Diamond

by Justine Elyot

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Justine Elyot

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Sneak Preview of Fallen

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Jenna Myatt has a famous name but, since splitting with her heart-throb pop star husband, she is desperate to make her own way in the world and buys a crumbling old house in the neighbourhood she grew up in.

  At Holderness Hall she is met with a mysterious man, who only goes by the name of Leonardo. Intrigued – and attracted – by him, Jenna agrees to let him stay as long as he helps her with renovations and fixing up the house.

  There is a strong attraction between them, although he has a massive chip on his shoulder about her wealth and connections. And despite being younger than Jenna, he has a lot to teach her about sexual pleasure...

  About the Author

  Justine Elyot’s kinky take on erotica has been widely anthologised in Black Lace’s themed collections and in the most popular online sites.

  She lives by the sea.

  Also by Justine Elyot:

  On Demand

  Seven Scarlet Tales

  Fallen

  Praise for Justine Elyot

  ‘If you are looking for strings-free erotica, and not for deep romance, On Demand is just the book... Indulgent and titillating, On Demand is like a tonic for your imagination. The writing is witty, the personal and sexual quirks of the characters entertaining’

  Lara Kairos

  ‘Did I mention that every chapter is highly charged with eroticism, BDSM, D/s, and almost every fantasy you can imagine? If you don’t get turned on by at least one of these fantasies, there is no hope for you’

  Manic Readers

  ‘... a rip-roaring, rollercoaster ride of sexual indulgence; eloquently written, at times shocking, and always entertaining’

  Ms Love’s Books

  Chapter One

  In many ways the place hadn’t changed. There were some differences – the high rises were gone, replaced with nests of tiny newbuilds. The pit head was a museum, now, and there was a ring road encircling the town, keeping it in, separate from the old coalmining landscape that had been its life blood, as if to say ‘This isn’t part of you, any more’.

  The signs of modernity were calculated to comfort, but they didn’t do much for Jenna’s mood, and she found herself in uncertain spirits as she parked the car and wandered down the lone, pedestrianised street that made up the ‘town centre’.

  Perhaps this had been a mistake, she thought, looking into the shop windows – those that weren’t boarded up. The only businesses that seemed to be flourishing on this wet Wednesday afternoon were the bookmakers, the pound shops and the glorified pawnbrokers that had sprung up on every corner.

  A big chain pub with a happy hour that lasted until teatime was full and bright, as if its façade of good cheer had sucked everyone off the street and left it empty. She thought about going in and getting a nip of something to keep the shivers off, but there was no guarantee she wouldn’t be recognised, and conversation was the last thing she was after.

  The high street drifted into nothingness: the old covered market was abandoned now, just a shed earmarked for demolition. She stepped under its dark, old awning and tried to remember it the way it was: the smells of overripe fruit and veg, meat and fish all competing to hit the back of her throat the hardest. The little stalls full of knitting wools or costume jewellery or model-making kits. The slow crowds of old ladies in five layers of clothing and kids in tracksuits. And at the centre of it all, Smash Records, where she had spent every Saturday afternoon. Where she had met Deano.

  She made a sharp about-turn and walked swiftly to the end of the street and into the residential area beyond, her umbrella charging before her like a weapon. Densely-packed terraces gave way to more spacious environs, within a ten minute walk, and soon she saw the church tower that confirmed she had taken the right route and was near her destination.

  She decided to walk through the churchyard rather than keep on the straight path. Something about churchyards in pouring rain encouraged contemplative peace, and she was in need of it. Among the lichened stones bearing names of people who had breathed their last centuries before, she stopped and looked up at the sky. Its grey threat was not the best omen for a day on which her life would change.

  But she didn’t believe in things like that. She believed in making your own luck. She had made hers, and now she could afford to buy the house that had fascinated her since childhood. And if she didn’t get a move on, she’d be late to pick up the keys.

  There it stood, just the other side of the churchyard, mostly hidden behind a high yew hedge. The grounds of Harville Hall had been the scene of many a childhood exploration, ever since the owners had abandoned it during the miners’ strike, when she was five. She and the other kids from the estate had used its ever-more-overgrown gardens and woodland for innumerable games of A-Team and Robin Hood. She had never managed to get inside the house, though, because the walls had bristled with alarms and those new cameras that filmed you. The big, red, spray-painted ‘TRAITOR’ on the side gable hadn’t been washed off for years.

  Of course, it would be long gone now.

  She went to stand by the padlocked front gate, looking up and down the street for signs of the keyholder. The house had been lived in again, since its abandonment, but little had been done to it in the way of renovation. Although structurally sound, it had a blank, neglected look.

