Mistress of the Game

by Sidney Sheldon

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thomas, but I’m afraid I couldn’t finish my assignment this week. I’ve been having terrible nightmares. Flashbacks about my ordeal.”

  Lexi’s big gray eyes welled with tears. Rachel thought: She’s a fine little actress, this one. She’s got them all fooled.

  Christian liked ditzy? Lexi would give him ditzy.

  Right along with this stupid-ass virginity burning a hole in my panties.

  Lexi was convinced she must be the oldest virgin at Exeter, if not in the whole of America. It was conceivable she was the oldest virgin in the world. Apart from nuns, obviously. And really ugly people like her aunt Eve.

  Deep down she was afraid that what happened to her as a child might have spoiled her for sex. She still had nightmares about the pig. Is that the real reason I’ve been saving myself for Christian? Did I pick someone I knew was unobtainable because I was too scared to “do it”?

  Whatever her true motivations, the wait was now officially over. Tonight was the night.

  As the party drew nearer, Lexi’s nerves started to get the better of her.

  What if he only likes girls with experience? I guess I’ll have to fake that, too.

  Sometimes Lexi worried that she pretended so much she’d forgotten who she really was inside.

  Maybe I want to forget?

  “Oh, Max. Max! Don’t stop! Please don’t stop! I’m coming!”

  Max Webster looked down at the girl writhing beneath him and felt ineffably bored. Her name was Sasha Harvey-Newton. Her father owned shipyards. Her mother’s father owned oil fields. She was eighteen years old, stunningly beautiful and sickeningly rich. She was widely considered to be one of New York’s most eligible young heiresses.

  She was also a nymphomaniac.

  “Harder, baby! Harder!”

  Sasha Harvey-Newton arched her eligible, $20-million back for Max’s benefit and let out a whoop of ecstasy.

  “Shut up.” Max put his hand over her mouth. She started sucking his fingers, and he fought back a powerful urge to ram them down her stupid, vacuous throat. Instead he forced her head down onto the pillow, muting her moans.

  “Hey. What’d you do that for?”

  Sasha looked up at him, her face flushed an unattractive strawberry red.

  “You were making too much noise. What if your mom heard us?”

  “What if she did? You know how many times I’ve had to listen to her and the tennis coach going at it? My mom’s a whore.”

  Max watched Sasha get dressed, pulling on a pair of skintight jeans with no panties, and without bothering to wash first.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  Sasha smiled. “So. Does this mean I’m your date for your birthday party next weekend? I’ve always wanted to see Cedar Hill House.”

  Max wrinkled his nose in distaste.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” The smile was gone.

  “I mean no. I realize it’s probably not a word you hear very often. But we’re already at maximum capacity for the party, I’m afraid. Our security people have insisted, no more guests.”

  “Your security people?” Sasha snarled. “Who do you think you are? The president? It’s a sixteenth birthday party, not a U.N. Security Council meeting. Uninvite someone if you have to.”

  “Ah, but I don’t have to,” said Max. “You got what you wanted, Sasha. I’ll see myself out.”

  Walking back to Park Avenue, Max reflected on his afternoon’s activities. He had not enjoyed the sex with Sasha Harvey-Newton, and he wondered why he’d agreed to go to bed with her in the first place. So he could boast about it? She was considered a good catch, after all. But to whom would he boast? It wasn’t as if he had a bunch of male buddies whom he tried to impress. Max Webster needed approval from one person and one person only. His mother wouldn’t give a damn that he’d wasted half a day balling some half-witted rich bitch who didn’t even turn him on.

  That’s the problem. None of them turn me on. None of them can hold a candle to Eve.

  Max loathed parties. He had only agreed to the joint birthday with Lexi because his mother asked him.

  “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, my darling.” That was Eve’s motto, at least where Lexi was concerned. She was always pushing the two of them together. “There will be a lot of important people at Cedar Hill House that weekend. Kruger-Brent board members, all the major shareholders and business heads. You can’t afford to let Lexi look like the star of the show.”

