‘I’m surprised you’re so upset!’ Lee had said, his smile as smooth as ever, his face as handsome; after throwing up the entire contents of her stomach, she had been so dizzy and hysterical with dehydration, a headache pulsing at her temples, that she had almost expected to see devil horns sprouting from his forehead, his irises now red instead of velvety brown. ‘You loved it freaky – isn’t this just a bit more of the same?’
‘Stop it!’
Charlotte, by the bath, had twisted frantically over the edge, feeling her insides knot tightly once again, but there was nothing left to come up. Behind her, she heard Lee laughing.
‘And you loved paying for it!’ he said. ‘I knew you would! I knew after that first time in your hotel, when I told you that was a freebie for old times’ sake but from now on I’d need to charge. You should have seen your eyes light up! I suppose being a freak runs in the family, eh?’
Charlotte couldn’t even cry. She had propped the phone on the sink surround, out of reach; she slumped back against the bath, exhausted, unable to do anything but let his words flow out.
‘Seriously, you’re the only client that actually loved being a client, you know that?’ Lee was saying with great relish. ‘You could lay out exactly what you wanted, and I’d have to go along with it if I wanted my money. You got way more of a kick out of paying for it than if we were just having an affair – be honest with yourself, you know it’s true!’
It was true. She couldn’t deny it. As soon as Lee had told her his profession, she had been thoroughly turned on by the idea, by having the ultimate control. She could specify what she wanted him to do, in what order, how fast, how slow; the words to speak, the games to play. Her imagination had run riot, and she had indulged it to the maximum. Lee had become her vice, her drug, her obsession.
The extra benefit of paying for it, she had quickly discovered, was that you could summon your gigolo whenever you wanted, as long as he didn’t have a previous booking. You weren’t dependent on a lover, with his own complicated schedule of work and family and leisure; you were dealing with a man whose job was to be completely available, who would fly to London at your expense just to wait in a bathroom in a conference hotel and fuck you over the sink like a cheap whore.
Well, Lee was the whore, not her. But God knew, he wasn’t cheap.
‘So, little sister, you know who I am now, and you know how to find me,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’m still available. I’ve got no problem with it if you don’t! And you won’t be happy for long with your vanilla sex at home with your doting hubby. Whenever you get bored, ring me, eh? I’ll be ready and waiting for your call!’
This was unbearable. Summoning up the energy to lunge across the room, Charlotte grabbed the phone and turned it off. Her body was drenched with sweat. She was revolted by him, but even more so with herself. She collapsed back against the bathtub, dropping the phone next to her on the mat, and curled up in a ball, hugging her knees. Her brain was racing, turning over and over in a nightmare of circular thinking, of memories of everything she and Lee had done together. Memories that she was trying, and failing, to reclassify as disgusting, repulsive.
It hadn’t worked. She still wanted Lee as much as ever. And she had confronted a terrible truth that day, one that was still consuming her. From then on, she would be struggling every single day with the temptation to hire his services just one more time . . .
Chapter Thirty-Six
Although the bride and groom had declined to spend the six figures required for the services of a cloud-bursting company, it had fortunately turned out to be unnecessary. The skies that morning were cerulean blue, barely a white wisp to be seen on the horizon, the sun beating down gloriously. By the time the open carriages bearing the bridal party reached the church, everyone was eager to cool off inside its stone walls. Mrs Rootare insisted Sirje pause by the lychgate so that she could lift her veil and dab at her forehead with pre-powdered rice paper tissues, ensuring her daughter was perfect on her big day.
As she preceded her down the aisle, Mrs Rootare’s smile was even more beatific than it had been at Adrianna’s wedding. Two down, just one to go!, she kept repeating happily to herself.
Posy and Quant followed with their flower baskets, having behaved so perfectly at Adrianna’s wedding a year ago that they had been the natural choice to lead the petal-strewing procession today. Sadly, they were not the same happy, secure children they had been in Venice. Because ever since then, their mother had been odd, distant, troubled, and no longer the supremely confident being who had given them so much confidence in turn.
