Читать книгу To Love, Honour & Betray - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 5

‘I thought I heard the phone ring,’ Garth Wallace commented as he walked into the sitting room of his London apartment carrying the papers he had been to retrieve from the briefcase in his bedroom.

‘You did,’ Estelle Frensham agreed. She had been working for the firm as a temp, filling in for Garth’s personal assistant who was on maternity leave. ‘But whoever it was rang off without speaking. I did a check on the number, though. This is it.’ Silently, Garth studied the piece of paper she had given him. Apart from his eyebrows snapping together in a frown, his expression gave nothing away to Estelle as she watched him. He had recognised the number right away. How could he not do when for over ten years it had been his own? There was only one person who was likely to ring him from Ivy House, and so far as he knew, Tara, his daughter, was presently in London.

Tara. His daughter. Their daughter, his and Claudia’s. Despite the fact that physically she resembled him much more than she did Claudia, Tara was in every other imaginable way so much more Claudia’s child. Every mannerism, every mere inflection of her voice to him were copies of Claudia’s, and sometimes watching her, he wasn’t sure if those similarities made him hate himself more or loathe himself less. One thing was sure; they certainly didn’t alter his love for Tara herself, nor change the way he felt about her mother.

If Tara was in London and Claudia had rung him, it could only be because her need to talk to him was desperately important. Claudia would never ring otherwise.

He glanced at his watch and then announced, ‘Look, Estelle, I’ve changed my mind. We’ll leave it for this evening, I think. I want to spend a little more time on this one. I’ll ring the client in the morning and put off my meeting until later in the week.’

Estelle gave him an assessing look. They had been working all out at the agency to get some kind of campaign down on paper for the new client who had approached them to take on his business, which was why she was working here this evening instead of working out at the gym. Not that she minded—Garth’s company was preferable any day of the week, any time of the day or night, to going to the gym, even if all he had in mind was work. At least for now.

From the moment he had first interviewed her for the temporary vacancy at the agency eight weeks ago, Estelle had decided that just as soon as she could arrange it, she and Garth were going to be lovers. Just the thought of it, of the pleasure she had promised herself that lay in store for her, made her start to ache deep down inside, the kind of ache she knew from long experience could only be soothed by the release of a full orgasm.

She wondered what Garth’s reaction would be if she came right out with it now and told him how she felt, what she needed. Some men liked women who were totally up front and unashamed of admitting their sexual needs, but Garth, she suspected, was not one of them. And so far he had certainly neither said nor done anything to suggest that he was sexually attracted to her. Still, there was no other permanent woman in his life, apart from occasional dates with one of the agency’s account executives—a woman in her thirties who Estelle knew would be no competition for her! She had managed to ascertain that much and she had checked, as well, that he was as heterosexual as he looked—no doubts there, either.

So far, it appeared he hadn’t recognised her deliberate sexual come-ons to him or he had recognised them but was ignoring them—and of the two Estelle knew which one she preferred. And tonight she had hoped … but obviously tonight was not going to be the night. Estelle was no fool and she calmly gathered up the papers she had spread out on the workmanlike desk-cum-table that dominated his large square sitting room. All right, so things might not be ending as she had hoped and planned, but if she couldn’t have Garth then there was always Blade. Oh, yes, there was always Blade. Blade who would happily provide her with whatever kind of sex she wanted, Blade with whom her relationship was not so much one of love and hate, as mutual dislike and contempt and mutual need and lust, as well. As she collected her belongings, she was already planning how she would spend the rest of the evening.

Watching her, Garth wondered what she was thinking. She had made it clear right from their first interview that she found him sexually attractive, but Garth was used to women coming on to him, and if necessary he could always tell the agency who had supplied her to find the firm an alternative.

She wouldn’t be the first young and not-so-young female employee they had taken on who had made it plain she was attracted to him, but over the years he had learned to recognise all the warning signs and to deflect potential pitfalls in plenty of time to negotiate a way around them.

‘I’ll call you a cab,’ he told her crisply, reaching out to pick up the phone.

That was one thing about Garth, Estelle recognised. He was quite definitely very much the old-fashioned sort when it came to the way he took what he saw as his responsibility towards his female employees. Very protective, very gentlemanly, in the very best senses of both words. Unfortunately.

