by Kris Pearson
She lifted embarrassed eyes to his and extended a trembling hand to take the money. He’d given her a pound.
“Kneeling on the sofa, with your back to me, lassie.”
She swallowed, shrugged the jacket off her shoulders, placed it on the floor, piled his coins on top, and turned her back to him so he could undo those of the tiny buttons she’d managed to fasten. This was a lady’s dress—there would always be a maid to help her mistress into such a garment.
His warm hands slid down her spine, loosening the fabric, bringing her shame ever closer. He eased the dress over her shoulders, down her arms, until it pooled around her feet.
Then he turned her to face him and began to unfasten her bodice as though she was a child. She offered up silent thanks she’d embroidered it prettily and edged it with a piece of old lace she’d salvaged from her last mistress’s discarded tea-gown.
Neither looked at the other now. Elizabeth kept her eyes closed and felt the inexorable progress of his hands as they travelled down to her waist. Hugo watched his fingers unthread the ribbons that bound her bodice fronts together. Finally the fastenings were free. He smoothed the garment aside and cradled a perfect breast in each hand.
“Sire!” she moaned, eyes flying open.
“See how beautiful you are,” he murmured, bending to each nipple in turn and sucking hard.
Elizabeth gasped, but something stopped her from pulling away from him. No man had ever taken such liberties with her body. The sensation was extreme, and wonderful.
“On the sofa,” he commanded. “Kneel. Undo those petticoats and slide them down to make a frothy frame for your pretty bottom.”
She padded across the room and knelt. His mouth still burned hot and wet on her flesh. When she glanced down she saw his spittle shining there. And her nipples were as long and hard as acorns.
“Not eating?” Meg asked.
Romy realized she’d been granted the blessed distraction of a daydream. As she spooned Tabouleh and salad greens and shaved peppered pork onto her plate, she made a mental note to check out appropriate masculine undergarments. For surely the Laird would be removing his kilt in the not too distant future. She had no wish to add a passion-killing vest to hide his impressive torso from Elizabeth. But did they really wear nothing in the way of pants under those kilts in the chilly highlands...?
CHAPTER 34 – JOHNNO SUBMITS: ELOISE SNEERS
“I can tell you this now Tigger’s not here,” Eloise said in her best stage whisper. Meg and Nurse Mandy scented gossip and leaned closer.
“You’ll never guess what my silly Johnno’s gone and done. Written a book. Well, written half a book, anyway.”
“It runs in the family then,” Meg said, nodding more enthusiastically than the news deserved. It was the first she’d heard of Johnno being the least bit literary. He was a woodwork teacher, surely? But the sparkling wine on an empty stomach had relaxed her to a surprising degree, and she was feeling magnanimous toward the whole world. “Half a book is better than no loaf,” she added.
“Half a loaf is better than no loaf,” Mandy corrected, likewise tipsy.
“No bread,” said Eloise. “Better than no bread.”
They all nodded solemn agreement.
“And no bread is what he’ll get for his book,” she continued. “He’s broken all the rules. Nobody’s going to publish it. Do you know what he’s done?” She eyed them with faint belligerence over her plate of pastrami and bean salad—the same bean salad that Bobbie ate so much of.
“Written it by hand?” Meg hazarded.
“No, not that bad,” Eloise dismissed. Johnno might be a bit of a fool, but he was her fool, and she didn’t want anyone thinking him that stupid. She reached around and squirted herself another generous glassful from the cardboard cask of dry red that Liz had brought as her contribution to their Christmas lunch.
“Forgotten his synopsis?” Mandy suggested. (Synopsis proved a difficult word to pronounce after several wines.)
“Hasn’t even written one, as far as I can tell,” Eloise sniffed. “No—he’s done a multiple submission!”
The others drew deep breaths of alarm and concern.
“A multiple submission,” Mandy murmured. “Oh no...”
“That’ll really get up their noses,” Meg agreed. “How many publishers?”
Eloise shook her head and managed a dramatic pause while she tipped her glass up and swigged. “Don’t know for sure. Six or seven? He went to the library and made a list of the people who print Wilbur Smith and Stephen King and Robert Ludlum and Jeffrey Archer and Dean Koon.”
