Those Wicked Pleasures (9 page)

‘I don’t need it. I’m high as a kite on sex already.’

‘It’s that little bit higher that counts.’

She took the cocaine.

‘It makes ladies very sexy. Later I will rub it on your
clitoris – it will make you crazy sexy – and in your cunt. In fact, lie down.’

He was right. Her insatiability with this man began to worry her. She seemed unable to say no to anything he suggested. And now, as she dressed, the tingling sensation of the coke acting upon her genitals filled her with desire to experience the erotic promise the
pied à terre
had to offer.

Jamal made certain she looked impeccable before they left his room. There was a party going on downstairs. This intimate evening of theirs must remain an absolute secret. She looked, if not the picture of innocence, certainly not the erotic woman he now knew her to be. Her icy, aristocratic beauty, those mischievous green eyes of hers, had always attracted him; more so now since he had had her. He had only to think of those strangely sensuous plummy-coloured nipples to want her again. He had received much more than he had bargained for with Lara, and he guessed that, by the time he returned her to Cannonberry Chase, theirs would be a
liaison dangereuse
that might last all their lives.

They slipped into the party, made their appearance, and stayed for a respectable time before they passed unnoticed from the conservatory into the house on Fifty-Third Street.

Chapter 5

The open car swerved off the main road and through the massive gates. Their iron frames hung from stone piers topped with spheres covered in lichen. A field mouse scampered around one side, dropped to the ledge it balanced on and disappeared into some ivy.

A pearly mist clung to the undulating meadow. The sun was already high in the sky. Between the chase and the sun, puffs of fog rolled in from the bay, half a mile away on one side, and the ocean about the same distance away on the other. Layers of luminescence and frosty colours. A band of blue, a streak of low-lying, silvery-white cloud, a slab of sun-yellow, and a wafer of milky-grey mist hung ethereally, culminating in a slash of bright green, the grass and trees of the parkland. Multi-layered nature encompassing earth and sky. A kind of magic. Cannonberry Chase.

The car sped up the three-mile avenue of huge, hundred-year-old elms. The odd cock pheasant paraded its glorious plumage nonchalantly along the edge of the drive, having abandoned the huge wood that teemed with game-birds further on. The estate was a twenty-square-mile peninsula jutting out into Long Island Sound.

‘Slow down,’ Lara demanded.

Jamal slowed, and they cruised up the drive, listening. The forlorn boom of a fog-horn was just audible. The twitter of a bird. From the patches of tall grass and wild
flowers came the rustle of some furry animal on the hunt for food. She hardly needed to ask. A mile or so up the drive, the enchantment of early morning, the peace and tranquillity of Cannonberry Chase, worked their magic on Jamal. He stopped the car.

Neither of them said anything. They watched the sun rise higher in the sky and slowly burn off the mist. He opened the car door and disposed of the leather jacket he had been wearing over his dress suit to counter the cold. He walked around to open the car door for her. ‘A glorious morning. Let’s walk together, become part of it. I think we should talk, settle a few things about what happened last night. We should get our story straight for the family, maybe establish some ground rules, before we reach the house.’

She didn’t move. He removed the chiffon scarf from around her hair and kissed the top of her head. She pulled away. ‘We have no future, Jamal. I thought I made that clear last night.’

‘It’s too late to behave like a silly child now, Lara. Let’s walk.’ There was a note of sternness in his voice.

He took her hand and kissed it and helped her out of the white Ferrari, removing the lynx car-robe she was wrapped in. She gave a slight shiver. He took off his jacket and placed it around her shoulders. They walked from the road into the long grass and across the meadow. The rustle of her silk taffeta gown became part of the sounds of the morning, the vivid colours of her dress part of the landscape. She ran her fingers through her long blonde hair, and he marvelled at the effect the place was having on her. She seemed to respond to the beauty, the peace and tranquillity of the newborn day. Here was the old Lara he had known from a child, lovely and provocative, an aristocratic maiden in the kingdom of Cannonberry Chase.

Only hours before, he had tapped into her darkest, most secret sexual core. Jamal had led her into sexual excess and she had allowed it to take control of her. Lara had revelled in the erotic fantasies of Jamal and the two other men he had provided for her. But now the coke, and the hashish, the champagne and the sex, had worn off, and it was time to come to terms with the reality of the night she and Jamal had spent together. He had handled her then in order to possess her. He had no problems about how to handle her now, to keep her as his
liaison dangereuse
, as he had every intention of doing.

