‘Thought it was you,’ said Dani. ‘Either that or a very noisy burglar. Bad day at the office, dear?’
‘I fired the chef.’ Venny dumped her bag on the hall table.
‘Excuse me?’ Dani half-turned and giggled as if someone had goosed her from behind. Shania was turned up again. ‘Why?’ she shouted, turning back to Venny.
‘Because he’s a lousy chef; because he’s got an attitude problem,’ said Venny. ‘And he wanted to form a partnership, can you believe it? Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.’
Dani cast about for something to cheer Venny up. Almost immediately, she found it. ‘Hey.’ Dani’s chocolate-brown eyes shone with delight in her sharply defined little face. ‘There’s a flat-warming bash next door on Tuesday. It’s going to be a vampires and virgins theme party. You coming?’
‘Tuesday?’ Venny echoed dismally. ‘I thought Tuesday was your line-dancing night at the Electric Ballroom?’
‘It is, but I can skip one week.’
Venny shook her head doubtfully. ‘I’ve got Monday to get through first.’
Venny yanked the door shut and walked on along the hall and into the bathroom. Dani shook her head. This was Venny’s other problem – apart from the control-freak thing. She was always so uptight.
Not like her.
Easy come, easy go, that was Dani. Privately schooled and pot-smoking only child of rich parents, she had emerged from a superior education with a lust for life and a cut-glass accent which she had quickly dumbed down. She had grown up with everything being handed to her on a plate – and the plate was silver. She expected things to be cool, and somehow mostly they were.
Dani’s parents had helped finance her mobile catering business. Parties, meetings and receptions. They’d bought her a van. Sometimes when things were tight they even helped with the rent.
And it didn’t stop there.
Because of her parents she was well connected. Because she was well connected she was fully booked, with work coming out of her ears.
But she didn’t have to work. She worked for fun.
She was having fun now.
‘Where was I?’ she asked herself dreamily, closing the kitchen door, tapping her booted foot along to ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’.
She eyed the big circular cake that stood in front of the sink. It was three feet high, and a metre wide at the base. It was pretty, too. Sugar pink scalloped with white. It had taken her a troublesome hour with the tissue paper and stapler to get it looking that good.
‘Surprise!’ she shrieked.
The top of the cake sprang back on a hinged flap.
A blond and naked man with an all-over bottle tan sprang up from the cake and flung his arms apart with a grin. His cock bobbed over the lip of the cake, semi-aroused.
‘Now look,’ Dani tutted. ‘What do I have to do to make this thing stay up?’
‘Strip?’ suggested Jamie.
Which was an appealing suggestion, but Dani knew that once they got going down that road she’d never get all the rest of the work finished.
But still.
Maybe if she just played along.
Whatever, she decided that she wasn’t going to let him put it in, not tonight. She wasn’t even going to let him cop a feel. She was a fun girl, but she had a sort of honour; when you booked a job, you made damned sure you got the thing done to the best of your ability. She had that much in common with Venny.
‘OK, OK.’
Dani peeled her beige top over her scruffy dark hair and stepped out of her floral trousers. She kicked off her boots. She was left wearing a scrap of burgundy silk around her crotch, and Jamie thought she was still overdressed. She had cone-shaped breasts with edible dark-cherry nipples. Jamie was salivating like Pavlov’s dog when the bell went.
‘More?’ he asked.
‘Oh, OK.’ And of course Dani was enjoying this, too; it was making her feel horny as hell in fact. She tossed aside her knickers. The hair on her mound was black against her velvety, white skin. Jamie’s cock reasserted itself.
‘Better,’ she praised, and reached out to fondle his cock thoughtfully. ‘Now, how do we keep this rock-hard on Saturday night when you jump out of the cake at the hen party? I can’t be standing there in the buff then.’
‘You could,’ said Jamie.
‘No, I couldn’t. I know. Keep a men’s magazine and a torch in there with you.’
‘Like what? Motorbike monthly?’