It was only too obvious that their father was distressed as he struggled to deal with the overnight change in his wife. Naturally, like everyone else, Paul was under the impression that Charlotte was suffering because she felt rejected by their father. Phrases like ‘Electra complex’ and ‘childhood trauma syndrome’ were in regular use in the St John’s Wood house as Paul researched diligently on the Internet, desperate for his wife to go into therapy to help her recover from this crisis.
This was, of course, never going to happen. Charlotte was never going to share her story with a therapist. The mere thought of opening that can of worms made her want to punch herself in the stomach with both fists. She had rejected poor Paul’s perfectly reasonable suggestion with so much revulsion that it had opened a rift between them. Not only that: without Lee as a much-needed safety valve letting off steam from the faux-perfection of her domestic life, Charlotte was continually cranky and irritable.
With all of this stress at home, her children were no longer the delightful flower-bearers with exquisite posture that they had been in Venice. Posy and Quant’s expressions were sulky, their shoulders hunched, and as they shuffled sullenly down the aisle, dragging their feet, they did not scatter the petals but flung them as far away from them as possible, as if they were handfuls of toxic waste.
Bella watched the children slouch into the pew beside their father, dropping their empty baskets noisily to the stone floor. Paul frowned at them, but Charlotte seemed oblivious to Posy and Quant’s poor behaviour. Staring straight ahead of her, she looked, as always these days, as if she were being strapped to a rack and slowly pulled apart.
Though Bella knew she could never really trust Charlotte again, the sight of her sister’s suffering over the past year had brought her to a calmer place, even some sort of forgiveness. Not knowing the full story, Bella assumed that Charlotte had been genuinely in love with Ronaldo, and had not only had her heart broken but her life upended by the revelation that he was their half-brother. No wonder she had wasted away to skin and bone.
Looking at Charlotte, who was so obviously struggling with the burden of a secret that she couldn’t possibly share with her husband, Bella wondered, as she often did, whether Charlotte had confronted her lover about his true identity. The sisters had never talked about it, and never would. But Bella had to admit to a deep curiosity as to what, if anything, had been said between Charlotte and their half-brother. Bella herself had been unable to resist texting Ronaldo, horrified at what he had done, and needing some sort of closure. All she had got in return was a few lines:
Look, the guy you thought you knew never existed. I’ve been all sorts of men for all sorts of women for years now and I like it like that. Don’t get in touch with me any more, little sister. It won’t do you any good.
You were really nice to me when we were kids. I’m sorry I did this to you.
Bella had puzzled over these words for weeks, but she had taken his advice not to push for any more answers, and gradually they had faded from the prominence they had once occupied. Especially as she had to focus on making the brutally difficult decision to switch off Thomas’s life support.
There had been a particular kind of guilt to the task, because it was, of course, so horribly convenient for her. Mrs Rootare and Christie had both been with Bella at the hospital when she signed the paperwork and stood by Thomas’s bed as it happened, and she w
as more grateful to them than she could say. She had left for the south of France with her mother that evening, staying with her for a couple of weeks, Brice banished from the house so that Christie and Bella could have proper mother–daughter time together. It had been a complete rest cure, as Adrianna had advised: nothing to do but swim, drive along the coast to Nice or Monte Carlo or Juan-les-Pins for leisurely meals, sleep, and then wake up to another day of relaxation.
When Bella was ready, she had returned to London and experienced another cure: the distraction of throwing herself into the complex demands of the CEO position. She had not expected the third and final cure, the man who was currently sitting beside her in the church pew.
On taking over as CEO, Bella had asked Nita to book her in for fundraisers and charity events twice a week so that she could network, feeling she had neglected this aspect of the job before. There was another motive, too: Thomas had kept her fairly isolated since her marriage, so that she did not have close friends to turn to for a social life.
Under normal circumstances, she would have been leaning on her twin sister for comfort and support, but that was out of the question. So making herself dress up every so often, postponing her return to an empty house by having drinks and dinner with a pleasant group of fellow professionals, had done her the world of good.
