The Golden Locket (Unbreakable Trilogy, Book 2) (2 page)

But we both knew there was something else we didn’t dare touch on. We both knew there was a third person lurking at the centre of Pierre and Gustav’s heartache. Gustav’s ex-wife Margot. The woman who caused it all.

‘I have to be big enough to apologise for all the pain. And I hope he will apologise to me too.’ Gustav laid me more firmly on top of him so that his hardness was wedged between my thighs. ‘But you know what’s best of all? That, despite the foul things you heard, you’re still here with me.’

I rested my cheek on his chest, and watched him in the mirror. The slow burn of arousal flamed inside me as he tugged at my hair. I didn’t want to kill it with fretting. Every time he pushed his hardness between my thighs I burned with wanting.

‘There’s nowhere else for me to be. But I can’t help feeling anxious that all you’ve achieved, after five long years, is that one awful row. I know you’ve made some tentative email contact with him, and he’s confirmed the date, but New Year’s Eve seems a long time to wait before you’re face to face again, even though we’re all in the same city now.’

‘That’s because his timing was terrible, as usual. I’m not going to be strong-armed into anything. I need time to gather my wits. And I want to be alone with you for Christmas.’

‘Stubborn as a mule.’ But I would store those lovely words up for later. ‘Just make sure you fix this. He’s your family. You don’t want to lose him again.’

Gustav’s eyes were tender as they returned my gaze in the mirror, his eyelashes misted with soapy water. He ran his hands over my bottom, grabbed the cheeks and pressed me harder down onto him. ‘I will, my wise little peacemaker. But no more talking about it now. Just let me enjoy you.’

His long, lean body was beneath me. I pushed him by degrees, his muscular shoulders, his chest, smoothing my hand over his flat, taut stomach, down beneath the navel, tracing the central line of hair.

Gustav Levi sank beneath the bubbles until the only visible part of his physique, the part I wanted, was rearing like a mast out of the ocean. As he surfaced again, I hitched myself back, watching the brightness glaze over in his molasses eyes as I wound a strand of my hair several times round the stiffness, winching my face closer, smiling triumphantly as it strained towards my softly opening mouth.

‘Now, let me remind you and that delectable mouth of yours that to reside in this top-notch abode, you must toil and spin and be very grateful to me,
signorina
,’ he groaned thickly as my lips closed round him. ‘Bodily, spiritually, aesthetically, romantically, intellectually, carnally.’

‘Orally,’ I crooned, and nipped at him to shut him up. I grinned as a thought struck me. ‘Ever noticed how the map of Manhattan resembles a dangling penis needing some attention?’

‘Trust you to see the phallus in everything!’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Now suck me, girl, because there’s a map of Manhattan right here needs some attention!’

To an outsider, I might look like a rich man’s plaything, cavorting in his rooftop Jacuzzi, going down on him and sucking him close to climax, but this man is deadly serious about me and I am mad about him.

He waited until the last possible moment and then with a groan he quickly unwound my hair, prised my teeth and lips away, lifted me and grabbed my hips in his strong hands. He hitched me up easily, swayed and washed by the simmering water, so that I was free to ride him.

I tucked him inside me and slid slowly down, down, leaning over him, making him look at and touch all of me, my breasts, my nipples, my hair, my mouth, and I was setting the metronome of our rhythm, keeping it regular, changing gear, racking it up faster until we were bucking together in the bubbly water, causing first a high tide and then a near-flood in every sense as our new home grew dark around us.

Later I let him unwind the silver chain from my wrists and carry me, damp with scented water and heavy with satisfaction, to our huge new bed. I gazed out at the city spread below us as he padded through the huge apartment, turning the lights off in the guest rooms and arched corridors that were waiting to be filled with our new life.

‘What have I done to deserve all this?’ I murmured as he slid beneath the feather-soft duvet beside me. ‘I can’t believe this nest in the clouds is where I’m going to come home every night!’

‘You and the light in those emerald eyes are my Christmas present to myself,’ he murmured into my hair. ‘You will be my princess and I’m going to spoil you and spoil you until you beg me to stop.’

I pressed my face into his neck, licked at the pulse beating under his warm skin. ‘I’m going to prove myself to you, though, Gustav. I’m happy to be your princess, but I want to earn my keep, too.’

He lifted my face and started to kiss me. ‘Oh, I know you will, Serena. I have no worries on that score.’