“Koontz,” Meg said with care.
“Koontz,” Eloise repeated. “Funny name.”
“He fancies himself in with that lot, does he?” Mandy asked. Having just had a request for her first full manuscript, she felt superior to someone trying their luck indiscriminately.
“And Dan Brown, if you please,” Eloise continued. “And James Patterson and John Grisham—you know the sort of people I mean?”
“Real top sellers,” Meg muttered. “He’s out of his depth, surely?”
(‘Depth, surely’ was another hard one after several drinks. Worse than Mandy’s attempt at ‘synopsis’, she decided.)
“So he’s written straight to all these publishers—didn’t even think about trying to get an agent,” Eloise continued. “I happened to see his Query Letter, if you could call it that, and I thought ‘Johnno, you’re dead in the water’, I really did.” She took another deep swallow and shook her head. “I wish he’d told me what he was doing instead of just barreling ahead. I would have said to him ‘Darling, one publisher at a time.” She held up a bony finger tipped with a silver nail. “Include a synopsis so they can see what happens in the rest of the book.” She unfolded another finger beside the first. “And third, for heaven’s sake grovel a bit.” The next finger stayed half bent so she abandoned the attempt to raise it. “He’s let them all know they’re competing against each other. And he’s actually said he has no intention of sending them the rest of the book on spec in case someone steals the whole thing.”
Meg and Mandy gasped. This was very bad indeed. Everything they’d gleaned from the trade papers and writing workshops, and Romy, who knew the ropes, had reinforced the fact that publishers and editors were the most important beings in the universe.
You Did Not Annoy Them.
“Still, it’ll keep him out of my hair,” Eloise said. “We’re in rehearsal for ‘The Graduate’ for the next four days. Then we knock off for Christmas. Darling Ashton wants us all back by New Year. Very tight schedule. Inhuman really. Some of the cast have to give up their holidays to take part. Johnno intends lurking at school, making the most of the computers for the second half of his bloody book.”
“What’s it about?” Meg asked.
“Typical masculine adventure thing. Lone yachtsman. New Caledonia. French love interest.” Eloise waved a dismissive hand. In fact the brief description she’d had from Tigger was the sum of her knowledge about the project. Johnno had managed to keep it out of her hopeful hands ever since she’d offered to read it aloud for him.
“A romance?” Nurse Mandy wondered.
“Hardly, darling. ‘Wham-bam, thank you ma’am,’ but no nice sensual seductions. Men!” she added with a dramatic eye-roll.
Ian chose that moment to approach their end of the room to restock his lunch plate. Meg—relaxed and replete—let her gaze roam over his sinewy brown arms and sexy narrow hips. ‘Men,’ she mused to herself. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’
CHAPTER 35 – ROMY LETS IT SLIP
“I’m probably a criminal,” Romy muttered to Liz so the others couldn’t hear. “Dammit, dammit, what the hell am I going to do?”
This was unimaginably large. Unstoppable as an avalanche or a neutron bomb. She’d been trembling since 8.30 that morning and saw no escape from its vise-like jaws.
“Nothing. You’re going to do nothing. I can’t see that you’re in the wr
ong at all. Let me do a bit a research before you panic any further.” She rubbed Romy’s arm.
“You won’t ask Paul?” Romy’s usually sparkling brown eyes looked as moistly pleading as an old dog’s.
Liz, who had indeed taken it for granted she’d get free legal advice from her ex-husband when he returned their children the next evening, shook her head. “I doubt he’ll be in the mood for talking,” she murmured. “One bare-chested man hanging out my panties on Friday, and another lounging around in a towel on Sunday...?” She raised an eyebrow and gave Romy a grin.
Romy’s confidence in her privacy returned a little. “So who?” she pressed.
“Dickie Arthur,” Liz said, pulling a name out of the air. “My first boss. He’s been retired a few years now—he’s an old darling. I was his last secretary. He’d do anything for me, I’m sure.” Including, she thought to herself, pat my bottom, look down my dress, kiss me rather wetly on my birthday.