As she bent down to retrieve an errant piece of paper, she deliberately allowed the long wrap skirt she was wearing to part, showing him the slender gym-honed full length of her thigh and revealing, if he should be interested, the fact that what she was wearing underneath it was either extremely brief or totally non-existent. But as she glanced towards Garth, Estelle saw that he was looking the other way, his mind plainly on other things. Never mind, she promised herself as her taxi arrived, there would always be another time, and for now her growing frustration and need called out for Blade.

Garth waited until he had seen Estelle stepping safely into the taxi he had called—the same reliable firm the business always used. Garth had heard too many scary stories of women being abused by unauthorised cab drivers to take any risks with the safety of his employees. Then he reached out to pick up the telephone a second time, punching in the number Estelle had written down for him.

After she had undressed and showered, Claudia opened the drawer of her dressing-room cupboard, pausing as she stared down at the small bottle of sleeping tablets she kept there. Her doctor had prescribed them in the early weeks after she asked Garth to leave. She rarely used them now, but at the same time she was never without a bottle. Just occasionally there were nights, a week or more of them at times, when something would happen, trigger her memory, and she would know that sleep was going to be impossible … unwanted even, because if she did sleep, she would be haunted by her nightmares, her fears, her guilt, and then and only then did she resort to the awful and frighteningly empty oblivion of drug-induced sleep as an escape.

The last time she had taken them had been towards the end of last year. Garth’s birthday … his fiftieth.

Tara had thrown a party for him. She had begged Claudia to go, but as she had quietly explained to Tara at the time, Garth was hardly likely to want her to be there.

‘But we’re still family,’ Tara had protested stubbornly while Claudia had shaken her head.

‘You and Garth are still family, Tara. You and I are still family, but the three of us …’

‘You were both there for my twenty-first and for my graduation,’ Tara had reminded her mother, ‘and everyone said then that both of you …’ She stopped.

What everyone had said at the time was that it was a shame that her parents had split up and even more of a shame that they couldn’t get back together, but Tara knew that to say as much to either her father or her mother was to court one of their rare displays of anger—a defensive anger in her mother’s case and a protective one in her father’s.

‘Gramps and Nan will be there and so will the Brig and Nannie,’ she had coaxed, referring not only to her paternal grandparents but her maternal ones, as well, but still Claudia had refused.

She had known perfectly well, of course, having been told by her mother, that they had accepted Tara’s invitation to celebrate their ex-son-in-law’s fiftieth birthday.

‘We could hardly refuse, darling, and in fact, your father simply wouldn’t have heard of it. You know how much he thinks of Garth.’

‘Yes, I know, and there’s certainly no reason why you shouldn’t both go,’ Claudia had assured her mother quietly.

‘It will seem so odd without you being there….’

‘It won’t seem odd at all, at least not to me or to Garth,’ Claudia had had to point out to her mother as she reminded her gently, ‘We are divorced and have been for a full decade now.’

‘Yes, I realise that,’ her mother had fretted, ‘although I’ve never really understood why.’

‘I told you at the time. Garth had … there was—’

‘Garth was a little bit naughty, I know that, darling, but men are sometimes like that,’ her mother had interrupted her. ‘That’s just the way they are. Even your father … not that he ever … not that there was … but Garth is such a very handsome and charming man that—’

‘I’m not going,’ Claudia had told her mother firmly and she hadn’t done so.

Instead, she had gone to bed early with her sleeping tablet and her unwanted memories. On that occasion, the tablet hadn’t worked, but her memories had. Perhaps tonight she ought to take two instead of her usual one.

When the telephone rang an hour later, Claudia was deeply asleep.

Frowning, Garth replaced the receiver and then dialled the number of his daughter’s London flat.

‘Daddy,’ Tara exclaimed, her voice full of love and warmth as she recognised his voice. ‘I’m glad you rang.’

‘Oh, have you been trying to get in touch with me?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I drove over to see Ma this afternoon. There was something I wanted to tell her. She’s had the most fabulous write-up in the local rag. Have you seen it?’

‘Yes, I have,’ Garth agreed curtly.

He had seen, as well, the photographs accompanying the article. In one of them, a man was standing close to his ex-wife’s side, his expression as he looked at her both predatory and betrayingly indulgent.

Garth knew him by reputation. He had downsized his business interests, moving out of the city and back to his roots where he was apparently intending to run his computer-based business from his old home town. Claudia, if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, had been approached by him for her views and advice on the type of problems likely to be faced by potential home computer workers he might employ. Garth had his own ideas about why Luke Palliser might be interested in his ex-wife, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with her professional expertise.

