Grace and Isabel turned to see a small, bluish bird, a rock thrush, sitting on the little iron café table as if quietly observing the goings-on in Emmett Archer’s sitting room—as he no doubt was, for this was the most reclusive of Grotte Cachée’s permanent residents, the shape-shifting djinni Darius.
Darius cheeped. Isabel smiled at him; he bobbed his head. Of course she wasn’t going to greet him out loud in front of Grace. She was surprised her father had done so, meds or no meds.
A movement in a tower window diagonally across the courtyard caught Isabel’s eye. It was the southwest tower, in which Inigo had his apartment, and in fact, it was Inigo she noticed first, standing with his back to her in the same Big Lebowski–style bowling shirt he’d had on earlier, kicking off his jeans. A pair of hands—Chloe’s, of course—reached around to knead his perfect ass with blue-tipped fingers. It wasn’t just perfect, it was a work of art, one of nature’s great masterpieces. Every time Isabel looked at the bathhouse statues, for which he’d posed, she thought, No man has a butt that perfect, a tight little package of muscle. But the thing was, whoever sculpted those statues was either an ass man or a damned brilliant sculptor, or both, because the marble representation of Inigo’s ass and the real thing were identical in every respect—except, of course, for the tail, which he had removed as soon as they came out with chloroform in the mid-nineteenth century.
Inigo pushed Chloe to her knees and held the shirt up around his waist while guiding her head with the other hand. The Perfect Ass flexed and released, flexed and released . . .
It took Isabel about a nanosecond to grow wet. She hadn’t slept with a man, hadn’t wanted to, since Adrien last August; she’d even gone off the pill. Between ten months of celibacy and the fact that it was midmonth, she was a veritable tinder box, arousal-wise. Even so, that little doctor-nurse scenario back at the hospital hadn’t done much for her; she’d always found sexual playacting a little too goofy to really get off on. But a magnificent male ass thrusting and churning while one of the world’s most spectacular cocks got sucked . . . That was a different matter entirely.
“Isabel?”
She turned to find her father and Grace, neither of whom were in a position to see what she was looking at, thank God, regarding her quizzically.
“Woolgathering, my dear?” her father asked.
No, I was getting turned on by watching Chloe blow Inigo instead of paying attention to my terminally ill father. Oh, yeah. She was definitely going to Hell.
“I was telling your father he seems a bit tired. Time to get some high-test into you, Mr. Archer,” Grace said as she uncoiled the tubing from the oxygen concentrator in the corner.
“God, how I loathe this bloody thing,” Emmett grumbled as she looped the cannula over his ears.
Grinning at the vulgar language—he never used to say “bloody,” at least not in front of her—Isabel said, “Dad, must you swear like a cutter?”
There came a chuckle from behind her. She turned to find Adrien Morel standing in the doorway.
“Isabel,” he said with a little duck of the head.
“Adrien.”
They shook hands and smiled their carefully opaque smiles.
Showtime.
Adrien filled Emmett in on Inigo’s proposal to turn the chapel withdrawing room into a screening room while Isabel, who had ended up seated with a view of the courtyard, tried to resist the urge to steal glances at the ongoing X-rated shenanigans in the tower across the way. It was a futile effort, though, like trying to turn away from an Internet porn site you’d stumbled across by accident when you were really horny and it was really good porn.
Under normal circumstances, she would have been consumed with shame to be engaging in such frank voyeurism, but nothing at Château de la Grotte Cachée was what you’d call “normal,” especially when it came to sex. And after all, if Inigo and Chloe hadn’t been more than happy to be seen, they would hardly be doing it in front of a window that was so clearly visible. She smiled when she saw that Darius was watching them, too.
When Inigo had enjoyed enough of Chloe’s mouth for the time being, he stood her up and pulled off her nursie dress, beneath which she wore the lace-topped thigh-highs, a sparkly navel ring, and a sheer, flesh-colored push-up bra. She was unusually stacked for such a petite woman, and the bra made her large, economy-size jugs look like a pair of cantaloupes with hard red nipples. No undies, of course. He bent her over with her hands on the window ledge, and then he dropped to his knees and performed a little doggie-style cunnilingus—pretty skillfully, judging from her histrionics.
