‘Of course! I will let you go. Later, you must tell me all the fun things you have done today over cocktails in the hotel bar,’ he said, finally releasing her hand. ‘I look forward to hearing them.’
He made another little bow and then turned to head off down the beach. More than anything – apart from securing that meeting with Vivienne Winter – Christine wanted to watch Tor walk away, those firm buttocks rising and falling, tight and round in the shiny black wetsuit. But if he turned and caught her staring at his bum, she would be mortified.
Christine was fiercely career-focused; nothing could completely distract her from the mission she had come here to accomplish. But if anything could manage it for a little while – she allowed herself one glance at Tor’s square black figure, now paused as he switched his weight from one foot to another, pulling off his flippers, then setting off again barefoot, running one hand through his thick copper-blond hair – if anything could, it would certainly be the anticipation of a date with a muscled Viking who had turned out to have a really good sense of humour.
Chapter Six
London – the same afternoon
‘Well, darling, I’m thoroughly exhausted,’ Angel said, his golden curls spreading against the padded headrest of his whirlpool bath. ‘You’re to keep your greedy little hands off my cock for at least a couple of hours.’
Nicole, lying at the other end of the bath, her shiny black hair dampening as the bubbles rose around them, the dark perfume and incense scent of Tom Ford’s Oud Wood bath gel filling the bathroom, gave him a slumberous smile.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said. ‘My poor bum is awfully sore. Want to spend the rest of the evening taking tranqs and passing out in front of some bad television?’
‘Sounds delightful,’ Angel said with great enthusiasm. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you, Nic! Are you in London for a while, sweetie?’
‘Yes,’ Nicole said as she reached for her glass of chilled muscat. ‘I happen to have made Hong Kong rather too hot to hold me for quite a while.’
‘God, Nicole, what happened?’ Angel asked, one of his elegant eyebrows arching. ‘You had such a cosy little berth there!’
Nicole sighed as she took a sip. ‘I got greedy,’ she said frankly. ‘You know I had this lovely setup with my dad?’
Angel nodded; Nicole’s situation had been no secret from anyone at boarding school. She was the illegitimate daughter of a high-powered British banker resident on the island, who had maintained a Chinese-born mistress in the city for many years. The mistress had an apartment in her name on the Kowloon Peninsula, a driver and full health insurance; although very young when she met Nicole’s father, she had negotiated successfully for the companionship she provided. And when she had, as planned, become pregnant with his child, those skills had been used to great effect for the benefit of her daughter.
Nicole had been educated by private tutors – largely to ensure that she did not associate with anyone who might also know her father’s legitimate children – and then sent to Chateau Sainte-Beuve, high in the Swiss mountains, as soon as she turned eleven. Its fees were stomach-churningly expensive, but her father could afford them, and Nicole’s mother had set her heart on her daughter having an education equal to anything her half-brothers and sisters were enjoying at their British boarding schools. Nicole’s father had made discreet enquiries and been informed, by an executive director who had found himself in a similar situation, that Chateau Sainte-Beuve was famously flexible in its policy about the background of the students it chose to admit, and equally tactful about the parent interviews that most schools usually insisted on conducting.
As Nicole had found on arrival, this was far from being the only flexibility that Chateau Sainte-Beuve’s staff and students enjoyed. Most new pupils took to the regime with great enthusiasm; they were, after all, pre-selected by virtue of the school being a notorious dumping ground for children who, though intelligent and well brought up, were not from conventional backgrounds. Angel had been kicked out of five schools before he ended up at the Chateau, but had instantly found it congenial. Vivienne had been full of relief that finally he had settled in a school that gave him such glowing reports – and certainly the institution would not have survived if it had not given its students an education that would enable them to go on to the best of universities. It was just that its methods of employing discipline, and its philosophy on how the students should best spend their leisure time, were extremely unorthodox.