She had met Santino del’Aquila, the celebrity restaurateur, six months ago at a charity dinner. Santino was a widower himself, bringing up three young boys as a single father. Although his and Bella’s circumstances were very different, they had fallen into conversation about their deceased spouses and their experience of grief. The last thing on Bella’s mind had been a new relationship, which was one of the reasons why Santino had found himself so attracted to her. After a brief flirtation with a D-lister on the reality show Celebrity Island Survivor, he had told the press in interviews that he was ready, after several years of widowhood, to start dating again. Ever since then, women had been throwing themselves at him in droves.
But not Bella. Quite the reverse: it had been Santino who had courted her. The women who had been chasing him had been status-hungry, their goal not just him but the publicity they would attract by being seen on his arm. Dating him would raise their profiles, propelling them higher up the gossip columns. While Bella Sachs, dedicated to her career, infinitely richer than him, needed neither fame nor fortune. What he could offer her, he had gradually realized, was a shoulder to cry on after the painful decision she had had to make.
Like so many men, Santino loved to be needed by a woman. And he found, as time passed, that, increasingly, he needed Bella too. They talked about what had worked in their previous marriages, and, even more importantly, what had not. Both of them had married comparatively young; both felt that they had learned so much since then. Each admitted to the other that, much as they had loved their spouses, they might not have picked them again if they met them now.
Because Ilaria, Santino’s wife, had been sweet-natured but almost cripplingly shy. Too reserved, too limelight-shunning to be a good match for a very gregarious chef and restaurant owner. With the best will in the world, this had caused increasing friction between them. Bella, though quieter than the exuberant Santino, was entirely comfortable in the world he inhabited, a much better match for him. He realized that a while before Bella did, and, over the course of a few months, as they went to dinner, to the theatre and to concerts, he worked at convincing her that the two of them would make an excellent couple.
From there, it had been another short step to verifying that they were very happily sexually compatible; thence to Santino introducing Bella to his adorable sons and Bella inviting him to her brother’s wedding. It was very new, and there were no guarantees in life, but dashingly handsome, family-oriented Santino, with his bronzed skin and strong-boned Sardinian good looks, was making Bella so happy and satisfied that she could not stop sneaking glances at him, squeezing his hand, sneaking kisses whenever she could. He made her feel silly, spontaneous and youthful, and as a CEO with the weight of running a multinational company on her shoulders, that was exactly what she needed.
Sirje and Conway were speaking their vows now, beaming at each other. It was ironic that Conway’s children, sitting beside their mother in the front pew, were behaving better than Posy and Quant, who were pinching each other and kicking the pew in front of them.
Santino, an Italian father whose idea of disciplining children was to let them run amok until they crossed an arbitrary line, at which point he would yell furiously at them, smiled at the children much more tolerantly than their own father did. Poor Paul was tense with mortification, hissing reproofs at them which they were deliberately ignoring. In their eyes, their father was a failure. He couldn’t make their adored mother the happy person she had been up until a year ago, so why should they listen to him?
Adrianna, sitting next to Bella, noticed Santino’s affectionate glance at a pair of sulky, badly behaved children who weren’t even his, and was confirmed in her instincts that Bella’s boyfriend was husband material. Bella would definitely pop out a couple of children as well as taking on Santino’s boys: they had more than enough resources to run a large family while the parents worked.
Thank God things worked out so well for Bella, Adrianna thought. If Thomas were still alive, according to Tania, Bella would have no chance at a family. Tania had described Thomas as an over-controlling father figure who had not wanted his wife to have children, since that would distract her from catering to his every need.
I can’t think how Bella could possibly have picked such a selfish older man to marry! Adrianna thought with the ghost of a smile, remembering her husband with affection, but no illusions about who he had been. Jeffrey had needed children to form his dynasty, but he had not engaged with them in any meaningful way. They had merely been game pieces to move around on his chessboard, living carriers of his DNA.
