Lovers and Liars: An addictive sexy beach read

by Nigel May

  Sheridan felt his cock twitch again as he thought of the cash and watched it rise to attention. For a man half a century old he was surprised at how quickly his hard-on had returned. It hadn’t been long since he had pumped his seed into the mouth of Kassidy Orpin. She could still perform a decent blow job, but if the deceitful little bitch thought she was going to stay on the payroll then she had another think coming. He’d dispose of her services after the fight. She’d sucked him off, now he’d sack her off.

  Sheridan’s loyal solicitor had phoned earlier to inform him about the changes in the will that Kassidy had obviously made – the small print making sure that she was catered for. After ten years in his service was she still stupid enough to think that Sheridan’s solicitor would file the will without checking every last word, even the ones written in the smallest of fonts? If Kassidy thought she was onto a winner should Sheridan meet his maker then she was sorely mistaken. He would see her burn in hell before he himself took up residence in the eternal fires of damnation – no doubt where he would end up if there were any kind of afterlife. You didn’t rise to the top of any business without prodding a few people along the way with the points of the Devil’s pitchfork. And Kassidy would be the next one to feel those poison-tipped prongs. But her sexual skills – and her organisational ones when it came to fight night – were invaluable, so he wouldn’t be snipping that professional cord until the Hatton Eden fight had put itself to rest.

  Sheridan thought of Hatton Eden as he dropped his towel to the floor and wandered over to a table on the far side of the room. Muscled-up faggot, he mused. He needs to experience the joy of a woman’s lips around his cock. Maybe I should show him what Kassidy can do.

  He glanced over to a small but perfectly placed camera that he’d switched on to record the pleasuring he had just received from his soon-to-be-ex-assistant. He recorded all of their sessions, as he did all of his sexual conquests given the chance. Nothing pleased him more than watching them back afterwards, knowing many of the women felt obliged into being shagged by their boss for fear of retribution. There may have been husbands, boyfriends and families back home, but in that moment those women were Sheridan’s and that pleased him. It was a kink that he had often discussed with Julian Bailey. He missed his right-hand man. Sheridan felt a fleck of sadness as he remembered his friend. He moved to the bar and poured himself a tequila and knocked it straight back, raising a hand in salutation to the memory of his departed friend.

  Sheridan grabbed his Rolex from the edge of the bar and slipped it around his wrist. Before moving to the bed to pick up his clothes he studied the award that had been positioned alongside his watch, his Tycoon of the Year accolade from two years ago. He’d be winning that again this year, for sure. Tonight would make certain of that. Screw boxers like Hatton and Orlando! There would only be one real winner tonight, and it would be Sheridan. He’d be making hotel history, turning himself into a Forbes-list legend like Gates, Winfrey, Spielberg and Stewart.

  Slipping on his crisp, white shirt, Sheridan buttoned it up, loving the feel of it against his freshly bathed skin. There was nothing like a new garment, one that had never been worn before, as if it had been waiting for the perfect person to try it on. He felt like the king within the clothes. Because that was what Sheridan was, the king, and as he pulled on his tuxedo trousers and fastened them in place he knew that nothing would stop him from sitting on his self-proclaimed rightful throne for the rest of his lifetime. At that moment, though, Sheridan Rivers wasn’t aware of just how little time he had left to live.

  64

  Picking up the specially commissioned diamond boxing glove cufflinks that had arrived that afternoon from Hatton Garden, London’s famed jewellery district, Sheridan Rivers slipped them through the buttonholes of his cuffs and secured them in place. He was just admiring how the diamonds danced in the light when a knock sounded at the door.

  Funny, he wasn’t expecting anyone. He checked his watch. Everyone should be heading towards the arena by now. He should be making a move himself within the next half an hour.

  He moved towards the door and opened it. On the other side was the last person he’d been expecting to see.

  ‘What are you doing here? Kassidy told me you were going for a facial or something like that. Although that face of yours has seen more treatments than the cast of Desperate Housewives!’

