Knaves (8 page)

To Valmont
’s surprise, Jeanne gave him an apologetic smile and then deftly removed herself from his grasp. Reaching out to take Sebastian’s hand, she looked ambiguously back at the Marquis as the pair walked away.

“
Thank you, Donatien,” she said. “I’ll look forward to what else you have to show me.”

Valmont was dumbfounded for a moment. Who did this upstart Englishman think he was? It had been quite clear that the overwhelming grandeur of Chateau de Tour had beaten down the inner man, no matter what strength his outer form possessed, but that last act had not shown any sign of weakness. Quite the contrary. Sebastian had caught him off guard, that was all: he would have to take care not to let that happen again.

Annoyed with himself, Valmont watched Latour arrive to lead them to their rooms before quickly turning and passing through a hidden door in the Galerie. He then took a complicated route to a private staircase, one of many throughout the Chateau. When he came to his room, he pushed the door open.

Eloise was still on the bed, of course, naked and
spread-eagled, each of her ankles and wrists bound to the four posters of his bed. How long had he been gone? Two hours? Three? She didn’t appear to have moved at all—her self-control never ceased to surprise him. She looked as beautiful as ever, her sex splayed between her parted legs, her breasts rising and falling with her breath and her hair a golden halo on the pillow, yet after only a short time with Jeanne Duval he couldn’t help but feel that there was something too coarse about the pleasures the two of them shared. He had, he felt, grown too jaded.

Crossing to the bed, he saw her blue eyes watching him.
“You’re awake,” he observed, relieved to be speaking in French again.

“
Yes, Master,” she replied.

He sat down beside her and began to release the first of her cuffs across her left wrist.

“There’ll be no need for that, not for the next few days,” he told her, matter of factly. As he released the leather strap, he frowned slightly at the faint red mark it had left. “I’ll have to be more gentle with you if you’re to have another chance with Rider. We don’t want to scare him off, not yet.”

Eloise gave him a rather strange look as he unbound her second wrist, rubbing the skin gently.
“They arrived, then?”

“
They did indeed. I’ve just been showing them the Galerie and they’ve gone to their rooms. We’ll meet again for dinner.”

“
We? Is this royal we, or am I to join you rather than stay out of the way of your plans?”

Valmont smiled at this.
“Oh, you are very much part of my plans, my luscious Lupa.” He kissed her briefly, almost tenderly, on her head before moving down to her ankles. She sat up, watching him with that same, peculiar expression as she massaged life back into her limbs. “What is it?”

“
You’re not seriously thinking of paying ten million for a night with that woman, are you?”

Valmont burst into laughter.
“Of course not! That would be a little too insane even for me. No, I don’t intend to pay a single cent for the pleasure of Jeanne Duval. I shall use her in the most delightful ways possible, and I’ll humiliate that stupid companion of hers into the bargain.”

For a moment, Eloise frowned at this before she regained her composure. Valmont
’s eyes were too sharp, however. “What is it?” he demanded.

To his astonishment, she merely shook her head. He considered climbing onto the bed and fucking her there, hard, so that she would remember who was the master here: the privileges he would extend to her would over the next few days had very certain limits. However, Valmont had also decided, now that Jeanne Duval was here at Chateau de Tour, to restrict his carnal pleasures. A degree of self-denial would make the final consummation so much sweeter.

In any case, he knew Eloise far too well—more intimately than any other man. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “When I’ve finished with Jeanne Duval, I’ll let you do whatever you want with Sebastian Rider.”

Hayden was becoming increasingly frustrated as he went in search of Karla. She
’d promised to meet up with him after an hour, but now the afternoon was wearing on and still there was no sign of her. She’d refused to do anything more than make small talk to him as they’d been led to their rooms by Latour. Because of his irritation, he’d not paid proper attention to the route (Valmont seemed to have taken particular delight in placing them on opposite sides of the chateau) and now he was lost.

He was surprised at how relieved he was
when he’d finally encountered Latour. Under any other circumstances, this clumsy, ugly giant of a man (How tall is he? Hayden asked himself. He can’t be much under seven foot!) would have been the least desirable person on the planet.

“
Ah, my good fellow,” Hayden said, affecting the charm that had been so successful until recently in his guise as Sebastian Rider. “This damned house. Lovely and all, but now I can’t find my way to Madame Duval’s room.”

Turning slowly, Latour stared at him with large eyes. Hayden would have been tempted to describe them as bovine, but he
’d never seen a cow that could look at him with such a whiff of contempt which was soon squashed. The manservant’s hair was thick and black but with the odd, strange patch of white, as ill-formed as his face with its huge, lumpy nose and the peculiar patches of skin as though formed from badly healed scars. He was well-dressed, no doubt with everything custom made on the orders of the Marquis, but his black jacket and trousers were ungainly, giving the impression when he walked of muscles bulging in slightly the wrong places.