And Lara? She had found sexual ecstasy. She had submitted to acts she had before considered impossibly decadent, and found erotic love. Sexual bliss. But as she walked now through the tall grass and wild flowers, the morning dew still glistening on them, in her beloved Cannonberry Chase, all life waking around her, such extremes seemed to the young woman too dark and murky to contemplate as anything other than sexual desire gone mad. Desire that must be suppressed.

She began to walk faster and faster and then, flinging the coat from her shoulders, began to run. Jamal caught it and chased after her. He grasped her by the waist and tackled her to the ground. He liked the fury he saw in her face, it excited him.

‘How could you? How could you let me be dragged into such an orgy as last night’s? A part of me will always hate you for that, Jamal.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. A part of you will love me all your life, my dear, for what you had last night. For what we will always have together.’

‘Never again.’

He laughed at her. She tried to raise herself, but he had her pinned down. She struggled. ‘I thought you
learned your lesson last night about struggling with me.’ She became very still.

‘That’s better. Now behave, and I will let you sit up.’ She made another, but more feeble attempt. He laughed and pulled her head back down to the ground by her hair. Then he kissed her quiet. It hadn’t been his intention, but when he felt her relax into his kisses and then take them over, he found an unbearable need to tame her one last time with his cock. And that was what he kept telling her while he fucked her. Afterwards they lay there, replete in their lust for each other, until Lara rose from the ground and offered her hand to Jamal. Together now as friends they walked towards the stables, he brushing the grass and leaves and seeds and broken twigs from her dress, and plucking bits from her hair.

‘We can’t go on, Jamal.’

‘Of course we can.’

‘I’m frightened. Where will this intense kind of sex-life lead me? I know I can’t go where you want to take me, even though I might want to take on that adventure and go. Promise me you will leave me alone to get on with life at a pace I can handle. If you love me, then you will.’

Jamal didn’t answer. He had had what he wanted. He had possessed Lara. He had reached down into the sexual side of her nature and had awakened it for himself. She had given him great sex, enormous pleasure, and he knew that for the moment he had to cool it. David, if he were to find out, would never forgive him. But the Stantons as a family would ruin him in society, and their power could destroy his reputation in the western world. There was something else: in time, in secret, when she was ready again, as she had been last night, he knew Lara would be his again. No other man would ever get where he had been with her sexually. That was the bond that would
hold them together, until, if ever, she found some sexual virtuoso superior to himself. But first he would have it seemed to let her go, though he had no intention of doing that, ever. Not completely, anyway.

‘I can’t leave you alone, not for ever. Leave you to what? Sam?’

‘He loves me. I’ll be safe with Sam. He’s a good lover, he’ll make me happy.’

‘So, seventeen years old and two lovers, and you think you’re an authority on love, sex and happiness. Not yet, dear. Sam, the Sams of your tiny world – forget them. They won’t last. I can offer you much more, the occasional glimpse of another world. Wonderful as life is for you, Cannonberry Chase is not the world. Nor are you Stantons and your exclusive circle of friends. This will never be enough for you. Your brothers know that. They live within the exclusive milieu of the Stanton name and all that it entails. And, with due discretion, out of it. And so must you, if you don’t want to wind up with a walk-on role in life. Do you want to turn into some bumbling philistine of an adult? Some passive beauty who knows nothing about what really moves the world – sex, the fear of death, hidden desires, compulsive perversions. A safe and marginally happy lady like Elizabeth – too frightened to do anything to improve herself beyond your mother’s design for life. You’re letting this world repress you. You think if you don’t succumb to that repression you will become some sort of pervert. You silly girl! Exciting sex has nothing to do with perversion, as long as no one gets hurt. Get those two things mixed up, and you’ll wind up a frustrated, wasted shell of a woman. Is that what you want?’

‘Of course that’s not what I want. Give me time to think about what I want. Please, we have to put last night out of our minds.’

‘You may have to. I don’t.’

‘Do you love me, Jamal?’

‘Love?’

The puzzled look on his face told it all. Until that moment she actually had it in her mind that he did love her. She had taken him at his word during his seduction of her. If Jamal’s love for her had not spurred her on to give herself to two strangers and revel in sexual licentiousness with three men, than what had? She looked into that handsome, sensual face and could not deny to herself how exciting and fulfilling sex had been with him. It had been like dying to all else in the world except that moment of bliss. But coming out of orgasm was like being born again. And to be in the arms of a man who loved you seemed, at that moment, as she stood in the meadow of Cannonberry Chase, an essential element of life.

