When they reached the hotel lobby, Carrie knew she should end the night there. But Jed lingered, finding more questions to ask about London. About anything. Until eventually she asked him to come up for a nightcap. “Since we’ve still got so much to tell each other,” as he said.
Carrie had not made love since she and Jed had last been together. She wondered if it had been the same for him. She doubted it. A heterosexual male model with massage skills in a town like New York, Jed was the ultimate catch. She didn’t want to think about how many offers he must have had. There was probably someone waiting for him right then. And that thought was partly why Carrie said “yes” when Jed asked if he could stay.
They both understood what “stay” really meant. As soon as he had Carrie’s agreement, Jed kicked off his shoes and moved from the armchair to the bed. He smoothed the counterpane beside him, wordlessly inviting Carrie to join him. She took off her own shoes, placing them neatly beside her half-packed case with the precision that had always made Jed smile and tease her. She sat down on the bed. Not quite right next to him, though she knew that soon she would be. They both knew.
“This reminds me of that hotel room in Paris,” said Jed. “What number was it?”
“Four seventeen,” Carrie responded. On their return to New York after their Paris interlude, Jed had sent flowers with nothing but “417” written on the card.
“There I was, thinking that you were going to give me a coffee and send me on my way, but you jumped me. I was quite taken aback.”
“Were you, hell,” said Carrie, shuffling back so that they were properly side by side against the pillows.
“It’s a memory that I will treasure for the rest of my life. It isn’t every day a guy gets ravaged in a hotel room.”
Carrie went to give Jed a playful cuff. He caught her wrist and used the leverage it gave him to pull her into his arms. She fell willingly, and soon they were kissing. It was as hot and heavy as the first time they’d kissed, and yet as intimate and relaxed as the last. Still, after a minute or so, Carrie pulled away. She looked deep into Jed’s eyes. They shouldn’t be doing this. And yet …
It was so easy. So natural. They fell back into each other’s arms like two dancers repeating steps they’d learned and practiced years before. If they didn’t think too hard about it, everything would be fine. They’d go through the old routine and then part. Back to the real world.
And Carrie had spent so long without this kind of contact. She wanted to be held and kissed and, she admitted it, fucked. She wanted to feel desired.
When they were both naked, their skin slick with the heat of their passion, Carrie moved so that she was on top of Jed, her legs about his waist. She edged backward so that she could feel the tip of his cock against her. Her body cried out to be penetrated. She felt a moment of supreme release as Jed took matters into his hands and pushed up into her.
The fit was so good. Carrie had never had a lover like Jed. His cock seemed to have been made for her. As she rocked her way to an orgasm, he grew and stretched inside her until she felt that she had never been touched so absolutely before. Their bodies were completely joined.
With her hands on Jed’s wide, flat chest, Carrie eased herself up and down. Jed held her by the waist, helping her, speeding her up or slowing her down. As her arousal grew and she felt her orgasm creeping up on her, Carrie let her head tip backward. Jed’s hands moved to her breasts, magnificent above him. Carrie was in a world of her own now, rocking, rocking. Faster and faster. Her thighs tightened against Jed’s waist. She began to dissolve around him. The only thing she could hear was the pumping of her own heart as the blood raced around her body, taking her pleasure to every part of her being.
Carrie didn’t have to worry about Jed. The moment she started to come, he was coming too. The feeling of her pulsing around his shaft was too much to resist. Each time she moved downward, he thrust upward to meet her. Their sighs echoed each other. Jed cried out Carrie’s name.
“Can I stay the night?” he asked.
Carrie nodded mutely. She shouldn’t have done it, she knew. She shouldn’t have made love to him. But it felt so good to be back in his arms. She felt so connected to him right then. Almost connected enough to tell him the truth about her feelings. Almost connected enough to admit them to herself.
If only it could always be like this. If only she could trust that Jed would always want to be this close to her. Then she might have been able to give their relationship a proper shot. But the shiver of unhappiness she had felt earlier, when he’d called her his friend, was nothing compared to the pain she would feel if she totally invested her heart and found herself rejected.
So Carrie said nothing. It was far better to do without these moments than find herself like her mother or sister. Loved and then abandoned and unable to get over it.
The next day, Carrie was taking the first flight back to London out of Kennedy. She left Jed sleeping, putting a note on hotel paper on the side of the bed where she had lain.
“I hope you’ll come to London sometime soon,” she wrote. But before she left the room, she crept back and stole the note away again. Jed would never know how close she’d come to admitting her vulnerability.
CHAPTER 24
As she waited for her flight back to London, Carrie picked up a copy of Vanity Fair in the first-class lounge. Flicking through it, her attention was drawn to a name she hadn’t heard in a while: Mathieu Randon.
Carrie knew all about Mathieu Randon. When she’d begun her career in the auction houses, he’d been a client for whom everyone rolled out the red carpet. Head of Domaine Randon, a multinational luxury goods conglomerate based in Paris, he was high on the list of invitees to any big event at Ehrenpreis in New York. He rarely showed up himself, though he had bought certain items through the house. Most notably a painting by Andrew Wyeth, who was the artist of Carrie’s own favorite painting: Christina’s World.
