Guilty Pleasures (8 page)

“We’re going to Italy for our honeymoon, like on a Grand Tour of Venice, Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples, and then we’ll finish up in France—” George said.

Francine spoke without taking her adoring eyes off her new husband. “Yes, so George can meet my great-grandmother. She lives in Carcassonne. It’s really beautiful, but we’ll be coming back. My next project is on the author, E.M. Forster.”
 

“Congratulations to you both.” Lance raised his sixth Loki and swallowed it in one gulp. “You should’ve called me. Man, we’ve been best friends since we were five. I was goin’ to be your best man,” he slurred.

“Hell, you still are,” George assured him. “We want to do that whole church bit for our family and friends, too. As a matter of fact, we’re planning a Victorian style wedding—”

“Because we both
love
Victoriana, and Dickens, of course,” Francine said.

“And so one of Francine’s friends pulled some heavy duty strings and is offering us a Victorian wedding dinner with a Miss Havisham wedding cake—”

“With sugar cobwebs and marzipan mice, at a place called Guilty Pleasures on the seventeenth of next month.”

Lance felt an odd combination of horror and jealousy rise up with a wave of alcohol at the back of his throat. With his last conscious effort before sinking into oblivion, he threw up on the happy couple.

With a sigh, Millicent Deafly put down her cell, stuffed a marshmallow in her mouth, and picked up her pen.
 

Horse barked.
 

“All right,” Millie said, throwing another marshmallow into the gigantic maw. “Such a spoiled baby!”

From the Diary of Millicent Deafly:

It’s my turn to take the morning shift tomorrow for the shopping. We’ll see how Will Pecklise shapes up.

Serge and I hashed up a killer menu for the Fashion Victims event. I bet these girls will be on soda crackers and water for a week after tomorrow’s irresistible dinner.
 

Also, Jean-Luc Chevalier-Dupree, the French ambassador, called. His daughter’s best friend has had a whirlwind romance and suddenly got married to some antiquities dealer, and they want to celebrate the wedding with a Victorian dinner party for forty. Jean-Luc is footing the considerable bill and asked me to fit them in at the beginning of next month. But the best I could do was the seventeenth.

I must call Jennifer at Jennifer’s Supreme Baked Goods about the cake. They want a Miss Havisham-style five tier cake with spun-sugar cobwebs and silver marzipan mice. It should be divine; a cross between
Corpse Bride
meets
A Christmas Carol
—watch out, Tim Burton. It’s very short notice, but Jennifer owes me a few favours and I can’t turn down the French ambassador.

In girlie news: I had a lovely day today, browsing in my favourite secondhand bookshop. I bought a tower of old dog-eared science fiction novels from the sixties and the seventies, and I went shopping for some vintage lingerie at Monde Erotique.
 

Isn’t it
so
funny? I’ve got no man, and don’t want one, but I love those flirty little things. I bought a bagful and turned it out onto the bed in a lovely tumble of silk, satin, and filmy voile. I tried them all on. I love the way they feel and I love the way they look.

Wearing them under my soberest clothes makes me feel sensuous and sexy and light. A pretty woman ready for love, just like Eliza Bennet.

It’ll be our little secret, okay?

Chapter 6

Two of the most sensitive erogenous zones in a woman’s body are easily accessible and legal to explore in public places. Curiously, these are also often neglected by even the most experienced lovers: the palm of the hand and the nape of the neck. Caress the first lightly, delicately with your fingertips. She will not even be aware of the intensity of her response. In a second phase, kiss the palm, brushing your lips softly back and forth across the skin. Thirdly, flick your tongue briefly across the palm.
Do not leave trails of saliva
. You don’t want her surreptitiously wiping her hands on her skirt.

The nape of the neck, with its delicate veil of fine hair, is most sensitive to soft stroking fingertips and to brushing lips. To simply stir the hair at the nape with your breath—do not pull a Darth Vader here—or a low murmur, will arouse startling sensations.

As with the palm, soft and delicate almost-kisses will elicit the strongest response. The no-saliva rule applies here as well. In fact, take it as a given that trailing saliva anywhere is an absolute no-no. Let’s try to keep boobies dry, too.

Never, ever slobber.

—Sensual Secrets of a Sexual Surrogate

“Oh, the silicone chip inside her head is switched to overload . . .”

Lance’s radio alarm clock bounced the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” off his sensitive eardrums. He covered his head with his pillow and cringed farther down into the duvet. After George’s wedding announcement last night, he couldn’t remember getting home. He couldn’t remember anything much except for the noxious taste of the Loki. He didn’t know what went into one, but it tasted vicious coming out.

Tattered bits of the evening flashed through his mind.
George and a Frenchie. Marriage and sugar mice. Millie and cobwebs . . . the wedding at Guilty Pleasures!

“Oh God, I am so fucked.” He moaned.

How the hell was he going to get out of this bind? Lance and Will could
not
be at the same place at the same time.
 