  There wasn’t much danger of that. No one at Kruger-Brent took Lexi seriously. Not anymore. But, technically speaking, under the terms of Kate Blackwell’s will, she still stood a chance of being appointed chairman when she turned twenty-five. Until he, Max, was safely sitting in the chairman’s seat, he couldn’t afford to get complacent.

  Max’s old familiar hatred of his cousin had taken a disturbing twist recently. Overnight, it seemed, Lexi had transformed into a sensuous, desirable woman. What made it worse, and more confusing, was that she was starting to look more and more like a young version of Eve. Lexi’s mother, Alexandra, had been Eve’s identical twin, after all, so perhaps it was inevitable that the likeness would be striking. Still, Max found this genetic irony upsetting. In fact, he found everything about his cousin Lexi upsetting.

  The paparazzi had always loved her: the brave, beautiful Blackwell baby, the plucky kidnapping survivor. Eve had once contemptuously described her niece as “America’s favorite cripple” and she wasn’t far wrong. Now, thanks to Lexi’s butterflylike emergence as a society belle, media interest in her life seemed to have quintupled. She was no longer the Blackwell Baby, but the Blackwell Bombshell. Everyone wanted a piece of her.

  She loves every second of it, too, Max thought bitterly. Last Christmas, when they’d briefly worked together at Kruger-Brent, he had sensed Lexi silently watching him. As if she were trying to catch him lusting after her, the way that everybody else seemed to.

  Forget it. Not me.

  Why can’t you just disappear? Go to deaf school, marry some other special-ed retard and get the hell out of my life?

  Sasha Harvey-Newton didn’t know how lucky she was to be missing Max’s birthday party. He heartily wished he could have missed it himself.

  “Quite a spread, isn’t it?”

  Tristram Harwood, head of Kruger-Brent’s oil and gas division, was talking to Logan Marshall, who ran the mining businesses.

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

  Neither of them had been to the Blackwells’ Dark Harbor compound since Kate Blackwell’s funeral almost seventeen years ago. It was wonderful to see the old house bursting with life and vitality again. Everywhere you turned, America’s impossibly beautiful, privileged youth were laughing and talking and dancing with one another while their parents looked on, the mothers dripping diamonds while they gossiped, the fathers grumbling about the latest plunge in the Dow Jones and the new fortunes to be made on the Internet.

  Cedar Hill House itself had barely changed since Kate’s day. The same Vlaminck floral canvas hung over the fireplace in the living room. Even the rose-and-green-chintz sofas remained, providing a lingering touch of femininity to what was now a man’s home. Peter Templeton had inherited the estate upon Alexandra’s death, but for years he had found the house too full of painful memories and rarely visited it. After Lexi’s ordeal, however, he’d brought her to Maine to recuperate. Slowly, summer by summer, Cedar Hill House had been allowed to live again.

  “Ah, there he is. The birthday boy. I suppose we should go and tug our forelocks, get it over and done with?”

  Logan Marshall followed Tristram Harwood’s gaze. Max was on the veranda, surrounded by a gaggle of admiring teenage girls. In a Ralph Lauren suit and Choate tie, on the surface he looked the epitome of a preppy young gentleman. But neither the clothes nor the old-money, East Coast setting could completely conceal Max’s feral nature. He reminded Tristram Harwood of a jungle savage whom some misgui
ded anthropologist had “rescued” and dragged, kicking and screaming, into the civilized world. As if he might at any moment start tearing off his Brooks Brothers shirt with his teeth.

  “Happy birthday, young man. I trust you’re enjoying the party?”

  Max turned around. He wiped the bored expression off his face and greeted the two Kruger-Brent board members warmly. He knew that his mother would be watching.

  “Of course. My uncle’s gone to a tremendous effort. And you, are you both well?”

  Tristram Harwood nodded. “Very well. Business is booming.”

  For a sixteen-year-old, the boy sure had an adult way of expressing himself. Such maturity. Such poise. Everyone at the firm knew that Kate Blackwell’s will favored Alexandra’s offspring over Eve’s. But when the time came to vote for a new chairman, all board members would be consulted. If they unanimously voted for Max, it would be difficult for the family to ignore their position. And really, how would a deaf woman ever manage to run one of the biggest multinationals in the world? The very idea was laughable.