The last Carrie had heard of Mathieu Randon was that he had recently come out of a coma. Eighteen months ago, he’d been struck on the head by a falling wine barrel when an earthquake had hit his company’s Napa Valley vineyard. Recent photographs showed him leaving the hospital in a wheelchair, his head lolling to one side, his eyes unfocused and glazed. It was widely assumed that would be the last anyone heard of him. He was facing a long time in rehabilitation. According to reports, he was hardly able to speak. Nobody could be sure that his laser-sharp business brain was what it once had been.
But here he was. Back from the dead and back in his office, giving an interview to Vanity Fair.
“People ask if I have changed,” said Randon. “Of course I’ve changed. How could anyone spend eighteen months in a coma, away from the stimulation of the outside world, and remain unchanged? But I do not believe that my life has been diminished for that time away. Rather, it has been enriched.
“It sounds like a cliché to say that now I understand the value of things far better than I once did. Whereas once I was only content to spend my waking hours generating money, and thought contemplation was for the simpleminded, now I am just as happy to look out of my window and see a butterfly or a flower in bloom.”
He’s losing it, thought Carrie.
“I have found new meaning in my life. And, most important, I have found God.”
Lost it, Carrie confirmed to herself.
The interviewer expressed the cynicism of much of his readership when he asked Randon how he could possibly square his billionaire lifestyle with the ethics of Christianity.
“Indeed it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” Randon quoted. “That’s why I’m formulating a strategy for disposing of some of my assets with a view to establishing a place where people of a like mind can find peace and contemplation. That is my mission now. That is the real reason I was put on this earth. That is clearly why I spent the first fifty years of my life so focused, to the point of blindness, on
amassing material wealth. It was all part of God’s plan. To enable me to one day establish a haven for pilgrims and students of the word of Christ, our Lord.”
“Like a monastery?” the interviewer suggested.
The question drew a smile from the lips of Mathieu Randon, one-time fixture on the European party circuit. He was rumored to have bedded more than a thousand women. Allegedly he had the books of several model agencies on his bedside table. The photos of those models he had slept with were marked with a cross and rated out of ten. Married men all over the world had cursed his wife-stealing name. And now …
“A monastery. Yes. A bit like that,” he said.
Carrie Klein couldn’t have cared less about Mathieu Randon’s newfound faith in Jesus, but all at once her own mission was very clear. If Randon wanted help in disposing of his assets, then she was the girl to help him.
“All mobile phones must be switched off,” came the cabin announcement.
“Rats,” said Carrie, as a flight attendant politely reiterated the message to her personally. Carrie grudgingly switched off her phone and made a note to ask Jessica to find out how she could get to Mathieu Randon the moment the plane touched down.
At his office on the Champs-Elysées, Randon read the six-page article about himself and his miraculous recovery from the coma and couldn’t help but wonder if he’d unwittingly committed the sin of pride. Was it true, as the interviewer had suggested, that he sounded smug when he spoke of the community of believers he hoped to create? He was merely a conduit for God’s work. There was no room for smugness.
The best way to dispel that kind of ugly aspersion was for Randon to get on with building his utopia as soon as he possibly could. He must begin to liquidate his assets, as he had promised he would. Sitting at his desk, Randon surveyed the paintings that graced the office. In that single room hung art worth many millions of euros. There were yet more riches in the headquarters of Maison Randon Champagne in Epernay. And then there was Randon’s private collection, scattered among his apartment in Paris; his homes in New York, in Napa Valley, in Tuscany, Capri, and on the Côte d’Azur; and his eighty-five meter yacht, The Grand Cru, which was currently moored outside Monaco.
Randon buzzed through to his assistant.
“Bellette,” he said. “Would you be so kind as to come into my office for a moment.”
Bellette closed down her Internet connection—which was open to an online fashion site—and responded to his call. She stood in front of his desk, notebook at the ready. She was dressed in a plain gray shift that hit her legs at midcalf. It was the most unflattering garment she had ever worn but it had become the unofficial “uniform” of the women who worked at Domaine Randon since their boss had come back from the hospital. Lots of things had changed since Mathieu Randon had gotten caught in that earthquake.
Randon smiled at her beneficently and motioned that she should sit down. Bellette decided that she preferred the old days, when Randon had leered at her breasts straining the buttons of a tight blouse, as though he were a wolf watching a three-legged lamb stumble away from the flock.
“I have a very special project for you,” he said. “But I want you to think very carefully about whether you’re willing to take it on.”
Bellette perked up a little. She was getting rather bored of typing up letters to the Pope.
“I need to prepare some of my art collection for auction.”
“I’d be happy to do that,” said Bellette.
“I want you to be sure,” said Randon. “Because, as you know, I have great respect for you and your personal integrity, and I must warn you that some of the paintings concerned are nudes. If you think that it would compromise your morality in any way, then you must feel free to refuse.”
Morality? Bellette looked at the man who had once bent her over his desk and fucked her hard while dictating a letter. Bellette had to bite down on the end of her pencil to stop a laugh from bursting out.
