by Sara Forbes
Ken moans and clutches the pillows on either side fiercely. A complicated look takes over his face as his eyes are squeezed shut. I get into it then, just using my imagination as to what I might like if I were him, licking, teasing, and taking him as far as I can without gagging. He tastes mildly salty. Because he’s reacting to every slight movement I make, it feels like I can’t do anything wrong.
“Wait. Stop. Yes, there,” he murmurs, in a sleepy, sexy rumble.
And up and down like that, just a little more. “Oh God, yes, keep doing that.”
And so I obey until his murmurs become incoherent. Soon his pelvis is thrusting and I have to pin him down with my weight against his thighs. He seems to like that even more, pushing hard against me, demanding his right to have his pleasure.
I take him deeper in my throat, fighting the gag reflex. His entire body tightens to an incredible hardness and when his juices gush into my throat all I can think about is the way he’s given himself up to me, completely, trusting me with his pleasure. I swallow his salty juices and wipe my mouth with my hand.
I sit up. Sweating, trembling, messy and sticky and euphoric. The expression of sheer gratitude on Ken’s face is mesmerizing.
His eyes snap open and we share an awed moment of wordless communication. A line has been crossed. He knows it, and I know it.
I still can’t articulate it though. I’m afraid it’ll disappear if I use words. My track record of keeping men happy with words leaves a lot to be desired.
“Liv, get the hell up here,” he says, reaching out for me.
I crash into his arms. His mouth finds mine and he plunges his tongue where his cock had been. Again, he tells me how much this means to him with the feverish way he attacks my mouth.
“Don’t leave. Will you be with me today?” he asks.
“How do you mean?” I ask in confusion. I am with you.
“I have stuff I need to do before I get back home.”
“I’ll go with you.” I say in determination. He had me at ‘Don’t leave.’ “What stuff?”
“I want to go back to the slaughterhouse. Ask if they’ve seen other racehorses sabotaged. Maybe Sill’s not the only one to be poisoned. They’d know because they couldn’t sell that meat on.”
I shudder. “I can’t believe you’re even talking to those people.”
“They provide a service,” he says grimly.” Supply and demand.”
“Well, I’m going with you.”
I slide off the bed then. The thought of dead horses and horsemeat has broken the spell and I desperately need a shower.
Ken leaves me to it and I’m glad he gives me this private space. He knows when to be pushy and when not to be. He reads me so well. I feel that I can relax around him, although it will take some time before I can let all my guards down. They’ve been too meticulously built up and stress-tested for that.
When I emerge from the mists of my scented hot shower, feeling amazing, Ken’s standing by the window in a white bathrobe, arms crossed. “And I want to talk to some of the other owners to see if anything suspicious has happened in the yards they use,” Ken says, continuing a prior conversation.
I nod.
“I call it a coordinated attack on British racing. Someone’s trying to turn a profit and then disappear to some offshore tax haven, no doubt. Racing’s almost impossible to make any returns with these days, and some greedy bastard wants to milk the last drops of life out of it illegally.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I know so. I’m going to bring these people down, Liv. This has been a long time coming. I don’t care who they are.”
His rough tone scares me, so different to the jokey, playful Ken I thought I used to know. I don’t know what he means by “bring down” but the way his brows are drawn together and his mouth set in a thin line of hatred, his fists clenched, it’s clear it’s not going to be a picnic for these enemies of his if and when he finds them.
“Let’s get you showered and then have breakfast,” I say.
I just want to see happy relaxed Ken once more before real life kicks us all back to reality.
15
KEN
THIS SHOULD BE THE best morning of my life. Why then can’t I relax?
My mind is tainted—not with sexual desire, although there’s a plenty of that, but with this craving for justice, and this utter neediness.
Like an alien being inside of me, it comes bursting out at the breakfast table, angry and relentless. And I just let it happen. Something about the demure tablecloth, the silverware, the tinkling Muzak, and the delicate sunlight grates on my nerves. It’s all so pretty that I have an urge to destroy it.
“So, out of curiosity, why did you marry Peter?” I stir my milk into my tea as if it’s the most reasonable question in the world. I study the changes in her face, observing as she grapples to answer the one question I’ve asked myself every day for two years solid.
There’s a flicker between her eyebrows, a tightening of her mouth to one side. She sets down her plate of fruit pieces and stares at me balefully. “I’m not sure we want to talk about that, Ken.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But damn it, Liv, I have to. Give me anything. Doesn’t have to be a big long spiel. But…” I spread my hands wide. “Why?”
I’m sounding like the world’s neediest bastard, and maybe that’s what I am when it comes to Liv Mackenzie.
“He was there for me… when Daddy was diagnosed,” she says in a small voice.
“I was there for you. Waiting at home.” Like a moron.
She stretches her hand towards me. I let her drape her fingers around my arm but I hold still, refusing to reciprocate. Am I being as bad as her ex when I’m like this? I don’t know. Maybe she’s the one to blame, bewitching all men in her life, turning them into monsters?
