Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries (The Crystal Fragments Trilogy)

by M. J. Lawless

  “Because she’s good at her job. I’ve known Maria Gosselin for nearly ten years, and she’s never let me down yet.”

  “Oh,” Kris began to push herself up the bed—and also slightly away from Daniel, the better to look at him.

  “Yes, oh.” There was a finality in his voice, an indication that he would brook no further discussion on this subject. Then he looked around him and his expression changed, showing a genuine distaste that surprised her.

  “We should get you out of here, back to Cascais.”

  “It’s okay. I can get back to Alfama after I’ve rested here for a day or two.”

  He shook his head. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t. Let Anna look after you for a while. I’ll set Jorge to drive you around—I know you like him.”

  “That’s true. But why not let them look after me here?”

  His mouth smiled grimly but his eyes still looked around him with extreme displeasure. At last they came to rest on her and he lifted his hand, waving it in front of his face. “Because of this,” he told her. “I spent too long in a hospital after the crash, and I’ve always resolved to waste as little of my time as possible in one ever since. I want to be with you tonight, if I’m going to be away for a week again.”

  The reminder about his crash made Kris more subdued, and she regretted her earlier tartness about the lawyer. “I’m sorry, I forgot.”

  This time his smile was genuine. “My, Miss Avelar,” he teased her. “You are in an apologetic mood today. Quite amusing, really. You’ve been somewhat feisty recently.”

  “Yes, well. I made a complete fool of myself today—no, don’t interrupt. I did. This,” she gestured towards her leg, “will be a reminder for a little while yet.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, looking at her bare leg in its clear, inflated cocoon, bruising clearly evident around her ankle. “I think it’s rather fetching. Having you in my power, utterly unable to resist all my darkest and most wicked desires...” Rubbing his hands together, he bowed forward and gave a melodramatic cackle before kissing her again.

  She was smiling when he drew back once more. “Like I could resist anything from you.”

  “Yes, indeed,” he responded, waving a finger at her. “I’ve been finding out more about the Braganza family than I care to know in recent weeks.”

  She burst out laughing at this. Braganza. Her safe word. A protection from Daniel when he had pushed her, made her submit to desires that she could not fulfil. “I’d almost forgotten that. I don’t think you’ve stretched my limits anywhere near enough recently. I don’t think you love me anymore.”

  He placed a hand on her forehead and stroked her gently. “Don’t say that,” he told her quietly. Then, with a wry glance at her head, he observed: “Not that I think I’ll be pushing you anywhere soon, not unless it’s in a wheelchair.”

  She reached behind her for a pillow and used it to smack him across the chest, a loud soft thump echoing from her blow. Both of them were laughing but, as she shifted around, a sudden stabbing twinge made her cry out in pain.

  “See,” he said, replacing the pillow behind her head. “That’s what comes of not submitting. You should know better by now, Miss Avelar.”

  “Indeed I should, Mister Stone,” she replied in mock seriousness. After she had spoken, he looked around the room again, his eyes fretful. She watched him for a moment then asked:

  “Does it remind you of her?”

  He nodded, not needing to ask who she referred to. “I didn’t see her when they took her to the hospital.” His voice was very quiet. “I didn’t even get to the funeral. I was out cold. Apparently they tried to save the baby but...” He stopped.

  She placed one of her hands on his. His fingers were warm beneath her palm, the ridges of his knuckles solid and sure. So strong, and yet so fragile, she thought.

  “Come on,” she said at last. “Get me that wheelchair you promised. Tell Filipe he’s taking us home.”

  Chapter Six

  The day was cool but still pleasant, a few clouds passing overhead but without the humidity that could make Lisbon unpleasant even by Kris’s standards. Autumn was truly here, however, and she had even experienced the first rains in the days since she had left the hospital.

  Daniel had stayed with her a little longer at the villa, determined to see that she was healing, and Anna had fussed around her from morning till night. If she needed to go anywhere, Jorge had been available to her, although after a few days he had been assigned other duties and so, to her slight disappointment, she then had to make do with Filipe. The younger driver was sober and quiet, always attentive to her, but she missed Jorge’s loquacious good humour.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Daniel had asked her on the morning before he left.

  “Yes!” she told him for the hundredth time, the thousandth even. There was something very touching about his concern, and she adored him even more because of it, but she hated to admit that it was beginning to grate ever so slightly. As much as anything, perhaps, she was somewhat ashamed of the cause of her fall: she had been a fool and he was too much of a gentleman to admit it.

  He had remained for another two days beyond the time he was meant to return to London. During those two days, his phone had become a constant irritation to her: she could see that he wanted to devote his attention to her, but the real world beyond the two of them was making its demands upon him.

  “Look, I understand. You need to go, I’ll be fine. When you get back in three weeks, I’ll be right as rain. You’ll see.”

  He clenched his jaw at this. “I can come back at weekends,” he told her.

  “What? A nine hour flight from New York to stay overnight and then back again for more meetings? It will kill you, Daniel. I’ll be fine. Really.” How many times did she have to tell him?

  “I can stay longer than... damn!” Another message, from Felix this time. She was sure that Felix was her personal demon, sent to torment her.

