The Sweet Caress (16 page)

She wanted Luke to know her to the marrow of her bones. Was that, she wondered, why it had been so easy to tell him about herself? Not even Pierre had known about Rose Cottage.

The waiter arrived to slam a huge plate down on the table before her. It was laden with fried eggs, a huge slab of beef, and fried potatoes. Half a loaf of bread landed near the plate, followed by a saucer holding a large wad of butter and an oversized cup of steaming coffee with cream. Candia felt the men’s eyes on her. Did they expect her to send it all back and ask for a poached egg on toast? Well, they didn’t know Candia Van Buren. She attacked her food with the enthusiasm of the starving.

The beef was so tender she could have cut it with the side of her fork, the eggs as fresh and succulent as if they had been gathered from the hen’s nest only minutes before, the fried potatoes as crisp on the outside as they were soft on the inside. She ate with gusto and while the proprietor, hands on hips, smiled with delight, one of the men from the next table tipped a shot of brandy into her coffee and a man at her table spooned three heaped teaspoons of sugar into her cup and stirred it for her.

Luke would like it here, she thought. He would marvel over the food and he, too, would sweep his plate clean, close his eyes and not think once about cholesterol.

By the time she had finished her breakfast the men in the small cafe were talking to her. How clever of her to find the best breakfast on the coast! Where did she live? Where had she come from? She enjoyed answering them, but soon it was time for them to get back to work. Each of the lorry drivers, construction workers, fishermen sitting at the tables shook her hand before they left.

The cafe was empty. The proprietor pulled up a chair to sit next to Candia. She smelled of fried onions and cheap perfume.

‘You like your breakfast?’ she asked.

‘It was amazing, quite delicious. I don’t know how you can afford to give a breakfast like this for the price.’

‘Simple. I don’t make any money on the food, only the drink,’ she told Candia, lighting a cigarette.

‘Then why do you do it?’

‘I love to cook and have men around me. You must understand that, a woman like you?’ She stood up and patted Candia on the back. ‘What matters profit when it comes to a real love for something.’

Her words were like an arrow shot straight to Candia’s heart. She had fallen in love with Luke that very first time she saw him in the Temple. How had she not realised that? All those days and evenings with him when she had felt more alive and vital than she ever did with Axel, it was love.

Candia paid her bill and left the cafe reeling with a sense of joy. She thought of the night before when she lay in his arms and spoke to him about herself. Now he knew her, warts and all. She had not the least fear that he thought the less of her for knowing who and what she really was.

She returned to the Temple, bathed and changed. She lounged around the house, walked the dogs through the garden. All day she waited for Luke to call. He didn’t, not even to ask her out for the evening. She rationalised that it was for the best. Luke had a life to conduct, after all. Axel made his usual evening phone call, only this time it was from his villa, he had come home.

She had every intention of telling him about Luke, until she saw him. He swept her off her feet and into his arms the moment she entered the hall. ‘I missed you, I love you,’ he told her.

She was surprised by how incredibly pleased she was to see him. She loved him, being with him was always exciting. He was bigger than life, he made things happen around him, he was loving and tender, and sexy as hell. She wanted him as much as he wanted her and so they went directly to bed, their passion for sex, their hunger to be sated by each other’s lust taking over their every thought.

The following morning Axel insisted she accompany him to London for a few days. She agreed to go but before she left she went to see Luke on the
Hesperides
. She stepped on
board at one o’clock and headed for the library. He was sitting at the desk. She walked over to him, and sat on his lap, draping an arm round his neck.

He kissed her lightly on the lips, caressed her cheek and told her, ‘You’re getting very bold with your affections towards me.’

She laughed, delighted that he was flirting with her. ‘I expected you to call but you didn’t. I
wanted
you to call, at the very least to tell me how lovely it was to sleep with me.’

‘And?’

‘To ask me out to dinner.’ Then she whispered in his ear, ‘To tell me you want me for far more than sleep.’