“
I wonder if you could help me,” he said patiently when Latour didn’t respond. Great! He thought to himself. He doesn’t speak English. “Où est la... chambre du…
de
madame Duval?” he asked in hesitant French. Even two months in France around Karla and her perfect linguistics seemed not to have rubbed off on him: part of the problem was that any woman they’d met was more than willing to talk to Hayden in English in the hope that he would more quickly begin speaking the language of love.

Latour raised a thick, meaty arm and pointed back in the direction from which Hayden had just walked, causing him to curse silently. Then the giant turned around, looking for all the world like Lurch in one of those old, black and white sitcoms, and ponderously walked away.

It took Hayden another twenty minutes to find the room he was looking for, involving opening and closing any number of doors. (How many bedrooms did this place have?) At last he opened one and peered in to see Karla on her hands and knees beside the bed.

“
You could knock,” she said tersely, apparently feeling along the underside of a low table next to the large, four-poster bed. Hayden had seen too many four-poster beds in the last half hour to consider them exotic any more, but the sight of Karla, head down and backside up, was almost too tempting.

“
What? And miss such a great opportunity?” She did indeed look lovely. In preparation for dinner, she wore a black evening dress, cut low at the back but rising almost to her neck at the front, a long slit in its side revealing a toned leg and her bare, pretty feet.

“
In your dreams,” she said sourly, immediately pouring cold water on the fantasies that were beginning to form in his brain. She pulled her head up and, not paying him the slightest attention, scrutinised something she held in her fingers as she stood beside the bed.

The terse verbal slap he
’d received reminded him how angry he was at her earlier display with Valmont. Working himself into a state of righteous indignation, he puffed out his chest and began to speak.

“
I can’t believe what you were doing down there. Jesus! Could you have made your intentions any more obvious? I’m pretty surprised you didn’t just jump him in that preposterous hall of mirrors. I don’t know what you’re up to, but we need to talk, K-”

To his absolute shock, before he could say her name she
’d leaped forward at astonishing speed and clamped her hand across his mouth. Although she’d done so with some force, it was more out of surprise that Hayden shut up—that and the fierce look in her glittering, green eyes.

“
I think you need to go to the bathroom,
Sebastian
,” she said.

Confused, Hayden stared at her but said nothing as she glared at him. He tried to speak, but only a mumbled sound came through her hand. Still watching him, she slowly pulled it away.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“
Of course you can use my bathroom,” she repeated slowly, as though talking to a child with learning disabilities. Lifting her other hand, she dangled a small piece of plastic and metal with a tiny grille.

“
Ah, yes,” Hayden said at last. “How foolish of me.”

As he made his way towards the elaborate bathroom with
its huge, cast iron bath, Karla paused a few moments to replace the bug and follow him.

“
Are you sure this room is clean?” he asked as she closed the door behind her.

She shrugged. By way of answer, she leaned across him and turned on a tap so that a loud
—and noisy—cascade of water began to fill the white-painted tub.

“
What the hell do you think you were doing, going to call me by my real name?” she hissed quietly.

Hayden groaned.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I forgot.”

“
Well don’t!” Her eyes were angry as she sat beside him on the edge of the bath. “We’ve got a job to do, so don’t forget it again.”

“
A job to do?” he asked incredulously. “Is that what you call it? You could barely keep your hands off Valmont earlier.”

She eyed him sourly.
“Oh, because of course you were handling yourself
so
well. Hello Marquis, we’d like to come and rip you off for as much money as we can, but in the meantime we’re going to act like such a grumpy pair of bastards that you’ll kick us out at the first opportunity!”

This threw Hayden off his mental balance.
“So, that was all an act?”

Turning her head to face him fully now, for a few seconds she stared at him in silence.
“What do you think?” she whispered.

Great, now this was all his fault.
“I don’t know. What was I meant to think? You’re not telling me anything!” He tried to keep his voice low, though once or twice it rose in volume as he became more emotional. Realising this, Karla maintained a calm tone.

“
I can’t get a reception here on my phone,” she said. “What about yours?”

“
Same here. Bloody French telecoms. Bloody useless.”

She nodded, thoughtfully.
“It’s going to be difficult to get messages in and out to Uncle.”

Hayden shrugged.
“We’ll call from his phones, or just go online.”

Karla shook her head.
“Everything’s monitored, I’m sure of it. Did you see the cameras?”

Becoming cooler as they spoke, Hayden flashed through a mental plan of what he
’d seen so far: unfortunately, he’d been so angry that his recollection was fuzzy. “Security cameras as we came in, but nothing else.”