  ‘How freakin’ modern of you, Sheridan! That show hasn’t been on for years. Maybe you should get one of your hoochie-coochie, two-bit, twenty-something hoes to give you a rundown on what’s hot these days.’ Sutton stomped into the suite without waiting for an invitation, removing her Stella McCartney Alexis faux-fur throw from around her shoulders and tossing it onto the sofa.

  ‘That’s bit much for Barbados, isn’t it?’ sneered Sheridan. ‘It’s July and boiling hot out there!’

  ‘Tell that to the air con blasting through the sports arena. It may be cold in there later on and if you think I’m getting beamed around the globe onto people’s HD TV screens with my nipples sticking up in my Issey Miyake, like a couple of Reese’s Pieces, then you’re sorely mistaken.’

  Sheridan sighed. He hadn’t seen Sutton in days and he was in no mood to let her spoil his excitement about the evening ahead.

  ‘So why are you here, Sutton? I’m sure it’s not to discuss fashion, is it?’

  ‘Not unless you think it’s fashionable to be the biggest shit of a father ever, no.’

  ‘Come to stick some more knives in my back, have you?’

  ‘Don’t freakin’ tempt me! Mind you, there would be a huge amount of space between those shoulder blades of yours seeing as you have no backbone to stand in the way.’

  ‘Aren’t you the smart mouth? Now, I need to get on, if you’ll excuse me. Some of us have an empire to run.’ Sheridan motioned towards the door, trying to coax his wife to leave the room. It was clear that she had no intention of going, not until she had done what she set out to do.

  ‘One of us has to be smart, Sheridan. And one of us has to be there for the family. Everybody and their dog will be watching us tonight and hardly anyone is speaking to you. How’s that going to look? You and I have to sit together but I need to tell you what I think of you right now or God help me I might start laying into you halfway through the first round. How could you not even show your remorse to Heather? You’ve ruined her life! How could you put your own reputation before the happiness of your own daughter? She’s lost a baby, our grandchild, because of the stress that losing Max put her under.

  ‘I know you didn’t mean to kill him, Sheridan, I know that. But I also know that you’re royally fucking up at trying to put things right with this family. You need to man up, grow a pair and start loving Heather as she needs to be loved right now! She needs a daddy who’s rich in the ways of love, not a billion-dollar absentee with no heart. And you’re trying to cut Nikki out of your own will, too. I will not let you ruin our daughters’ lives. I’d rather see you dead than let you leave them high and dry. I signed my life over to you before we got married. That was what I had to do, but those girls were born into this family and it’s about time you made them feel part of it again. As it is right now, you’d be better off gone to them. They don’t need this sorry-assed excuse of a father!’

  Sheridan listened as Sutton waggled her manicured finger at him, walked over to the bar and picked up the award that sat there. It felt heavy in her hands. ‘Tycoon of the Year.’ She read the engraving on the award. ‘Oh Sheridan, you ain’t ever gonna win one of these for affairs of the heart, are you? You can fool around behind my back all you want, sticking what God gave you into any passing tramp or floozy on the payroll, but that ain’t ever gonna gain you true happiness. You don’t find that in some skank’s panties. I can take it now – do what you like, I don’t care. It’s too late for us. You started to lose my love the moment I saw you screwing around with that opera singer when I was expecting Nikki. But you need to start injecting some time and effort int
o rebuilding this family if you really want to find happiness again and not lose the love of the girls. I know deep down they love you despite everything. I can see you’re hurting, but you need to sort this.’

  ‘So what do I do? Tell me, Sutton, you always have. What do I do?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say. That needs to come from your heart, not mine. You just need to see if there’s one in you first that can be defrosted in this Barbados heat.’

  ‘So you don’t have any advice for me then?’ asked Sheridan, resigned to the struggle that he knew lay ahead if he wanted to have Nikki and Heather back in his life.