  Both of them were frustrated, but she offered him platitudes. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Neither of them completely believed it, but necessity would not let him go completely.

  “I was away too long before,” he had told her. “When I was at Comrie. Things have become... complicated since then.”

  How complicated he would not say, but she could see that sometimes he had to force himself to give her his complete attention, even when they were not being interrupted by his mobile. His gaze would sometimes pass into the distance, far away and slightly troubled.

  And yet that was something he would not share—other than to tell her that the Chiado deal was progressing very nicely indeed. Maria Gosselin was not one of their interruptions, for which Kris was grateful. “She thinks I’m back in London and off to the States soon,” he had explained. “And I didn’t see any reason to disabuse her. In any case, she can manage very well without me.”

  Their final lovemaking had, for the first time ever, not satisfied her. Her ankle was still in pain and Daniel was considerate and kind: perhaps what she had really wanted was just to be held by him, but when he was behind her, moving softly in and out of her, she had felt him concentrating too much on not hurting her. It was sweet, but also frustrating.

  Indeed, everything about her injury was annoying. She cursed herself a dozen times a day for being such a fool, and while the pain had begun to diminish a little after the third day it was clear that she had damaged herself.

  For a couple of days after Daniel left, she mooned around the villa in Cascais. Without him, however, it seemed even emptier. Anna and Joana remained, carrying out daily duties that only occasionally involved her, and the whole place was clean, spotless, hygienic... soulless. She had sent Filipe out for drawing materials, but as she had expected no inspiration could come here: in any case, having Daniel’s staff wait on her hand and, quite literally, foot was not something that came easy to her. She wanted to do things for herself!

  As such, before the wee
k was up she had asked Filipe to drive her back to her apartment in Alfama. She had been doing daily exercises and physio, and Daniel had left instructions for a local doctor to visit her regularly and check on her progress. That was another thing that had left her feeling foolish, but she tolerated it as well as she could.

  “Well, Miss Avelar,” he had told her. “Try not to put too much pressure on it, certainly, but at the same time ensure you get some exercise to strengthen the ankle.”

  Daniel phoned her every day, and she often found herself wondering what he was doing. She tried to ignore the related question of who he was with. She understood very well that that way madness lay.

  And yet, before a week was up at Cascais, she knew she had to get away from there. The life of idle richness was not, after all, one for her, particularly when it was enforced. The villa was beginning to feel a little too much like a golden cage, or more accurately one of perfect white walls and marble. She thanked Anna for her kindness, but asked Filipe to drive her back to her own apartment. She had told Daniel to take her home, but without him this place wasn’t it.

  Without him. She had to stop herself looking obsessively at her phone, hoping that he would call, and again. She had completed one painting, more by determination and force of will than true desire, but it was hard for her to focus on anything new. She even considered throwing everything and booking a flight out to New York herself—he wouldn’t mind. At least, she hoped he wouldn’t mind... and that single moment of doubt dismissed those plans.

  Three weeks was not so long, she told herself, but each day seemed to drag. She would make herself go out, partly to exercise her leg, walking carefully and resting whenever the twinges in her ankle became too much, but mostly to take her mind away from the brooding clouds that settled upon it.

  And so she found herself one morning on a terrace not far from the Se, the somewhat grim and imposing cathedral that looked more like a fortress than a church. Looking down, she remembered first visiting it with her father, a young girl looking up at the crenellated towers. That particular memory filled her with a slight sadness, more for the fact that it had been not so very long after her mother had died. She had been too young to fully understand everything that had happened in the previous months, but she could simply remember her father’s own melancholy. When he had brought her to the cathedral, she understood that it was the kind of place where her mother’s memory could be prayed for, but as they entered the stone grey building she had also thought that heaven must be a cold and forbidding place.

  As she sipped her coffee, lost in thoughts, she saw a couple not far away from her. The woman, with thick, black hair, was looking longingly at her dark-skinned boyfriend, both of them still probably in their teens. The boy was handsome, if still too boyish for Kris’s tastes, and while the girl’s nose was a little long she was extremely pretty.

  As they gazed into each other’s eyes, their mouths came closer and then kissed, the merest hint of paler pink flesh as they slid between each other’s lips. Watching them, Kris felt her own lips tingle, could taste Daniel’s mouth on hers, smell him. She closed her eyes for a moment, imagining the warmth of his body.

  When she opened them, she saw the boy’s hand move up the waist and chest of the girl, squeezing her breast and making her smile shyly. Kris could feel Daniel’s hands on her own breasts, feeling their gentle heaviness but holding them more firmly than this young boy, those strong fingers of her lover’s pressing her nipples firmly, pinching them so that the tips of the flesh would start to chafe.

  She could feel him so vividly in her imagination that she gasped a little, and her wayward memories took her further. Inside her sex, the walls of her vagina rippling slightly as he pushed in, the folds at the front stimulated by his shaft, the head of his cock pressing against the neck of her womb.

  Fuck! She had just made herself wet. It had been nine days since he had left and it was far too long. Dropping some coins on the table for her coffee, she stood and wobbled slightly on her feet, less from the sudden twinge in her leg than the rippling inside her abdomen. Shaking her head, she turned towards the wall overlooking the Se, giving it a final view before she would make her way back to the apartment.

