Lovers and Liars: An addictive sexy beach read

by Nigel May

  ‘Penny for them?’ asked Fidge as they pulled up outside their hotel. It was a phrase that he used often with Hatton when the Bulgarian’s mind went fathoms deep into thought. At first Hatton had not understood the phrase but after years together he now knew what Fidge was asking.

  ‘It is the same every time I come to Los Angeles,’ he explained. ‘It is a place of opportunities and for people to be the best at their game yet there are so many here, the losers, who never do what they really want. I find that sad. I know it happens everywhere but I feel it is magnified in LA.’

  Fidge wasn’t sure how to respond, but tried nevertheless. ‘It’s not sad for us, you’re here as a victor, Hatton, as an unbeatable force in your sport. Someone to be feared, a true winner, that is to be celebrated. Don’t beat yourself up. Los Angeles is the land of dreams, mate. Cold winds should never blow at the end of a rainbow. Now come on, a quick shower and change and then we need to meet this journalist.’

  Fidge opened the door of the limousine and Hatton climbed out. He followed his partner across the tarmac and into the hotel. Hatton didn’t say a word. He was busy thinking about rainbows and whether he actually liked the idea of being feared. Hadn’t he already known enough fear in his life? He focussed back to the moment when he had been most scared.

  Thirteen-year-old Hatton, or Zlaten as he was then, woke from his dream. He had been chasing a rainbow, a jubilant arc of colour that had stretched itself magnificently from the playground of his school, where he had been kicking a football against a graffiti-strewn brick wall into the skies above, curving into the atmosphere and dipping down to who knew where, its resting place as yet uncharted territory. Zlaten had been about to attempt to climb it, placing his teenage feet on the multi-hued band of escape that stretched off into the yonder. He had placed no more than a foot on it when a loud noise had woken him up.

  Zlaten sat upright in his bed, the chill of the night air hitting his skin with a burst of goosebumps. He stared at the small alarm clock on his bedside table. Despite the blackness surrounding him he could see that the fluorescent hands on the clock had moved to just after 1 a.m. He had been asleep for at least three hours and his dream had been vivid and rich in detail.

  For a moment it was silent and then the noise came again, a crashing from the front room, the kitchen area where he and his parents had enjoyed the glorious Bulgarian stew, the kavarma, just a few short hours ago.

  Zlaten moved out from under his duvet and crept towards the bedroom door. He was about to open it when the sound of his mother’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘There is nobody else here, just us. Please leave us alone.’ Her voice was drenched in fear, every word hesitant yet loud in volume.

  It was Zlaten’s father’s voice that sounded next. ‘Just take what you want and leave our house. We do not have much but you can take what we have. Just don’t hurt us.’ Like his wife’s, his voice too was coated in panic.

  A horror gripped Zlaten, a chill that was nothing to do with the temperature of the night air making him shiver. An inner voice told him that pushing his bedroom door, which opened onto the small room adjacent to the kitchen area, would not be a good idea. But it was clear that his parents were in some kind of trouble and he wanted to help them with every bone in his being.

  Another crash sounded, this time a smashing of crockery, or maybe a mirror. Zlaten wasn’t sure, but he needed to know. Turning the handle on his bedroom door as quietly as he could, he moved it until the lock came free and he was able to open it as narrowly as possible, just allowing himself to look through. What he saw made him raise his hand to his mouth in fear as he tried to stop himself from screaming out.

  In the dim light of the kitchen he could see that his father and mother, both still clothed in their daytime attire, were kneeling down on the cold, hard surface of the floor. Their hands were behind their back and even though Zlaten couldn’t see clearly from the angle he was looking from, he assumed correctly that they were tied. A man he didn’t recognise stood menacingly over his father, pointing a gun directly at his dad’s temple. Another man, on the far side of the kitchen, was walking around, his movements agitated and frantic. They were both in their early to mid-twenties, unshaven and looking like neither of them had washed in days. The man wandering around had grabbed a pile of plates from the draining board, the ones Zlaten and his folks had feasted from earlier in the evening, and was throwing them onto the floor. It was the sound of the plates smashing that he had just heard. He could see a brownish-red pool of liquid on the floor and an upturned pan where the leftover stew too had obviously been jettisoned onto the floor from the stove.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Zlaten’s mother. ‘We have nothing, it is just my husband and I who live here, no one else.’ Again her voice was raised, as if she was determined for someone to hear every word she was saying. As the only other person in the house, Zlaten knew that it was meant for him. The sound of his own heartbeat echoed loudly within his chest as he tried to work out what was happening.

  Even at the tender age of thirteen Zlaten was streetwise enough to know that the two men, both manic, were not friends of the family. He could sense the horror in his mum’s eyes, even from his distant vantage point. Were the men drunk or perhaps they were on something? Zlaten couldn’t tell but there was an anxiety in their actions that made him realise that they were both beyond crazy.

  The one who had been throwing things spoke next. ‘We want money, you must have that. Something? Anything? Jewellery? Anything of worth.’