‘Whatever you wanted to say to your mother must have been important if it necessitated driving all the way to Gloucestershire and then back again without staying overnight,’ Garth commented as he switched his thoughts back from his ex-wife to his daughter.

‘Well, yes, it was, but I couldn’t have stayed anyway. There wouldn’t have been any point. Ma was going out for the evening. Daddy …’

Garth waited. He knew of old that particular note in his daughter’s voice. It had accompanied every minor and sometimes not-so-minor mishap in Tara’s life, from the collision that had bent the front wheel of her first proper bike to the less dire but far more expensive bump that had damaged the small car he had given her for her eighteenth birthday.

‘You know I told you that I needed to take all my holiday allowance because I was planning to spend time in Boston with Ry?’

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything to you at the time—not until I’d told Ma—but Ry and I … it could be more than just a few weeks I’ll be spending in America.’ She paused, allowing her words to sink in, but Garth wasn’t in need of any extra time to assimilate what she was telling him. He had known … guessed … sensed already, his guesswork keeping pace with her carefully delivered words.

As his hand gripped the telephone receiver, he could feel his palm starting to sweat. At the same time, a cold shock of nausea was gripping his stomach. Now he knew why Claudia had been trying to get in touch with him.

‘Daddy, are you still there?’ he heard Tara demanding uncertainly.

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ he told her, praying that his voice sounded far calmer than he felt.

‘Can you talk to Ma for me?’ Tara was asking him. ‘I know she’s upset and the last thing I want to do is to hurt her, but I love Ry so much…. I just wish there was some way we could all be together, but it’s a bit like it was when you and Ma told me that you were going to divorce, isn’t it? Sometimes you just can’t have all the people you love with you.

‘Ryland’s family, his work, are in Boston. He’s always known that it’s expected that he’ll go back to take his place in the family firm and it’s what he wants to do. You and Ma will be able to come over for holidays. I’ve already told Ma that … and we’ll be able to come over here, and besides, nothing is settled yet. I’ve still got to go through the grilling process,’ Tara went on mock-humorously. ‘And according to Ry, a full investigation by the FBI is nothing to what his aunt is going to put me through. She’s going to want to see family trees, proof of a clean bill of health and a total lack of any inherited disruptive genes before she’ll even call me by my first name, never mind accept that Ry wants to marry me, according to him. Not that Ry cares whether or not she does approve, but he says that won’t matter to her. Once she realises how we feel about one another, she’ll set the full investigative process into motion whether we agree to it or not.

‘She’s the main shareholder in the family business—her late husband, Ry’s father’s brother, was the elder son. When Ry’s uncle died, naturally his controlling share of the business passed on to her. Ry’s father has some shares and like Ry he works for the business. From what Ry has told me about her, she’s terribly starchy. Apparently she’s going to want to know all about my own family background. Not that I’m worried, really. It will be easy peasy. Gramps and Nan go way back and the Brig knows the name and address and how many fillings every single member of the clan has ever had. Daddy, are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Garth confirmed quietly.

‘You will speak to Ma for me, won’t you?’ Tara coaxed. ‘I know that secretly she was hoping I’d marry a nice local boy and settle down within pram walking distance of Ivy House and I’d have liked that, too, but … I really do love Ry.’

‘Have you applied for your visa yet?’ Tara heard her father asking her sombrely.

‘I’ve filled in the forms, but Ry says there won’t be any problems putting down that this is a holiday and we can sort the rest out over there. That’s funny. Ma asked me exactly the same question.’

After he had finished speaking with Tara, Garth tried Claudia’s number again even though it was almost midnight.

Once more there was no reply. Where was she? Tara had told him she was going out. Out where and with whom? The man in the newspaper, Luke Palliser, whose expression and body language had made it so plain that he wanted far more than a mere business relationship? Was she even now in his arms … in his bed? Stop it, Garth warned himself as he paced the floor. What the hell was happening to him? Surely he knew Claudia better than that. The last thing that would be on her mind right now would be sex, as he ought to know. The only thing, the only person, on her mind right now would be Tara. Even when Tara was a baby, he had once half-jokingly told Claudia he felt she loved her more than she had ever loved him or could ever love him.

‘Yes, I think I do,’ Claudia had agreed seriously, ‘but it’s a very different kind of love. The love that perhaps only a woman who has already lost one child can know. It doesn’t take away from my love for you, Garth. It’s simply different … very different.’

