The Gift of Shame

by Sophie Hope-Walker

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Also by Sarah Hope-Walker

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Sad, sultry Helen flies between London, Paris and the Caribbean chasing whatever physical pleasures she can get to tear her mind from a deep, deep loss.

  Her glamorous life style and charged sensual escapades belie a widow’s grief. When she meets handsome, rich Jeffrey she is shocked and yet intrigued by his masterful, domineering behaviour. Soon, Helen is forced to confront the forbidden desires hiding within herself – and undergoes a startling metamorphosis from a meek and modest lady into a bristling, voracious wanton.

  Also by Sarah Hope-Walker:

  Unfinished Business

  The Gift of Shame

  Sarah Hope-Walker

  1

  HELEN LAY HER head on this stranger’s belly and contemplated the source of her pleasure.

  His cock, in repose, she decided, was quite beautiful. Much more complicated and intricately worked than she had ever before noticed. Thick veins ran their complicated patterns under its fleshy surface. The skin shone with the buffing of its recent exertions. Exertions which still burned deep in her belly. Taking it delicately between the tips of her fingers she lifted it to feel its dead weight and then, moving her head, probed it with her tongue. It moved like the live thing it was, and she could feel it tensing in expectation. An answering response came from deep inside herself and, reaching just an inch or two more she took him, limp still but already stirring, between her lips. She savoured him for a moment before taking him wholly into her mouth.

  His body flinched and he moaned, but all she cared for was the stirring in her mouth. With rising excitement she felt him growing, hardening, and she raised herself slightly so that the downward thrusts of her lips could become whole-hearted engulfments. As she felt him reaching down to caress her head she knew she wanted to swallow him whole. She pounded him against the back of her throat and only wished she could reach further and deeper to take him in completely.

  He called out and broke the mood but the Devil rose in her. She resented his intrusion on her private pleasure. She didn’t want him involved in this. Didn’t want his voice, his needs, to interfere with her own pleasure. For hours she had submitted to his demands, but this, she was determined, would be hers alone. She wanted this pleasure for herself – he was a necessary accomplice but she didn’t want him interfering.

  Taking her mouth from him she whispered urgently. ‘Be still!’ She saw that his own pleasure had caused him to thrash his head from side to side. Raising herself up, she swung her thighs across his fully roused cock. ‘I’m going to have you,’ she told him. ‘This has nothing to do with you. Be still.’

  Tucking his huge arousal inside herself, she looked down on his closed eyes, clenched teeth, and knew that this was difficult for him. It was his initial assertiveness that had brought them to this pass in less than twenty-four hours from meeting. She was as astonished as he that she was taking the initiative – asserting herself in a way she had never done before.

  Her hands pressing down on his hips allowed her to more precisely control her own body’s movement. As she did so she tried to, objectively, study her body’s pleasure. Outside of this room, beyond this bed, she knew there was a world resounding with sophistication, constructed to man’s own arrogant pleasures but here, at the junction of her loins with his, was the oldest, most exquisite pleasure known to human-kind. Needing no artifice or machines, it was a lust unchanged from beyond the birth of civilisation and one she intended to have in full measure.

  Her head flung back as she ground slowly down onto him, the fire licking deep into her belly, his hands on her breasts. ‘No!’ she admonished him. ‘Don’t touch me! This is mine!’

  Still moving with a smooth, slow, rhythm, refusing to respond to her body’s increasing urgency, she swayed herself into a circular motion and reflected on how this exquisite moment had come about.

  This man had found her out. Less than twenty-four hours previously she would have been offended if anyone had thought of her as anything other than a virtuous widow.

  Kenneth had died ninety feet under the Caribbean. His air tanks, they told her, had become entangled with the loose hawsers of the wreck he had been diving on. She should have been with him. Regulations insisted that divers go down in pairs. Kenneth had been the expert, she his novice diving ‘buddy’ but, suddenly appalled at the weight of water surrounding them, she had panicked and surfaced.

  The Diving Master had told her not to worry. It happened to novice divers. She would do better next time. Reassured, and quite proud of how she had managed the surfacing drill alone, she lay down on the deck to work on her tan. She had forgotten to report that Kenneth was now alone. Had she done so she would have saved his life because Kenneth, his air tanks holed and running out, was at that moment fighting for his life. His diving ‘buddy’, who should have been there to seek assistance, was instead contemplating that night’s renewal of their sexual revels.

  No one but herself had blamed her for Kenneth’s death and she had told no one of the guilt she felt, so no one understood why she had gone into such social seclusion.

  ‘You’ll have to start going out sometime, Helen, darling,’ Millie had insisted. ‘Either that or join a religious order. Besides, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

  So, after six months of grieving she had forced herself to accept the relentless invitations and gone to the pre-Christmas party.

  The moment she’d arrived she’d known it had been a mistake. Too many sidelong glances at the woman who had returned from her honeymoon alone.

