Those Wicked Pleasures (38 page)

‘Do you think he will sign it for me? It’s a bit of an imposition to ask our celebrities and I hardly ever do. We’re not supposed to but … a man of his stature? I guess I’ll risk it.’

The celebrated scientist had made a modest return to his gangway seat.

‘Excuse me. May I?’ asked Barney, handing out the magazine.

‘I’d be pleased to sign this for you. But, would you mind, some coffee in about ten minutes?’

Barney took the hint. His retreat was as happy as it was hasty. But he had to return. Evan Valentine was settled in his seat next to Lara, the magazine still in his
hand. ‘Sorry, sir, a message has come through for you that …’

Evan interrupted, ‘After coffee. I’ll deal with it then.’ Barney’s training equipped him to realise he was being dismissed.

Evan turned to Lara, concern evident in his expression. ‘I wish you need never have found out. But, now you have, are you still prepared to take me on board?’

‘I wish I could say it hardly matters. But it does. The only thing that hasn’t changed is my feelings, my resolve that, having just found each other, we should not give each other up merely because we have lives other than the one we can have together.’

‘We will have to keep them very separate.’

‘We can do that, so long as we let the outside world die for us when we are together.’

‘I don’t want to drive myself to distraction thinking about what you are doing when we are not together. We will have to be strong enough to take nothing of our other lives along with us when we are together. To take a chance on love with you, I can be very strong. What about you?’

‘Is that a proposal?’

‘Only the second one I have ever given in my life. But, before you answer, I want to make myself clear. Ours will always have to be a secret love. I will make you my greatest love outside my work. But do you want to be an illicit love that I can flee to from fame and people? Is it enough for you to be my secret world, where only you and I and our
grand amour
exist? I am past sixty and haven’t ever fallen in love at first sight, or wanted a woman as I want you. I feel alive as I have never felt before. I can’t give you up without trying to make it work for us. But there have to be strict ground-rules. We mustn’t ever cause each other pain or disappointment.’

She simply could not say yes. She could only nod her
head in assent. Emotion was welling up in her. Her heart went out to him. Towards the love she saw in his eyes for her now, towards the nervous tremor in his voice. Because, against his will, he had fallen in love. Because she could see the need he felt for her – that same need she had felt all her life to be loved. To be number one in someone’s life and have that feeling returned.

They said their farewells with little more intimacy than two mere acquaintances would have shown. He would call her at a specific time at The Connaught, after the investiture. That was one of the ground-rules: to call each other at specific times. He would not have her waiting on the end of a telephone for him. Another rule was that they could each take one other person into their confidence, but not even to them would they divulge their lover’s identity. She chose Nancy, her secretary. He chose Elspeth, his personal assistant. He was Mr Smith, and she was to be Miss Jones.

Was this the recipe for a great love story? How was it possible? But it was. Even from the beginning they got it right. And it never went wrong. When they were together, they had no other lives. Apart, they had no life together. And their separate lives never overlapped. They worked at their love and passion for each other. And so it worked for them.

Lara had not realised how much they had wanted each other sexually until they were alone together for the first time. Oh, yes, she had wanted him, she knew that the moment she saw him in the museum. She wanted him to make love to her as she had seen Max make love to the Chinese twin. But her sexual desires had been held in check by love. Now they were alone, and he had her in his arms and kissed her. It was extraordinary that it should be their first kiss, because she felt so completely a part of his life. He was far more sensual than she
expected. She had been fooled by his conservative, even strait-laced, manner; the tweed suit, the waistcoat that matched … only the eyes, the sensual, passionate, smiling eyes gave a hint of what was to come.

He held her face in his hands while he kissed her. Between kisses he kept telling her, ‘I can’t stop looking at you. You are so beautiful.’ Then he would touch her cheek, the bridge of her nose. He ran a finger lightly across her long silky eye-lashes. He kissed her eyes with a tenderness she had never known. She didn’t dissolve under his kisses, nor did she become weak-kneed under his sensual love. She found herself instead exhilarated. His gentle loving excited her passion. His body-scent was clean and fresh, like lemons or peppermint. She felt unable to keep her hands off him, touching his face, the back of his neck, his hands. His skin was warm, not soft but smooth to the touch, and was of a pale olive tone.