‘Well, yes, let’s maybe not talk about love, or us, or a future. I think let’s just go home.’

Lara found the look of relief on his face embarrassing. Only then did David’s words come to mind. He had said often about Jamal, ‘He is one of my best friends, but it’s as well to remember that underneath all that charm there lurks an often sadistic cad.’

Walking back towards the car, Jamal felt an unpleasant stirring of unease. It had to do with something he saw in Lara’s face, that tilt of the head, a touch of arrogance in the way she looked at him. That American high-society haughtiness that sparked off her. He felt his power over her diminishing, and he couldn’t stand that. He cast a line of fear, hoping to reel her back to him, if only to prove to them both that he still had her on the hook.

‘You can’t just “go home”. It’s not as easy as that, Lara. You have secrets to hide. Explanations to make. I will, of course, support any story you tell. No one will ever know about what really went on last night. That will
always be our own special secret.’ He looked at his watch and continued, ‘It’s nearly six-fifteen, somebody is bound to be up and about the house. We had better create a good cover-up for being out all night.’

Lara listened to him and was appalled. Lies, deceit. She hated that conspiratorial tone in his voice. These were aspects of life she knew little about, and her immediate reaction was to reject the very idea of them. She would almost rather confess to her night of sexual indulgence. That was impossible, of course. She was in a trap.

They were standing by the car now, looking at each other. Her feelings were confused. She felt herself drawn to Jamal, maybe even held in some kind of a grip by him, but not enough to be reduced to becoming a liar, a cheat. What he felt showed in his eyes: satisfaction at holding the trump card in his game of seduction.

The tone of his voice changed. It suddenly took on warmth, sincerity. ‘Lara, who knows when we will be able to talk openly like this together again? It will never do, our sneaking into corners to whisper something intimate to each other. You have to know that we will be together again, in spite of what you say or may think. I will plan a way for us to spend some time together without the family finding out. Last night was only the beginning for us. All our sex is going to have to be secret, at least for a few years. Tell me you accept that as a possibility. I ask no more of you than that. Our relationship can be as it has always been in front of the family. And not only the family: between us as well.’

In later years Lara would always recall that moment with Jamal, standing in the sunshine in Cannonberry Chase, as the time that she really grew up and faced herself and took her first action as a woman. It was as if she had blanked out but had now regained consciousness. She felt a coldness, a determination never
to be a sexual victim, not of Jamal’s or any man’s. She would master the art of erotic love for her own pleasure, and share it with Sam, or Jamal, or any man who loved her enough to win her to him. One night, one day, a lifetime. She would prefer one man, one lifetime. Jamal didn’t send out any signals that he could be that kind of man for her. But Sam? Dear, safe Sam was something else. But for the moment there were other things to cope with: the most pressing, how to handle her arrival home.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

He grabbed her by the elbow as she made an attempt to get into the Ferrari. ‘Answer me, goddammit! You do accept what we are together? You will not deny us? A yes will do for now.’

She suddenly felt in control of herself. Home on the safe ground of Cannonberry Chase, she felt strong enough to admit to her erotic love for Jamal and Sam, yet not to feel compelled to do anything about it until she was ready, if ever. Who was to know? Maybe Jamal was the great romantic love of her life. Maybe Sam was. What was romantic love anyway? Jamal was quite shrewd while she was no authority on the subject. But she vowed that one day, whatever it was, she would have it. All options open, it was like going for the Yacht Club’s gold cup. But for the moment, galvanised by the changes in herself and her life, Lara gathered her strength. Gazing into Jamal’s eyes she answered him.

‘Yes, yes, yes. Clandestine sex, by what one experience of it can prove, is for us. Yes, when I am away at school it is a possibility. Yes, you win, you win. Now drive us to the stables, and don’t ever try and turn me into a liar with the family again. I will handle them, and our being out all night. I have managed to handle my short shock-introduction into the big wide world of sex and love. I’ve still come out of it happier to be there than not. So I think
I had better behave like an adult. I’ve got to take responsibility for my actions, and I mean to do that without compromising anyone – least of all myself.’

The stables, like all else on Cannonberry Chase, were impressive. Here you would find some of the best horseflesh in the country. Racing stock, a stud, hunters, an indoor as well as outdoor riding-ring. The groom, already at work, saddled up for Jamal and Lara. They grinned when she rejected any offers of riding clothes and insisted she and Jamal would ride as they were.