‘I’m telling you now,’ he said and caressed her neck.

‘Why didn’t you call?’ she asked him.

‘I thought you needed some time away from me. Otherwise you would have stayed for breakfast, or
you
would have called to set a racing heart to rest.’

Candia wanted to say something about loving him, but the words would not come. ‘Luke, Axel came back to Juan-les-Pins last night. You’re settled, you have your work in hand, I need to go away with him for a few days to work some things out. Tell me you understand.’

‘I understand,’ he told her as he eased her off his lap.

The tone of his voice upset Candia. She suddenly felt fearful that she would lose him. Her eyes filled with tears but she managed to control them. She gazed at him and he reached out and pulled her into an embrace.

‘Tell me I won’t lose you, Luke. I don’t think I could bear that.’

‘You won’t lose me, not now, not ever,’ he told her.

‘I love you, Luke.’

‘Now, no tears. You go and do what you have to do and have a good time doing it. Candia, please just go. I can’t take much more of this. Do you think you’re the only one concerned about your departure? You don’t make it easy for me. In fact it’s especially cruel of you to say you love me
and then leave me. You know how I feel about you.’

‘Luke, please! That’s not fair! You’ve known all along about my commitment to Axel, that we’re in love, that he wants to marry me. Whatever has happened between you and me, I didn’t plan it. I never wanted to love two men at the same time, but I think I do. Tell me you understand that I must go away with Axel and work this out. If I don’t, what hope is there for us?’

In London, Axel and Candia went to the ballet, to the theatre, to the opera. Axel was fawned over at one fine restaurant after another. They knew him well at the Connaught where he lived when he was in London. They attended elegant dinner parties where ministers of State, foreign diplomats, and the most powerful media people in the world were the other guests. And always he had his entourage with him.

It was in London that Candia realised truly what a powerful man Axel was, and what his ultimate goal was: global control of the media. Candia found it rather frightening. It would give him more power and influence than any government, dictator, king or queen, and Candia did not think any one man or corporation should have so much power. There were few radio or television stations around the world in which he did not have a major interest. Newspapers and magazines, publishing houses and the computer world quaked when he turned his attention to them as a possible addition to his empire. His saving grace was that he had a heart for mankind in general, he hated fascism and in most cases hired and paid off the right people.

There was no doubt that that much power was attractive to Candia. She had been used to wealthy men all her life, but not ones with global celebrity. It was seductive, and tremendous fun. The few days in London turned into a week, followed by five days in Paris, a break in Venice, and
a twenty-carat diamond engagement ring in Rome.

Candia kept thinking that one day they would wake up and the circus would be over. She and Axel would return to Juan-les-Pins, he to his house and she to the Contessa’s Temple and the mad menagerie, and Luke. Luke. The longer she was away from him, the more important he seemed to be in her life. It was strange.

As so often happens in life, it was a little thing that changed everything for Candia, Axel and Luke. Axel was growing more and more attached to the erotic life that he and Candia were enjoying. He wanted her all the time. He had become profoundly free in his sexuality, but that puritanical sexual repression so prevalent in many Americans never really left him. On occasion it would take hold of him and he would feel guilt. Therein lay the flaw in Axel Winwood. He liked to blame others for his guilt – for his appetites.

He and Candia were in Venice when the incident took place. They were enjoying an orgy of sex and orgasm. Candia was lying naked and wanton, exposed in the most seductive manner. Axel was filled with lust for her, for sex, and his imagination took flight. His head filled with fantasies of the many other women, exotic creatures like Candia, whom he could enslave – lovely, delicate Japanese women, nubile, black African beauties with their dark and lustrous skin, Indian ladies in golden saris, on and on they formed in his mind. Candia had done that to him, he realised; she had raised his libido to a height it had never dared soar to. His fantasies suddenly seemed disturbing. He had never indulged in sex on the level he did now, until Candia had come along and seduced him.