  As such, her glance downwards was a chance one, but she recognised immediately the long blonde hair tied up, the elegant steps of the woman as she left the doors of the cathedral and made her way down the steps at the front.

  Although it was not particularly cold by Kris’s standards, Maria Gosselin was wearing a coat, a light, champagne coloured quilted jacket that came to just below her waist. Beneath this, a dark pencil skirt came down to the woman’s knees, and her legs were sheathed in black nylon, a pair of high, wedge-heeled shoes on her feet. The outfit made the woman walk in a more stately fashion than Kris would have, she having chosen practical wear that included jeans and trainers, and so Maria had to take slow, measured steps across the flag stones before the cathedral.

  Kris was sure it was the Gosselin woman. Though she could not see her face clearly, the sunglasses were the same and the air of confidence seemed to match. All thoughts of returning to her apartment were banished now. For reasons she could not quite explain, Kris wanted to follow this woman, to see what she was doing, what she was up to.

  As such, she walked a little too quickly along the long, sloping pathway that led down to the front of the cathedral from the terrace where she had sat drinking her coffee. Although her ankle was hurting a little, she forced herself on, occasionally stopping to lift her foot and rotate it from side to side.

  She could see Maria ahead, walking slowly and enjoying the few shops that were scattered a little further down the hill. Kris was glad her pace was so sedate: she also found herself fascinated by the woman’s motions. When she walked, her hips swayed from side to side, the movement emphasised by her heels that she placed carefully one in front of the other. The jacket was cut high enough to reveal fully the curves of her buttocks beneath the skirt, flowing outwards before cutting in to a narrow waist. One arm of the quilted jacket was held out sideways, a delicate bag hung from her elbow, and from time to time Maria would pause before a shop window, bending to view the contents of some stall or basket.

  Kris grimaced slightly as she followed. Once or twice when Maria turned around, she would duck behind a building or tree, desperate not to be seen for a variety of reasons. She wanted to spy on this woman, to be a voyeur of some slice of her mundane, real life—she certainly did not want to expose herself to Maria’s gaze, dowdy as she was in her sweater and jeans, fragile as she was on her feet for the moment.

  Hearing a noise behind her, Kris saw a tram trundling down the hill. Maria was some fifty feet or so ahead of her, away from the tram stop. Keeping her head ducked down when she saw Maria glance backwards, Kris gladly hopped onto the yellow tram and showed her ticket. She had an idea where Maria would be heading, as the road ahead of them led eventually to the large plaza before the river front. Normally Kris would have thought nothing of walking the mile or so, but the steepness of the hill was hurting her ankle too much.

  Sitting down, she held her hand beside her face, her eyes free to watch the street without displaying too much of her features. There was the flash of blonde hair, the sunglasses and, when the tram went a few feet alongside Maria Gosselin, Kris was able to see very clearly the exquisiteness of her face. She could not explain why that made her feel so strange: this person was just some passing stranger in her life.

  When the tram had descended the hill, Kris stepped down carefully and looked back along the street with its tall, painted buildings. Here the city was even busier so that she couldn’t see the other woman for a while. She was glad that the short journey had allowed her a chance to catch her breath, but even so her leg was aching. Be careful, she told herself. You don’t want to overdo things.

  Unsure of herself for a moment, she loitered among the crowds of shoppers and workers as cars waited by the traffic lights and a policeman directed
them around a noisy, chaotic work site. The shop and bank fronts where she was standing were flush to the pavement, without a convenient doorway to stand inside, and she was uncertain what to do. Indeed, she had no idea why she was so keen to follow this woman. She didn’t know whether to wait on the pavement, with the chance that Maria would recognise her as she went by, or walk towards the very hill that she had descended—which would equally expose her to Maria’s gaze.

  The most sensible thing would have been to turn aside, to forget it all. Yet there was a compulsion that would not relent inside Kris’s breast. She knew there was something about this woman—Maria Gosselin was not simply an employee of Daniel’s, of that she was certain.

  Annoyed, and not having caught sight of her target for at least five minutes, she decided to walk slowly back in the direction of the Se. Her eyes were scanning from side to side, but nowhere did she see the same blonde hair tied up, sunglasses half covering the slender face, the champagne-coloured coat over a trim, elegant figure. This increased her anxiety—she had lost her!—but at the same time she started to feel relieved. She had lost her, and there was nothing else she could do.

  She paused by the lights at the final crossing before the road began to rise up the hill towards the Se. There was no way that she was going to attempt that steep climb, but would instead cross to the other side and catch a tram back up towards Alfama, taking her as close to home as possible. The back of her leg was stiff and painful, and she knew that she would pay for this indiscretion later, something which simply added to her annoyance.

  And then, waiting to cross, she saw her. The same hips sashaying from side to side slightly, shoulders slim and petite, but broader than the slender waist that the coat accentuated rather than hid. Her steps were still as precise and as poised as before, and for a second Kris believed that she could have been watching a scene from a film in which the heroine walks away from camera, an ersatz Kim Novak wandering through the streets of the city.