Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  No question, that was what it was. Whatever Kumiko was to Maitland, it was clearly he who would make the decisions, and Kumiko who was doing the work. This wasn’t Milly’s first time with a woman; like many actors, she was very open to any kind of new experience, especially when a role might be dangling tantalizingly at the end of it.

  But Kumiko was by far the best lover she’d ever had, so skilled that Milly would not have been at all surprised to find out that Kumiko had done this – or was doing this – on a professional basis. Her short fingernails opened Milly up for her darting tongue so comprehensively and explicitly that Milly’s hips jerked right up off the coverlet in shock as Kumiko touched her tongue to Milly’s centre. The burst of sensation was so intense it felt as if Kumiko had burnt her, held a fizzing sparkler right between her legs, her clever fingers holding Milly’s delicate folds apart so that they couldn’t give any protection, offer a layer between Milly’s clitoris and Kumiko’s hot wet pointed tongue.

  Milly bucked in panic, thinking that she would be overwhelmed, that the intensity might even flip to pain, but Kumiko was surprisingly strong. Her elbows secured Milly’s knees, her steel fingers held Milly’s pelvis in place, and two seconds later Milly was coming fast and furious, hugely relieved that Kumiko knew exactly what she was doing. Milly managed to get her head back far enough to watch her orgasm face in the mirrored headboard, and the sight of her fuchsia lips parted in a gorgeously seductive O as she wailed and screamed her pleasure was an extra turn-on for her; at home, she always masturbated in front of a full-length mirror, and preferred sex with Tarquin somewhere she could view the entire spectacle.

  This was the fastest she had ever come. She wondered, even as she came again, screaming as prettily as she could, if she could teach Kumiko’s technique to Tarquin, without, of course, saying where she’d learnt it. Tarquin thought she was faithful, would be very distressed to ever find out that she wasn’t, which was fine, as she had no intention of ever letting him discover this or any other extra-curricular activity that she engaged in to further her career. Tarquin – bless his sweet heart, she thought a little contemptuously – was possibly the only rocker in the world who intended to be faithful to his wife. Which was ironic, as Milly certainly wouldn’t be bothered if he did let the occasional groupie suck his cock in his trailer . . .

  ‘Shit!’ she yelled, as Kumiko slid two, then three fingers into her, her tongue flicking Milly to another orgasm. ‘Shit, that’s so . . .’

  It was really hard to know what words she should use. Who was she playing? What was her role here? Slutty or innocent? Eager lesbionic – as she and her friends at boarding school had nicknamed their after-dark licking games – or first-time convert, seduced by Kumiko into a world of new experiences? She had managed to catch a glimpse of Maitland’s face in the mirrored headboard, but with the goggle glasses and the thong over his nose and mouth, any attempt to read his expression was impossible.

  And in the next second, she genuinely found herself the amazed innocent, as Kumiko’s whole slender hand, the fingers pressed tightly together, began to open her up, slide up inside her. It felt . . . amazing. This was definitely outside anything a woman had done to her before; they’d never dreamt of this at boarding school. Milly was jerked out of any attempts at acting, was dragged fully into the intensity of the moment as she felt Kumiko’s hand inside her, the thumb of the other hand rubbing circles around her clitoris, waves upon waves of pleasure building as each orgasm sucked Kumiko’s wrist further inside Milly, who was dripping wet and practically begging for more; it was extraordinary, the sensation incredibly strong, nothing she would have dreamt of wanting, but now she would die if it stopped . . .

  Kumiko’s fingers flickered inside Milly’s hot wet walls, exactly on her G-spot, and Milly felt herself letting go completely in a gush of orgasm that was so strong she thought afterwards that she might even have lost consciousness for a few moments. Her body spasmed again and again, clenching around Kumiko’s hand and wrist completely involuntarily, the powerful muscles clamping hard, lubricated by the rich surge of come flowing from Milly. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before; she felt completely opened up, turned inside out, worked like a machine that had functioned to maximum capacity because of the highly trained operator.