After the taxi had dropped her off outside her apartment block, Estelle made sure it was well out of sight before punching a number into her mobile phone. Perhaps she was being overcautious but she had made it a rule never to mix her private and public personae, and Blade was very much part of the intensely private side of her life.

‘But that’s close to incest,’ a friend had gasped in shock when as a young teenager Estelle had boasted in lavish detail about just what kind of relationship she actually enjoyed with her stepbrother. The other girl had been shocked, but Estelle enjoyed knowing that what she and Blade did together would have been forbidden by their parents. It was all the more exciting and exhilarating knowing what secrecy and deceit they had to employ.

When she had told Blade what she had boasted to a friend, they had had an argument during which he had hit her once very hard across the mouth before forcing her to go down on him thirstily with her mouth as he swore at her and not stopping until he had finally come, his semen spilling from her mouth and running down over her naked body.

Estelle had found it one of the most thrilling, erotic things they had ever done and had her own orgasms without his even touching her, long before he had come himself. She had been thirteen then and Blade had been eighteen. They had continued their sexual relationship all through Blade’s years at university as well as her own—frantic, heated, obsessively driven sado-masochistic sex sessions interspersed with long time periods when they neither spoke nor even saw one another.

Estelle could remember one particular occasion when they hadn’t seen one another from the time Blade had returned to university at the end of the summer until his arrival at home just before Christmas. She had been out with friends when he arrived—a deliberate ploy—knowing how infuriated he would be when she wasn’t there waiting for him. But the party she had gone to had turned out to be rather wilder than she had expected. The school friend who was giving it had an older brother who had turned up with his friends.

Estelle hadn’t had sex with them; she had grown wary and wiser since the days when she had enjoyed confiding all her secrets to her friends. The outside world knew and saw one Estelle; she and Blade knew quite another. But she had enjoyed some pretty heavy snogging sessions and when she arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, very much on a sexually driven high, fuelled in reality far more by the knowledge of what potentially lay ahead of her with Blade than what had already happened, the thrill that had shot through her body as Blade unlocked the front door to her was almost orgasmic in itself.

He didn’t speak; neither of them did. Instead, he simply stood at the bottom of the stairs watching her while she walked up. By the time she reached the top, her nipples ached as though they were already raw, she felt wetter than she had ever felt in her whole life and her clitoris felt so swollen she could hardly walk.

Her bedroom with its own en suite bathroom was at the opposite end of the house from that of her mother and father. Her mother was fond of saying that she believed that teenage girls needed their privacy, but what Estelle knew she meant in reality was that she simply didn’t want to be bothered with her.

Estelle had learned long ago that her mother neither liked nor loved her—and she certainly hadn’t wanted her. It was no secret to Estelle that her conception had been an accident since her mother had never wanted children.

‘I’ll kill myself,’ Estelle had once threatened dramatically as a girl. ‘You just want to get rid of me!’

As she turned away from her, Estelle had heard her mother saying grimly, ‘Isn’t that the truth!’ But it had been another few years before Lorraine had bluntly told her that she had tried to abort Estelle in the early days of her pregnancy.

‘I believe a girl Estelle’s age is old enough to be trusted to make her own rules,’ Lorraine responded with a dismissive toss of her head when people commented on the amount of freedom she allowed Estelle. As if one difficult child weren’t enough, Ethian Morton, her second husband and Blade’s father, had been less than pleased when his first wife’s partner had declared that Blade was beyond their control thanks to the poor quality of the fathering he had received during his parents’ marriage and that they were passing the responsibility for the boy back to his natural father.

Despite being expelled from three boarding schools for inappropriate behaviour, much to Ethian’s relief Blade had managed to scrape through enough A levels to get into an admittedly second-rate university. Both parents were also relieved when neither of their offspring had wanted to join them on the skiing holiday they were due to take, starting just as soon after the Christmas festivities had ended as they had decently been able to arrange it, which meant, in fact, that they were flying out to Colorado on Boxing Day.

‘You’re leaving Blade and Estelle at home on their own?’ one neighbour had asked, unable to conceal her feelings.

‘Blade’s an adult,’ Lorraine had reminded her, affronted, ‘and he and Estelle get on wonderfully well together. In point of fact, they’re closer in many ways than if they were actually brother and sister. He’s very protective of her. It’s quite sweet, really.

