Lovers and Liars: An addictive sexy beach read

by Nigel May

  The smile on Jona’s face said it all.

  Oh yes, I’ll avoid the sun for a while, Sutton thought to herself. By staying in rainy old London and spending some time with the delicious Hatton Eden.

  7

  Nikki Rivers flicked off the TV she’d been blindly staring at for the last thirty minutes and lay flat on her back on the couch of her Velvet New York hotel suite. It was always kept empty, ready for her to use whenever she was in the Big Apple and it was somewhere she loved being. The vibrancy of New York thrilled her. Or at least it normally did. But today she couldn’t concentrate. Normally she would find out which fashionistas, power-bloggers and column-inch fillers were in town, do some lunches at the swankiest of eateries, create some photo opportunities and generally make sure that the Velvet chain was mentioned in as many magazines and websites as possible, alongside photos of her looking nothing short of fabulous in the latest Zac Posen or Marc Jacobs. But today Nikki was not ready to bite: the Big Apple seemed far from tasty.

  She was twenty-seven, heiress to one of the biggest business empires in the world, possessed a beauty that was cut for catwalk and had dated some of the biggest celebrity names in the world. There was hardly a fashion week, film or rich list that didn’t feature a man or six who had been seen with Nikki on his arm at some point. She was a serial dater and had spent many happy years chewing up the big names and spitting them back out. Not in a nasty way, there was never any malice; it was simply a case of moving on. Love never went wrong, she just never gave it the chance to develop in the first place. She would be in a different time zone before the words ‘second date’ could tumble from their lips. And that was how she liked it.

  So how come she was footloose, fancy free and totally fed up? Her only liaison lately had been with Julian and that was purely a business arrangement, as she was sure he understood. Well, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but that wasn’t Nikki’s concern.

  She stared at the overhead fan, positioned above the couch, and watched it circle. It was almost hypnotic. The continuous whirling reminded her of how her own life had become: a never-ending circle. It should have been a spin cycle of parties and posing, without a care in the world other than looking all shades of fantastic as she danced until sunrise. Instead it had become a stale and worrying whirlpool of paranoia and despair. And it had all changed in a heartbeat.

  Sure, she could still talk the talk as she toured the globe but now she could only do it with an undercurrent of nervous vexation swirling beneath her perfectly made-up features. Blood-red lipstick and a smoky eye shadow could conceal a lot more than just a stretch of skin.

  And what was making her funk worse was the fact that Nikki had to deceive those closest to her. If her dad found out that she was siphoning money away from him, he would be heartbroken. He and Sutton had not raised their eldest daughter to steal from the hand that feeds. Especially one that had always supplied the finest food money could buy. And if they knew that Nikki was shagging the knicker-sniffing Julian Bailey she was certain that both Sutton and Sheridan would never allow her to set her designer heels through a Velvet hotel reception again.

  So why was she shagging a man two decades older than herself with a gusset fixation? To put it simply, she had no choice. Well, she did. But shagging Julian meant the money kept on rolling in. Without him on her side, or make that under her, she wouldn’t be able to do what she needed to do.

  Nikki leant over and stared at the bag on the floor. She unzipped it and peered inside. It was full of cash, her latest withdrawal from the bank of Julian. Courtesy of the bank of Velvet, the Rivers’ family business. In a strange way she was entitled to it. She was Sheridan’s daughter when all was said and done. She now had to make sure that one thing that would never be said was, ‘Hi, Daddy, I’m being fucked by your right-hand man, Julian, who is stealing a whole host of cash from you on my instruction,’ followed by, ‘Oh yes, and I’m blackmailing him into keeping the dollars coming by not telling you that he’s into sniffing my worn underwear.’ There were certain things a father, no matter how liberal, should never have to hear. That was something that Nikki had been clear about with Julian. If he wanted to keep sampling the pleasures of her flesh, then he needed to keep his mouth shut and do exactly as she required with total discretion. Thankfully he was a man who always seemed to think with what was between his legs.

