The Gallery

by Fredrica Alleyn

  ‘It wasn’t the same,’ said Guy quietly. ‘She never really lost herself in the sensuality of the moment. You’re my perfect partner. I’m going to start all over again now, but I’ll finish differently.’

  His words heightened her anticipation, as he’d known they would, and by the time he’d worked his way down her breasts, over her belly and then up her legs again she was in such a state of high sexual tension that she was trembling all over. Rose, unable to resist the temptation, slid down the bed and softly ran a hand across Cressida’s upthrust stomach, watching the gentle ripple of the muscles as the other woman’s body reacted instantaneously.

  ‘She’s ready to come again,’ she whispered to Guy, who nodded and then slowly inserted a pulsating vibrator inside her, easing it in a little at a time so that Cressida’s whole body twisted and turned with despairing need.

  Guy carefully watched for the tell-tale clenching of Cressida’s fingers and then he eased back the hood of her clitoris and drew circles round the pulsating flesh at the same time as the vibrator flooded her with glorious sensations. Almost immediately Cressida felt the tension tighten to an almost unendurable level and then her taut muscles spasmed and she was flooded by the liquid warmth of her second climax.

  Sir Peter was now so aroused that Rose had freed his erection and was caressing the rim of the glans, trying not to obscure his view of the other couple while at the same time heightening his pleasure. His fingers were inside the leg of her panties and just after Cressida’s second climax Rose had her first orgasm. She knew from the way her husband was responding to the show that it would be the first of many.

  By now Cressida was so lost in the sexual sensations that all she wanted was another orgasm, but this time with Guy inside her. He knew instinctively what she needed, but made her tell him. ‘Say it,’ he urged her. ‘Tell us what you want.’

  ‘I want another orgasm, but I need to feel you in me; to tighten myself around you so that we come together,’ she pleaded, arousing Sir Peter so much that he nearly came there and then.

  ‘That sounds a very good idea,’ murmured Guy, and stripping off his clothes he lay across the foot of the bed and then pulled her on top of him, her legs on either side of his body, her hands on his lower chest and her back resting against the tops of his thighs as she lowered herself on to his straining penis. ‘Work for it, Cressida,’ he urged her. ‘Let them see you milking me. Prove that it’s the man who’s the puppet, not the woman.’

  His words reminded her of Rick’s drawing in the gallery, the one that had first awoken her dormant sexuality, and suddenly she took control, easing herself up and down on him, caressing his nipples with her sharp nails and clenching and unclenching her internal muscles so that time and again Guy was on the point of coming but every time she felt his body start to spasm she kept totally still and refused him all stimulation.

  Soon he was as frantic as he’d been used to making her, and when he cried out, begging for release, she felt a surge of triumph. As Sir Peter threw himself on the panting Rose, Cressida increased the tempo of her rhythm, and when Guy’s body tensed she continued the stimulation until he was finally allowed to come. He shouted out incoherently in gratified triumph and relief.

  All four of them were collapsed on the bed, their breathing still uneven from their exertions, when the front door bell rang. Rose lifted her flushed face from the pillows and stared at her husband. ‘Who on earth can that be at this hour of the night?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he retorted. ‘Unfortunately we gave Marie the night off so one of us had better go and see.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Rose. ‘Don’t move, any of you,’ she added with a smile. ‘I’ll be back very soon!’ Pulling a robe round her she hurried down the stairs.

  Cressida was only vaguely aware of what was going on because Guy was holding her close, telling her how wonderful she’d been and how there was even better to come. For a brief time her real purpose in being with him was forgotten and she revelled in the sheer sensuality of it all. The respite didn’t last very long.

  ‘I think you’d better come downstairs,’ said Rose suddenly from the bedroom doorway. ‘Marcia and Rick are here and they say they have something urgent that they need to talk to us about.’

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ murmured Cressida. ‘It’s bound to be business and you don’t need me.’

  ‘I’m afraid we do,’ said Rose, her voice cold. ‘Marcia says that there’s something we should all know about you.’