  ‘Life’s too short – Julian and Max have taught us that. But apart from that, no.’

  Sutton placed the award back down on the bar, grabbed her stole from the sofa and flung it around her shoulders with dramatic flair as she reached the door.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, you can drop down dead and never stand back up again, but I’m not here for me. I’ll see you at the fight.’

  She never did.

  65

  Smoothly mixing his way from a beat-heavy dance remix of a David Bowie classic into a funked-up Jason Derulo, Blair Lonergan checked the length of the track ahead: just over seven minutes in its entirety. That should be enough time. He’d line up another track though, just in case – you never knew how long these things might take. He looked around the arena at the people gathered for the fight. It was filling up swiftly. Give it another fifteen minutes or so and the place would be rammed. He’d save his mammoth tunes for the last minute.

  Blair turned to one of the security men behind his DJ stage and signalled to him that he was just taking a break – he made it clear to him that he was to stay there. He had no need of him. This wasn’t Blair’s usual hell-raising crowd of flesh-grabbing fans – tonight it was mostly A-list celebrities. He could manage without protection. Besides, this was something that he needed to do on his own. He slipped off his headphones and walked away from the stage.

  Sitting in her Velvet Barbados suite, Nikki Rivers switched off her phone. She didn’t want to speak to anyone else tonight – she’d had enough callers for one day. The last call she’d taken was the one that she had been dreading: it was from her lawyer. She’d known to expect it. The police in New York had advised her to talk to her lawyer and confess everything. As had Sutton, Heather and Pasinetta. Now that Ollie Featherstone was in custody and looking at the rest of his life behind bars, Nikki knew that the story of her running down the criminal in the backstreets of Harlem would come to light. It was bound to. And she knew that the fallout would be something she would have to deal with.

  The conversation with her lawyer had actually been a pretty positive one. Yes, Nikki was drunk behind the wheel, and yes, she had killed someone and driven off into the night, but her lawyer was convinced that the public would see she had been frightened out of her mind by Ollie and his thugs and had taken the only action possible and wasn’t thinking rationally. Her only instinct had been to try and run, to try and survive. And the subsequent blackmailing and the death of poor Julian Bailey would hopefully, according to Nikki’s lawyer, push people to sympathise with her even more. Would she be looking at a stretch inside? Unlikely, but she may be the new poster girl for community service for a while. According to the lawyer, the police could arrest her at any time if they chose to, maybe even tonight during the fight.

  Nikki checked her reflection in the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. All was good. If she was going to be arrested and have her photo splashed across every website, newspaper and blog in celebsville then she needed to look her best. She tossed her phone onto the sofa and left the suite.

  She checked her watch – she should head to the fight and take her seat. But there was something she needed to do first…

  ‘Are you pumped? Are you ready? Are you The Main Man?’

  Fidge Carter’s words of encouragement bounced around the changing room backstage at the sports arena as Hatton Eden paced up and down. It was that moment before the fight when everything started to race through Hatton’s mind. Questions were firing through his head like bullets. Had he trained enough? Was he in the best mental and physical shape possible? Would this be the fight that moved him up another rung of the sporting legend ladder? Or would it be his last, his career ended with an ill-timed punch to the head?

  Fidge never knew how Hatton would be before a fight. His work was done. There was nothing more he could do for him than offer him words of support. But he knew tonight would be a milestone for Hatton. How could it not be? He was the best boxer he had ever worked with and the best man he had ever loved. After this fight they would spend some quality time together, away from the prying eyes of the world. They could take some time to be themselves and to work out what their next move would be. That would be idyllic. Maybe marriage would be an option – the thought thrilled Fidge.

  He watched Hatton pacing across the floor, bringing his hands together in prayer and muttering under his breath, his face barely visible underneath the hood of the russet-red silk robe he always wore into the ring, its colour almost identical to his mop of hair. It had become his good luck charm. Fidge knew that tonight would be a monumental night for Hatton; he would make sure of it. Nothing could spoil the glory that they would achieve together. Nothing.