  She zipped the bag back up, satisfied that the money was still there. It had been every time she had checked on the flight from Bridgetown to New York on one of the Velvet family jets. It had been every time she had checked in the back of the yellow cab across New York on the way to the hotel. But she couldn’t stop herself from checking; Nikki couldn’t afford not to.

  Her phone vibrated. She’d been expecting the call. She looked at the screen and a bead of sweat automatically formed on the nape of her neck. She pressed the answer button.

  ‘Hello.’

  The voice the other end said a few words, then Nikki hung up. She knew how it worked by now. She knew the address she had been given. She could be there in the time allowed. If she left now, she could make it. She watched the fan above her head circle around once more and then stood up, grabbed the bag and her coat and made for the door.

  Blair Lonergan was elated to be back in New York – back on his home turf. Not that he was quite able to return to his Lower East Side loft just yet. That would come when the DJ needed to crash and burn and lock the door on the outside world. Right now, he had another residency to think about: he was booked to headline a one-night-only event at Velvet New York, part of his ongoing contract with the chain. It was the easiest money he had ever earned and now represented the majority of his already huge income. First-class travel from one hotel to the next and an endless supply of fans ready to make sure that Blair’s night always ended on a high was the stuff of dreams and it was a dream that he was more than happy to live out.

  Blair passed the driver of his cab an extra fifty-dollar note and told him to keep the change as they pulled up outside the Velvet New York. A group of girls had already gathered at the front entrance and rushed towards his cab as he suspected they had done for every yellow taxi that had pulled up over the last ninety minutes. Blair groupies were a determined breed and had doubtless checked on the progression of his flight from Tokyo.

  ‘They here for you, man?’ said the cab driver from underneath his baseball cap.

  ‘I reckon they might be,’ smiled Blair.

  ‘You somebody then?’

  ‘Me? Oh no, I’m just a guy who plays some tunes in a nightclub from time to time. I must be playing the right ones.’

  ‘Well, they’re definitely here for you. Bloody hell, they’re going to pull my wing mirrors off!’ The cab driver watched with a degree of horror as the group of young women rushed towards the cab, and having spotted Blair through the window, began to bang on the car, screaming as they did so.

  ‘I’d better say hi, then, hadn’t I? Cheers for the ride.’

  Blair exited the cab and felt a wave of hands upon him. He never tired of the feeling of being adored. ‘Okay, ladies, give a DJ some room here. Who wants photos and autographs?’

  Just as the first fan had wrapped herself around him, holding her phone out in front of her for a selfie, another woman bumped into Blair. She wasn’t one of the fans.

  ‘Have you finished with this cab? It’s free, I take it?’ Her voice was more than a little agitated.

  Blair took a good look at the woman. She was jaw-droppingly beautiful. He knew her from somewhere but whether it was jet lag or just fatigue after his journey he couldn’t quite place her. But her flowing dark hair, feline eyes and full cherry lips were a winning combination. Drop-dead stunning.

  ‘I’m done with it. It’s all yours if you…’ Blair’s voice tailed off as the woman opened the door of the cab, climbed into the back seat and slammed the door behind her.

  ‘…want it.’ Blair finished his sentence talking to a taxi window.

 
‘Smile, Blair, smile!’ screamed the fan still wrapped around him as she continued to click a series of selfies. Blair flashed his pearly whites and looked at the iPhone in the young woman’s hand. But out of the corner of his eye he watched the cab drive off down the street and disappear from view around the corner of the block. The face of the woman inside was still imprinted on his brain. He hoped he would see her again. Something inside told him he would.

  8

  Pulling her Gucci cap further down her face so that the peak shielded her eyes from the sun directly overhead, Heather took a swig from her water bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  ‘Walking around these ruins is thirsty work,’ she puffed, glad for a moment’s rest. ‘Is it me or is that sun becoming hotter?’

  ‘The temperature has definitely shot up a degree or two since we arrived, that’s for certain,’ said Max. ‘But we couldn’t miss seeing this for the world. Apparently the palace itself would have had sea breezes blowing through it in the summer as it had porticoes and air shafts. So the people living and working there would have been really cool.’

