Country Pleasures

by Bond, Primula

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Janie and Sally escape to the English countryside hoping to get some sun and relaxation. They soon become the focus of attention for the local farmers, who are well built, down-to-earth and very different from the boys they have been dating in town.

  When Sally’s ex-lover rents out a country house nearby, and Janie’s childhood playmate Jack buys the farm next door, the girls are spoilt for choice as to whom they will leash their charms. But will everyone get what they want?

  About the Author

  Primula Bond has written a number of titles for Black Lace, including Country Pleasures and Club Creme, as well as Behind the Curtain for Nexus. She is also the author of The Silver Chain, the first book in the Unbreakable Trilogy.

  Country Pleasures

  Primula Bond

  Country Pleasures

  ‘I asked you a question, earlier,’ Maddock said to Janie. ‘Did it turn you on, watching me and your friend?’

  Sally folded her arms crossly around her knees. Since Janie had unexpectedly burst in, both the rugged farmer and her friend seemed to have forgotten she was in the same room.

  ‘And I would like to ask you a question,’ said Janie. ‘When would you like to leave? Right now or in one minute’s time?’

  ‘My question was, did you enjoy watching us?’ Maddock persisted.

  ‘A bit difficult to avoid watching, seeing as how you just strolled in and started shagging my friend on the floor.’ Janie still had one foot in the hall, as if she was contemplating her escape. ‘Now, I really don’t want to hold you up any longer. Don’t you have to be somewhere?’

  ‘His Lordship and the lads can get the pints in,’ said Maddock. ‘I want to know . . . did you enjoy it? Looks like something’s flicked your switch.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t pretend to be so uptight, Janie,’ goaded Sally. ‘Admit it, you were turned on just then, weren’t you? Sex in the sitting room on a rainy night with a bit of rough. What could be a better way to pass the time?’

  Maddock kept his eyes on Janie, unflinching at Sally’s description of him. ‘And that was just the warm up,’ he said.

  1

  Rain spattered on the windows. It drenched the old thatch and tried to seep under the doors. The wind yanked at any loose timbers it could find and howled round corners before giving way to more bursts of rain.

  Janie couldn’t believe it. It was July, for God’s sake. Tucked away in the shallow hills of South Devon, this place was meant to be a summer retreat. It looked more like a witch’s cottage, covered with poison ivy and crawling roses, and it was invisible from all the surrounding roads. Perfect for a hideout. They were meant to be lolling around naked in the garden, concealed from view by the wild trees and bushes, sipping home-made Cosmopolitans and skinny-dipping in the sea at sunset. It should have been an opportunity to sort out their lives, and generally chill until it was time to rejoin the rat race. Instead of which ...

  ‘Are there logs we can chop to get a fire going?’ asked Sally as they sat in the beamed sitting room. ‘And while we’re at it, are there any hot-water bottles? I’m losing the feeling in my toes and I’ve only been here a couple of hours.’

  Janie turned from the window seat, where she had been watching the dog roses lose their petals under the weight of rain.

  Sally was hunched in front of the empty fireplace, listening to one of the handful of jazz and classical CDs they’d found stacked beside the hi fi, and contemplating the demise of her career. She was nursing a bruised ego after taking on the might of yet another City tribunal and, yet again, losing.

  As usual, Janie had waded in with a rest cure. At least, that was what it was supposed to be. She turned back to the window and frowned at the rain. The slightest discomfort in these supposedly idyllic surroundings would be bound to tip Sally into a foul temper, she thought.

  Ever since they were at school, Janie had been Sally’s unofficial therapist. She worked like a kind of escape valve. The pair were total opposites, which was probably why their friendship worked. Janie was bohemian and dreamy and, for all her friend’s braying confidence and skimpy business suits, Sally depended on Janie, rather than her brash City mates, to get her back on track after a crisis. By the same token, Janie’s own life was brightened by the drama and chaos that accompanied Sally wherever she went. When life and limb were restored and Sally had hurtled back to reality, Janie’s world always seemed, for a while at least, much too quiet.