  Eve watched her son schmoozing with Harwood and Marshall and smiled contentedly. She was seated alone in a corner of the living room, next to the French doors that opened onto the veranda. In a full-length black shift, with an exquisitely hand-painted Venetian mask covering her ravaged face, she sat as still and unnoticed as a black widow spider while the party ebbed and flowed around her.

  Good boy. Reel them in.

  Tristram Harwood had always been a shameless opportunist. Years ago, he’d tried to seduce Eve on almost the exact same spot where he now stood sucking up to her son. Eve had toyed with him a little, until her grandmother stepped in.

  “He’s a married man, Eve, and a vital asset to the company. Leave him bloody well alone!”

  Stupid old bitch. As if she, Eve Blackwell, would be interested in a lowly, chinless drone like Tristram Harwood!

  Just then, Lexi appeared on the veranda. She had run up from the bottom of the lawn, followed by a ravishing boy. Her flawless cheeks were flushed from laughter and exertion. Eve felt her heart tighten and a ball of hatred swell in her chest. It was like looking in a twenty-five-year-old mirror.

  She looks exactly like me. She’s stolen my beauty. My youth. My power. Everything that was taken from me has been given to that cripple. Alex’s spawn.

  “Holy moly,” Logan Marshall whispered to Tristram Harwood. “Somebody’s grown up fast.”

  Max looked on as both men turned to admire his cousin. Lexi was indeed looking stunning. The dress his uncle Peter had bought her clung to her teenage body like shrink-wrap. Her hair, worn up for once and held loosely in place with a vintage diamond-encrusted comb that had once belonged to Kate Blackwell, was escaping in sexy tendrils around her beautiful face. Max felt the beginnings of an erection.

  I hate her.

  Just then, a loud crash from the boathouse caught everyone’s attention.

  “What the hell was that?”

  A skinny, blond man with incredibly long legs and a long-lens camera slung around his neck was limping toward the harbor. Judging from the hole in the boathouse roof and the debris scattered across the grass, he must have been hiding behind one of the gables and somehow lost his footing.

  “Get security!” A grim-faced Peter Templeton emerged from inside. “Someone go after that guy.”

  “Don’t worry, Daddy,” said Lexi as Danny Corretti hurled himself into a waiting motorboat and roared off into the night. “It’s only paparazzi. I’m used to them.”

  “Yes, well. You shouldn’t have to be used to them,” said Peter. To Tristram Harwood he added: “These lowlifes follow my daughter around like a pack of hyenas. It’s a disgrace.”

  Max’s eyes were glued to Lexi.

  A disgrace? Bullshit. She’s loving every second of it.

  A liveried butler emerged from the living room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. Dinner is served.”

  Robbie sat next to his godfather, Barney Hunt.

  Barney asked: “So, are you going to play for us tonight? A live performance from the great Robert Templeton?”

  Robbie spooned another meltingly good piece of Black Forest chocolate cake into his mouth and shook his head firmly.

  “Uh-uh. No way. I’m off duty. Anyway, Dad hasn’t asked me. He’s got the entire evening choreographed down to a tee. I wouldn’t want to upset him any more than I do already. You know, by existing.”

  It was said in jest, but Barney Hunt picked up the undertone of sadness.

  “Come on. Your father loves you. He just…”

  “…wishes I weren’t gay. I know.”

  Lisa Babbington, one of Lexi’s most beautiful girlfriends, caught Robbie’s eye and winked at him lasciviously from two tables away. Clearly, the boy sitting beside her, Grady Jones, was failing to float her boat.

  “Looks like your dad isn’t the only one.” Barney laughed. “Have you had much time alone with your sister yet?”

  Robbie looked frustrated. “No. Every time I get near her, she’s being whisked off to dance or for photographs. I have to fly back to Paris in the morning, but I can’t seem to pin her down.”

  Barney glanced over at the top table. Lexi’s place was empty.

  “Hmm. I see what you mean.”

  On the floor of the boathouse, Lexi lay beneath Christian Harle trying not to feel disappointed.