  Within half a minute, the door of a shiny, red sports car parked up the road had opened and a man in a very smart, dark blue pea coat stepped out and strode towards her. Having no umbrella, he held a leather satchel over his head to keep off the rain and he grimaced at her as he drew level. The grimace did nothing to disguise his handsomeness, though. Jenna was pleasantly impressed and couldn’t help giving him one of her brightest beams back.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Jenna Myatt.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he said, holding out the hand that wasn’t occupied with the satchel. ‘Lawrence Harville. What a day. Shall we step inside? Or I could hand over the keys in my car, if you prefer?’

  She shook his rain-wet hand and nodded, indicating that they might go inside the Hall in order to complete their transaction. She wasn’t sure who was checking out whom harder – both of them trying to keep their cool at meeting a ‘celebrity’. Old money meets new, she thought, and it’s hard to say who’s more impressed. It was nice, and novel, to be able to hold her own with a Harville now. He might have the history, but she had the stellar career, the amazing roster of celebrity clients on her books and the international reputation for being the best manager in the business.

  He unlocked the gate, which was in dire need of oiling, and led her up the side path. The borders were so overgrown that the weeds brushed against her tights, wetting them. She would have to hire a gardener. What was the going rate around here? Much less than in London, she guessed.

  The stone steps were still intact, and the front door’s paintwork might have been peeling but it was still substantial enough and only needed a bit of a shove to open.

  ‘It’s the damp weather,’ explained Harville, with an apologetic little smile.

  ‘You’d think it would be used to it by now,’ said Jenna. ‘Living round here.’

  Harville’s smile brightened into brilliance and he laughed politely.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, stepping into a musty
but enormous hallway.

  Jenna had been living in Los Angeles when she bought the place, and this was the first time she had crossed the threshold. Her assistant had tried to warn her, she remembered.

  It’s not in the best condition. You can get a modern mansion in Cheshire for just a couple of hundred thousand more.

  But she had not been able to get Harville Hall out of her mind, and she had insisted on pressing on with the purchase. She’d made her bed, and now she’d have to lie in it.

  It wasn’t even like her to be sentimental. She put it down to the split and the stress of it. Three years in La-La-land had turned her gaga. She had yearned for home, but not the redbrick council semi home. She wanted a home that reflected her success in life.

  ‘Must be a wrench,’ she said, looking around at the dusty, black and white diamond tiles and the woodwormy walls. ‘This house was in your family for years.’

  ‘Not that long,’ said Lawrence. In the semi-dark, his face was pale and rain-slick. ‘It was built in 1836 for my great-great-great, add a couple more greats, you get the picture.’ His smile was charming, and his teeth so white. She couldn’t work out if he was older or younger than her, which made her feel at a disadvantage with him.

  ‘I’d call that a long time,’ said Jenna.

  ‘Well, it is, I suppose, and times change, don’t they? We aren’t the big, bad landlords grinding the faces of the local widows and orphans any more. We’ve nothing to keep us in Bledburn.’

  ‘Although Bledburn kept you very nicely for more than a hundred years,’ said Jenna, more tartly than she intended.

  ‘Well, yes, it did.’ Lawrence looked a touch uncomfortable and she was surprised by her urgent need to see him smile again. He, of course, was far too polite to bring up anything he might know of her situation, and she ought to be grateful to him for it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It was nothing to do with you, I know. So, where are you going?’

  ‘Not far,’ he said. ‘Nottingham. I’ve still got some property in the area, so I’ll be around and about.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll, uh, drop in for a cup of tea.’

  Why the hell had she said that? She was here to pick up the keys to the house off him, not establish a social connection. Now he would think she fancied him! It was a definite over-compensation for such a small slight.

  At least the beam was back. ‘I’d like that,’ he said. ‘Care for a tour?’

  ‘Oh. All right. I’m guessing this is the hall.’

  ‘Well guessed. If you come through these doors to the right, we have what we used to call the family room. The drawing room, to our more formal ancestors.’

  He took her through three more similar chambers, plus the enormous kitchen, a few steps down from the reception rooms in a semi-basement. Each of the five bedrooms on the upper floor was faded and cobwebbed, the sash windows awry in their frames so that draughts blew in and raindrops collected on the sills. They were empty of furniture, but Jenna was not going to bring much into the house until her full refurbishment was complete. Until then, she would camp out in one of the downstairs rooms with a mattress, a suitcase of clothes and her laptop. The kitchen range was perfectly usable, so she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking, and she would buy firewood to burn in the hearth. Not coal, she thought, wryly.

  ‘You have plans for the place, I assume?’ said Lawrence, pausing on the landing.

  ‘Yes, a full renovation, I think. I need a project.’

  She wished she hadn’t said that. It meant that she had to think about how much he might know about her. Perhaps he pitied her.

  ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ he said, with a slightly too-knowing smile.