  The palace Max was talking about was the historic palace at Knossos, the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on the island of Crete and what was said to be Europe’s oldest city. It was also swathed in Greek mythology, something both Max and Heather adored, which is why they had chosen to hire a car and drive there from Elounda.

  ‘Well, lucky them, because I am boiling. I’m not sure which is glowing more, me or that sun. This place is amazing! I adore the suggestion that King Minos perhaps ruled from here and that he had the craftsman Daedalus build a massive labyrinth to keep his son captive in. I thought it all sounded a bit dodgy and brutal until I realised that Minos’s son was the dreaded Minotaur, half man, half bull.’

  ‘Yes, that’s one beast that not even you would want to pat on the head and stroke lovingly.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know! I’m of the opinion any wild beast can be tamed and made to submit, if need be. You certainly were last night.’ Heather beamed at the thought of their lovemaking the night before. ‘You would have done anything for me.’

  ‘You know I would. And for the record, if anyone asks you can tell them that I’m the wild one in the bedroom and it’s me who always calls the shots, okay?’ Max grinned and winked at his wife.

  ‘Now who’s talking bull? You know you’re just a pussycat, but if it makes you feel better, then I’ll happily stroke your ego for you…’ Heather left a brief pause before adding, ‘oh masterful one.’

  Her conversation returned to the myth, or at least her modern twist on it, as they continued to wander round the site. ‘If he was around today, you’d have Daedalus on one of your telly craft shows, you know. Building a labyrinth sure trumps a bit of, what is it you show on those cards that your guests make? Die cutting?’

  ‘So you have been watching?’ smirked Max. ‘And yes, it is. Big business too, I’ll have you know. But I think our guests are a lot nicer than any of the people involved in the myth of the Minotaur. Did you know that apparently every nine years King Aegeus would send seven young boys and seven young girls to Daedalus’s labyrinth so that they could eaten by the minotaur? That’s not very nice, is it? Give me KFC any day of the week.’

  ‘That’s brutal. What did King Minos say about it all?’

  ‘Nothing. He died and became a judge of the dead in the underworld.’

  ‘So he ended up as a zombie Simon Cowell?’ laughed Heather.

  ‘Yes, I guess you could say that. On a kind of The Greek Underworld’s Got Talent,’ laughed Max, amused by the notion.

  Heather linked her hand in his as they continued to walk. They still had another full day before Sheridan, Kassidy and potentially Sutton were due to arrive and she was determined to make the most of every moment.

  ‘Have you heard from your father?’ asked Max.

  ‘He texted saying that we’re to meet him at the hotel. He’s sent his flight details and stuff. I just hope he can see the beauty in all of this. Crete is pretty magical. Okay, I understand that everywhere needs hotels but Daddy’s are normally monstrous big things, not quaint little boutique hideaways. It would be such a pity if he brought something so ugly to such a beautiful place.’

  ‘If anyone can persuade him to do the right thing, it’ll be you.’

  Heather hoped so. Crete was rapidly becoming one of her favourite places and the thought of her family’s business taking away any of its mythological magic and historical beauty was completely alien and abhorrent to her.

  As she and Max strolled hand in hand and took in the wonders of Knossos’s frescos of griffins and charging bulls, she was so pleased she had leapt upon her father’s offer of the trip to the Greek island for herself and her husband.

  Maybe if she had known what Greek tragedy was lurking just around the corner, then perhaps Heather would have strongly reconsidered.

  9

  One of the many things that Sheridan Rivers loved about being his own boss was that he had to answer to nobody. Which meant that he could do what he wanted, when he wanted, with whom he wanted. And right now what he wanted was to fuck Kassidy Orpin’s tight little pussy as she bent over the edge of his Velvet Barbados penthouse’s hot tub.

  He would have preferred the hot little Bajan receptionist who had just started at the hotel two days before, or maybe the LA swinger who had recently checked in with her actor husband. The actor was obviously happy to let his wife act the slut as she had done nothing but flirt outrageously with Sheridan from the moment the couple had checked in, suggesting maybe the mogul would like to ‘party with her and her husband’ back at their room. Sheridan would have eagerly had a slice of what was on offer between her legs but he was more than happy to pass on the husband. Some things were better not shared and pussy was one of them. He’d managed fifty years of not engaging in any kind of gay action and he had no intention of starting now. So the swinger would have to wait until he could seduce her solo. As for the new receptionist, well, he’d let her settle in a bit more before showing her exactly how she could advance her career prospects.