  Jeffrey had come out of the mix of faces and she’d known at once that this was the one Millie had meant her to meet. Guiltily, she realised that Millie had been right. As she chatted to this tall, quietly spoken man she found herself thinking the unthinkable. By sitting and talking with this stranger she felt as obvious as a whore sitting in an Amsterdam window.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he had asked.

  His tender enquiry broke her. She knew if she didn’t leave now she was lost. Rushing away she went to find her coat, intending to leave.

  Millie caught up with her as she searched among the piled coats. ‘Helen! Whatever’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m sorry Millie. It’s just – I just can’t do this. I have to go.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. I shouldn’t have come. It’s too soon.’

  It was then that Jeffrey caught her arm. ‘I’ll drive you home,’ he’d said. ‘St John’s Wood, isn’t it?’

  Looking into his eyes, so full of real concern, she knew she was defeated.

  She waited with embarrassing docility as he found his own coat and then, taking her firmly by the arm, had led her out to his car.

  It was a long-slung Continental sports coupé of a kind she had never seen before. The seat into which she sank was so low that her legs were forced flat out along a luxurious carpet. This was a car totally out of tune with her mood.

  As he drove she looked across at his profile. Somewhere deep inside her there had been a gear-shi
ft of emotions. The empty guilt she had felt at the party fell away to leave, in its place, an emotion so powerful and direct that she felt instant shame.

  With a feeling of growing unreality, an internal denial that this was really happening, she had let him escort her to her door.

  As she fitted her key she had meant to say. ‘Please don’t come in,’ but somewhere between her brain and her tongue the negative had got lost and came out sounding like a brazen invitation.

  For a long, agonising moment he had looked directly into her eyes. ‘I don’t think you mean it,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you and we’ll meet when you’re less upset.’

  Then he had gone, leaving her with a perverse feeling of rejection.

  Miserably, she went to bed feeling shame tighten round her like an instrument of torture. She felt hollow inside while her outer shell became rigid with the horror she had been about to perpetrate. She told herself she might as well have gone to the cemetery and squatted over Kenneth’s grave.

  Helen woke from a fitful sleep to the sound of the telephone. It was an anxious Millie.

  ‘What happened?’

  Wearily she tried to read the face of the bedside clock which always eluded her. ‘Millie! What time is it?’

  ‘Good God, girl, it’s nearly noon.’ Millie took in a long, pretend shocked breath. ‘Don’t tell me he’s still there?’

  ‘Who? What are you talking about?’

  ‘When I saw the way he whisked you off last night I was certain – well, that there would be developments …?’

  She knew precisely what Millie meant and she was ashamed that, but for Jeffrey’s understanding, it would have been true. She hated being that transparent before her friends and so, perversely, continued to play at confused virtue.

  ‘Millie? Are you talking in riddles or what? I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Jeffrey …!’ prompted Millie. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t remember!’

  ‘Oh. Him. Yes, well he just drove me home. That’s all.’

  ‘Not even a late night coffee?’

  ‘Nothing. I told you.’

  Millie drew in a long, exasperated breath. ‘I really don’t know what we’re going to do with you.’

  ‘Nothing. You don’t have to do anything with me. I’m quite happy as I am. But, Millie, could we talk about this later? I’ve just woken up and have to run to the bathroom.’

  ‘All right, but be sure and call me back for a long gossip.’

  ‘About what, Millie? I told you nothing happened.’

  ‘So you say!’ said Millie, and hung up.

  Almost immediately the telephone rang again. It was her mother. She felt trapped. It had been accepted and, she had agreed as always, to spend Christmas with her parents. She was meant to be travelling down to the coast that very afternoon. She was being reminded of her promise to bring liqueurs as her contribution to the festivities.

  What once had seemed the commonplace of family courtesies was, suddenly, an intolerable burden.

  ‘So you won’t forget them, darling?’

  ‘No, mother. I promise.’

  Her mother took one of her long pregnant pauses before repeating what was, these days, a constant theme.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll find the idea of living at home again a little more appealing after you’ve spent some time with us. It’d be for the best, you know.’

  ‘Mother – we’ve been through this so many times …’

  ‘I know,’ said her mother in that familiar dismissive tone, ‘but I’m your mother and I worry about you. Kenneth’s gone and there’s nothing we can do to bring him back. I worry about you, alone in that flat with all those memories. I really believe you would do better to come home.’

  She wanted to tell her mother that, in her mind, she was home but where could she find the words to soften the ultimate rejection? Her mother had thought of her leaving home – even for marriage – as a temporary condition which, by a twist of fate, was now capable of remedy.

  Mother loses daughter to husband, daughter loses husband, ergo, mother regains daughter. The logic of it, seen from her mother’s perspective, was flawless.

  How could she explain that she didn’t see it quite so simply? How to explain the agony of the guilt she felt about Kenneth’s death? A guilt as yet unexpiated, since no one but herself had ever laid it at her door? Far less could she hope to explain the crushing burden of having contemplated adding sexual betrayal to her list of crimes.