  So they were thieves. Chancers who had obviously forced their way into the family home wanting to fund their next fix or bottle of 190 proof with his parents’ hard-earned money. Zlaten could feel the anger boiling within him at the injustice. It was all he could do to stop himself ripping open the door and charging at the two men. He was strong and big for his age and had no doubt that he could stop them, but he couldn’t risk anything happening to his mum and dad. And it was clear that both of his parents were keen for his presence in the house to remain a secret.

  Zlaten felt helpless. Should he try and raise the alarm? The nearest house to them was still a fair distance away, which was why no one reacted to the noises the men were making. Even if he could escape his room and flee the small house without detection, there was no guarantee the two men would still be there on his return. Tears flooded across his eyes as he contemplated the futility of the situation. He was strong, but he was scared.

  The man holding the gun to Zlaten’s father’s head twitched, a sudden spasm of movement running through him. Zlaten could see that the man’s face was wet with sweat despite the bitterness in the air, his hair stuck to his head.

  ‘We have nothing,’ repeated Zlaten’s father.

  But the man without the gun was not accepting his excuses and grabbed another plate from the draining board. With an almost theatrical flair, he lifted his arm in the air, holding the plate aloft, and then threw it violently to the floor, causing it to shatter. The noise was loud but it could never be as loud as the sound that followed. It was a sound that Zlaten would take to his grave.

  As the plate hit the floor an already nervy thief jerked with fear and surprise at the loud noise and squeezed on the trigger of his gun. Whether it was involuntary or not didn’t matter as the bullet sailed into Zlaten’s father’s head, entering with a bloody thud into one side of his skull and exiting at force through the other. A spray of red accompanied the sound.

  Zlaten may have screamed, he couldn’t tell over the wail of his own mother as she realised what had happened. Her own noise was silenced as the man with the gun turned it towards her and let another shot ring out. The circular ring of red that appeared between his mother’s eyes was all Zlaten needed to see to know that the bullet had reached its tragic destination.

  Zlaten could feel the tears running down his face and his heart beating to near explosion. Even if he had wanted to scream now, there was no noise forthcoming, his throat
dry and useless.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ It was the man without the gun who spoke once more, a sense of terror wrapping his words.

  ‘You scared me.’ His partner-in-crime’s words were equally fraught.

  ‘Fuck this shit, man! Search the house, grab what we can and let’s get the fuck out of here. You weren’t supposed to kill the poor fuckers.’

  Zlaten wanted to open the door, to roar like a caged beast and unleash the demon pulsating with rage within him; to grab the gun and fire it at the two men. But he knew that if he attempted to do that, chances were he would end up alongside his parents on the kitchen floor, another lifeless casualty. And that is not what his mother and father would have wanted: they needed him to survive this. Through their actions they had told him so.

  As the man with the gun moved towards his room, Zlaten took action. He ran towards his bedroom wardrobe, opened the door and climbed inside. Jamming himself as far down into the corners of the large wooden cabinet as he could, he covered himself with as many clothes as he could grab. He placed his hand over his mouth to stop the sound of his own breathing, booming in his head, and played dead, hidden from view.

  Five minutes later, having listened to the men running around the family home grabbing anything they deemed of value, and then waiting for silence to follow, he finally found the strength to remove his hand from his mouth. As he made his way from his wardrobe and crept quietly across his bedroom and back into the kitchen he found the front door wide open, the men vanished into the night. He fell to the floor, legs too weak to support him, alongside the corpses of his parents. Both of their eyes were still open and staring at him. It was then that he let out the scream that had been brewing – a loud, piercing, miserable scream. It was the first noise that the neighbours had heard from the house all night.

  Zlaten couldn’t help but wish that he were still chasing rainbows.

  30

  Sutton was slipping her key card into the hotel suite door, feeling deeply chilled after her visit to the Sandy Lane spa. The beat-laden delights of Timbaland played through the earphones she had wrapped around her head and she was rapping along in a world of her own as she pushed the door open. As she did so a hand landed on her shoulder from behind and made her jump high enough to attract vertigo.

  ‘What the fuck!’ she screamed, swivelling her body around at breakneck speed to see who the hand belonged to. Thankfully she recognised the face and smiled as she removed her earphones, muting Timbaland as she did so.

  ‘Jesus, Julian, you scared the crap out of me! Creeping up on me like a goddamned serial killer. You’re lucky I didn’t try some kickass Pam Grier blaxploitation shit on your ass!’

  ‘Well, I was calling after you all the way down the corridor but you weren’t answering. I can see why now,’ said Julian, pointing to the earphones. ‘I’ve been looking for you for hours, where have you been?’

  ‘Turning my skin butter soft at the spa, thank you very much. We need to start some of those treatments in Velvet hotels. My skin feels dreamy. I need to speak to Sheridan. D’you need him too? He should be in here.’ Sutton pointed inside the suite.

  ‘No, on both counts,’ countered Julian. ‘No, I don’t need to speak to him and no, he won’t be in there.’

  ‘So where is he?’ asked Sutton.

  ‘Back at Velvet.’

  Sutton raised her eyebrows, as much as her constant Botox injections would allow her.

  ‘There’s some urgent business he needs to attend to back at the hotel and he said I was to look after you and tell you not to worry. He might be back tomorrow, he might not.’