  ‘I can cut it, Janie, whatever they say about me,’ Sally had insisted a week earlier, as she jabbed at the financial pages spread all over the café table in Portobello Road. They were sitting in the sunshine and had forced themselves to read the sniggering reports about Sally, the ‘petite blonde’ trying to take the markets by storm. ‘It’s just that this time they had one over me. I didn’t see it coming. Those jerks hijacked my deals. Particularly that bloody Jonathan Dart. I only hired him six months ago, and yet, before I could blink, he’d wheedled his way into my knickers and then shafted me. And not the kind of shafting you’re thinking of. Now a bit more of that I would have enjoyed.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Janie chucked the newspapers onto the pavement and slapped her hand over Sally’s complaining mouth. ‘Enough. Verboten. No more talk of office politics or shafting or Jonathans or any of that stuff. Off the menu from now on.’

  ‘I didn’t mind that,’ continued Sally after unpeeling Janie’s hand from her face. ‘You know, the knickers bit. I was really getting the taste for it, but then it turned out I was sleeping with the enemy. Just out of the blue.’

  ‘I said stop! Men are off the menu.’

  ‘Even hunks in pinstripe suits with big lunch boxes?’

  ‘Especially them. Now listen, you’re out of a job, right?’

  ‘No need to rub it in,’ Sally grumbled as she reached for her handbag. ‘Where’s my lipstick?’

  ‘So, you have some free time. A bit of redundancy pay came out of all that, didn’t it?’

  ‘Quite a lot, actually.’ Sally smirked, her lips painted red again. She raised her voice and pinned her shoulders back as the waiter edged past the table. ‘Enough to send me to the Caribbean for a few weeks, anyway. Get away from this shit hole. Could we have the bill, please?’

  ‘Forget the Caribbean.’ Janie coughed as a motorbike backfired along the traffic-heavy street. ‘Come to Ben’s cottage with me. I’m going down there anyway. I said I’d do some painting for him in return for a freebie, practice some of my designing skills while he’s away, cast my eyes over some of the other properties in the area that might need tarting up.’

  ‘Not more work,’ sighed Sally, gazing up as the waiter returned, and holding tight to a fiver so that he had to prize it, very slowly, from her extended fingers. She had already scribbled her mobile phone number on the back of the bill. ‘I refuse to get my head round any more business.’

  ‘You don’t have to. You can just laze about, lick your wounds, prepare the odd salad, open the odd bottle of wine. I could do with the company. It’s very quiet down there, especially since the cross-eyed neighbours across the field sold up or died of the plague or whatever. Anyway, they left. No one to flash your tits at, Sally. Sally!’

  Sally wound her tongue back in and turned to Janie with a mock batting of her eyelashes.

  ‘Yes, y
es, I’m listening. Therapeutic rest cure in the middle of nowhere? No shops, no bars, no men? Darling, it’s a lovely idea.’ Sally scraped the iron chair back to stand up. She rested one foot on the seat and raised her arms to cram her messy hair into a comb. Her frayed miniskirt rode up her thigh, until the denim was drawn tight over the twin curves of her bum. The crease where the plump cheeks met the tops of her legs parted and closed as she jigged about, fiddling with her hair. In the shadow cast by her skirt it was possible to catch a glimpse of Sally’s golden pubes, her pussy-lips parting with the movement of her leg to reveal a delicate magenta sliver of flesh before vanishing again. Several heads in the café snapped round, and over at the counter the waiter slammed the till shut.

  ‘By the way, what knickers?’ Janie yanked at Sally’s tiny denim skirt to grab her attention, then began to gather her own belongings. ‘You said that chap Jonathan got into your knickers.’

  ‘And?’ Sally brought her foot down slowly, not bothering to adjust her skirt. The hem rested cheekily halfway up her crotch. She leaned across Janie to lift her bag; the little skirt may as well have given up and gone home. Sally’s white buttocks were totally on display, and a defiant yellow curl of her bare bush brushed against the sharp edge of the table, catching croissant crumbs in its blonde hairs.