  She wasn’t aware of Kumiko’s easing her hand out gradually, only dimly felt the mattress move as Kumiko crabbed over to the beside table, pulled some tissues out of the silver box there, and wiped her hand down. Milly lay there, eyes closed, legs open, her own breathing so loud that, mercifully, it drowned out Maitland’s, feeling her chest rise and fall so heavily that it almost hurt with each inhalation. Her entire body was a mass of sensation, as if the vaginal orgasm were a flash fire that had spread through her whole chest, up to her face, bathing her in flames that would take long, delicious minutes to subside . . .

  Maitland was unsnapping the thong from his face, rolling it up and putting it in the pocket of his baggy hipster jeans.

  ‘So?’ he said to Kumiko, who was lying back on the bed now, stroking concentric circles on Milly’s stomach with a fingertip.

  ‘Completely open,’ Kumiko said seriously, rendering a verdict. ‘Totally present. She fell, definitely.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s how it looked,’ Maitland agreed. ‘She has a really nice range of expression when that potentiality’s unlocked.’

  Milly, hearing herself talked about, raised her head, looking from Maitland to Kumiko, registering that her thong had disappeared and deciding, reluctantly, not to mention it. She smiled at Kumiko, would normally have pulled her head down to kiss her, but the scene felt so choreographed that Milly hesitated.

  Instead she said: ‘Can I return the favour? I’m not as good as you, but I bet practically no one is . . .’

  It was exactly the right thing to say. Kumiko smiled complacently as she answered: ‘Not how I roll. But thanks.’

  Milly had absolutely no idea what Kumiko meant by that, but she was relieved that she wouldn’t be expected to perform herself. She was naturally lazy in bed, much preferring to receive – while viewing herself – than to give. She stretched, tossing back her fair curls and smiled at Kumiko, waiting for a further cue: she knew it would come. They had decided everything up till now. They’d tell her what they wanted next.

  ‘You can get dressed,’ Kumiko said, exchanging a glance with Maitland, who nodded slightly. ‘Take your time, we’re cool. No rush.’

  Kumiko slipped off the bed and went through into the large oak and granite bathroom, where she could be heard relieving herself; she didn’t bother to shut the door. Milly sat up, arched her back, looked at Maitland still sitting on the chair, very close to the bed, so close that she’d have to brush against him if she went that way, and decided not to risk it. Instead she rolled off the far side, giving him a nice action view of her little white buttocks as she went, passed the striking view of Fitzrovia’s skyline through the huge window, and walked at a normal pace into the living room to reassemble her outfit, minus thong.

  By the time she was dressed, neither of them had come back into the living room; unsure of how to handle this, she peeped back into the bedroom to see that Maitland hadn’t moved from the chair. Kumiko was now curled up in his lap, and he was stroking the thick mass of her hair with regular, rhythmic caresses.

  ‘Maitland’s keeping your thong,’ Kumiko said to Milly. ‘That’s good. You should be pleased.’

  ‘Great,’ Milly said. But Maitland wasn’t even looking up: it was clearly her cue to leave, and she duly slipped out of the suite, pressing the button for the lift, her brain racing. She’d call her agent, say that things had gone really well, ask her to do a follow-up call tomorrow, get the lie of the land . . .

  And what’s Maitland Parks going to say? ‘She was so good I kept her thong’?

  Normally, Milly would have sniggered at this, but she was taking the possibility of a part in And When You Fall too seriously for anything but a brief smile to cro
ss her face. It could make her, be the breakout vehicle that Bertolucci’s The Dreamers had been for Eva Green, in which that actress had had explicit sex scenes with two actors. Nowadays it was no-holds-barred, though it was usually a European director that wanted the actresses to spread their legs, like Michael Winterbottom with Nine Songs; still, after Paul Schrader had cast James Deen, an actual porn star, in The Canyons, and Sasha Grey, another porn star, had taken the lead in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, the boundaries were really blurring.

  Look, as long as it’s called an art film and puts me on the map, I could care less about having sex on screen, Milly thought happily. The lift whisked her down to the lobby, and she stepped outside into a gloriously warm early September evening. Heads turned in her wake, not just because they recognized her, not just because of the still striking hair and make-up, but because her eyes were shining, her expression transcendent, her limbs loose and suffused with the aftermath of an out-of-body orgasm.