Dani tweaked the tip of his cock.
‘Ow,’ said Jamie.
‘Well take this seriously, will you? Damn! It’s going down again.’
‘Your fault for pinching it,’ accused Jamie.
‘This is the dress rehearsal,’ said Dani sternly. ‘It’s got to be right. God, it’s hot. Drink?’
Jamie nodded. Dani got two tins out of the fridge, popped the pulls and gave him one. Jamie downed the whole tin, tipping his head back and gulping it down like the guy in the Diet Coke ad.
Dani sipped hers and watched him. She liked a bit of rough, and Jamie fitted the bill just fine. Sometimes she wondered if he was just a tiny bit too hot to handle, but still she considered him one of her best discoveries. She’d spotted him months ago when she’d done a dinner for the art college. There she’d been, dishing up the baby pink salmon mousses, the bloody red slices of beef, profiteroles dripping with chocolate and cream, looking prim in her black dress and white apron. More wine, sir? Red or white?
Trying to behave as if she didn’t know damned well she was turning on all those dusty academics like crazy.
And all the time, while they had been eyeballing her, she had been eyeballing the painting of Jamie, stark naked on a blanket.
Instant lust.
She’d quickly found out who he was. He was a Glaswegian and an art student. He was seriously shaggable. He was lowlife and light-fingered. He made weird planet-shaped mobiles to sell, and ice sculptures, which was useful to a busy caterer like Dani. She already had three commissions booked ahead for him: a wedding at Leeds Castle in Kent, a twenty-first at the Oxo Tower, and the Blue Ribbon restaurant awards at the Cranleigh Hotel in Piccadilly.
Jamie was permanently potless, always in need of money.
Well, she had money, and she felt sorry for him, sorry for the raw deal life had pushed his way.
They were both pleased with their arrangement and they sealed it on the first date. She’d fucked him bandy, and he’d been signed onto the payroll.
But Jamie had one big fault – the attention span of a gnat. Oh, he had pluses too, like that humongous cock of his. And he looked good, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, in a waiter’s uniform. Jamie had the good sense to flatter old women, defer to men, flirt discreetly with the babes. So when Jamie was on the team, the tips flowed free and there were lots of happy smiling faces. And he balled the boss hot and strong whenever she wanted it. Which was frequently.
But there was work to do tonight.
Jamie tossed his can into the sink and looked at her.
Come-to-bed grey eyes and tousled streaky blond hair.
The heat and the quiet of the night thrummed as they stood and looked at each other. The rain had eased to a whisper.
Dani was stroking her throat slowly with the moisture-beaded tin.
Finally she put the tin aside.
‘Well, just this once,’ she said, and stepped into the cake with him.
Venny was lying in the bath, her tits half-submerged and sheeny with water and foam, when she heard them. She stuffed the end of the flannel in one ear and a hank of loo paper into the other.
She could still hear them.
Panting, murmuring, bumping and grinding.
Oh, and shrieking.
Why did Dani always have to howl like an Alaskan she-wolf when she was getting laid?
Venny yanked her useless earplugs out, lay further back in the citrus-scented foam, and thought calm thoughts. But before very long work problems started drifting into her c
onsciousness, and then Bill put in an appearance with his wounded puppydog eyes and his big red cock. Before she knew it, her nipples were puckered above the waterline and she was rubbing them with her fingers and feeling hopelessly horny.
She stretched her legs out restlessly beneath the water and her breasts bounced as she moved. Critically she gazed down at them. She had lit candles around the tub before undressing, lavender-scented ones to soothe stress – and oh, boy, did she need that – and the soft warm glow from them highlighted her tits beautifully.
She put her hands under them and lifted them higher, and thought suddenly of Bill’s dark head hovering there, of his hot mouth sucking at her. Restlessly her palms moved over her nipples, scuffing them into heightened sensitivity, and then her fingers tweaked them, pulling them out and onto Bill’s imaginary tongue.
Nice.