“Don’t tell him our names,” Romy begged.
“Promise. Cross my heart.” Which she would have done, had she not been balancing an empty plate in one hand and a glass of dry red in the other. “I’ll ring him tomorrow,” she added.
“Sunday?”
“Ah, Monday then. He’ll know. Family Law was his field. But,”—and here she paused very delicately—”how on earth did you find out about Neill?”
“He told me. Came straight out with it. I’d been pushing him to get a proper job again, instead of all the part-time rubbishy cash stuff he does.” She reached out and waved a hand at a wasp which had flown through the open French doors and was about to settle on Vi’s trifle. “He’s lucky he hasn’t been caught for tax evasion, if you ask me. And I really, really want to try writing full time. So I thought it was fair enough.”
The wasp zoomed by for a second attempt. Liz, with surprising accuracy for someone who had downed several drinks, set her glass aside, slapped at the wasp, and sent it hurtling into the whipped cream and walnuts which topped Vi’s splendid dessert.
“Shit!” she said, grabbing a nearby spoon and scraping it off. She deposited it on her holly-patterned paper serviette and pushed some walnuts over the damage on the trifle. Both women gazed at the struggling cream-clogged insect until Liz folded the layers over and squeezed. “Sorry,” she added as Romy grimaced.
“I’ll pretend it was Neill Bloody Farrell. Liz, I’ve had it with ADverts. I’ve worked full time all these years and earned a lot of the money we’ve lived on. The kids are all at school now. I want a bit of time for me.”
“So what did he say?”
“That he wanted a divorce.”
“Oh fuck! You poor thing.”
“Mmmm. ‘Romy I need a frigging divorce first’,” she mimicked. She carried off Neill’s Scots accent quite well. “Of course I thought he meant a divorce from me, and it came so out of the blue I just about fainted. I mean—we’re good. We’re great. Or so I thought.”
Liz reached for Romy’s empty plate, stacked it on her own, and stretched over to set them on the table. She placed the waspy serviette on top. “And?” she whispered.
“He realized how it must have sounded, so then he said, ‘No, no, the bitch in Aberdeen’. And I said ‘Which bitch in Aberdeen?’, and he said ‘Ma wife, ma lawful wedded wife. Ma awful wedded wife.’ Then he went very quiet. I did too.”
Liz drew a deep breath and glanced around. They had a good turnout for the writers’ Christmas lunch. Even some of the more sporadic attendees had made it to Meg’s home today. The noise level was deafening—conversation, cutlery against china, music from the stereo in the corner.
“You are not the bigamist,” Liz said. “He is. He’s in real trouble I suspect, but you’re not.”
“Except that I love him and want him here in New Zealand—not locked up in prison on the other side of the world. He’s Daniel’s Dad...”
“I doubt it’ll come to prison,” Liz said with more confidence than actual knowledge. “Wait till I’ve got some proper info from old Dickie.”
“I suppose Neill was trying to be the invisible man,” Romy continued, blowing her nose on her paper serviette and then looking around for somewhere to put it. She dug her bag out from under the chair and dropped it in after a few seconds’ hesitation. “We haven’t talked properly yet. I tore out to the car and just drove like a lunatic for a while, crying heaps. For all I know he’s an illegal immigrant, as well. Probably came to New Zealand on a Visitors’ Permit to do mountain treks and whitewater rafting and stuff. You know how he loves being right away from civilization?”
“All those family camping trips to remote beaches and so on? But you enjoy them too?”
“Paradise,” Romy confirmed. “But what if he just stayed here without applying for permanent residency? He’s so darn keen to keep out of the limelight that I have to wonder. He never seems to need a doctor, so I bet he’s not on the Health Department computer. Has no proper job, so Inland Revenue won’t know about him.”
“He’s got a kiwi driving license though, hasn’t he? I remember we were all comparing photographs a few months back.”
“I think he got one off his old UK one,” Romy said gloomily. “Maybe. I don’t know. God...” She heaved a huge hopeless sigh.