‘Nosy cow,’ she had said angrily to Ethian later. ‘Just because she runs around those noisy brats of hers all day long and enjoys playing earth mother and martyr.’

Estelle’s bathroom was mirrored all along one wall. Blade’s suggestion and her fifteenth-birthday present from her parents. When she walked into it, she didn’t bother closing the door. She tugged off the skimpy dress she had been wearing, let it fall to the floor and then stood in front of the mirror staring at her reflection. Her mouth was swollen, the bright red lipstick she favoured smeared. She was tall and slim, her breasts firm and high enough for her not to need to bother wearing a bra, and besides, she liked the feel of her nipples rubbing against the fabric of her clothes and she liked even more the looks she got from men when they saw their taut outline.

Eyes half-closed, she licked the swollen flesh of her mouth, sliding her hand inside her knickers so that she could feel her own wetness. A familiar clutching sensation seized her lower belly. Closing her eyes, she wriggled out of her knickers.

She heard the bathroom door close and slowly opened her eyes, one hand still on her body, teasing the quivering piece of flesh her clitoris had become, the other still holding her wet knickers, her gaze locking with Blade’s as she returned his silently intense scrutiny.

‘What have you been doing?’ he demanded expressionlessly as he came towards her, the question almost a mild, uncritical whisper, but Estelle knew better. Her heart started to pound as she felt the onset of a familiar feverish excitement and fear.

‘Smell,’ she taunted, holding out her knickers to him. As she knew he would, he took them, smoothing them out very gently before inhaling the scent of her sex from them. Her sex and no one else’s.

‘Come here,’ he ordered, still using the same soft, gentle voice, but Estelle wasn’t deceived. Trembling from head to foot with the sensation that to her was almost more pleasurable than the release from it that lay ahead, she did as he instructed.

As she approached him, Blade unzipped his jeans, and as she had expected, he wasn’t wearing anything underneath them. His penis was stiff and rigidly erect, rising from its bed of thick, coarse, tangled dark hair. In the early days of their intimacy, his sexual organ had fascinated her and as a punishment for her ‘transgressions’ he had ordered her to wash his penis for him, sometimes by lapping it with her tongue, sometimes with soap and water.

Walking past her now, he lay down on the floor and commanded, ‘Come here.’ Estelle’s whole body convulsed, quivering with sexual urgency. ‘Sit on it,’ he demanded, drawing her towards his erect penis.

Willingly she complied, straddling him and lowering herself eagerly onto him. As she did so, he started to thrust upwards so forcefully that the sensation of him inside her was almost more pain than pleasure and at the same time he reached down between her legs and used his fingers on her clitoris.

It was too much for her self-control. Within seconds she had started to climax.

They spent what was left of the night in her bathroom and after he had finally spent himself and had his orgasm, Estelle knew that she was going to be sore, but she didn’t care. She had loved every moment with Blade, every moment.

The memory of that high still had the power to make her smile and to make her wet, very, very wet indeed. She was smiling now, her hand automatically reaching between her legs, her body turned into the protection of Blade’s doorway as she heard him answer her phone call.

‘Blade, it’s me, Estelle,’ she told him softly. ‘Are you in?’ That question was their private code and meant ‘I want sex.’

She could almost feel the dark, triumphant smile slicing his face as he told her softly, ‘No, I’m afraid I’m not. It’s all right, darling,’ she heard him saying as he half covered the receiver. ‘It’s only my sister.’ Then his voice dropped to a whiplash sting of mocking sound as he told her, ‘If you’re really desperate for it, Estelle, I could always talk you through it. You’ve always enjoyed that, haven’t you? Or, of course, you could come round and watch … even join in.’

Furious, Estelle cut the connection. She was more than well aware of Blade’s predilection for voyeurism and three in a bed, but right now she wasn’t in the mood for playing games or sharing. Right now she wanted him to herself. All to herself.

Angrily, she turned on her heel and started to walk towards her own apartment building. There was a man standing on the pavement several feet away from her, waiting to cross the road.

Hungrily, Estelle studied him, her eyes gleaming with predatory sexual urgency. He wasn’t her type, though, thin and pallid-looking, his body stance limp and docile, and no doubt his sex was the same.

Glaring at him in disgust, Estelle mentally cursed Blade, knowing how much he would be enjoying having the woman who was with him right now, all the more so because he knew Estelle was going hungry … wanting him, needing him.