by Thea Devine
Georgie shaded her eyes. But it was really just an excuse to catch a glimpse of Charles. Oh fine, and what did she think that would tell her?
"They're almost done."
"And it's almost noon and it will be too hot to play."
It was hot, but that might have been the wash of heat she felt, as if she had failed somehow last night. One thing she hadn't done was return to her mother's house before morning. She'd hidden out in the club, curled up in one of the banquettes in the bar, and it had saved all the awful questions and embarrassment of admitting she had failed with Charles Elliott once again.
There were no questions at all as she crept in that morning dressed in Charles's thoroughly wrinkled shirt. No comments. No requests for a report.
The evidence was clear: she had spent the night. He had ravaged her gown and given her something to cover her nudity. Just the way every gentleman was expected to respond.
Charles was proved a right one, and so he qualified to stay on in the Valley.
The deceits. The lies.
"Put on your hat, Georgie." This from Olivia from under the depths of her wide-brimmed straw.
But then she couldn't see him, couldn't watch him as he leaped onto his mount, and rode at breakneck speed down the course and toward the goal. Couldn't admire the flexing of his thighs, the control of his horse, the steel in his body—
What was she thinking? That somehow the degradation of the previous night would be wiped away by day? That her cheers would encourage him to change his mind? That he'd come to his senses and somehow make it known to her that yes, he'd been a fool not to fuck her when he'd had the chance?
She jammed her hat on her head. He was a fool, and he knew nothing about what he had gotten into here, or what was expected of him. So if it wasn't her, it would be someone else, but sometime during his sojourn here, he would have to spend his cream.
She couldn't bear to think of it... that thick heavy penis pumping into someone else ... not her ... damn it, the man was a hammerhead, and she was wasting her time.
She felt a presence behind her and turned. Lydia, an umbrella in hand, said, "Oh. Georgie."
"Welcome to polo, Lydia. Isn't it fun? According to Mother all that hard riding does not drain the juice from the plum."
"They're addicted to hard riding no matter what form it takes," Olivia said acidly. "And balls. They could be doing more interesting things with their balls ..."
"Feeling like a little goose and duck, Sister dear?"
"Always, Sister dear."
"That Charles person . . . quite stunning. How is he in bed, Georgie?"
Georgie cringed. Of course everyone knew. Even Lydia who seemed to be in her own world sometimes. "Like nothing you could ever imagine," she murmured, which waffled over the truth, without telling an outright lie.
"I expect everyone will want to take him on then," Lydia said. "Is his dance card full yet?"
"Oh, he's a particular one," Olivia intervened before Georgie could answer. "Moreton made the choice, so stop salivating."
"I wondered about that. And I'm not salivating. He's far too young for me, and definitely not the kind of bangtail I prefer."
"Darling, he's a pacer if ever there was one. I'd ride him to a lather if I had the chance ..." Olivia's sleek head followed his movement as he raced down the field. "Look at those legs, those loins ... the way he moves—"
Lydia was looking. Lydia looked horrified, but Olivia wasn't paying attention to her. But Georgie was. She touched Lydia's arm. "Lydia?"
Lydia looked faint. She shook herself. "I'm all right, Georgie dear. Just a touch of the sun, I think."
Just a touch of hallucination, rather. It cannot be; it just cannot. They were all dead, all of them. 1 haven't felt a moment of regret for that, not even for my son.
Well, maybe for him.
But they were savages, after all. Barely civilized. Tellal Ali Bakhtoum had been the best of the lot. And even he— raising his son to follow in his footsteps, his nomadic barbarian life...
I don't want to remember the rest ...
Besides, the stranger's name was Charles, Charles El-liott, as English a name as there was. And he was from Argentina. He had a ranch. He raised polo ponies and came highly recommended.
Moreton would never let anyone into the Valley who hadn't come highly recommended. Who wasn't willing to play their games.
He'd been willing. Hadn't Georgie said so?
So there. I am imagining things.
Maybe.
It was the way he handled his mount: the line of his body, the hard line of his chin and cheek ...
She turned away from Georgie, turned away from the sight of him, had purposefully stayed away from him these past few days apart from at dinner. But of course, formally dressed and with the veneer of manners, his hair slicked back, and his skin bronzed from the morning's play, he looked and sounded nothing like the desert brigands from whom she had escaped.
It was on horseback where the ferocity of his nature was defined by the game that she saw it. With the sweat pouring off his face, his eyes shaded by the helmet, his arms flexing, and his legs controlling the every movement of his mount, it was then she saw the truth about the man—and she felt a tremor of fear.
It could not be. It would not be. Everyone was dead. Everyone. Moreton had made sure of it.
She felt cold as stone. She couldn't move. She had to know; she was utterly terrified to know.
She waited with Georgia and Olivia as the game came to a thunderous conclusion and the players rode along the fence to accept the congratulations of the onlookers.
Only Charles hung back, to remove his helmet and wipe his face.
And his gaze locked with Lydia's, his eyes dark as the devil's, hard, judgmental, unforgiving.
No, No! She would not acknowledge the possibility. It was the only way. Never give him leverage. Never let him see her fear. Cut him dead whoever he was. If she had the courage to do it.