On graduating from Chateau Sainte-Beuve, two years before Angel, Nicole had taken a degree and an MBA in America. She had then returned to Hong Kong – against her father’s wishes, as he was now, ironically, the Chief Risk Officer of a hedge fund and even more scandal-averse than he had been when he first started seeing her mother. Realizing this, Nicole, with her mother’s acumen, had secured from him, in addition to the monthly income she already received, a luxurious apartment close to her mother’s, in return for an ironclad agreement that her parentage would never be mentioned. She had proceeded to establish a small financial advisory company that served as a cover for a range of much more nefarious activities.
‘You didn’t betray Dear Daddy, did you?’ Angel asked now, lighting up a cigarette and propping his elbow on the black marble bath surround, hand high, to avoid it getting wet from the roiling water. ‘Darling, never bite the hand that transfers money into your bank account! God knows I’ve learned that the hard way with Granny Viv!’
He grimaced, an edge to his voice as he pronounced Vivienne’s name.
‘No, I wasn’t that silly,’ Nicole said, rolling her eyes. ‘I still have my monthly whack from Daddy. But I got involved in an insider trading deal that turned messy. I had to get out fast.’
‘Oh dear,’ Angel said, quite unsurprised. ‘Interpol on your trail, or whatever they call it?’
‘No, no, I covered my tracks as far as all that goes,’ she assured him, sliding down so her shoulders were covered by the luxuriant bubbles. ‘I was the middleman – middle woman – between this trader and the triads. It was perfect! I was totally safe from the police, because no way would the trader ever dare to give away his triad contacts, even if he got busted. Which he did, because he got greedy; but that wasn’t the issue. The real problem was that I was fucking the triad guy – one of their White Paper Fans, which means he’s on the financial side – and he thought he was the only guy I was seeing. Oops!’
She pulled a comic face.
‘So when the shit hit the fan, Mr White Paper Fan had the trader killed in prison when he was waiting for trial – because he found out that I was fucking him too, and got really pissed off. So, I obviously needed to get out of town pronto, in case he decided I was next.’
‘My God, how lurid!’ Angel said, hugely entertained. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve brought the triads to my door?’
‘No, no,’ Nicole assured him. ‘He’s married to the daughter of the Dragon Head – that’s the big boss. Which meant that we were ridiculously quiet about the fucking part. So as soon as I left Honkers, I was fine. He isn’t going to reach out to have the Wo Shing Wo – that’s the British wing – come after me. That would be giving things away – making it really obvious that it’s personal rather than business – because if I’m out of the country and not testifying against him, there’s no need to bump me off. I never even said one word to the police there. I’m completely out of the loop.’
‘God, Nicole,’ Angel said, mesmerized. ‘You do know how to live.’
She shrugged. ‘Honkers isn’t the Wild West,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘It’s not that big a deal doing business with the triads. I just shouldn’t go back there for, oh, twenty years or so, unless of course he drops dead unexpectedly. He was really into me.’
‘Not a surprise,’ Angel said appreciatively, taking a drag on his cigarette. ‘Not a surprise at all, darling. What was he into?’
‘Oh, the usual. Naughty girl sits on your lap and tells wicked stories about boarding sch
ool,’ Nicole said airily. ‘The funny thing is, of course, that most girls have to make them up, don’t they, but mine were all true!’
She rolled her hazel eyes.
‘In fact, I had to dial down some things, you know? I told him about sucking off the boys’ doubles teams, and then Herr Hoffman, but I gave him the impression that they made me do it, rather than me begging them to let me so I could beat that whore Gisele’s record.’
‘I bet he loved your naughty tales,’ Angel said, finishing his cigarette and stubbing it out in the large Venetian glass ashtray on the marble surround. ‘Pour me some muscat, will you, my sweet?’
Nicole reached for another gold-rimmed dessert wine glass and poured a generous dram of amber liquid into it, sitting up to hand it to Angel. Water poured down her torso, bubbles clinging to her pert nipples, and Angel observed it with approval. He had installed colour-changing lighting in his bathroom, set into the large shower recess under the double sinks and black lacquered built-in cabinets, and as they cycled from golden yellow to greens to blues, purples, reds, and a flaming orange that faded into yellow again, their glow was reflected in the multiple mirrors that lined the walls, catching glimmers off the black marble and lacquer surfaces, creating an instant atmosphere of decadence and seduction. Their wet skin glimmered too, the lighting giving their slightest movement ripples of light and colour that were exquisitely erotic.