The noises from the kitchen were growing frantic. Venny slid her butt down further in the bath and opened her legs. Keeping one hand busy at her tits, she slid the other down between her legs and felt the hungry twitch of sensation there as she touched herself.
She thought of Bill’s body as she rubbed steadily at her clit, making the ultra-sensitive tissues there scream for even more. Dark hair and solid shoulders and cheeky blue eyes.
Wait. Blue eyes?
Bill was changing into someone else. The body-frame was lighter, taller. The eyes – yes, they were blue all right. And the hair was dark, but it was gelled up into spikes. Her ripe and ready pussy was suddenly crammed with a feeling of emptiness, and she pushed two fingers inside the entrance. Wet from the bath and from her own silky juices, she jammed her fingers frantically deeper as the face came into focus.
Oh, this wasn’t Bill.
This was trouble. This was someone she’d seen, someone she vaguely knew, someone who had now elbowed Bill to one side, who had usurped her usual gang-bang line-up of fail-safe film stars, all of whom were guaranteed to make her come hot and hard.
Her questing fingers moved faster, faster. She blanked out the face, made the man back into Bill. But before long, he was back, and she was too creamy, too desperate and too filled with longing to push him back out again.
He was in her. It wasn’t her fingers driving her to a frenzy, it was his cock. She jammed in another finger. He was big. Not, perhaps, as thick as Bill, but certainly big, plenty big enough for her. His teasing smile and impudent eyes were more serious now, because he was intent on her, hovering over her on his elbows, bending now and then to kiss her throat, her breasts, her lips, her shoulders.
Oh, this was good. The bedroom they inhabited in her mind was lit with bronze, slanting afternoon sun, and a soft breeze swept coolingly over their fever-hot bodies from an open window. As the man pushed at her, so Venny’s fingers pushed too, until her fingers and his cock were one and the same, a single pleasure-giving unit.
Venny’s legs flopped wide open. Her eyes closed, and her breath came in shallow pants. She was no longer aware of the sounds from the next room; there was only this, this man whose hips seemed to be boring her into the mattress, hammering her into it like a nail into a wall.
Every time he thrust up into her, her buttocks lifted to meet the thrust, arching her up against him. He murmured filthy words of encouragement in her ear, saying what a greedy little whore she was, how she loved taking his cock inside her, didn’t she? And oh, yes, she did. She had to agree, because if she didn’t he would just keep on fucking her like this forever, however exhausted she became. He would just go on and on humping her.
The thought of that was too much. Venny’s orgasm crashed over her, smashed her back onto the bath – not the bed. Her fingers were crushed by spasms so intense that she let out a brief scream of delight.
Dry-mouthed, and with her heart pounding hard enough to bust straight out of her chest, Venny sank back in the bath and felt the glorious feelings ebb away into faint disappointment. There was nothing better than coming like a train, and nothing worse than the let-down afterwards. Now she was coming down from it, she could hear Dani again, wailing away in there while Jamie pumped. To add to the chorus, she could hear her mobile too, perched on the edge of the sink where she could get to it if she needed to.
Her arm felt weak as wet string, just like the rest of her body, when she stretched out and picked it up. ‘Yes?’
‘Venny?’
Venny started to sit up, slipped, and was momentarily submerged by tangerine foam. She hauled herself up again. Spluttered and coughed. Bill bloody Thompson.
‘What the hell do you want?’ she asked.
‘To give it one more try,’ said Bill, sounding annoyingly humble. ‘Look, a partnership between us would be great, and you know it.’
‘No partnerships,’ said Venny. Jesus! Hadn’t they discussed all this already?
‘What’s that noise?’ asked Bill.
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘It’s a sort of bumping noise.’
‘Nope.’
‘And someone just screamed.’
‘Must be something wrong your end.’
‘There’s nothing wrong my end, Venny. But there’s definitely someone being shagged to death at yours.’
‘My flatmate,’ said Venny coldly. She was not letting this conversation be railroaded into a phone-wank. Her cunt gave a brief pulse of sensation and she squirmed in irritation. Not with Bill, that was for sure.