  ‘Oh, did he now?’ said Sutton, a smile spreading across her face. ‘So, it’s me, a huge hotel suite and some of the best cocktails that Barbados can offer for the entire weekend.’ Sutton reached across and grabbed Julian’s tie, moving the whole length of the red silk between her fingers and working her hand up and down the material. It was pure suggestion. ‘And you to look after me, of course.’

  Now it was Julian’s turn to smile.

  ‘Well, I did promise Sheridan,’ he grinned, bringing his hand up to Sutton’s face and stroking her cheek with the back of his fingers.

  ‘And you’re always a man who has kept his promises, aren’t you?’ purred Sutton.

  ‘Your skin is soft,’ remarked Julian.

  ‘It’s not just my face, honey. Why don’t you let me show you?’

  Keeping her hand on his tie, Sutton yanked Julian into her hotel suite and before he could say a word she pushed him up against a wall and let her lips find his.

  Their tongues looped and their teeth gently hit against each other as they gave in to their passion, as they had done on many occasions before.

  Letting their lips part for two seconds, Julian spoke. ‘Is your skin this soft all over, then?’

  ‘Find out,’ cooed Sutton, as she pushed Julian to the floor so that his face was level with her sex. Julian lifted up the short, floral skirt Sutton was wearing and placed his fingers inside the lacy band of her panties. In one speedy move he manoeuvred them down her legs and buried his face in the soft, juicy flesh between her legs.

  And to think that Sheridan trusts me with anything, how fucking ironic is that? thought Julian as he breathed in the fresh-scented sweetness of Sutton’s pussy and pushed her back until her rounded ass cheeks were resting on the edge of a table. He’d have a field day if he knew I was banging both his daughter and his missus.

  He had been consoling Sutton about Sheridan’s infidelities in his own unique way for years, not that she was ever at the top of his carnal pecking order, but needs must.

  Sutton leant back across the table and raised her feet off the ground, wrapping her legs around either side of Julian’s face, his tongue exploring the delicious depths of her wetness as she did so. It was now his turn not to hear a word as he sported some silencing earphones of his own.

  31

  Some interviews go to plan whereas others can become legendary for all the wrong reasons. For every smooth Ellen interrogation or CNN reporter hitting the jackpot there are those journalists who have found themselves left all alone with nothing but their pad full of questions and thirst for celebrity juice for company. No one knows exactly how or where the interview will lead from the moment the first question is asked.

  Blair Lonergan could usually tell exactly where an interview was going from the moment he sat down opposite the person firing the questions, especially if the person asking them happened to be a highly attractive woman. On many occasions he had assuredly answered every question thrown his way with a splaying of legs to flaunt a growing bulge at his groin and a wink of the eye to hammer home his intention of giving the reporter an interrogation of his very own speciality after the tape recorder or camera had clicked off. Blair always knew if an interview had the potential to move from vertical to horizontal.

  And Tash Dallin, host of Toronto’s top entertainment show, would definitely have been more than suitable to receive a dose of Blair’s masterful lovemaking (enough women had told him so for him to believe his own hype). She ticked all the boxes: poker-straight hair the colour of a deep orange Moroccan sunset, skin as flawless as an airbrushed cover girl and eyes that were planet-large and moon-round. She possessed an almost prom-queen beauty and innocence in her purity, fused with one of the sexiest voices Blair had heard in a long time; she was a definite ‘my heart goes bang’ kind of girl. But as he stared into her eyes and answered the quick-fire questions that she delivered to him in tones rich enough to challenge Rockefeller, not even the burning twitch that seemed to automatically spring into action in his pants could make him want to take the action elsewhere after the Canadian TV producer in charge of the segment yelled ‘Cut!’. Because, despite what his loins were doing, Blair’s heart was elsewhere: time zones away in the lushness of Barbados and the arms of Nikki Rivers. Blair Lonergan was rapidly learning something and he found it more than a little strange. For a man who had
had countless women’s hearts placed in his careless hands, there for him to shatter and lose not one millisecond of sleep over, suddenly it was his own heart that was feeling every shade of happily vulnerable. And Blair was powerless to do anything about it. More to the point, he didn’t want to.

  At the same time, Hatton Eden was sitting himself down opposite a hack from Celebrity Heat in a small private room off the bar area at the swanky LA hotel he and Fidge Carter were booked into. The room was wall-to-wall winterland white and housed nothing more than two high-backed chairs, a glass table and a vase bearing one white calla lily, tall and proud and ready to watch over proceedings. As Hatton seated himself on the stiff leather chair and shook the hand of the reporter he realised that, like a lot of LA, the room was built for fashion and not function. Had he been there alone with Fidge – who had retired to the bar to let Hatton conduct the interview on his own but would have copy approval before publication – he would have wisecracked that he’d ‘sat on softer cocks in his time’ but there were definitely some things Celebrity Heat and the world at large did not need to know. Plus, there wasn’t enough space for Fidge in the room, which by Hatton’s reckoning was about the size of the outside toilet he’d always hated using at his parents’ house back in Bulgaria when he was young. Just like the room, that too had been cold and uninviting.