She stared at him with an ambiguous look.
“That’s not like the man I knew. You’d have spotted everything when I first met you. Each room has a pretty obvious camera when you know where to look, and I spotted at least two in the Galerie.”

Her words stung
—not least because they were true. A year with Karla and he’d begun to turn soft, unprofessional. “Well, what did you expect,” he hissed defensively. “I was too distracted by you waltzing with the Marquis.”

That made her eyes flash with anger again.
“You’re pissed off at that?” She was struggling now not to shout, her voice occasionally bursting beyond a whisper. “I’m the one who came in and found you with your cock out with that… whore!”

“
I didn’t have my cock out!” Sticking to the literal facts enabled him, momentarily, to tell the truth.

“
Oh, but you were putting it away after you’d fucked her!” The bitterness in Karla’s voice was a slap as sharp as her hand had ever been and she no longer kept up her French accent.

“
I didn’t fuck her!” he protested.

Folding her arms, she stared at him with cold contempt.
“Oh, I get it. The Bill Clinton defence. A blow job doesn’t count. When you’ve got a dick that big, then it’s no problem getting it out for any whore who comes along.”

“
Will you please stop calling her that?”

“
Why?” Her eyes narrowed threateningly. “That’s what she is, isn’t she? A woman who fucks men for money?”

“
I… Don’t… That isn’t what I mean! Anyway, haven’t you done the same?”

Now her eyes went wide, very wide, and for an instant Hayden thought tears were going to flood from them. This time, there wasn
’t a proverbial verbal slap but a very hard, physical one that made him see stars. I deserved that, he thought to himself.

“
Don’t you ever say that again. I have
never
had sex for money.”

“
Shit… I know. I was… I was referring to that time you married the multi-millionaire.”

“
I
married
for money, but I sure as hell didn’t
fuck
him! That was the whole point. Generally, I tend not to be attracted to octogenarians, even when they are as rich as Croesus. Don’t you forget that, Hayden Carter!”

“
Sebastian,” he mumbled.

“
What?”

“
Sebastian Rider. We’ve got to stick to our roles.” That brought him another slap.

Standing in front of him, Karla pointed a finger directly into his face.
“I have never fucked another man for money, and don’t you
ever
accuse me of that again. You seemed to have forgotten it when you promised Valmont a night with me for ten million, but I promise you this,
Sebastian
: if you don’t behave just so, I will fuck him, and neither I—nor you—will get a single penny.”

With that ultimatum, she turned off the water and left the bathroom. Eventually, sighing at just how badly he
’d handled that, Hayden followed after her.

When they descended together down the main staircase, they saw Latour standing in the hallway waiting for them.

“Doesn’t it creep you out?” Hayden whispered in Karla’s ear. “The way he just stands there saying nothing?”

“
He’s dumb,” she mumbled in reply.

“
Well, anyone can see that. I mean, I doubt there are two brain cells in that thick skull of his that could hit each other in all that empty space.”

“
I mean he’s a mute, you idiot!” Karla’s eyes regarded him contemptuously again and then she smiled sweetly at Latour as he led them through reception rooms towards the
Galerie des Glas
.

The table that had been placed there was enough to dwarf any normal size room, but here it looked peculiar, overwhelmed by the massive chamber. Hayden was becoming thoroughly sick of the entire Chateau. Everything in it was designed to make him feel small and unworthy. Hell! He was being beaten by the Marquis before he
’d even played a card.

At least Valmont had other servants, he
was pleased to note as two maids were laying cutlery on the table—very elaborate arrays of knives, forks, spoons and crystal glasses, all of which he could tell at a glance cost a fortune and were no doubt very old. Perhaps he could take some pleasure in breaking a few pieces before the evening was through.

Latour indicated two seats on one side of the table and then moved to stand against the wall. Karla seemed to have completely regained her composure and was commenting to one of the maids in French, making some remarks about the loveliness of the service in a way that caused the young woman to blush. For his part, Hayden was wondering where Valmont had got to.

When the Marquis finally did arrive, his presence caused Hayden’s face to sour—while his companion made Karla freeze.

It wasn
’t the same, thought Hayden. Yes, Eloise Bissette was astonishingly beautiful in some ways, but even at this distance it was too easy to see how constructed it all was. She must have had some kind of plastic surgery, he thought, and not just in the most obvious ways. Her nose was a little too pinched in that way the French seemed to admire, and part of the mask-like effect was due to the fact she wore too much makeup. While her body was undoubtedly voluptuous it was all just too false to appeal to Hayden any more. Okay, okay, he was fooling himself slightly. She had great tits, but when he remembered the feel of them in the cold light of sobriety, they hadn’t been
right
—too hard and plastic. She was a doll, and there was no need for Karla—a real woman—to be jealous of her. That was why Valmont wanted Karla.