‘Candles are much too much like hard work,’ he had said airily to Nicole earlier, when she exclaimed in pleasure at the effect. ‘All that melting wax, and remembering to blow them out when you’re all happy and sleepy on muscle relaxants. I always look at the scenes in films with fifty candles lit around the bath and think “Amateurs”. You know, school barely banned anything, but that “no smoking inside and no candles either” rule was bloody sensible. We’d have burned the place down in a month if they hadn’t enforced it.’
Nicole clinked her glass with Angel’s and continued, ‘So I’m selling my Honkers apartment, and I’ve got a line on an exciting new opportunity, which is where you come in.’ She grinned. ‘It’s to do with your illustrious grandma.’
Angel raised his eyebrows.
‘Granny Viv? Really?’ he asked, genuinely surprised, but again with the sharpness that any mention of Vivienne always brought to his voice. ‘I’m dying to hear what kind of scam you could be running that involves her. She’s very quiet these days.’
‘You haven’t been in touch with her for a while, I’m guessing,’ Nicole said.
Angel shook his head.
‘Doesn’t approve of my lifestyle,’ he said, his mouth twisting into an ugly sneer. ‘Wants me to settle down. Cut my trust fund payments to the absolute minimum. I’ve had to hustle and bustle to pad out my income, I can tell you. I’ve got a big coke deal on at the moment that ought to set me up nicely for a while, but I shouldn’t bloody have to toil away like this. When I think about what she put me and Mummy through! I shouldn’t have to lift a finger!’
Nicole had clearly heard this before, or very similar words. Her head tilted sympathetically, her eyes softened, her lips parted on a soft exhalation; all the classic indications of a good friend who wants to demonstrate concern and understanding, but who knows that there is nothing left to say on the subject.
‘So what on earth are you into that involves her?’ Angel asked, his expression still unpretty.
‘It’s the jewel collection,’ Nicole said.
Angel’s sneer deepened, his amethyst eyes cold as the stones they resembled.
‘You’re not planning to steal any of it, are you?’ he enquired. ‘Let me advise you against that plan, if so. It never ends well.’
‘Oh God, no!’ Nicole exclaimed. ‘Nothing that crude! You know me, darling. I never get my own hands dirty. I wouldn’t remotely dream of anything that . . . direct. No, this is all about the auction.’
‘The what?’
Angel was clearly baffled.
‘The enormous auction! She’s planning to sell off almost the whole of her jewellery collection for charity – hadn’t you heard? Goodness, you two really don’t talk, do you?’
Then Nicole shrieked, because Angel had jumped to his feet, sending displaced water flying everywhere. She whipped her glass up to avoid soapy water mingling with her wine, her other hand protecting her face.
‘How dare she?’ Angel ejaculated furiously. ‘How fucking dare she? That’s my fucking inheritance she’s flogging off! I’ve been holding on all these years playing nice, just waiting for her to finally kick the bucket so that I’d come into everything, and now she’s selling it out from under me? That bloody bitch!’
The sudden surge of anger made it impossible for him to keep still. More water splashed wildly as he took a big step up onto the wide marble surround, his balls swinging as he did so, and then down onto the plush bath mat. His penis slapped fatly against his long, muscled thigh as he strode over to the heated towel rail and whipped a towel off it, wrapping it round his waist.
‘Fuck her!’ he said, pacing to the far side of the bathroom, smacking one hand against the black marble sink surround. ‘How dare she do this? She’s screwed up my entire bloody life, and now she’s selling off my inheritance to make herself look good!’
Nicole lowered the wine glass and finished its contents in silence. Angel was never rational on the subject of his grandmother. Nicole knew from long experience that there was no point, God forbid, pointing out that the mother who hadn’t worked a day in her life and who died of an overdose when he was nine years old was scarcely a victimized, innocent heroine, cruelly mistreated by her own evil mother – which was the picture Angel insisted on painting of Pearl. But it didn’t take a genius to work out that Vivienne could not have gained custody of Angel against Pearl’s wishes, at least not without a prolonged and bloody court case.