“You seemed far away,” she says. “When my father got ill. My world of endless possibility just seemed to close in like quicksand. I can’t explain the choking feeling of not having options anymore. I was desperate for my parents, Daddy especially, to be happy with my choices. I thought it would turn everything around. I thought… Peter would call in his experts and Daddy would be miraculously cured.”
Her pain is so clear. I want to stop this inquisition now and take her in my arms. But I still don’t feel the satisfaction. It’s clear she wasn’t thinking clearly. It’s clear she wasn’t thinking about what she felt at all.
But did she stop, even once, to think about me? I clench my teeth, telling myself not to argue. I know how close she is to her father, how every day must feel like a ticking time bomb for her. Hanging around here with me must make her yearn to get home again.
“I was waiting,” I say.
“While Peter bombarded me with love,” she says. “I felt overwhelmed by all the attention, by all the things he promised… the best specialists in the world. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. And… I wasn’t good at fending for myself back then. My friends had moved out of our shared apartment in London. They’d become a couple. I felt lonely and tired and sick of college. I was at rock bottom and he just… appeared.”
“Yeah.” I know his type. The type that singles out prey at their weakest.
“And then,” she continues, “when he came home to visit, he got on so well with Daddy. Their faces... they were happy for that one moment.”
“And you?”
“Yes. I was happy, too, Ken. What do you think? I’d marry someone I hated? No. Peter came across as the sensible lord who’d be by my side when I had to deal with everything, the fallout when Daddy…” She can’t bring herself to say it. “You know what my mother’s like.”
“And I? I suppose I was the joker boy next door?”
“I’m sorry, Ken.” Her eyes pool with water. “Truth is, I didn’t think you were all that serious about me.”
I huff out an incredulous breath. “I was waiting so it would be perfect. I wanted to get away from my family, from your family,
for your friends, from everyone. It seemed like you were the queen bee at times, everyone buzzing around you. I wanted you all to myself even though your agenda never seemed to allow that. Or maybe you just weren’t interested in being alone with me?”
Her eyes flash as if in pain. “Ken… when I tried to touch you, you pushed me away.”
I inhale sharply. Is that how she remembers it? “No, I…”
But I can’t deny the truth of it. I remember it clearly. In the barn beside our stables. We’d come back from Brighton. We were both incandescent with desire, and we tumbled in the hay, kissing, fumbling. Liv placed her hand on my thigh. My cock was raging in my pants and still I insisted we wait until we could get away from Belgrave Castle, from Strathcairn, from Suffolk.
“I wanted our first time to be outrageous. As indeed it was.”
She purses her lips trying not to smile. Then, I can’t help it. I grin too.
I grab her delicate hand and crush it in mine. “Don’t leave me again. I don’t think my heart can take it.”
“No,” she whispers. Her eyes darken as if overcome by the enormity of what she’s saying. I see her integrity shine through. Right this moment I want to screw her again, hard like last night, branding her mine.
“Ken,” she protests. I’m gripping too tightly. I let go.
“Sorry.”
She offers me a shy smile. “Don’t apologize. You have no idea how good it feels to be wanted.”
“He didn’t want you?” I’m finding it hard to keep my voice down and another couple of late breakfast guests have just joined us in the saloon.
“Not in any normal way. He needed me around as a verbal punching bag, maybe, to elevate himself. I guess he just hates himself and that’s what it comes down to. That what my therapist says.”
“I’m glad you sought help. I had no idea how hard your life has been.”
“Well, I think it’s getting a lot better,” she says.
My heart warms at this. It almost makes up for the two years of pain.
16
LIV
AS WE DRIVE NORTH, I feel braver than I’ve felt in two years. I feel free.
Unloading my burden of feelings onto Ken without suffering any repercussions afterward has filled me with a sense of strength, as if some of Ken’s warrior energy has transferred to me. I’ve spent too long covering up my true feelings, and having my passions crushed by Peter’s sullen silences. There’s no need for me to cower in the shadows any longer. It’s time to stand up for what I believe in.
I’m committed to stepping up and helping Ken in whatever way I can. If that means contacting Peter and asking him what he might know about Edward Greer’s operations, then so be it. Because if there’s one thing I know about Greer is that he shows up whenever there’s money to be made, no matter how, and Ken’s little speech about somebody siphoning off the profits and then dumping them offshore stinks of Greer and people of his ilk. If he’s not doing it himself, he probably knows who is.
When we get back home, I’ll organize it. Peter and Edward Greer were friends at school and judging by the body language at the races, are still in each other’s confidences. Contacting Peter for my own benefit will mark the point where I’m truly free from him.
“Mind if we go over?” Ken’s at the turning point to the slaughterhouse.
“Let’s make it quick.” I want to see this hellhole by daylight but I do want to get home sooner rather than later. Mummy doesn’t like being on her own tending Daddy.
“You got it.” He swerves onto the country road.
There’s more life in the building now. Two empty horseboxes sit on the tarmac outside. The sight is chilling. I gulp.
Ken parks outside. “Well, we can’t go in.” He checks his watch. “Can you spare forty minutes?
“Ye-ah, okay.”
He gets out and I follow his lead.
“Look, nothing’s going to happen at home while we’re standing here,” he says, reading my mind as he sits against the bonnet of the car.