  So Kassidy it was. The same snatch that he’d been banging for the last decade. Kassidy was his ‘go to’ when no one else was around and the blood was pumping to his cock. Which was why he preferred to do her from behind; bending her double over the edge of the hot tub was one of his favourite moves. If he couldn’t see her face then he could pretty much imagine it to be anybody. Pretty though her face was, Sheridan saw it day in, day out. And right now, in his mind, he was slipping his length into the hot, wet, ripe vagina of the girl on reception. So what if Kassidy’s fair Irish skin was the total opposite to the dark, exotic fruit welcoming his guests? That didn’t matter. If he closed his eyes, one sugar-walled cavity was just like another. It was the image in his head that was turning Sheridan on the most, not the accented, going-through-the-motions cries of ‘That’s beautiful, so it is!’ coming from Kassidy’s mouth.

  If she were honest though, Kassidy was finding it far from beautiful. The last thing she had wanted at the end of her working day was to bend over and please her boss. She used to love it, happy to shape herself into whatever position Sheridan required with the dexterity and double-jointed prowess of a Russian gymnast. But over the last year or so she had noticed a change in him. There used to be a sense of excitement and want in his lovemaking, but now it just seemed to be a necessity. Whereas once he had made her feel special with secret little gifts of Pandora bracelets and Aspinal of London scarves, now he hardly even thanked her after pulling his cock from her. Then there were the comments. Little snips and digs from the tycoon. Sheridan probably didn’t even realise what he was saying, but to Kassidy it cut deep.

  ‘Not as young as you once were… You’re a lucky girl to have this job… Sutton wasn’t much older than you when she first had her tits done.’

  Add to that the countless times Kassidy had been called upon by Sheridan to arrange a dinner date
, a spare hotel room or to buy a special thank you gift for yet another of her boss’s sexual dalliances and all she could see on the horizon was her own sell-by date rapidly charging into view as she moved further down the list of Sheridan Rivers’ preferred bedroom conquests – which seeing as she was only twenty-nine seemed more than a little cruel. But if Kassidy had learnt anything in her time working for Sheridan it was that her middle-aged boss’s power and money allowed him to choose the youngest and freshest meat from the sexual smorgasbord of life whenever he pleased. Lately Kassidy had the horrible fear that when her boss was banging her pussy, in his head he was metaphorically scraping the barrel.

  There had been a time when she had believed she loved him. Believed that he would leave his wife for her. That the Velvet empire that she had so skilfully worked for and helped grow as Sheridan’s assistant for the last decade would be shared with her. That all of her childhood dreams of playing the lady of the manor, surrounded by staff and servants and those willing to please, would become a reality. In some ways it had. She travelled the world by private jet, stayed in the most luxurious of hotel rooms and dined from the fanciest of menus. But it was never on her terms, was it? Socialising with royals in the South of France or sharing canapés with an Oscar winner in Los Angeles were all well and good but she would only ever be there at her boss’s side. Loyal and faithful. A good PA. A puppy dog. A mug.

  After nearly a decade of loyal service, Kassidy was not going to let anyone toss her aside. She’d given her twenties to Sheridan Rivers, years in which she could have been meeting the man of her dreams, the man to acknowledge all of those ambitions rooted inside her and help make them a reality; but with her thirties approaching it seemed to Kassidy that she had made the wrong choice. Sheridan didn’t love her, he never had. How had she been so blind? He wouldn’t leave his wife, he had never intended to. Perhaps that option had only been a potential reality in Kassidy’s ambitious imagination. And as for the other guys, well, who notices the staff in a room full of royals or an awards bash packed with A-listers? Kassidy was rapidly coming to the horrible, dreaded denouement that that was all she was and would ever be – the staff. The loyal assistant with the loyal ass. The choreography of her loyalty was becoming clearer every day. Taken from behind and taken for granted.