And that emotional neglect of his children had, in his widow’s opinion, fatally shortened his life. He had never truly recovered from the revelation that his bastard son had had sex with both of his daughters, something that could never have happened if he had dealt with the situation more honestly, rather than sweeping his son under the carpet like a dirty little secret.
Everyone thought I was going to fuck Jeffrey to death and he’d die happy, Adrianna reflected. But it was his own family who weakened his heart so that one day, just a few months after we were married, he never woke up.
She had slipped out of bed at 6 a.m. that morning and gone to the gym, as was her daily routine. She would never know whether her husband had been dead by then, or if he had passed away in his sleep while she was working out. One last lost opportunity for Jeffrey to lick the perspiration off her skin; poor Jeffrey, it had been a hardcore workout with her trainer that morning, and he would have loved to watch her peel off her exercise clothes and offer him her extremely sweaty body to worship.
He had, however, looked serene and peaceful in his last and longest sleep. To Adrianna’s surprise, tears of mourning had sprung to her eyes as she looked down at her husband. And then she wasn’t surprised at all. Jeffrey had been nothing but wonderful to her. He had done justice to her intelligence in his will, leaving her a fantastically rich woman with a seat on the governing board of the Sachs organization and a significant stake in the business. He had trusted her implicitly, and he had been right to do so.
Tania had agreed to continue as her assistant, though Adrianna had entirely redecorated her husband’s office. It wasn’t remotely her taste, and besides, it would have been ridiculous for her to sit on a throne when Jeffrey’s daughter was now the CEO. Bella had chosen to stay in her own cosy executive suite: her style as the boss of the Sachs Organization would be much more accessible, she had decided, than her father’s terrifyingly intimidating management style and near-medieval decor.
So Adrianna had taken down the wall between Tania’s exterior office and Jeffrey’s throne room, exposed the windows that his G
othic panelling had blocked, and stripped out the chandelier, the dais and the throne. Now the two women shared a modern, beautifully decorated open-plan office full of light and art.
Tania was at the wedding, of course, sitting further back in the church with her wife and sons. But it was Bart, his brother’s best man, standing to one side of the altar with his hands folded in front of him, listening respectfully to the end of the wedding ceremony, on whom Adrianna’s eyes settled as Conway lifted Sirje’s veil to reveal her beautiful face, the groom seeming delighted that his new spouse was made up like a dancer in a nightclub rather than a bride at a daytime ceremony in a village church.
As attuned to Adrianna as she was to him, Bart was instantly aware of her gaze. He met it with his own, a happy, fully contented acknowledgement of their attachment that was a sea change from the wild, partying Bart of a year ago. They exchanged a smile before Adrianna looked back to Sirje and Conway, and was taken aback to see them kissing passionately.
At least Sirje had the decency to raise her hands and lightly ease Conway away as soon as he tried to prolong it beyond what was suitable, out of respect for his ex-wife and children sitting in one of the front pews. Then, much to Adrianna’s approval, Sirje held out her hands to George and Emily. After a swift glance at their mother, who nodded, they went very willingly to hug their father and new stepmother.
The handsome groom and gorgeous bride, flanked by the groom’s small children, holding hands in a family chain, were walking down the aisle to sign the register in a niche by the doors; the little village church was too small to have a vestry. Liilia darted out to pick up Sirje’s train, and Adrianna let her do it alone. The task didn’t require two bridesmaids, and she wanted a moment to herself. The vicar followed, together with Mrs Rootare and Christie, who were the witnesses, a verger bustling ahead to open the church doors.
Sunlight poured in over the flagstones. The wedding guests stood up, stretched their legs, started to head for the door as they chatted happily about how lovely the ceremony had been, how attractive a couple they made, how nice it was that Conway’s children were here. In lower tones, they commented that these things could be so difficult, couldn’t they? So how lovely it was that everyone was behaving so well . . . Samantha certainly seemed happy, which was wonderful, considering . . .
Bad Twins Page 39