  All the warmth and pleasure of the evening vanished and Cressida felt as though someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over her. Shivering slightly she got off the bed and began to pull on her skimpy items of clothing, wishing that she had some other clothes with her that left her less vulnerable at such a moment.

  Guy watched her quizzically. ‘This sounds interesting, don’t you think, Cressida?’

  ‘I’m not in the best condition to think,’ she replied, her brain racing as she tried to work out what she was going to do if her back-up failed to materialise and her cover had been blown.

  ‘Well, I think we should at least go and talk to them after they’ve taken all this trouble to come and find us. It isn’t like Marcia to interrupt my social evenings unless it’s something very urgent.’

  ‘We’ll join you in a few minutes,’ said Sir Peter, who plainly wanted to spend a little more time with his wife.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Guy agreeably. ‘It will give me a chance to hear what this is about. Come along, Cressida. You must be as curious as I am.’

  The moment they entered the drawing room Cressida realised from the expression on Marcia’s face that the other woman knew the truth about her. She hardly dared look at Rick, but when she did she knew that he too had learned her true identity, and that this knowledge had both hurt and angered him. She didn’t care too much about that, but what she did care about was how Guy would react and whether she was going to get out of Sir Peter’s house alive.

  ‘Love the outfit!’ drawled Marcia, her eyes skimming over Cressida’s skimpily clad body. Cressida tried to clutch the tiny kimono more tightly round her but then gave up. It was a little late for modesty.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Guy with interest. ‘I hope the gallery hasn’t caught fire?’

  ‘The gallery’s safe, for the moment,’ replied Marcia, ‘but you and I have had our fingers badly burnt by Miss Cressida Farleigh here, or perhaps I should call her WPC Farleigh to be absolutely correct.’

  Guy’s fingers, which had been linked lightly round Cressida’s wrist, tightened. She tried to twist free but failed in the attempt. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked curtly.

  ‘I mean that Cressida is an undercover police spy. She was put into our gallery by the fraud squad, who wanted to catch you before Interpol did.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ he asked.

  ‘I followed Detective Sergeant Tom Penfold to a pub late last night and told him that Cressida was having an affair with you,’ said Rick. ‘I pretended that it was such an intense affair the pair of you were thinking of getting married and he went berserk. Within minutes he was telling me the whole miserable story. He felt sorry for me, you see, because I’d been taken in by her too.’

  Guy spun Cressida around and pinned her against the wall. ‘Is this true?’ he demanded, his mouth a tight line against the sudden pallor of his face.

  ‘Guy, please, don’t hurt me. I was given a job to do. I didn’t have a choice,’ protested Cressida, wishing that she believed he had a better nature to appeal to but since she didn’t, playing for just a little more time.

  ‘Is it true?’ he repeated, his hands hard on her shoulders.

  ‘Of course it’s true!’ said Marcia. ‘She’s only here tonight because of the Holbein. As for that man who brought us in a Matisse, he was another policeman, a cover-up for the fact that we caught her snooping in our files.’

  Guy frowned. ‘The Holbein?’

  ‘That’s what Tom Pe
nfold told me,’ said Rick. ‘Haven’t you given it to Sir Peter yet?’

  ‘Shut up, both of you!’ snarled Guy, turning back to Cressida. ‘For the last time, Cressida, is this all true?’

  Cressida was terrified by the expression on his face, and also by the realisation that this was the end for her and Guy. Never again would she feel his hands on her body, or enjoy the glorious searing pleasure that only he had ever been able to give her. He was everything she could have wished for in a man, and she was going to lose him, either to prison or by ending up in the bottom of some quarry deep in the countryside where she’d probably not be discovered for years. She began to tremble but made herself look him in the eye.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘It’s all true.’

  To her amazement he released his grip on her shoulders, stepped away from her and laughed. ‘How you’ve wasted your talents, Cressida. You should have gone on the stage! I could have sworn that you were really enjoying yourself with me, and I’m not an easy man to fool.’