She had to. It was the only way.
She held those eyes for a long cold minute, held her breath to calm the furious pounding of her heart, and then lifting her chin, she disdainfully turned away.
It wasn't even for Olivia to know. Olivia had her own secrets, after all. But Moreton—she had to tell Moreton. Moreton would think she was crazy. That was the thing. He wouldn't believe that after all these years the boy could be alive, could have transformed himself into a vengeful adult. Not after all these years. And so many thousands of miles away.
But Lydia knew: She'd read death in those glitteringly opaque eyes. He'd searched the world for her; he'd sworn to avenge his father's death. It was the way of his people. And somehow he, of all of them, had survived, had hunted her down, and would make her account for her sins.
She felt like death already. Instantly she understood why she had been so removed from everything in the Valley. There was no bliss for a woman who had tacitly conspired in the murder of her family. No life for one who counted her comfort above her commitments. No way to outrun a past that had never had a future.
Her son. Dear God. She hadn't said or thought those words in so many years. He was dead; he'd been mourned. But she'd never missed him, because, in the end, had she remained with his father, he never would have been hers anyway.
And she knew she was unnatural, thinking like that, dead herself after she countenanced all that Moreton had done in the name of delivering her from the heathen.
Who was the heathen now?
She had to find Moreton now, to tell him that a viper had invaded Eden.
Chapter Five
He told her she was imagining things. He told her the boy had died; he was certain of it. But he didn't tell her why: that he had made sure of it himself, so that there would be no witnesses, no evidence. So this Charles Elliott, whoever he was with his exotic dark looks, his ever-so-English name, and his precise clipped accent, couldn't possibly be the boy.
"What if he's the boy?"
<
br /> He was in bed with Olivia after a very strenuous coupling, and they were side by side, staring at the ceiling.
The boy had invaded the bedroom. But this was the first time Moreton had mentioned him because he had been weighing the consequences and ramifications of Bakh-toum's only son and heir turning up in Bliss River Valley.
Especially in light of his unexpected yearning to go back to England. Especially since he had been thinking for a while now that Lydia had quite outlived her usefulness.
And here came her long-lost son, obviously bent on revenge. He could not have shown up at a more opportune time.
What could be better? He could use that. He had a list of grievances against Lydia pages long, not least that he had always suspected she'd withheld some of the jewels from him. The jewels of Ali Bakhtoum, the riches of the desert that Lydia had disingenuously tempted him with in her desperate letter begging for salvation from the heathen sun.
Why else would he have taken such a risk? He'd rescued her for the jewels, he'd appropriated the jewels, and he'd always had the feeling that she'd withheld something. But he'd never been able to find anything, not for want of searching, and he'd had to raise money for the entertainments of the Valley in other ways once that initial stash had run out.
And that was the other thing: somehow he had become the director of amusements in the Valley. People got bored too easily; once they signed on, they expected too much, and even unfettered sex was not enough to keep them amused. A man could only get it up so many times a day, after all.
As he had good reason to know.
Damn, but he was tired.
And now the boy—
He pondered it some more, not wanting to jump on his first thought. But it was a bolt of inspiration; it was a fait accompli the moment he conceived of it.
God, he had a black soul. And he didn't care. What was life but a tightrope walk to put yourself in the best position possible when you had little or nothing in your pocket.
Look at what he'd accomplished. He'd made real the wet dream of every horny man: an isolated society of sex-crazed voluptuaries who wanted nothing more than to spend every moment of their lives fucking.
That was an accomplishment, one for which he would never get credit in the history books.
No matter.
The reign of every king eventually came to an end. And rather than wait for the assassination, he would step in the line of fire.
"If it's the boy ..." he said tentatively.
"It's not a boy," Olivia said sharply. "It's a grown man, vetted by the right people for the right reasons. Lydia is hysterical. Or feeling guilty. Or something."
"But if it is the boy ... think—"
"I thought the point was never to think."
"Olivia, I beg you. Mind your serpent tongue for a moment, and think—Aling. England. You and me. The brothel. The money." He waited a moment while she absorbed that. And then: "The boy is the solution to the problem of Lydia..."
"What—How—? Oh!" Light dawned. And then a moment's hesitation: "Oh ... my sister?" Weighing every angle now, seeing every side, particularly hers, and the price she would pay to have a future with Moreton.
And then she shrugged. "You unconscionable son of a bitch."
"Do you care?" he asked carefully, stroking that part of her body that was already hot with need.
"Not when you do that," she purred. "When you do that, the whole world can go to hell for all I care. Including Lydia. I will leave it, as I leave everything, in your capable hands..."
The lies. The deceit. Her mother never questioned it when she left the bungalow that evening. Olivia just assumed—they all assumed—that she would be with the guest, the stranger.
She ought to go to Lydia's, Georgie thought. She ought to find out just what made Lydia look like a ghost this afternoon. The problem was, they were all too entangled.
They had absolutely no recourse for any problem that came up. It was Moreton's fantasy, Moreton's creation, Moreton's rules.