When next he placed a kiss upon her lips she slid her tongue from between them and licked his lips. She nibbled at them, and she could feel him giving in to her. And the more he did, the more overwhelming was her desire to give herself to him. Everything she was, everything she had ever been, all the things she could ever be sexually, she wanted to give to this man.

She slipped out of his arms. Taking him by the hand she led him to the bedroom. Under a long, dark, rich amethyst-coloured jacket of
crepe de Chine
, she was wearing a dress of black in the same material. Soft and loose, it clung alluringly to her by the sheer magic of its cut. It was the sort of dress that was a chic prick tease, with its top that just covered her breasts, and its slim slipper-straps over the shoulders. Around her neck was a collar of rubies, and in her ears her yellow diamonds. She looked luscious, ripe and rich, all elegance, youth, sensuousness. Evan craved her more at that moment than
life itself. She could sense his desire, the scent of his lust and love for her. His tremendous urge to multiply sexual deaths inside her.

She opened her silk jacket, and for the first time he ran the back of his hand across her skin. She let the jacket slip off her shoulders and down her arms to fall on the floor. He was as if mesmerised by her, watching her every move as she caressed her own shoulders seductively, slipping one strap off to fall against her upper arm and then, slowly the other. She opened the zip at the back. The slippery
crepe de Chine
slid off her breasts and down around her waist, her hips, her thighs, slowly to the floor. She stepped over the silk and stood before him naked, except for the black stockings held high up around her comely thighs by a band of elasticated lace. She caressed her breasts and ran her hands down her body to her mound of silvery silk pubic hair. Then, with arms open, she went to him, placed them around his neck, and kissed him.

He halted her kisses long enough to tell her, ‘You’re magnificent, more divine to me than any other woman. There will be no stopping me. I want it all.’ And then he crushed her to him with an erotic violence that amazed them both. She took him by the hand and led him to the side of the bed. She removed his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat, loosened his tie. When he was naked, he picked her up in his arms and laid her on the bed. He placed pillows under her bottom to raise her, wanting her at an angle the better to view her, and where she could feel more deeply the thrusts of his cock. He was a big man who wanted to be between her legs. So, kneeling there, he slowly spread them further and further apart. He needed to see her open and ready for him. He looked at her with a kind of awe. Few men had ever looked at her his way.

He caressed her pussy, licked it and kissed it. He was rushing nothing, simply savouring her. With such gentleness he opened her cunt lips and lowered his mouth to them. He sucked them. She felt his teeth teasing them. His tongue sought out her clitoris. She came and he tasted her for the first time, the strange aphrodisiac that she was for him. He slipped fingers of each hand on either side of her yearning cunt and she was open. He entered her for the first time with his tongue. Deep as he could he probed her, and she came for them again. He made a feast of her.

Unable to keep her silence, she allowed herself sighs of bliss, words of lust. Her fingers dug hard into his massive shoulders. He rubbed his face in her cunt and kissed the inside of her thighs, then worked his way up her body to her breasts with kissing gone wild. He bit into her flesh. He reached her breasts, flesh as raunchy and exciting as he had ever seen. The dark, dark nipples and surrounding nimbus were rich in their decadence, stirring him to an animal lust he had long forgotten how to feel.

She felt his hunger. He was famished for her sex. His starving touched her heart. She yearned to feed such erotic needs. He raised her from the bed, placed her on her knees and kissed the arch of her back, licked the succulent orbs of her bottom, and then between them, and that small tight place. He pierced it with his tongue till she could bear the sensations no longer. She begged to be taken. With gentle caressing fingers, he wrenched apart the fleshy, deep rose inner lips of her cunt and eased himself slowly into her. He paced his fucking to give them long slow tantalising pleasure. Tears of joy trickled down her face as she came in a long leisured climax, soon succeeded by another.