She came three times by Isabel’s count, and then Inigo stood. She held her hands behind her, wrists together, saying something to him over her shoulder, ending with “Please?”; Isabel could read her lips.
With an obliging smile and a little shrug, Inigo stepped away from the window, returning a moment later with a length of wide red ribbon. Positioning her with the windowsill supporting her just under her breasts so that she was looking down into the courtyard, he lashed her hands behind her, then yanked her head back by the hair and leaned over to whisper something in her ear. His snarly expression was a shock to Isabel, who’d never seen him in any mood other than one of mellow good humor. Of course, he was just putting on a show to please Chloe, but it was a good enough act to send shivers down Isabel’s spine, making her think he must have been into it on some level. Of course, if there was any way to make sex even sexier, a satyr would be into it, wouldn’t he?
Chloe nodded, saying “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
Inigo disappeared again and brought back a little plastic bottle, which he flipped open, squeezing a stream of fluid onto his colossal cock. He rubbed it up and down the shaft with firm, masturbatory strokes. Squeezing some of the lube onto his fingers, he pushed them inside Chloe, taking his time as he slid them around, saying things Isabel couldn’t hear, of course, but that made the little redhead squirm and nod. “Yes, sir.”
When he’d judged her to be suitably lubed up, he pressed one hand on the small of her back while he used the other hand to push his gleaming wet cock into her pussy.
Chloe tensed, wincing. This wasn’t the first time they’d fucked, of course, but he was very huge and very hard, and there was no amount of lube that was going to make him an easy fit for the average woman. He gave it another slow push, pausing when she flinched. Another push, and another, and he was still only halfway in.
He gave her ass a hard slap; it looked like she yelped. He spanked her about a dozen more times, saying things between each smack that Isabel couldn’t decipher except for “dirty girl,” which he said several times. That seemed to help. She arched her back like a kitten getting petted, and even started cocking her hips up to take him deeper. Smiling, he sank it home.
Inigo unhooked her bra and tossed it aside, leaving her heavy breasts hanging free. He tugged on her nipples as he fucked her with deep, even strokes. Before long, she was thrashing with such abandon that he had to grab her hips just so he could keep thrusting. Isabel was pretty sure she came at least one more time. Inigo’s movements grew erratic, and then he hunched over Chloe, his face darkening. His eyes closed. His mouth opened.
A phone trilled, making Isabel jump in her chair. She pressed a hand to her skittering heart, whispering “Jesus.”
Adrien dug his cell phone out of the front pocket of his khakis. “Allô. Oui, Mike,” he said in that deep, roughly soft voice, a lion’s purr with a French accent. “Escortez-les à l’appartement de Monsieur Archer. Hm? That’s right. They’re expected.”
“Who’s expected?” Emmett asked. His breathing was still strained despite the meds, hence the steadily increasing dosages.
Adrien caught Isabel’s eye and gave her a look that said the floor was hers, which was only fair, since this was essentially her doing.
Here goes. “Um, look, Dad, I know you said no visitors, but—”
“Oh, bloody hell,” he growled.
“Da
d.” Kneeling next to him, she put her hand on his arm—an unusually physical gesture for the two of them—and said, “It’s Hitch. I told him you didn’t want any visitors, but he insisted, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was online booking the trip from Chicago even as we spoke. He said he was gonna bring his new wife and stepson, since you hadn’t been able to go to the wedding last spring, and I remembered you saying you wished you’d had the chance to meet them.”
“And you didn’t tell me this because . . . ?”
“We didn’t tell you,” Adrien said evenly, “because we knew how you would carry on if you thought there was still time to cancel the visit.”
“Dad, it’s not just anybody,”Isabel said, “it’s Hitch. My God, he saved your life. Now he wants to see you. Don’t you think you kinda owe him?”
“He saved your life?” Grace asked.
Emmett sighed, nodded.
“It was during a heli-skiing trip about three years ago,” Isabel said.