Caressing her with searching fingers, he told her, ‘You are a corrupting influence, my love.’

Candia could hardly believe she had heard correctly. She was distracted by his caresses, was feeling those lovely beginnings that lead to orgasm, so she asked him in a voice
already husky with lust, ‘What did you say, darling?’

‘I was never sexually corrupt until I met you,’ he said with a note of anger in his voice which he made no attempt to hide.

Immediately, she thought of Luke, the way he was with her, how he had told her he loved her, the happiness and oneness he had felt with her from that very first day he had walked into the Temple. Luke, a man in love, could never have considered her a corrupting influence but a woman who added positively to his life. Oh, how stupid she had been! Axel didn’t love her, he enjoyed her as a beautiful libertine to wear on his arm, to marry for his image. She felt they were cheating rather than loving each other, and she realised there had always been a shadow over their love affair. She had held back from living in Axel’s palatial house, from marrying him. It hadn’t been because of insecurity about committing herself, rather it had been the shadow of Luke’s love for her, her feelings for him, so complete and so right, hovering over them.

Candia pulled herself up against the pillows and away from Axel’s caresses, still hardly believing he saw her not as love but as corruption. ‘You think
I
corrupt you?’

‘Yes, actually, I do,’ he told her.

For a few seconds she thought he was teasing her. But the lamplight showed a serious face. That shocked her. She sat up even further against the pillows and reached for her dressing gown. She slipped it on and the cream-coloured satin fell into seductive folds around her. ‘Axel, that’s deplorable! Get out!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he protested.

‘You say you love me. You say you want to marry me. You tell me you’ve never been more happily intimate with a woman than you are with me. I believed you. I thought we shared what we have together. And now you call me a corrupting influence. You bastard, you should be on your knees to me for setting you free from middle-class morality.
You have two choices. You can get out of this room now and we will never see or speak to each other again, or you can call your pilot and tell him to get ready for a flight out of here to take me back to Nice. I suggest you do the second or I will blow that pristine reputation of yours, which the media world so enjoys displaying, wide open.’

‘You’re overreacting.’

‘You really believe I’ve corrupted you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that says it all for me. I will
not
take the blame for your sexual appetites. You beat on someone else to ease your conscience.’

‘But I love you and you love me.’

‘Not enough to marry you, Axel. Not even enough ever to have sex with you again. The telephone is over there. Make your calls and let’s just allow this romance to fade away, the way old soldiers do.’

Candia was back in the Temple for more than a week before she called Luke. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about him. It wasn’t even that she was unhappy or upset by the break-up of her affair with Axel. It was more that she needed solitude.

During that week she thought seriously, for the first time in weeks, about those lost four years. She wanted them back. She felt cheated that they had been taken away from her. And so she began recording what she saw when those windows to her mind briefly opened. She made notes on white squares of paper and spread them out on the Contessa’s writing table. She took pains not to force her mind to understand them, merely glanced at what she had written several times a day. The more she became involved with the puzzle of her past, the more the windows opened.

‘Candia dressed in a police officer’s uniform walking down a long corridor opening door after door until she was no more than a dot that finally vanished. Candia wandering
through a hospital searching for a doctor. A river, its banks thick with trees in bright colour, autumn leaves. Chinese lanterns gently swinging in a warm breeze and the sound of a violin and a viola.’

Pinning down those flashing scenes in her conscious mind brought her a tremendous sense of wellbeing and she was encouraged that soon her memory would return. She could feel it in her bones. She had no fear about what had taken place during those years. It had to have been good, she reasoned, because she had returned to her old world a stronger, better person, far more stable and independent, a woman who could survive whatever she must in order to live. To live was what mattered. And when she reached that point in her thinking, Luke came to mind. That was when she dialled the
Hesperides
.

‘I’m back. I missed you,’ she told him.

‘I appreciated your phone calls. When did you get back to the Temple?’

‘A week ago. When can I see you?’