  ‘And … you never wear knickers!’

  Sally’s mobile phone trilled as the girls giggled. She flicked it open, listened, then glanced across at the waiter, who was leaning in the doorway of the café, talking on his own mobile. Her tongue slid out again and ran across her wide mouth.

  ‘I’ll see you in Devon,’ she said, winking at Janie and bumping her hip against the chair to shift it out of the way. Sally’s skirt rose higher still. She sauntered through the audience of swivelling heads and drooling mouths towards her waiting admirer.

  Now Sally was hunched, as promised, on one of the deep flowery sofas in the cottage sitting room, books and magazines strewn across the old carpet, rubbing her hands together as if they were sitting in a gale, and blowing into a cup of tea.

  ‘Here, put this on if you’re cold,’ urged Janie, chucking a bulky sweater across the room. ‘I found loads of Ben’s jumpers in the cupboard upstairs.’

  ‘Lovely,’ croaked Sally, before blowing her nose. ‘Let’s have a rummage through his drawers. Such huge, manly jumpers he wears. They smell all soapy and woolly. I expect you were always borrowing them when you were a kid.’

  Fat chance. I was the annoying little distant cousin who wouldn’t go away when he and his ugly friend Jack wanted to play cowboys and Indians. He always said I wasn’t distant enough.’

  ‘Cowboys and Indians, eh? Kinky. Bet they would have used you as the squaw in their game if you’d all had more imagination.’ Sally tilted her chin and threw her arm towards the window. ‘They’d have caught you stalking them and tied you up with your own lassoo to the totem pole. Ah, the ultimate phallic symbol. They’d have erected their great big totem pole right out there, in the garden, hidden from view by that big beech tree so the parents couldn’t see. The pair of them, whooping round you, waving their tomahawks, offering up bloody sacrifices to the gods, then sparing you from execution, untying you and dragging you into the tepee – Big Chief Throbbing Dick and his sidekick Flicking Tongue!’

  ‘You’re so wrong!’ spluttered Janie, laughing at the idiocy of it. ‘Our childhood was all Enid Blyton, not Linda Lovelace.’

  ‘Sod that. Consider the potential.’ Sally kneeled up and waved her arms around to sketch the imaginary scenario. ‘Just think, there you are, bound with your own ropes, being tumbled naked onto the bearskins – at least they’d have had a fire going in the wigwam, unlike this apology of an inglenook.’

  ‘I’ll complain to the management.’

  ‘And then both of them are crouching over your supple young body, one starting at your head and one starting at your feet. They are new to this, as well, and they’re taking it in turns: exploring you, working on you with their hands and mouths then, using teeth and tongues, groping every inch of you, stroking your skin, nibbling slowly up your thighs –’

  ‘Still thinking of roasting me in the pot?’ asked Janie.

  ‘Silly! And all the while you’re squirming and wriggling away on the bearskin, struggling to keep your legs crossed to hide what little modesty you have left, yet at the same time you’re straining to be free of the leather cords.’

  ‘Stop!’ Janie threw a magazine at Sally. She was blushing at the vivid picture: the two boys and her, tangled up together inside the secret wigwam. ‘Nothing like that ever happened.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t want the fantasy, I’ll keep it for myself.’ Sally sniffed.

  ‘It’s just that we were scrawny kids. The boys were far more interested in drawing blood from each other than using me as some kind of sex toy. Thank God neither of them knew what a desperate crush I had on them both.’

  Janie moved round to the fireplace and stared at her reflection, indistinct in the enormous tarnished mirror. She twisted long strands of hair into two plaits and stood up straight.

  ‘What good’s a crush when nothing comes of it, Mini Ha-Ha?’ remarked Sally. ‘You have to pounce on men you fancy; at least let them know you’ve got the hots for them. That’s what I do. It’s what comes of having no one to play with when you’re little. But you’ve never been a brazen slut like me, have you? You look just the part now, all tall and solemn, with that dark-red hair, the way your eyes slant up at the corners. All we need is the feather headdress, the buffalo-skin tunic –’

  ‘You can laugh,’ said Janie, trying to bring Sally back down to earth. ‘Dressing up may be our only entertainment until we can get the TV fixed. Now, get off your arse and help me look.’