Grace said, “A what trip?”
“Heli-skiing—it’s where you spend a week or two on a mountain, and every day a helicopter takes you from the base camp to a different place to ski.”
“You did this just three years ago?” Grace asked Emmett.
“I haven’t always been a pathetic invalid,” he said.
Isabel said, “He’s always been into that whole ‘sound mind in a sound body’ thing—right, Dad? Remember that RAF exercise routine you used to make me do before school when I was little?”
Adrien said, “The first thing Emmett did when he succeeded his father as administrateur was to turn the upper hall into a gymnasium. I didn’t see the point at the time, but now, of course, I use it every day.”
Grace brightened. “There’s a gym here?”
“Yes, indeed,” Adrien said. “Cardio machines, Nautilus, free weights—even a sauna. You are more than welcome to use it. It’s in the west range over the dining room.”
“So, anyway,” Isabel said, “Hitch lives in Chicago—he’s American—so he and Dad would get together a couple of times a year for these macho, testing-the-limits type expeditions. You know, white-water rafting in India, climbing K2, skiing every double black diamond slope in the Canadian Rockies . . . Three years ago, they booked this heli-skiing excursion on Makalu, which is one of the tallest mountains in the world. It’s in the Himalayas, near Everest. One morning, Hitch gets up before dawn, straps on his snowshoes, and sets out on a little prebreakfast solo hike. About ten minutes later, an avalanche comes roaring down the mountain and totally demolishes the base camp—with Dad and their Sherpa guide still asleep in their tents.”
“I woke up with the rumbling, actually,” Emmett said dryly. “Had just enough time to unzip my sleeping bag before it slammed into me.”
“Blimey,” Grace murmured.
“Everything’s just gone in, like, a minute,”Isabel said. “Hitch knows my dad and the guide have to be buried under the snow downstream of where the camp had been. If they’d been skiing at the time, they would have been wearing these beeper thingies—”
“Transceivers,” Emmett said.
“Right. You know, so you can be located if you’re buried in the snow—but of course they didn’t have them on, ’cause they were sleeping. So Hitch has to take his best guess as to where they might be, but luckily he’s got this walking stick—”
“Trekking pole,” her father corrected.
“Fine, a trekking pole, and the thing telescopes to, like six feet, and he probes the snow with it and finds my dad. And on his backpack, he’s got this little . . . it’s like a shovel for avalanches.”
“Avalanche shovel,” Emmett said with a snarky smile.
“So he digs my dad out of the snow, then finds the Sherpa and digs him out. Dad owes Hitch his life, and he hasn’t even seen him since that trip, ’cause he got sick and stopped traveling after that.”
“Hitch didn’t come here to visit?” Grace asked.
“Dad wouldn’t let him. God forbid his closest friend in the world, the man he’s always said was like a brother to him, should see him when he’s not in tip-top form. He’s like family, Dad, and family should be with you at a time like this.”
“She’s right, pal,” said Robert Hitchens from the doorway.
The peevishness faded from her father’s expression as he took in the old friend he hadn’t seen in three years. Hitch, a retired commercial airline pilot who was exactly her father’s age, had the kind of rangy, sandy-haired, sun-gilded good looks that turned the heads of much younger women. In fact, the pretty honey-blonde standing next to him—his new bride, a lawyer named Karen—looked about half his age; but given her college-age son, looming behind her, she was probably at least forty.
Hitch’s smile didn’t falter for a moment as he greeted Emmett with a handshake and a shoulder pat, despite the shock he must have felt at seeing his surrogate brother and fellow adventurer reduced in such short order to a feeble old man. He shook Adrien’s hand and gave Isabel a big hug, as always, and then everyone got sort of haphazardly introduced to everyone else.
“Were you named after the Henry James character?” Karen asked Isabel.
“Ah, a brainy beauty,” praised Emmett. “Looks as if you’ve caught yourself a live one, Hitch. Can’t imagine what she was thinking, throwing in her lot with the likes of you.”
Turning to his wife, Hitch said, “I told you he was a pain in the ass.”