‘Sounds good,’ said Bill.
‘Well, I expect he’s better than you,’ said Venny cuttingly.
There was a brief, hurt silence. ‘Look, I won’t ask again, Venny,’ said Bill.
‘Look, Bill.’ Venny took a deep breath. ‘I know this is hard to take, but will you do one thing for me?’
‘What?’ Now he sounded hopeful.
‘Piss off.’
‘You know, you really are a bitch,’ he said in a rush. ‘I can’t imagine you peeling vegetables and taking orders and washing up and—’
Venny squinted at the phone. ‘What?’
Of course she was useless at all that. She ran businesses. In fact, the best advice she’d ever been given was from a property developer. He’d told her that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t lay foundations or bricks or put on a ridge tile straight; his job was to hire people who could, pay them, and get paid for organising the whole bang shoot.
It was damned good advice, and she’d followed it.
She intended to go on following it, too.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked Bill.
‘It means I’ve spoken to the rest of your staff, and they’re not.’
‘What?’
‘Your staff.’
‘What?’
‘They’re not your staff anymore. They’re mine. I’m taking them with me.’
‘You childish bastard,’ shouted Venny. In her rage she slipped again and went down like the Titanic.
Chapter Three
On Monday Venny hustled her way across town to get to the bank on time. By some miracle she’d swung an appointment, and lateness was not an option. As she drove, she reviewed the situation. Well, she’d been warned.
Friends in the city had told her that the restaurant business was crazy, that she’d be better off putting her money into stocks and shares. Or stripping redundant manufacturing businesses of their assets. Or running a cathouse. Anything other than what she had done.
She had bought the restaurant. Redecorated it, staffed it, publicised it. Sometime soon she had expected the damned place to start showing a profit so that her current cash flow difficulty would not get out of hand.
But now her problems had got worse, not better.
Bill leaving, and the rest of the staff – the very good staff – with him.
And that might mean that he was going to set up somewhere else, in competition.
She hoped not too close.
Bill wasn’t anyone’s idea of hot competition, but sadly there was such a thing as a flooded market, however impressive –
or unimpressive, in Bill’s case – the competition might be. When a flooded market occurred, you soon discovered there was only so much trade to go around. Even if you were selling a quality product and advertising it to the hilt, there would be a limited number of takers because of all those other restaurants nibbling away at the cake.
Anyway, to hell with Bill.
There were other chefs, other waiters, waitresses, kitchen staff.
At the lights she dipped a hand into the glove compartment and stuffed a fistful of M&M’s into her mouth. Was she comfort eating?
No, she wasn’t.
The loss of Bill Thompson need not impede her ambition to win this year’s Blue Ribbon award. She wouldn’t let it. She ate some more M&M’s and squeezed her nippy little car through the log-jammed traffic in the pouring summer rain. Lots of taxis, buses, four-wheel drives. Chelsea tractors, Dani’s Scots friend Jamie called them. Offroaders stuck in gridlock, not a hill or a farm track in sight. Ridiculous, when you thought about it.
This morning’s meeting would start to put things right.
She had come prepared.
She had all her business projections in her briefcase on the seat beside her.
She had her laptop there too, so that she could discuss her files with the bank manager.
She had put her crinkly blonde hair up so that it looked businesslike. It was already frizzing in the damp air, but was she downhearted? She was wearing a short belted pastel-blue raincoat, with blue velvet gloves and inappropriate but leg-enhancing fuck-me high-heeled strappy sandals in a matching shade of blue.
And nothing else.
Beneath the raincoat, she was naked.
Which felt good.
The raincoat was silk-lined and slipped lightly over her skin as she steered the car, changed gear, applied the brake, the clutch, the accelerator. It slid over her as intimately as a lover’s hand, so that by the time she reached the bank and parked the car she was in a simmering state of sexual readiness.
After Hours: Black Lace Classics Page 3