  He could see that Hatton was in the zone, a man alone with his thoughts. Fidge checked his watch. Not long now. But there was still time to do what he needed to do – Hatton wouldn’t even know he had gone. He slipped out of the changing room, leaving Hatton still murmuring under the hood of his silk robe.

  Kassidy Orpin could still taste the result of her latest seedy rendezvous with her boss in her mouth. He had been fairly rough with her too. As she felt the onslaught of a headache coming on she pulled open the drawer of her office desk and looked inside. She was sure she had some mints and some painkillers in there – they would take away the nasty aftertaste and appease her headache.

  A nasty aftertaste… That’s what Sheridan had become to her lately. All those years she had worked for him, in every possible position, and yet she now felt more worthless than ever. The way that he spoke to her was becoming increasingly disrespectful. He was her boss, but she used to feel special to him. Now it felt as if she were a convenient body who just happened to be there when he wanted to empty the contents of his balls. Sex between them had become a one-way street. And Kassidy knew she was worth more than being an empty repository for his needs.

  The will would change all that though. Now that it had been filed, her small print undiscovered, at least that one-way street had a rich cash reward for her at the end of it: a seven-figure reward. She just needed Sheridan to meet his maker. He was worth more to her dead than alive, if she were honest. But he was fifty already, death might not be that far into the future. His life could be snatched away at any time. But then again, it might be decades. Could she wait that long? It would be somewhat fortuitous if she could have all that she wanted coming her way sooner rather than later.

  She stared at the photo of her mother on her desk. Her beautiful Irish face stared back at Kassidy, her smile wide and radiant. Now there was a woman who had let men take advantage of her. How had she been able to hide such domestic horrors with such a beautiful smile? She was so strong, such an inspiration. Yet she allowed herself be ruled by a bully of a man. Kassidy wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t now finding herself in a very similar position with Sheridan. She needed to do something about it.

  She found the painkillers in the drawer, popped one from the packet and downed it with a glass of water before checking her watch. There was still time. She left the office, unable to find the mints. The aftertaste would have to linger… For now.

  Heather Stoneham looked up at the fireworks illuminating the night sky above the beach. Red, green and yellow decorated the sky as they exploded into life. They had been sounding all evening, heralding the arrival of the Belter in the Swelter. Though the nigh
t air was far from sweltering as she walked along the golden sands, feeling the powdery softness between her toes. The air was warm, as it was constantly in the Caribbean at that time of year, but as Heather watched the glittery cabaret of colours light up the sky she felt a chill. As was always the case lately, it wasn’t due to any kind of meteorology. It was a chill that radiated from the emptiness within her heart. A Max-sized emptiness that she knew would never disappear. He would have loved being here at the fight with her tonight. Not to see Hatton and Orlando beat the living daylights out of each other – Max was a lover, not a fighter – but he would have loved seeing the celebrities walking the red carpet into the event. He would have loved being part of that madness and watching the LA court jesters as they fawned all over each other – it was the shopping telly showman in him.

  But without Max there was no reason for her to be there. So why was she walking along the beach with her Louboutins in her hand, wearing a Versace off-the-shoulder gown, rocking old Hollywood glamour? She would much rather have been back home in St Lucia, walking the beach in flip-flops, a loose-fitting shirt and a pair of cut-off denim shorts – much more herself and much closer to Max. She should have flown straight back after her one-to-one with Sheridan. She didn’t need him as part of her family any more, not after what he had done, but family was why she was still in Barbados. For Nikki, for Sutton, for those who counted. Not for Sheridan… He could rot in hell.

  A burst of fireworks lit up the beach, causing Heather to snap out of her dark thoughts about her father. A thought struck her as she stared at the sand. She checked her watch – there was still time. She would make time. It was a matter of life and death. It was what Max would’ve wanted, had he been allowed to live…

  66