“How was it?”
“Not as good as when Ciara dominated me.”
I smiled, feeling cocky. “Why?”
“Ciara’s a true dominant. Shay never was.”
“She is… or maybe I taught her well.”
“No,” Teddy said, adamant, “Ciara has a self-assurance and confidence Shay never had. Pouring with curves, she still wears them triumphantly. But when Shay was naked with me, she was self-conscious, I could tell.”
“You think someone did treat her bad, then?”
“Maybe.”
“She always seemed confident to me–”
“That’s because you have no self-esteem either. Neither did she. Ciara on the other hand knows herself and boy, she’s got balls. She’s got principles and won’t be pushed around. She knows how to push men’s buttons, but she chooses to only push yours. You should hold onto that, you know? She is so extraordinarily rare.”
I sensed he was a little envious, but he shook his head, wiping his hand across his mouth after taking yet another sip of port.
Seemed like we were in for the night.
“I honestly don’t know how I secured her, I honestly don’t. I don’t deserve her.”
“She loves you, it’s obvious. She loves you absolutely. Even if you both walked away, she’d still love you. She’s not the sort of woman to give it away for nothing. She adores the ground you walk on. If Daltrey were here, he’d tell you the same. He’d tell you to walk her down the aisle as soon as possible, put a baby inside her and live somewhere with peace and quiet, away from all this shit.”
“He would, yeah… but if only it were that simple. Sometimes shit happens.”
“What’s that sorrowful look for? What happened with her?”
I looked him in the eye. “I did put a baby inside her but she lost it. She lost another before me, too. With someone else. It might not happen. We don’t know.”
“What?”
“Yep,” I said, taking a drink, “it was truly the worst moment of my life after Daltrey, watching her in pain, unable to do anything to give her back what she lost.”
“She never gave away anything like that had happened–”
“That’s who she is, very private and insular. It’s why I didn’t make her mine all those years ago. I can’t always read her because she guards herself so closely sometimes.”
“You’re wrong, you know? With a whip in her hand, she’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“What do you mean?” I peered at him, egging him on to say something that would be deserving of a hard punch to the guts.
“The night she whipped me, she was angry at me, I could tell. Angry because she thought I hurt you. With other people, she’s only kind and considerate, but with you and anyone hurting you, she shows her wicked side. Only love could do that to a woman like her, a woman otherwise closed off. She hates it too, you know. She hates being out of control, having no say over her emotions. She’ll get annoyed sometimes but mostly with herself. She’s probably loved you since day one, otherwise why would she have stayed in your life? It’s not been a good life, has it? Not always.”
Hearing it from my oldest friend, it finally sank in. Ciara really loved me, really wanted me. It wasn’t a dream, it was actually a reality.
“You think she really loves me?”
“With all her heart. It’s what scares her. She’s got so much love and it’s all wrapped up in you.”
I covered my mouth and my eyes watered. “I pushed her away.”
“It’s not too late.”
“I know, but now you’ve said all that… I feel so ashamed.”
“Maybe if we’d both been here for one another all these years, we’d have made less fuck-ups.”
“We always did shit apart.”
“Yep,” he agreed.
We shared a fond exchange of smiles; it was about as far as we were willing to go for one another after so long an estrangement.
He put on a serious voice. “Just go get Ciara. Fuck the rest.”
“What about Shay?” I said her name, even though I wasn’t sure if it belonged in the dirt.
“What about her?”
“If she didn’t kill Daltrey, who did?”
“Want me to be honest?” He looked me clean in the eye.
“Yes.”
He drew in a deep breath. “It’s been eleven years. A part of me thinks we won’t ever know. Maybe it was mistaken identity or maybe it was just a random attack. I really don’t think she had enough cause to kill him. It doesn’t fit. Something about it all… doesn’t mesh.”
“I agree. Maybe it is better left in the past. Besides, she’s dead now too so if she did do it, perhaps she got her comeuppance.”
“It’s best you move on if lingering on the past is only going to hamper your future.”
I stood up. “You’re right. Now, let’s find us both beds for the night. I have a woman to chase in the morning.”
I decided it was better I waited until morning to tell Teddy about Sexton and Ayda. Better he learn all of that while hung-over and numb – the shock of it all absorbed by his alcohol haze then.
Twenty-Three
Ciara
MY HEART FELT SO LIGHT, and so free, it almost didn’t seem possible. My feet felt carried on the air, my body weightless, his hand in mine as though it had always been that way. We arrived at our cottage after a walk on the beach, and something about the day and the sea air and our union, seemed to have calmed the world around us and time had slowed right down to make minutes seem like hours.
“Are you thirsty?” he asked.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Shall we go to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Come here then.”
He stood at the bottom of the staircase with a needy look in his eyes, a sparkle about his aura and some sort of pride which seemed to have made him three inches taller than his already statuesque six-three.
I walked to him and he held my waist tight, his hands rigid on the soft lace covering my softer
body.
“Slip off your shoes,” he said, and I did.
My white sandals fell from my feet easily and after I kicked them towards the shoe rack, where more shoes lounged around the carpet than on the actual rack, he bent down slightly and picked me up the way Superman always carried Lois Lane. His eyes focused intently on mine and he held me with solid strength. My hero. My mystery.
“What made you this strong?” I murmured, my heart pounding as he took to the stairs.
“You,” he said.
His hair had continued to enthral me all day long, just one curl from the thick mass of his hair continually swiping his forehead, unruly, despite a recent haircut.
By the bed which my sister had covered in white rose petals and a brand new floral coverlet, assisted by all the under-blankets we had to have in old stone houses like these, we smiled down at the beauty of the arrangements she’d made.
“She’s quite good at this, isn’t she?” I asked him, hands resting lightly on his chest.
Mum had died and when she had, my baby sister had given my dad a kick up the arse and transformed the farm, offering the outbuildings as summer rentals, one of which she’d loaned to me and Dante for free – for our honeymoon.
“She’s a natural at doing beautiful things, like you.”
Electricity sparked between us and I could barely look him in the eye. I’d never wanted him so badly before and yet, I’d always wanted him more than anything.
Gently he turned me in his arms and pressed his front against my back.
He used the back of his hand to stroke down the side of my throat, along my shoulder and to my upper arm and down to my hand, which he held.
I felt his lips at my ear as he began to speak. “Tonight, you’re my virgin. You’ve never been touched before. This could be our first night, or our last night even, but this is how I’d always choose to make love to you.”
Hairs were raised all over my arms and neck, and he used the back of his hand again to brush against those raised hairs, sending shivers down my spine. His touch let me know exactly how he was going to love me and my spine straightened in anticipation of everything I wanted to accept from him.
The Fix (Nightlong Series Book 2) Page 22