  She took her nagging guilt with her to the shower. There – never having learnt the trick – she couldn’t avoid getting her hair soaked and so had to hunt the hairdryer out from where it had, inevitably, hidden itself.

  She sat on the base of the bed and watched herself drying her hair in the mirrored closet doors.

  She remembered going with Kenneth to buy them, both feeling wicked because they reflected the full length of the bed and the erotic possibilities they offered. She remembered those images and, bitterly, the images they would never show.

  Switching off the dryer she had the feeling that the telephone had been ringing for some time. Thinking it would surely be her mother with some more last minute instructions she lay across the bed to reach for it and spoke her ‘hello’ a little wearily.

  ‘I didn’t wake you did I?’ Jeffrey asked.

  Startled, she sat up, reaching for a bath-robe to cover her otherwise naked body. ‘No. I just didn’t hear the telephone, that’s all. My hair got wet and I was just drying it. I’ve got a very noisy dryer.’

  She cursed herself, even as she spoke, for this overlong explanation. Why hadn’t she told him she was naked? She’d mentioned everything else!

  ‘I was wondering, somewhat forlornly perhaps – it being Christmas Eve – if you would be free for dinner tonight?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. No. I’m going down to Eastbourne tonight.’

  ‘Tonight? What time?’

  ‘Well. Usually I like to drive down and get there before dark but I overslept so that isn’t possible.’ Why was she going on at such length like this?

  ‘Suppose we met for an early dinner?’

  ‘No. I really would like to get away as early as possible. I hate driving at night.’

  ‘I could drive you down there.’

  Suddenly she was vulnerable. He was pushing too hard and she felt she ought to mind but found she didn’t.

  ‘To Eastbourne? No. That would be ridiculous. Besides I need my car down there.’

  ‘I could drive your car.’

  ‘And what would you do then?’

  ‘Take a train back.’

  ‘They stop running early on Christmas Eve. There aren’t any on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Then I could take a cab.’

  ‘From Eastbourne to London? You must be mad.’

  He paused and she found herself hoping he could think of something more acceptable.

  ‘Look,’ he finally said, ‘I’m only about ten minutes from your place. Why don’t I come round. I really would like to see you before you go away.’

  Aware of the unmade bed, her own nakedness and wrecked hair she tried to put him off.

  ‘I’ll only be gone three days. We could meet when I come back.’

  ‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘I’ll give you half an hour.’

  She laid down the phone and stared at it. Was she really going to allow this? What was the point? What time would they have? None. An hour at the most and then she would have to leave. This was insanity. This time yesterday she didn’t know of his existence and now he was making assumptions and invading her life.

  Hurrying back to the bathroom she stared at herself in the mirror. What would she wear? How could she get her hair into some semblance of order? Should she try and rush to make up her face?

  Settling for a vigorous brushing, a smear of foundation and a sweater and jeans, she was still feeling harassed when he rang the bell.

  ‘I really don’t have time for th
is,’ she told him as she opened the apartment door to him.

  ‘I’ve been up most of the night thinking about you,’ he told her.

  ‘Me?’

  He came to stand intimidatingly within her space. ‘You needed me last night and I walked out on you.’

  ‘“Needed” you …?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and, reaching, made his arms into an embracing arc and brought her tight against his body. The move had been so sudden, even if half anticipated, that she made no protest.

  That first real kiss had unnerved her. Swept along, without thought or protest, she had come to be naked under him, feverishly rising to meet his every harsh, cruel, thrust.

  Her brain, protesting her libidinous body’s betrayal, had sought to transmute pleasure into punishment. His powerful thrusting had caused her to thrash helplessly from side to side, blocking protest, preventing contrition, denying resistance. That first time her eyes had been tight shut to block out the contempt she was sure he must feel for the abandoned person under him. A woman now so crazed and out of control that she heard her own voice begging for pain, then sobbing and screaming as his fingers responded, digging deeply, painfully, into her buttocks. It had hurt and it had been punishing, but it had also thrilled and intensified her pleasure.

  Then came the moment of her body’s final betrayal as she felt the clenching throb of her own orgasm against his. It was a mutuality she had never achieved with Kenneth in a thousand tries, but which had ceded to this man on his first assault.

  When he had exhausted himself she had not resisted the downward pressure on her head but had gone to greet the fallen, sullied, warrior with an enthused mouth that sought only to bring him back to full erection so that he might plunge into her again.

  And he had.

  And she wanted to die of shame.

  Now, barely minutes later, she lay listening to him in the shower and wondered how she could face him. He must have known, Millie would have gossiped about her, that he had made her change from resolutely virtuous widow to voracious wanton in less than a day. Could any man respect such a creature? How was she going to bear the lash of his contempt? She lay in wretchedness, a hollowed, empty victim awaiting the inevitable humiliation.