  Sally made a face and had an exaggerated fit of coughing. ‘Look for what?’ she asked.

  ‘Logs, electric heaters, Monopoly, a pack of cards –’

  ‘Vibrators?’

  ‘Like an eligible single man would have vibrators in his weekend retreat!’

  ‘You’re always very defensive about him, aren’t you?’ sniffed Sally, hobbling to her feet like an old lady. ‘Won’t hear a word against him.’

  ‘I’m just saying, about the vibrators –’

  ‘Don’t tell me, he’s a walking, talking vibrator! So well hung his girlfriends would have no need of any … aids for their pleasure.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about his love life,’ Janie said primly. ‘We used to see each other a lot, when all the rellies used to troop down here to visit his family in their holiday home, but now it’s usually by phone or email. I haven’t seen him for ages.’

  Janie wandered out into the chilly hall and yanked open the cupboard under the stairs.

  ‘But he’s happy to let you come here while he’s away?’ said Sally as she followed her friend and crouched next to her.

  ‘Yes, keeps it occupied, and anyway, look at the place: it needs more than just a lick of paint. He can’t have touched it in ten years. I had a good snoop round before you got here. It needs complete redecoration.’

  ‘Not going to be much fun for me if you’re slaving away over a hot paintbrush all holiday.’

  ‘I told you, you’re to relax. In any case, I won’t be able to do the whole thing. Not on my own, anyway. I’ll have to talk to him about getting some builders in.’

  Sally pushed Janie aside and burrowed into the cupboard.

  ‘Look at all this!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s like something out of a Noel Coward play: tennis racquets, croquet hoops, parasols. What’s this contraption?’

  A pile of metal poles and rods clattered out of a bag.

  ‘I think it’s a swing-seat for the garden,’ Janie said, pushing it all back in the bag. ‘You’d think from this stuff that the sun always shines down here.’

  Sally wandered down the hall and into another little room at the back of the house.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she called. ‘He’s got a neat little office set-u
p here. You could spend all winter in this place, holed up with plenty of food and booze, working away on some big business deal or writing a book.’

  ‘Ben never sits still, though,’ said Janie, joining her friend who was busy snooping round the office space. ‘I’m surprised to see all these computers and stuff. I don’t think he’s here more than two or three times a year.’

  ‘He might be your hero, Mini Ha-Ha, but there must be loads you don’t know about him. Perhaps he runs some kind of racket from here, far away from the prying eyes of Interpol or the Inland Revenue.’

  Janie shut the cupboard door and brushed cobwebs out of her hair. ‘You’re right, there is loads I don’t know. I don’t even really know what he looks like these days.’

  ‘What happened to his ugly mate?’ asked Sally, as she climbed the stairs with her bag.

  ‘Jack? Haven’t a clue. I last saw him crouching halfway up the cliffs, shooting at seagulls and narrowly missing my head. We must have been about fifteen. Oi!’

  Janie spotted Sally on the landing, and bounded up the stairs, two at a time, to catch her.

  ‘Bags I the master bedroom.’ Sally giggled and pushed her shoulder against the first bedroom door.

  ‘Too late.’ Janie barred the way into Ben’s bedroom. ‘I’m in here. I’m likely to be here all summer if he wants me to blitz the house, so I get first choice.’

  ‘But I’m supposed to be your guest.’

  ‘Your room is very sweet. Look.’

  They trooped into the smaller bedroom, which had a bowed wooden floor and a vast Victorian brass bed covered in lace cushions.

  ‘It’s cute: a real love nest. But who chose the décor, his mum?’

  They both looked round. The muslin curtains wafted gently in the draught. Outside was a tiny balcony.

  ‘Very likely. Or his sister. I guess she still comes here sometimes. It’s not very masculine in here, I admit.’

  ‘Perhaps he puts his girlfriends in here, and visits them for a shag late at night.’