His whole perfect plan for
Awakening
Millie Deafly was going pear-shaped. His head hurt, his stomach hurt, and a shameful ache in his heart told him his reaction last night had a large dose of envy mixed in with bile-black jealousy.
 

George was
his
. His friend. His only friend. The one true friend Lance had ever had. He couldn’t lose George. So, he’d have to bite the bullet and share.

Lance winced.
No more Lokis ever again
. He’d have a cold shower, run a couple of miles, sweat a bit, and find a way around the pit that French bitch had dug right under his feet.
 

Stop thinking like this, Lance; that way leads to bitterest disappointment and lost friendship. The wise man accepts the curve balls life throws him and hits a home run.
He took a deep breath, and groaned as nausea hit again. First, he’d head for the john and vomit up the last of that bile, then he’d take charge of his life with a cold shower and some friendly advice from Caroline, his oldest confidante.

Lance cleared the mist from his bathroom mirror and took stock of the damage. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips dry and cracked, and his complexion was dull. He applied a refreshing skin tonic and a moisturizing lotion, dabbing carefully around the sensitive eye area with an anti-wrinkle cream.
 

With wet hair from the shower, and a towel wrapped around his waist, he walked barefoot to the lounge and reached for his cell. He closed his eyes.
Should he?
Even after all these years, she was still the first person he thought of when emotional disaster hit.

His first lover, the woman who’d shaped his character and his life, and taught him everything he knew. He called up her number, and listened to her Ringback Tones song—Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”—while he waited for her to pick up.

He smiled, remembering the slow lazy afternoon they’d first made love: Neil Diamond crooning “Longfellow Serenade” while Caroline reared above him, moaning his name, and a bumblebee buzzed stubbornly against the skylight above her head.
 

Caroline had been forty-two when she’d seduced him, and she had not only been his mother’s friend, but George’s mother as well. Somehow they’d managed to keep their love affair secret for three delirious years during which Caroline, after four unsatisfactory marriages and many failed amours, had created her own dream lover.
 

She’d trained a young Lance exhaustively in all the ways of pleasuring a woman, carefully expunging every ounce of sexual selfishness from him. Finally the idyll ended. His second stepfather, a kind—and wealthy—man Lance remembered with real affection, had sent him to college in the United States for three years—a coming of age gift that was to shape Lance’s future.

The song abruptly cut off, and Caroline’s husky voice answered. “Hello?”

“Caro, it’s Lance.”

“Oh, darling, are you all right?” Caroline’s voice transmitted anxiety. “Is George all right?”

“Yes, yes. We are both fine. Actually, George is better than fine, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yes! He called me last night. I’m flying over for the wedding. How are you taking this?”

Lance hesitated. “I’m surprised . . .”
 

“Darling, you were always more dependent on him than he on you, appearances notwithstanding.”

“George had a mother,” Lance replied acidly.

“Oh, darling, that was so long ago . . . get over it.”

“Caro, baby, it’s you I can’t get over!”
 

Silvery laughter greeted his exclamation.

“Lance, I’m now a grandmother, thirty pounds heavier and twenty years older than the woman you loved. Keep that in mind. About George—”

“I’ll admit I’m a bit jealous.” He took a deep breath. “Envious, too.”

“You need a life of your own, Lance. Get a girl, have a child.”

“Um, actually, odd you should say that.”

“Oh, Lance! Who is she? Do I know her? Oh darling, I’m so happy for you.”

“It’s not what you think; she’s a client. I was hired by her mother to . . . well contribute to their family.”
 

“What?”

“Well, to put it bluntly, to seduce her to ensure their family line continues.”

“Oh
no . . .
please, Lance, don’t do
that!
” Caroline’s voice resounded with her horror. “Tell her to go to a sperm bank; don’t they hand out pseudo-husbands there?”

“No, I don’t think they do.”
But what a coincidence you mention that place.
 

“Lance, you don’t know what you’re getting into! You’ll be so hurt.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not doing it! Well, I told her I’d do it, but I’m not.”

“You don’t need money that badly, Lance. No money in the world is enough. How could you even consider such a thing? Stop all this and live. When was the last time you fell in love?”

Hello? Is she listening to me? I said I wasn’t going to do it.
“Caro, please. My job doesn’t exactly facilitate my lifestyle.”

“Rubbish! You earn a living teaching women to masturbate so they can go home and make fantastic love to someone else. You are just sidestepping your entire life.”

“I have a perfectly happy, organised, well-balanced and tranquil life,
and
an excellent career doing a job I love. I don’t need a string of broken marriages to prove I’ve lived. And
you’re
not exactly qualified to lecture me on propriety, are you?”

“Touché, Pussycat.”

Lance sighed. “I just miss you, Caroline. Though I do have to admit, I’m enjoying this assignment. I’m enjoying
her
. She’s sweet and totally unimpressed by me. Her world is fascinating, absorbing, really.”