Emmett glanced at his watch, a gesture not lost on Adrien, who ordered up a heavily laden tea tray.
“I saw Lili and Elic downstairs,” Hitch said. “I swear they look exactly like they did the last time I was here, which was thirty-something years ago. What is it, something in the water?”
“That’s the theory, actually,” said Adrien, offering the standard, if misleading, reply to that observation. “Auvergne is known for its therapeutic mineral spas. Some visitors to Grotte Cachée have theorized that our cave spring is unusually high in the types of substances that promote longevity.”
Hitch said, “I’m surprised you haven’t become a mecca for the people who are into that kind of thing.”
“Oh, we are very covetous of our privacy,” Adrien said.
Jason, Hitch’s stepson, said, “Is that why your guard confiscated our cameras and cell phones?”
Adrien nodded. “He’ll give them back when you leave. If people started taking photographs of our little valley, others would soon find out about us, and we would be overrun with trespassers looking to rejuvenate themselves in our bathhouse pool.”
“A fountain of youth,” Karen said incredulously. “Didn’t that pipe dream die with Ponce de León?”
“It’s not necessarily a pipe dream,” replied Jason, a bulky, bespectacled young man in a Northwestern sweatshirt and baggy jeans who had a kind of a geeky bear thing going on. With his almost-blond hair and his height, he could have been the natural son of Hitch, who’d never actually fathered any children himself; Katie, his daughter with his first wife, had been adopted from Korea. Twelve years ago Katie moved to New York to study theater at NYU, where Isabel was a senior. The two only children became fast friends, almost like sisters. Katie was a working actor now, with regular roles on the various Law & Orders, the soaps, and off-Broadway.
Jason said, “Studies have indicated that certain enzymes, amino acids, and hormones actually do have anti-aging properties. They retard the aging process either by encouraging cells to continue dividing after they should have died, or by preventing them from releasing the free radicals that cause oxidative stress. Who’s to say there aren’t minerals or other components in the water here—or elsewhere in the environment of this valley—that have that effect?”
“My son the know-it-all,” Karen said with a smile of pride and affection. “He’s one of those brainiacs who doesn’t sleep. Stays up till the wee hours of the morning, gets three or four hours of sleep, max, then he’s good to go. He’s majoring in biological sciences, and then he
plans to get his Ph.D. in . . . What is it? Molecular biochemistry . . . ?”
“Biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology,” he said.
Emmett said, “University of Chicago, isn’t it, Justin?”
“It’s Northwestern, actually. And, um . . . it’s Jason.”
“Of course it is,” said Emmett, looking abashed. “My memory . . . This blasted disease, you know. The lack of oxygen to the brain.”
“Well, and those don’t help,” said Isabel, nodding toward the vials on the desk behind Jason and Hitch.
As Adrien expounded on the importance of keeping Grotte Cachée’s theoretical healing qualities a secret from the outside world, Jason quietly scooped up the three vials and scanned their labels, ignoring his mother’s stern shake of the head. He found one of the vials particularly interesting, judging from his scowl of absorption as he read the label.
Hitch, sitting next to him, leaned close and mouthed, “What?”
Jason held the vial so that his stepfather could see the label. Isabel was probably the only person in the room, aside from Hitch, who heard Jason whisper, “Diamorphine.”
Hitch shrugged, as if to say So?
“It’s heroin.”
Hitch sat back and fixed his gaze on Grace, who noticed after a few moments and met his eyes. He cocked his head toward the door, Universal Sign Language for Let’s talk outside.
She nodded and stood.
“Excuse us,” Hitch said as he ushered her out into the hall. “We’ll just be a minute.”
Isabel got up and slipped out the door behind them. Hitch gestured for her to close it, which she did, and then he turned to Grace. “You’re giving him heroin? It’s not even legal.”
“Hitch—” Isabel began, but Grace held up an I’ll-take-care-of-this hand.
“Diamorphine can be prescribed in the UK,” Grace said.
“Is he in that much pain?”
Whispers of the Flesh Page 13