If you wanted to play in Moreton's world, then you allowed Moreton to be your judge and jury.
And they all wanted to play, even poor Lydia who'd been gullible enough to marry him. Why? Or were the reasons of no moment to the freedom of the Valley?
Georgie felt a supreme desperation to find a way out. There had to be a way out, and she had resigned herself to the fact it wasn't going to be Charles Elliott.
God, she had so hoped ...
Even so, she left her mother as if she were going to spend the evening with him.
She'd deliberately timed it. The promenade was over; they were all paired off. A whole group was on its way to a farm for a long weekend of debauchery, drunk on lust and whiskey. They were already fornicating in the lorry as they drove down the track out of the village, their laughter and shrieks trailing like a comet.
Was there ever a place like this?
This, she'd been taught, was the norm; that was how Moreton had sold it to them all those years ago. All that repression and depression with which they'd been raised, trying to constrict themselves into suppressing their perfectly natural needs—that was abnormal.
And Bliss River Valley was the answer, a place where man, woman, child, could be totally, naturally, as God made them, free.
Only they weren't free. They had no more freedom than any society; there were rules and strictures here, too. Even if the governing precept was feel free to lie with anyone. You made your bed and then, if anyone had any reservations about it, if anyone didn't want to, he or she was censured, shunned, shamed.
Not one of them.
Moreton's vision. Moreton's Valley. The man was depraved.
She had to get away.
But how many times, for how many years, had she yearned for that, tried to plan for that, only to wind up exactly where she had always been?
Well, she was older now, more self-sufficient, more aware of the yawning future that awaited her as a vessel of lust in the Valley.
Her own mother had sold both their souls for that— And her own father had self-righteously determined she could not be redeemed.
Maybe she couldn't. Charles Elliott made her feel as if she were branded, as if she were the spawn of something vile, born in Eden, destined to die in the Garden, forever in service to any man's lubricious desires.
Not tonight. She would spend the night on the banquette in the club. No one would ever know, if Charles Elliott didn't tell them. And he wouldn't tell them. He hated this more than she did. He wouldn't last more than another few days in the Valley as it was. Her secret would be safe.
Unless they found him out.
Her jab about saving him, saving them, had hit a nerve.
It just wasn't enough to save her.
So now Lydia had really looked at him, and now she knew. And had probably told Moreton, and between the two of them, they'd probably murder him where he slept.
Moreton wasn't above anything, as Charles had good cause to know.
Hadn't Moreton sent him the queen? By the sacred heavens, the queen. He couldn't get her out of his mind, couldn't push away his insidious craving for her by sheer force of will.
The naked queen, flaunting her body with a fluid certainty that every man wanted her. That he wanted her.
So right. Yes, he wanted her. Yes, he could have rutted like every other goat in the Valley. Yes, yes, yes. He could have treated her like the whore she was. And he should have, since everything in the Valley was for the taking.
She belonged to them all. That body, those breasts belonged to every man in the Valley. And for all he knew, every man in the Valley had spread those legs and shot his seed into her. For all he knew, they had all suckled those luscious breasts, fondled her silky skin, and buried themselves so deep and hard inside her that she couldn't tell one from the other and didn't care.
That was the kind of woman she was.
Regal as a queen, dirty as a pig.
Ah
Moreton, you are a worthy adversary. And now that Lydia knows, I wonder what you'll do... The queen won't distract me, you know. But I don't think she told you that. I don't think she told you anything about her abortive seduction; about how she came to me, naked, about how she stroked and played with me, and about how I refused to root myself between her legs.
Not that I didn't want to, Moreton. Just this once, I will confess to you: I wanted the queen on her knees, sucking at my vitals. I wanted to spew all over her breasts and rub it into her nipples. I wanted her to eat it and love it,
'You have no idea, old man, how hard I had to control myself to keep from just mindlessly ramming myself into the queen's parlor. She was an excellent choice, old man, more than you knew.
But it's not going to stop anything. Lydia's fate was written in time, blood for blood, blow for blow. I'd kill the whole colony for vengeance's sake, but I swore only this one reprisal, and so it shall be.
On the blood of my father, my father's brother, and on my father's son, I now take my mother's life into my hands...
She could outrun nothing in the Valley. That was her fate. Even after concealing herself behind the bar at the Nandina Club until the last patron left, even when she thought herself safe under the reassuring cover of darkness as she settled herself into a far corner of the dining room where no one could find her, she still couldn't hide.
Someone bumped into the table, someone tripped over her ankle. A light flared in her eyes, blinding her.
"Georgie—is that you? I thought—"
Never ever safe. Never ever alone. Never to escape ...
She leaped off the banquette and ran.
"Moreton!... Georgie's back ... I just heard the door latch—just the faintest click; she doesn't want us to know."
"Perfect. Let her get settled, my dear. I don't want her to know we're awake.... I can't believe our good fortune. I couldn't have planned it better if I tried. I never thought the moment would come so soon. Shhhh—it's almost time to go..."
Moving surefootedly in the darkness was second nature to him. The night held no fear. He knew every trick of using it to his advantage, no more so than now when the streets were empty and ghosts walked the shadows.