  Is this it? Is this really what I waited two whole years for?

  She’d expected…what had she expected, exactly? Pain. That’s what all the books said. A sharp pain, followed by something momentous, some life-changing, mind-altering feeling of bliss that she would remember for the rest of her life. This was Christian Harle, after all. Christian Harle! The biggest catch in Exeter, the boy who had filled Lexi’s days and consumed her nights since she was fourteen years old.

  After Lexi’s kidnapping, the psychiatrists had told Peter that the trauma of sexual abuse would stay with her forever. “She may marry. She may have children. But it’s unrealistic to expect her sexual relationships to develop normally.” Once again, however, they had underestimated Lexi’s willpower.

  She would enjoy sex.

  She must.

  She would not give the pig another victory.

  So why was sleeping with Christian such a terrible letdown?

  Still inside her, Christian propped himself up on his forearms so Lexi could read his lips. Sweat was dripping from his forehead. His cheeks were flushed beet red. He did not look his best.

  “Is that good, baby?”

  Dear God. Is he talking to me? What is this, twenty questions? Why isn’t the earth moving?

  Lexi nodded, pulling him back down on top of her. She wriggled around, the way she’d seem Pamela Anderson do it with Tommy Lee on the Internet, and tried to breathe more heavily. Christian had clearly learned his technique from a different sex tape. He started doing some sort of strange, circular motion inside her, like someone vacuuming the interior of a car and wanting to make sure he got his nozzle into every nook and cranny.

  At least he’s thorough. Thoroughness is an underrated attribute in a man. One can never be too thorough, that’s what my old nanny used to say. I wonder how Mrs. Carter’s doing these days?

  Above Christian’s head was the hole in the roof where the paparazzo had fallen earlier.

  Poor man. I hope he’s okay.

  Lexi stared up at the stars. She felt the muscles in Christian’s butt and stomach tighten, then relax. The warm wetness between her legs gave her a brief feeling of triumph. Good-bye, virginity! I won’t miss you. A few seconds later, the warm glow faded. Lexi started shaking.

  “What’s the matter?” Christian panted. “Hey, are you okay?”

  He was looking at her, talking to her. But Lexi couldn’t read his lips or see the concern on his face. All she saw was a pig mask.

  One word and I’ll slit your throat.

  She screamed.

  Christian Harle started to panic. Lexi�
��s cries were unearthly and getting louder. She wouldn’t stop screaming.

  What’s wrong with her? One minute she’s all over me, squirming around like a fish on a hook. The next she’s acting like I raped her.

  “Stop it, Lex. Please! Someone’ll hear.”

  Not knowing what else to do, he slapped Lexi hard across the face.

  Miraculously, it worked. The screams stopped. Lexi watched, dazed, as the pig mask faded away. She found herself looking deeply into Christian Harle’s terrified eyes.

  You’re just a boy. A kid. You’re as lost and scared as I am.

  What did I ever see in you?

  She got to her feet, silently straightened her dress, and walked back to the house.

  Peter looked worried. “Where have you been? Rachel says you went off to the ladies’ room and never came back.”

  Lexi signed angrily: “I went for a walk. I needed some air, that’s all. Rachel worries too much.”

  “Yes, well. The dancing’s about to start. I thought it’d be nice if you and Max kicked things off.”

  Lexi looked at him incredulously. “Me and Max?”

  “You are the joint hosts, after all.”

  “He’s a freak.”

  “Lexi, come on now. He’s your cousin.”

  “No. No way. Why can’t I dance with Robbie? He’s my brother.”

  Not for the first time, Peter was glad that so few people understood sign language. Lexi could be incredibly rude when she wanted to be, not to mention stubborn. He tried to make excuses for her. Her deafness must be horribly frustrating. Even so, it embarrassed him at times.

  “Robbie’s playing piano. Uncle Barney roped him into it. Look, Max is coming over now. I’m warning you, Lexi, don’t make a scene.”

  So many bodies in a confined space had made the house stiflingly hot. Max had removed his tie and jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. With his tanned skin and jet-black hair, he reminded Lexi of a pirate.

  All he needs is the cutlass between his teeth.