  God, I love my job! she thought blissfully, holding out her hand for a passing cab. And I should just have time to nip to the Myla boutique on Oxford Street before it closes to pick up another thong so Tarquin won’t wonder why I’m coming home without my knickers on . . . hmm, I wonder if I can write them off as a business expense?

  Chapter Ten

  ‘So it’s war,’ the Fracking Queen said, her beautifully shaped lips setting in a firm line, her eyes glittering darkly in a way that made Lady Margaret McArdle, sitting opposite her at the table in the garden of Tamra’s Chelsea mansion, raise her eyebrows in anticipation of the conversation to come.

  ‘Well, war’s maybe a little—’ began Veronica, the publicist who had just broken the news to Tamra that Milly Gamble was her daughter’s rival for the title of Style Bride of the Year.

  ‘Oh no, it’s war,’ Tamra corrected her firmly. ‘Only one of them can be on the cover. There’s a winner and a loser. It’s definitely war.’

  ‘A battle to the death,’ Lady Margaret drawled, swirling the ice cubes in her gin and tonic. ‘I do love watching you get all excited, Tamra. We just don’t do that over here in Britain. We pretend we don’t remotely care about anything and then we secretly fester with resentment and stab our rivals in the back.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll stab her in the front if I need to!’ Tamra said, stirring her champagne with such vicious twirls of the silver whisk Edmund had found for her that the fine silver tines clattered dangerously against the glass.

  ‘Tamra, I – errr . . .’ Veronica said nervously.

  ‘Ah, she’s just letting off steam,’ Lady Margaret said, sitting back in the white-painted wrought-iron chair and crossing one leg over the other, ankle to knee. ‘Let her have her head.’

  Lady Margaret, as always, was wearing trousers. Even for the recent royal wedding of Prince Hugo to Chloe Rose, which Lady Margaret had naturally attended, having been the best friend of Hugo’s mother, Princess Belinda, she had worn an ankle-length printed silk divided skirt, wide-cut enough to swish around her ankles, with a tailored jacket and matching navy top hat. It was the perfect compromise: Lady Margaret had been able to tell herself that the culotte-like design meant that she was really in trousers, and if anyone at Westminster Abbey had noticed that the folds of her ‘skirt’ divided a little suspiciously, Lady Margaret had paid enough lip service to the conventions that nobody was brave enough to tell her that she needed to go home and change.

  Had she not been a Duke’s daughter, and godmother to the future King, matters would have been different, but what would be absolutely taboo for commoners was just about permissible for an aristocrat who had always been known to be on the eccentric side. And though King Stephen and Queen Alexandra were sticklers for protocol, certain events leading up to the wedding involving them, Lady Margaret and some other key players meant that neither the King nor the Queen would have dreamt of going mano a mano with Lady Margaret over what she chose to wear to Prince Hugo’s wedding.

  Many jokes had been made in the gratin of London society – the highest echelons – about Tamra and Lady Margaret’s close friendship, as Lady Margaret’s sexual preferences were entirely Sapphic. Lady Margaret had warned Tamra that if they closed down the bar of every party they attended, roaring with laughter at each other’s jokes, assumptions would inevitably be made, but Tamra had shrugged that off with magnificent disdain.

  ‘Hell, I’m not the one husband-hunting!’ she had said. ‘And no one’s going to turn down Brianna Jade just ’cause they think her mom’s rug-munching the daughter of a Duke, are they?’

  ‘If only!’ Lady Margaret had grumbled wistfully, clinking glasses with her friend.

  Tamra was perfectly well aware that Lady Margaret was a little in love with her, and had made it perfectly clear to her friend that nothing would ever transpire on that score; but Lady Margaret was much too sophisticated for that clarification to make any difference to the friendship, and had been more than happy to recommend the very discreet and very expensive escort agency from which Tamra had hired Bruno and Oliver. Their sexual needs very well taken care of by Diane’s young ladies and gentlemen, Tamra and Lady Margaret were free to run riot at the best parties London had to offer. Lady Margaret also ensured that Tamra was invited to all the house parties that her set threw in the countryside – not the stuffy formal shooting or hunting ones, but the chic, gay-friendly, urban-weekenders, where guests drank expertly mixed martinis, played poker for high stakes, watched the latest films in home-cinema rooms, and neither Labradors nor small children ever made appearances.