CHAPTER 25
Back at his apartment that evening, Randon felt much better for having taken steps to put the plan for his new community of believers into action. Bellette had been very mature about the whole thing, assuring him that she would be honored to catalog the more risqué of Randon’s artworks, knowing that it was all for a good cause. Jesus would have understood, she assured him. After all, hadn’t he associated with ladies of the night? Randon was glad that Bellette had been paying attention to his sermons.
Alone in his bedroom, where once he had entertained supermodels and Oscar-winning actresses, Randon poured himself a glass of water from the jug on the coffee table. He no longer drank alcohol, though his family’s empire had been built on the foundation of one of the world’s finest champagne houses.
Sipping the water contemplatively, with one hand resting lightly on his late mother’s well-thumbed Bible, he gazed on the small Madonna and Child that stood on the mantelpiece. Around that small painting was an enormous patch of faded wallpaper that betrayed the fact that a larger painting, of a voluptuous nude with a lotus between her legs, had previously hung there for many years.
As Randon gazed at the Madonna, the feeling started to come again. It seemed to happen every time he looked at that painting. The harder he stared, the faster it came. His field of vision narrowed. There was a glitter of lights at its periphery, as if a sparkler were being held just out of view. Then came the headache. The searing pain that preceded every visitation. Oh God. The pain was so intense. Each time Randon thought he might die.
“Mother Mary preserve me,” Randon cried out before he lost consciousness and slid to the floor.
Coming round five minutes later, Randon scrambled for his pen and pad of paper. It was important to write down as much as he could remember as quickly as possible. These were, after all, messages directly from God.
Still sitting on the floor, Mathieu Randon began to scribble. This time he’d seen a riverbed. Tall reeds. Was it in Europe? Or in Egypt? Was God showing him the Nile? Then he saw the face of a woman. As beautiful as an angel. Her clear white face was framed by soft black hair. She had brown eyes edged by long dark lashes. Full pink lips. Her eyebrows were arched in surprise. Or was it concentration? She was leaning forward toward him. Her smile looked uncertain. Who was she? She was wearing white. Her arms were bare. She held them out for him. Beckoning? Beseeching?
After filling two pages with his fractured recollections, Randon could drag no more clues to the surface of his mind. As the light faded, he read through once more all the notes he had written since emerging from the coma whenever the vision had come to him. The river had featured often. And the woman. And sometimes a house. Almost a château in size and scale. It had to mean something significant. Was the woman a saint guiding him toward the perfect setting for his community? That made sense.
Randon called Bellette, who knew that she should always be ready to receive his call. No matter what time of day.
“Where are you?” he asked, when he got through to her mobile. “It sounds noisy.”
“At the station,” she lied. She was sitting in a bar.
“Tomorrow morning I want you to call someone at Sotheby’s real estate. I’m looking for a house next to a river. First thing. It’s very important. There must be a river.”
Bellette switched off her mobile phone. Her boyfriend, Olivier, leaned over and nibbled her neck.
“Got to get you into my room and out of this sack,” he said, regarding her horrible dress. “Was that Randon again?”
“Yes,” Bellette sighed.
“More work for the mission?”
Bellette nodded. “He wants me to start looking for a property.”
“Do you think if I got my head shaved and pretended to be a monk he might toss me a few hundred grand?” Olivier asked.
Bellette ran her hands through Olivier’s wavy dark hair. “Well, if you shave your head, you’ll definitely have one thing in common with a monk,” she said. “You won’t get laid.”
&nbs
p; CHAPTER 26
Like Bellette, Lizzy had an early start the following day. She was to begin work on putting together Ludbrook’s sale of important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings. There had been a lot of interest. Like the old masters, the Victorians seemed to be riding out the recession rather well. Their inoffensive subject matter and pretty execution made them the artistic equivalent of a two-bedroom flat in Chelsea. Blue chip. Nat was expecting great things.
“May even put you up on the block if I get tired,” he said.
Lizzy paled, remembering her humiliation at the Trebarwen sale.
“Only joking,” said Nat. “Though, if you are going to be an auctioneer, you’re going to have to get back up there at some point.”
“I know that,” said Lizzy. “It’s just … give me time.”
“Whatever you want,” said Nat, dismissing her with a pat on the bum.
• • •
The staff at Ludbrook’s were not the only people looking forward to the Victorians’ sale with eager anticipation. From passing Serena’s work through small antiques shops up and down the country, Julian had decided that it was time to make the leap to selling through a proper auction house in preparation for off-loading her little Madonna. He took one of Serena’s larger works, a painting of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, up to London and requested a meeting with Nat Wilde.
Nat was only too pleased to meet Julian for lunch. The Trebarwen sale, although low-key, had been a highlight of the previous year’s calendar. Not only that, of late Nat had learned the importance of keeping your client relationships up to date. Nat didn’t think he would ever stop feeling bitter about the fact that, just before she finally got round to popping her clogs, Mrs. Kingly had changed her will so that it instructed that her estate be sold through Ehrenpreis. It was just too much. Carrie Klein had put up with only a few months of the old dear’s moaning. That bloody American woman had been siphoning off Nat’s clients left, right, and center.
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