Angel, however, blamed the whole tragedy on Vivienne. In his mind, that terrible day in Paris had been his grandmother’s fault entirely. She had kept Pearl so short of money that Pearl had been compelled to steal from her; hired someone who assaulted Pearl, forcing her to defend herself physically; then refused to help her daughter without imposing terrible conditions on her, coercing her into giving up her son. This was Pearl’s narrative, of course, in which the words ‘She made me do it’ were always prominent.
Pearl had seen her son only fleetingly after Vivienne took him into her care. Naturally, she had blamed this on Vivienne, rather than the fact that without Angel to look after there had been no brakes at all on how much Pearl had been able to party, and as a result she was utterly unreliable when it came to scheduling and keeping visits with her son. Her run lasted two years, until she was found by a guitarist with whom she had spent the night face down on the sofa of the hotel suite in which he was staying. The doctor summoned by the hotel officially attributed her death to an overdose, but his private opinion was that Pearl had thrown up and then passed out in the mess she had made. It had not been the combination of drugs and drink she had taken that evening that killed her, but the fact that she had suffocated on her own toxic vomit.
Angel had never been the same since. For all her good intentions, Vivienne had remained just as absorbed by her career and her love life as she was when Pearl was young. Failing to learn anything from the mistakes she had made with her daughter, Vivienne had raised Angel with the same lack of stability, employing a constantly rotating staff of nannies and private tutors as she dragged him in her wake from one continent to another. At eleven he had been sent to a succession of boarding schools; predictably, he had proceeded to cause so much trouble at each one that eventually he had ended up at the Chateau Sainte-Beuve. It might have been described to Nicole’s father as a school willing to accept students from unorthodox backgrounds, which was perfectly true; but it was better known among the hyper-rich as a place of last resort for children who had made more conventional establishments too hot to hold them.
Despite the fact that Angel had flourished at his
final school like the wicked man in the Bible spreading like a green bay tree, it had not abated his resentment of his grandmother in the slightest. Nothing could.
‘I have a way for you to get back at Vivienne,’ Nicole said eventually, watching Angel as he strode up and down the bathroom, his jaw set, attempting to work off some of his anger. ‘And make good money from the auction. Two birds with one stone.’
‘Keep talking,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘God, it’s taking all my energy not to smash something . . .’
‘Okay, I’ve done some research,’ Nicole began, ‘and the way these big celebrity auctions work is that an awful lot of the high-ticket items are sold behind the scenes. Most of the sale lots are smaller, less pricey things that sell at auction for way more than their actual value, because people want to be able to say that they own something that belonged to Elizabeth Taylor, or Audrey Hepburn, or Vivienne Winter. I looked up the Elizabeth Taylor auction, and some of the pieces went for over a hundred times their estimate, just because of the provenance. A bracelet valued at twenty-two grand went for over ten times that – two hundred and seventy thousand. A necklace valued at two grand sold for over three hundred grand! And the Taj Mahal diamond, a tiara Mike Todd gave her, a huge ruby ring from Richard Burton – they all set new records. The diamond went for over five million.’ She smiled at him. ‘You can see I’ve been busy!’
Angel’s full, berry-tinted lips pressed together in frustration as he imagined the vast sum his grandmother’s world-famous jewellery collection was bound to realize at auction. Pausing by the recessed bathroom cabinets, he opened one, rifled through a selection of prescription medication and swallowed a small, lozenge-shaped Alprazolam dry with a skill obviously learned through long experience.
Nicole knew him well enough to wait it out. Arguing with Angel never went well: charming as he was, his triggers were numerous, and one of the reasons he had been repeatedly expelled from his previous schools had been his tendency to get into fights. He had been utterly vicious, willing to do anything necessary to win. At the Chateau this energy had been swiftly diverted into sexual games with a distinct BDSM flavour, but nevertheless his fellow students had learned quickly not to provoke him – especially by referring to his mother or grandmother. Even an inadvertent mention could set him off, and he had absolutely no gentlemanly scruples: he’d turn on a girl as fast as on a boy.
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