  ‘I was,’ she whispered. ‘That wasn’t an act, but I still had a job to do.’

  ‘So when you begged me to enter you, when you implored me to give you an orgasm, to finally let you come, that was genuine, was it?’ he asked mockingly, and she blushed furiously at the look on the faces of Marcia and Rick.

  ‘Please, don’t talk about it,’ she begged him.

  ‘Why not? You’ve done plenty of talking to people while we’ve been together, although presumably not about our sexual excesses! I must congratulate you. You totally misled me. In fact, I’d begun to grow alarmingly fond of you. How lucky for me that you weren’t what you appeared to be. I was quite nervous about falling in love for the first time.’

  His words were like hammer blows to Cressida and she flinched inwardly, but she knew that no matter how calm he seemed he must even now be plotting how to get rid of her and make his escape. She tried to block out her personal feelings.

  ‘Now you know I’m a spy I’ve no doubt I’ll “vanish” like Lord Summers’ paintings,’ she said crisply. ‘Before I do, perhaps you’d like to tell me exactly how you did it.’

  ‘I thought you’d worked it all out,’ he said with a half smile. ‘You seem very certain that you know what we’re up to, so you tell me.’

  ‘I know that you cheat your so-called friends by offering to renovate paintings for them and then having them copied. Presumably once you feel sure that they’ve been taken in by the copy you sell off the originals to private buyers around the world. What I don’t know is who your contacts are, or who does all the work for you. I can’t believe Rick’s the only artist you use.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have been a writer,’ murmured Guy. ‘Your imagination is certainly fertile enough.’

  Cressida laughed. ‘You’re not going to try and tell me we’re wrong are you? That Interpol and the Fraud squad are following the wrong man, and that you didn’t switch Lord Summers’ paintings? Or that the Holbein you’re about to return to poor Sir Peter is the same one he gave you?’

  Guy shook his head. ‘No, I’m not going to try and tell you that.’ He reached out towards her and Cressida pressed herself tightly against the wall, but all he did was softly stroke her breasts through the flimsy material of the bra. ‘You’ve such a lovely, responsive body,’ he said to himself. ‘I shall really miss it.’

  ‘Stop playing with me!’ shouted Cressida, realising that time was running out and determined to hear the truth from him whatever happened to her. ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘He hasn’t done anything wrong,’ said a voice from the doorway. ‘He’s only done what his friends have asked him to do.’

  Turning her head, Cressida saw Sir Peter Thornton standing in the doorway. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked in bewilderment.

  The older man sighed. ‘It’s all rather pathetic I’m afraid, but although you’re right about Guy having copies made of my Holbein and poor Michael’s two paintings it was because we asked him to. Lord Summers, like me, had a much younger wife and, also like me, he had trouble keeping her sexually satisfied. That’s bad enough, but if you want to keep them despite your sexual failings you have to shower them with gifts. When most of your money’s tied up in family trusts or entailed it isn’t as easy as you’d imagine, so several of us resorted to asking Guy to sell off some of our art treasures.

  ‘It was all done perfectly legally. We gave him the proof of ownership certificates and he sold them discreetly for us, replacing them with almost undetectable forgeries. Lord Summers broke the law, because the pictures were part of his estate, and I’ve done the same with my Holbein, but Guy hasn’t done anything wrong. We never even told him we weren’t free to sell them, although no doubt he guessed. He’s a very discreet middleman and invaluable to stupid old men like me who spend their final years trying to keep beautiful young women at our sides.’

  Cressida could hardly believe her ears. ‘You mean, both you and Lord Summers knew what was happening?’ she demanded, as she heard the sound of screeching tyres on the gravel drive.

  ‘We instigated the whole business, as have many other elderly titled men around Europe in recent years,’ he said sadly.

  ‘And Guy didn’t do anything wrong?’

  ‘He was helping out his friends, nothing more.’

  Guy laughed. ‘I think someone had better open the front door. There are several PC Plods hammering on the wood right now.’