I belong to him. But he belongs to me, too.

I’m jerked back to the present. Another burst of fireworks explodes over this side of the park. The display is so bright that I’m dazzled. My vision is streaked with silvery licks of fire and I have to rub them away.

Behind me, my own eyes gaze mournfully from the oversized self-portrait Gustav has had flown over from London and hung on the wall. The girl escaping on the train from Devon the day that photograph was taken has become the girl on the plane. She’s arrived. She’s up on the wall, keeping watch as her first guests poke around, exploring the new flat. She’s gazing at the fireworks flashing over New York City, gazing out from the top of the world, wondering what the next few months will bring.

It’s New Year’s Eve and the city is revelling. I was swimming against the tide as the Yellow Cab brought me slowly up Broadway just now after my fruitless trip to the airport, hoping that Gustav would be on the next plane. Everyone else was surging southwards, towards the overcrowded neon oblong of Times Square.

As the rockets explode like mortars above the building another reflection in the darkened window comes to stand beside mine.

Pierre presses his mouth against my ear. ‘Such a pity Gustav isn’t here.’

The Levi Gallery in central London, two weeks ago. The moment when Gustav Levi came face to face with his long-lost brother.

You could have heard a pin drop. The five of us were frozen in a tableau, our expressions ranging from bewilderment to shock. Gustav, me, Pierre, Polly, and Gustav’s faithful assistant Crystal.

It was suddenly very dark in the huge space. The pool of light from the anglepoise lamp struggled against the encroaching shadows and the thick white snow falling over the Embankment outside, which blocked out the remains of the day, closed all escape routes and turned down the volume.

‘Pierre! So let me get this straight. My cousin Polly’s new boyfriend turns out to be Gustav’s brother?’ My voice, too shrill, was the first to shatter the silence. ‘You were masked last time I saw you at the Halloween party. No wonder I never put two and two together, just the eyes – but my God, look how alike they are!’

Nobody replied. Nobody stirred.

‘I’m – for once I’m lost for words,’ Gustav stammered at last, his voice creaking up from somewhere so deep inside it could have been buried in a coffin. He had taken one step, but he was still standing behind the gallery desk. I could see a dense stain of colour creeping up his jaw line. ‘I never thought I’d see you again, Pierre. How did you find me?’

‘I’ve always known where you were. After all, you haven’t exactly ventured far in five years, have you, despite being an international man of mystery? I thought you might have started afresh, Paris, perhaps. Amsterdam. Tokyo. But I guess you’ve been keeping close to your assets.’

Pierre’s voice was as deep and dark as his brother’s. There was the same mesmeric, smooth texture to it, except that tonight it was pebble-dashed with bitterness and there was a transatlantic twang in his accent, contrasting with the clipped, European flavour of Gustav’s.

‘I’m just about to make a move to New York, as it happens,’ replied Gustav. ‘Various business projects over there need my attention for the next year or so. Another few days and you’d have missed me. But I’ll admit it, a part of me always hoped you’d come back one day.’ He leaned heavily on the desk, his dark hair falling over his face as he bit his lip, hard, in doubt. One hand was still poised over the sales figures we’d been congratulating ourselves on just a couple of minutes ago. ‘So what are you doing here?’

Pierre gestured at the photograph
Stairway to Heaven
, depicting an empty escalator forever ascending in a shopping centre. The picture was now propped up against the desk, half wrapped in brown paper and gaffer tape. My self-portrait was still up on the wall, not yet destined for New York. All the other photographs had been shipped to their new owners.

‘It appears that I’m a client. I’ve had a few hours to get my head round this unexpected reunion, so I’m better prepared than you, but until this morning, when Polly asked me to write a cheque to the Levi Gallery, I had no idea we had any connection.’

‘No connection? No connection?’ Gustav lifted both his hands and slammed them back on the desk, pushing it with a discordant scrape of wood and wheels across the concrete. We all flinched. ‘We’re brothers, you bastard!’

‘Gustav! Stop it! He must be as anxious and wounded as you are, but he’s here, isn’t he?’ I pressed close to make him hear me. My hand was still on my lover’s arm. I locked my fingers hard even though I knew perfectly well he’d rather I backed off. ‘I still don’t know exactly what went so terribly wrong between you, but isn’t this, deep down, precisely what you’ve longed for?’