  Now, Tamra’s eyes, dark and full of resolve, met her friend’s over the rim of her champagne glass as she took a long sip of the de-bubbled Cristal and set the glass firmly down on the glass table which grew out of the glass terrace beneath it, as did the chairs. It was an extraordinary piece of design, conceived by Michael Devine, the most fashionable garden designer in London. Money had been no object, and Devine had really let himself run wild. Beneath the terrace was a tropical aquarium, providing guests with fascinating glimpses of the shoal of Convict Cichlid fish, which were genetically engineered in Taipei to glow blue in the dark. Devine had pointed out to the owner that the reflections from the sheet of glass by night meant that one could catch the occasional glimpse of other guests’ underwear from time to time, depending on the lighting, angle and whether they were wearing any. Always a useful diversion if there happens to be a lull in conversation, he had drawled.

  Dramatic as the terrace was, with the fish beneath and the spreading, Dali-esque table and chairs extruding from it, the focal point of the garden was a fifteen-metre-tall Niwaki ‘cloud-pruned’ tree, handcrafted entirely out of glass by Venetian glass-blowers, which towered at its centre. The branches and leaves were suffused with thousands of tiny lights which provided warm ambient lighting over and around the dining terrace. The only living plants in the garden were a perfectly manicured circular lawn beyond the dining terrace – hand-trimmed with scissors on a daily basis to maintain its pristine condition – and behind that, a forest of Niwaki Cryptomeria japonica, several hundred years old, sited at the far end of the garden to create a private space for quiet contemplation.

  Behind a sheath of black glass trellis, a veil of water flowed continuously down the opaque glass walls of the garden. Fibre optics running through the trellis gently glowed blue in the evening, to tone in perfectly with the flickering Cichlids. This was why Tamra preferred the bathroom overlooking the garden; sometimes she sat in its window seat in the evenings, sipping a drink and contemplatively watching the fish circle dreamily in their huge aquarium, their soft blue echoing the lights of the fountain, muted by the black glass. Right now, however, was not the time for contemplation, but for action, and she didn’t glance down at the fish, but kept her gaze as steady as if her eyes were twin black barrels of a double-barrelled shotgun aimed at the face of her publicist.

  ‘We need to know our enemy,’ Tamra said decisively, ‘strategize, and take her down. W
hat do you know about Milly Gamble?’

  Despite Tamra’s intimidating stare, Veronica was prepared for this: she rattled off Milly’s CV to date, covering all her career highlights as well as the ethical jewellery line. Tamra greeted every role that Milly had played with theatrical snorts of derision; Lady Margaret watched the spectacle with great enjoyment.

  ‘Honestly, who is she anyway?’ Tamra snorted at the end of Veronica’s short summary, tossing back her glorious rose-gold hair, picking up her Dior ‘Demoiselle’ hand-painted sunglasses from the table and sliding them onto the bridge of her perfect nose. ‘How could the wedding of some little actress who’s never had a lead part possibly trump my daughter marrying an Earl, for Christ’s sake? Who is Milly Gamble in this world?’

  It was Lady Margaret’s turn to snort. This was a line from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, a reality show to which they were both addicted. Tamra had introduced Lady Margaret to all of the various Real Housewives franchises, with Beverly Hills and New York their favourites. They had a regular night where Lady Margaret would come round to watch the latest episode, downloaded from the internet. Tamra set up a whole row of lines and shots, and they would snort and sink them according to a complicated scoring system they had evolved.

  ‘Rather, my dear, you should be asking who her fiancé is,’ Lady Margaret said, leaning forward to ring the silver bell on the table. ‘That’s the really interesting point here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Behind the big lenses of the sunglasses, Tamra’s eyes narrowed in concentration. The huge French doors of the living room stood open, and Marta, Tamra’s housekeeper, came through them, dressed in her pale grey uniform with white apron. Without a word needing to be said, she refilled her mistress’s and Veronica’s champagne from the cooler on the table, then picked up Lady Margaret’s empty glass, taking it to the living room bar to be refilled.