“Okay.” I’m worried of course that father will choose this moment, while I’m trespassing on a slaughterhouse property, to drop dead. “Forty minutes. I’m calling Mummy anyway.”
After the call—I tell Mummy I just took a break with old friends, and she reports dispassionately that everything’s the same as yesterday—I join Ken sitting on the bonnet. He takes my hand in his. With the birds twittering in the overhanging trees, I could sit for hours like this. The temptation to make out with him is counteracted by the sense of it being absolutely the last place in the world you’d want to kiss someone.
Then there’s a bloodcurdling squeal from the building. I clamp my hands over my ears. “That’s it. I’m out of here, because if we don’t go, I swear I’m going to break in there and do something I’ll regret.”
“I agree.”
As we’re driving away, a car pulling a horsebox comes trundling towards us. Ken doesn’t make room for him on the road by going to the left. He drives straight down the center.
I slap my hand against the dashboard and stare at him. “Uh, Ken?”
The car ahead stops.
The driver, a man in his mid-forties with the ubiquitous navy padded vest and plaid shirt, jumps out and approaches our car. The way he nods seems to suggest he knows Ken.
I sag back into my seat with relief.
“What got you out here, Lord Belgrave?” His face drops. “Not the Silmarillion, surely?”
“Just… checking the facilities,” Ken says, non-committedly.
“Oh right. Well.” The man glances around nervously.
Ken cocks his head toward the man’s horsebox. “That’s not Armageddon, is it?”
The man’s face twists with regret. “Yeah, turned six. Can’t keep him. Didn’t get sold at auction. You know the story. Or maybe you don’t.” He shakes his head sadly. “Just not enough money anyway.”
I squeeze Ken’s hand in a vise grip.
“Damnable business,” Ken says.
“But that’s okay,” I pipe up, leaning across Ken to look at the man’s face. “We’ll take him off your hands.”
Both men turn to me, aghast. In both their expressions, the signals of wanting to protest against my dumb idea are evident, but I’m so used to Peter that their reactions wash over my Teflon skin.
“That’s right,” I say in a louder voice. “My sanctuary is open for horses exactly like this. All you have to do is let us pay you the money you were going to hand over to this lot.” I gesture towards the slaughterhouse. “And I’ll take care of it for you. Your horse will live out his life another twenty years if he’s lucky. He’ll be well fed and cared for. You can visit him at any time.”
Temptation softens the horse owner’s face. “But the contract—”
“Is it signed?” I ask.
“No, actually.”
“Well, fuck the contract.” All my pent-up anger bursts through. I want that horse.
Ken looks at me in sheer amazement but turns to the guy, nodding briskly. “Yeah, fuck the contract.”
The man shifts from one foot to the other. The battle plays out across his rugged features. Something tells me he wants his horse to have a nice retirement and not go squealing through a hellhole where he’ll be shot, bled, and sent to France to be packaged as lasagna.
“You may have seen my estate?” I say in a gentler, more refined voice.
“Strathcairn,” Ken prompts.
“Oh aye.”
“Well,” I say as primly as I can. I’m used to talking to farmer types who are down on their luck. “It’s acres of grassy meadow. The stables have been in my family since the sixteenth century. We partner with schools and recreational facilities to allow city kids access to horses. I think that’s a more fitting end to a beautiful stallion, don’t you?”
Ken kicks my ankle, probably to tell me I’m laying it on thick, but I’m on a roll. I’m so angry and the passion is pouring out. And, if I’m honest, I’m loving
it.
“Look, can we... can we go somewhere and sort this out?”
“No,” I say. “We’ve got a hook on his car for your horse trailer. We’re going to hook it on and take horse and horsebox back with us. If you want your horsebox back, I’ll send you the details and you can connect it when you’re visiting your horse. How about it?”
“You got the cash on you?” Ken asks.
“Yeah.”
Ken looks at me and shrugs. We both turn to look at the man.
He’s overruled in every sense of the word.
“Let’s do it.”
“Well hurry,” Ken growls. “There’s someone coming.”
Indeed, a man in blue overalls is strutting out from the factory. He comes to an abrupt halt, and stares at us. He knows what’s going on, I’ll bet.
“Fuck this,” Ken says. “Jump in and drive away,” he orders the man. “Follow us.”
“Are you crazy?” Ken asks, turning to me as he reverses in a skid out from the hedgerow.
“Yes. No.”
The slaughterhouse guy is shaking his fist through the gates. Then he’s running towards a van. “Shit, he’s coming after us,” I squeak. “Step on it.”
Ken speeds up. “I don’t know these roads, not sure I can lose him.”
“Just need to get onto the motorway and he’ll give up I’m sure.”
And he does. Once we’re on the A1, there’s no sign of that ominous blue van anymore. There’s just the white jeep pulling Armageddon’s box.
At the next rest station, we swerve in. The business is conducted over a cup of coffee, a donut and a handshake. There will be time to draw up a proper contract tomorrow. Ken attaches the horsebox onto his own car.
Four hours later, we let Armageddon into his new home in my stable, the stall next to Silmarillion. The sick horse whinnies as if welcoming his new housemate.