She told him in a husky, emotion-ridden voice how
much she loved him. Then she reached down to hold the soft loose sack beneath his penis, thrilled to the weighty feel of the balls within. She cupped them in her hands and fondled them, yearning to take them in her mouth. She would suck and lick them, to give him yet more pleasure.

He felt her orgasms, warm, wet and as slippery as silk, coat his penis and moisten his testes. Had he ever had such sex? Known a woman so ready to die in the embrace of Eros? He had hardly dreamed that a woman would want to give herself so completely. He felt her body go taut. The shudder of her ecstasy, another wave of cum. He heard her call out in a frenzy of passion. His fingers bit into the flesh of her hips, where he held her fast and mercilessly throttled her with cock as he climaxed into a powerful orgasm.

No need for him to tell her. She sensed that this climax had been for him the end of living for years in a sexual desert. He lay for a time with her in his arms, until at last he was able to compose himself and tell her, ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ And here were their beginnings.

She thanked him by making love to him that night. Kissed him as she had been kissed by him. Took him, in the full measure of his mood, into her mouth and made love to him. He was thrilling and passionate and loving. She sucked on him until he came and she absorbed his life’s force, cherishing every drop she swallowed. Before morning he had used every orifice to fill her with his seed. She was his master, he her pupil, and he obeyed her in acts of erotic love he had rarely dreamed of.

A real love and affection governed their erotic life together, allowed them to be as base as they chose to be in their sometimes fierce couplings. It allowed them to wallow in a kind of sexual depravity. She was able to draw
from him his most secret sexual fantasies, and he allowed himself the luxury of passive as well as aggressive sexuality. She was a new sun in his life and all of his hopes and dreams of a relationship with a woman. And if she was all those things for him, he was no less for her. They thought of themselves as having been given a second life when they met, and they grabbed it with both hands.

It was as if she were swimming against a tide of soft white cotton wool, that process of waking and resisting surrender to the luxury of a peaceful and oh-so-sweet sleep. She gave in, and opened her eyes. But still her awakening was slow. She stretched and felt the sheer luxuriance of a body coming alive again. Her mind caught up with her body, and she remembered that this was their first morning together. She sat upright, leaning against the headboard. This was true awakening. He had opened the draperies to let greyish morning light pour through the sheer white under-curtains. The bedclothes had fallen away. She sat naked from the waist up and looked around the room. He had quite obviously straightened it, laid his clothes out neatly over one chair, hers over the other. The bathroom door was ajar. A stream of electric light cast a stripe across the oriental carpet.

It was a very pretty suite of rooms. The bedroom, all English flowered cotton chintz, full-blown garden roses in shades of peach, red and aquamarine and lots of green leaves on a ground of a rich cream colour, and comfortable chairs and a chaise. The chest of drawers, a dressing-table, and the four-poster bed were in rich Georgian mahogany. The pictures on the walls, handsome black and white etchings of seventeenth-century London, were framed simply in silver-leaf. A large bowl of white arum lilies adorned a round, marble-topped table. She threw the covers off and, naked, went to the dressing-table;
taking up the brush, she worked on her hair. She stopped and viewed in the mirror the bruises on her breasts where he had clung so hard while he had devoured her nipples and the nimbus around them. She closed her eyes to savour the memories that came flooding back of sensations he had induced in her by his appetite for her. She checked further, found another blue-black oval mark on her hip, one on the inside of her thigh. She had never known a man so hungry for her. He seemed to explode with sexual desire for her. She reached for her dressing-gown. What was that promise she had extricated from him in the heat of passion? Never to hold back, but to share with her his every sexual fantasy and for them to dwell in the house of erotica forever. It seemed melodramatic now in the light of day but then she was reminded of how he had told her, ‘Teach me. I want to experience everything with you, in a secret world we don’t have to share with another soul.’ He needed her, she knew that, and he was worth giving herself to. She had yet another sensation she had not experienced in life before: a man who she wanted to care for, make happy.