“And it happened this morning?”
“I was due to drop the kids at Saturday sports. And I had a niggle at Neill about a full time job while they got all their stuff together, and he just came out with it. I freaked.”
Liz had a sudden vivid picture of tall fair Neill, small dark Romy, children tearing around happily, and the bombshell blowing them all apart.
“I roared off and left him to it,” Romy added. “I suppose he took them in his van. There was nobody there when I went back to get changed and grab my seafood quiche.”
“So he needs to sort out his divorce, which must be possible because he’s been out of Scotland and away from his wife for ages. Yes? How long? I know that makes a difference. I think it has to be seven years. And then re-marry you properly—depending on what happens in the meantime.”
Romy reached over to the stack of paper serviettes on the table, took another one, and began twisting and tearing at it. “Seven years? Well, Daniel’s five, so it must be six at least.”
“Have another drink,” Liz suggested. Romy shook her head, so Liz topped up her own glass.
“This means Daniel is illegitimate!”
“Sssshhh...”
“But he is.” She hiccupped prior to sobbing in earnest, and Liz bundled her out to the garden, hoping the others wouldn’t notice. They paced from one end of the dandelion studded lawn to the other, and then turned and retraced their steps. Every few seconds, Romy sniffled into the crumpled paper serviette. Liz took a long swallow of red wine while she searched for anything she could possibly say to make the hideous situation any easier.
“You’ve got to keep it looking normal for the children. You can do that. Go back home after this meeting as though everything’s fine. You all have dinner, and do whatever you were planning to do on a Saturday night anyway...”
“Natasha and Sarah were going to a sleepover with some friends down the road. Just Daniel home for the night.”
“Are going to a sleep-over,” Liz corrected. “Well, that’s a help. Pack them off, get Daniel into bed early, and have a big talk with Neill.”
Romy shrugged. Waves of anguish rolled off her. “No, you must,” Liz encouraged. “You’ll probably find he married really young and his wife got bored while he was out working the oil-rigs and she was unfaithful or something.”
“Unless he’s got a string of other kids and he was the unfaithful bastard. Bloody Scotsmen—can’t keep their cocks safely under their kilts!”
They both sniggered at the thought.
“No, truly,” Romy insisted, once she’d got over her nervy giggles. “It took him less than half a day to get me into bed. He’d been helping on that Community Clean-up truck before lunch, and chatted me up with a
ll his muscles and gorgeous accent. Then he came sniffing around late in the afternoon to see if he could be ‘a wee bitty help’ with anything else. I stupidly gave him dinner, and he never really left.”
“And this had nothing to do with him being a great big strong sexy sinful hunk?”
“Nothing at all!” Romy said with half a tearful smile. “Oh Liz, what am I going to do? What else hasn’t he told me? How can I ever believe him again if he can keep something this huge from me for so long?”
Liz shook her head, then up-ended her nearly empty glass and finished the wine.
Romy dabbed at her nose. “If he has to go back to Scotland to get this sorted out, who’s going to look after the children? I can’t keep working at ADverts with all my long days and trips away. I won’t find another job that pays half as well.” Her lower lip began to tremble again. “And I’ll have no time to write my books,” she wailed.
Liz let her sob for a while—no-one else had come out to investigate. “He won’t have to go back to Scotland,” she said after some serious thought. “The second marriage—the one to you—is the crime. And that happened here in New Zealand, so that’s where it needs to be settled. I don’t know about any immigration stuff though.”
There was an awful kind of justice beginning to rear its head here. Romy, who had everything, might suddenly have a lot less. All the years of earning big money, of never having to cook or do housework; of having the sporty cars, the gorgeous man to look after her, and the published novels, seemed to be crashing around her ears.
Liz, who’d been keeping a big house and garden running on her own, feeling beholden to Paul, and working half time for laughable pay so she’d be free when her children needed her, felt a savage little glitter of satisfaction. She tried very hard to squash it, but it kept sneaking through.
‘Bitch,’ she hissed at her own envious soul.
CHAPTER 36 – A TRIFLE TOO MUCH