  Stunned by what she’d heard and wanting to weep at what she’d lost because her bosses had got it all so wrong, Cressida could only stare helplessly at Guy as the police rushed in to rescue her.

  ‘Good God, Cressida, cover yourself up!’ shouted Tom, dashing across the room and wrapping his jacket round her.

  As Guy, Marcia and Rick were handcuffed and bundled away, Guy glanced back at her and grinned. ‘Yes, cover yourself up, you abandoned hussy!’ he said mockingly. ‘Time to return to sex on Saturday nights with the lights out I think.’

  ‘It wasn’t him!’ protested Cressida as she watched Guy being taken away. ‘He didn’t do anything. Ask Sir Peter here, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘Come along, Cressida,’ said Tom gently. ‘You’re in shock, but you’ve done a wonderful job. I just hope you recover from all this. I can’t bear to think about what you’ve gone through in order to nail that bastard.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ yelled Cressida, pulling herself free and throwing his jacket to the floor. She turned to Detective Chief Inspector Williams. ‘If you want to hear the truth about this scam you’d better talk to your “good friend” Sir Peter here, and then decide whether or not you want to press charges.’

  As her chief stared at her in stunned amazement she walked proudly out of the house in her skimpy underwear and short black kimono, climbed into one of the waiting cars and was driven away, leaving Tom open mouthed behind her. All she wanted now was to get home and be allowed some time to weep in private for everything that she’d lost.

  Three weeks later Cressida was wandering around her house, wishing that her four-week compulsory recovery leave was over so that she could return to police work. Being alone with nothing to do all day, wondering where Guy was and whether Marcia was now enjoying the incredible sexual pleasure he’d once given her, was driving her mad.

  She knew from what Tom had told her on his one brief visit, a visit that had ended abruptly when she’d told him that she no longer wanted their affair to continue, that Guy, Marcia and Rick had been released without charge and that so far no charges had been brought against Detective Chief Inspector Williams’s friend Sir Peter Thornton either. Cressida had a shrewd suspicion that it never would be. Men of that type tended to stick together. The old boys’ network still flourished and she had no doubt that the entire investigation would be quietly dropped.

  None of which helped her. Her whole life had been changed by the assignment, and now she was expected to return to her old life and pick up the threads of what she realised had been
a very mundane existence. Even her work no longer held the appeal it had once done, because she was totally consumed by her need for Guy.

  When the front doorbell rang she thought it was the postman with a parcel she was expecting and held out her hand without looking at the waiting man properly. ‘What do you want – money?’ asked Guy. ‘I’m the one who should be asking for compensation, don’t you think?’

  Cressida stepped back in shock as he pushed his way into the house. She couldn’t tell if he was angry or not, but she felt a rush of gratitude that at least she’d managed to see him one more time. ‘Are you leaving England?’ she asked nervously, noticing that he was carrying a small suitcase.

  ‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘Why are you wearing that dreadful pleated skirt?’ he added. ‘It makes you look terrible.’ With that he reached forward, unhooked the clip at the side and watched it fall to the floor. ‘That’s better. I don’t care for the blouse either. Will you take it off, or shall I?’

  Cressida felt a mixture of fear and arousal. ‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes, if you must know I am. Here, let me assist you.’ Before she quite knew what was happening her blouse was off and she was standing in front of him in her cotton briefs, sensible bra and bare legs.

  ‘At least you aren’t wearing tights,’ he commented, looking around the room until he saw what he was looking for. ‘Move that footstool over to the wall,’ he demanded, and when she hesitated he pinched one of her breasts hard in his right hand so that familiar darts of dark pleasure seared through her.

  Quickly she obeyed, and immediately he lifted her up so that she was standing on the footstool with her back against the wall. ‘Keep still,’ he instructed her, and then he undressed himself until he was totally naked.

  ‘Draw the curtains,’ murmured Cressida. ‘Please, someone might see.’

  ‘I thought you enjoyed that possibility,’ he reminded her. ‘We don’t need darkness, you and I. We know each other too well for that. As for the neighbours, who cares?’