‘Serena, please,’ Gustav hissed back at me. ‘You don’t know what he and that witch did.’

‘They slept together. And left together. You and Crystal between you have told me that much. And I’m guessing it was extremely ugly – enough for you to stop speaking for five years.’ I lifted my hand towards Pierre, still keeping my voice down. ‘But he’s stepped back into your life. Now’s your chance to make up.’

Gustav shook his head impatiently, his eyes still lasering across the room at Pierre as if he couldn’t bear the sight but could not tear himself away either. ‘Pierre. First things first. You just said you found my business card in your car. How did it get there?’

‘My driver gave it to me when he picked me up from the airport the other day. He’d cleared out the car immediately after my last trip to London and found it wedged beside the arm rest.’ Pierre continued running the card across the dark bristles on his upper lip. ‘Someone had left it there. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t Polly and it certainly wasn’t you. So we had to recall who else had a ride in the limo when I was over here at Halloween.’ Pierre flicked the card over in his fingers and tipped his head to one side. ‘Which didn’t take long. Because on the back, in your handwriting, it says, “Ring me, Serena
.
” So it all started to fall into place.’

Now all four of us were looking at Gustav, waiting. He kept his black eyes fixed on his brother. So agonisingly similar. Same simmering, volcanic fury. Same height, same glossy black hair, although Pierre’s is cut shorter and thicker, standing in rebellious boyish tufts on his head.

They were like a pair of matching stags about to rut in the gloaming.

Pierre cricked his neck and then waved his arm in a sweeping arc to encompass me and Polly. ‘Looks like our lovely girlfriends have brought us together.’

‘How did the business card I gave to
you
, Serena, end up in my estranged brother’s car?’ Gustav turned slowly and glared at me. I could see the muscle going in his jaw, the flicker of tension that I hadn’t seen for weeks now. ‘What the hell has been going on?’

I opened my mouth like a fish, closed it again. Kept my grip on his arm. He tried to shake me off, but I put my hand up to his face and turned it towards me, gripped his jaw in my fingers so I could feel the scrape of his teeth, see my own fingerprints going into his skin. The same gesture he uses to calm me down.

‘Look at me, Gustav, and stop treating me like a jerk.’ I kept my voice deadly calm. ‘Nothing has been going on. I met Pierre on Halloween night. Just that once. I didn’t know he was your brother. I didn’t even know his surname. Only that he was Polly’s new boyfriend and she’d met him through her work in New York. They are both in the entertainment industry. Polly’s a fashion and personal stylist for magazine shoots. Pierre supplies wardrobe for film and theatre. He was throwing a Halloween party to launch his costume business in London.’

Gustav continued to stare at me. The veneer of anger was fading slightly but I couldn’t be sure he was hearing me. I could see something else, confusion, fear, flickering behind his eyes. I put my finger on his mouth and pressed it hard.

‘Go on,’ he muttered hoarsely.

‘That first night you and I met, we went to the Dukes Hotel bar, remember, and we had those Martinis. I was already hoping something would happen between us, but then I got that text from my cousin Polly saying she was over from New York and inviting me to a party, and I had to leave you. Turns out the party was Pierre’s Halloween launch party. It was full of beautiful people in amazing clothes and masks, but I couldn’t get into the spirit of it, I couldn’t get you out of my head, I just wanted to be with you, Gustav. Even though we’d only just met, I wanted to get back to you somehow or at least speak to you. I was in a terrible rush to leave the party but I reckoned you would no longer be sitting in that bar so Pierre’s driver took me home and that’s when I lost your card. That’s why I couldn’t ring you.’ I was gabbling now, aware that everyone was watching me.

‘I was frantic, you had my cameras because I’d left them behind at the Dukes Hotel bar and in all the excitement I hoped you had them, but everything turned out fine because just when I was giving up hope of ever seeing you or my cameras again you phoned my mobile the next morning. Thanks to technology, you said. You’d put my number into your contacts so you obviously wanted to see me again, too. Oh, God, I wish I’d persuaded you to come with me to the party now.’

‘Then all this drama could have been dealt with weeks ago. But how would that have played out, do you suppose?’ murmured Pierre from behind me. His voice was very quiet, very low, as if he was feeling his way in the dark. ‘Can you imagine the mushroom cloud going up over Aldwych if my beloved brother had sauntered unannounced into my London launch?’