  ‘Well, the devil won’t be coming anywhere near me, at any rate,’ said Jenna, as briskly as she knew how.

  ‘I’m sure.’ He paused. ‘Well, a Bledburn girl returns to the fold. How long since you were last here?’

  ‘Oh, you know, I don’t even … Maybe fifteen years?’

  ‘As long as that? You don’t have family here?’

  ‘My parents wanted to retire to Spain so I bought them a villa. Marbella. They love it out there.’

  ‘You could have joined them. Sunny Spain or rainy Bledburn? Seems like a no-brainer.’ He looked bleakly through the huge stained-glass arch above the stairs, on which rain blattered without cease.

  ‘I used to dream of living in this house,’ said Jenna softly.

  ‘You know it’s reputed to be … Sorry, sorry, I should think before I speak. Tell me to shut up.’ Lawrence looked so stricken that Jenna laughed.

  ‘Haunted? Of course I know that. Everyone does. But I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Good. Besides, what did they used to say? “The only good Harville’s a dead Harville.” So you should be quite safe.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Those were bad times. You can’t have been more than a baby then.’

  ‘I was toddling, I think.’

  So he was younger than her, but only a year or so.

  ‘Funny how our lives have been shaped by something that happened before we could possibly understand it,’ she said.

  ‘I think that’s the human condition,’ said Harville. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Our best,’ said Jenna with a nod. ‘That’s what we can do.’

  He closed his hand around the banister with a rueful little burst of something that was not quite laughter.

  ‘You made your fortune,’ he said. ‘And now, here we are. Who would have predicted this over our cradles, eh?’

  Jenna bit her lip. ‘I’ll take care of this place,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Thanks. Listen, here are the keys.’ He took them from his pocket and handed them over. ‘That one for the front door, that one for the kitchen door – well, I’ve labelled them anyway. I ought to get back to town.’

  She followed his determined move towards the stairs, watching his pea-coated back and broad shoulders in descent.

  ‘If you’re passing,’ she said, once he was at the door. ‘Do call in.’

  He turned, and gave her a long look.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he said, taking a mobile phone from his satchel. ‘Give me your number. I’ll call.’

  Much later, after the van had delivered a rudimentary complement of furniture – all of it old and sturdy, from reclamation yards – and Jenna had finished her dialled-in Thai takeaway and got the butane gas heater on in the front parlour, she got out her phone and looked at the number she had been given.

  She was sitting on a mattress in her temporary encampment. Once the house was done up and sparkling, she would have her half of the furniture from the LA house shipped over. It wasn’t easy to picture it here, in this faded room, but she was sure its beauty and suitability would amaze her, when everything was in order.

  Lawrence Harville, though. She lay back on the mattress and let out a long, loud laugh. Imagine what Deano would think if he heard about that. Everyone in Bledburn had hated the Harvilles, after they sold everyone out in the strike, but Deano most of all. He had even written a song about them. ‘Lord of Plenty’, track four on the Bleeding Hearts album. Jenna began to sing the chorus to herself:

  ‘Fine clothes, fine house

  Fine words, fine wine

  And it’s all paid for

  By the men in the mine.’

  It had been quite an anthem, at the time.

  Yes, a few careless snaps of her with Harville in the sidebar of shame would be enough to get Deano launched into orbit. If he asked her out, she’d see that they went somewhere extremely and unavoidably public. To begin with.

  She betted he was a charmer, a smoothie, a fast worker. She’d met enough of his type, over the years of glitz and glam. He’d be experienced, and probably decent in bed, even if he would have his hand up your skirt by the time the entrées were taken from the table.

  Selfish, though. An egotist, probably. Just like Deano.

  It was still worth the wind-up. If
he called her, she would definitely show an interest.

  And why wouldn’t he call her? She might be a bit older than him, might be taking a sabbatical from her high-profile, high-pressure career in music promotion, but she was at her physical peak.

  She was toned, honed, perma-tanned, coiffed, Botoxed, groomed, plucked, buffed and styled within an inch of her life. She was never going to be featured in one of those magazine spreads with a photoshopped circle around some less-than-perfect feature. She only wore tracksuits at the gym and she was only seen without make-up in bed. Sometimes not even then.

  True, it wasn’t going to be easy without her retinue of staff, all devoted to the greater glory of Jenna Myatt’s image, but there was no need to let things slide. This house was evidence enough of that.

  Don’t you ever get tired of being perfect?

  Deano’s voice cut into her thoughts, still heavy with the local accent that he had never made any attempt to lose – unlike Jenna, who had hired an elocution coach the day she left Bledburn. Indeed, in latter years, Jenna had grown to loathe Deano’s accent. It had become more an affectation than a genuine dialect, a shorthand way of showing that, however rich and famous and American he might look, he was still a Bleddy boy at root.

  As if you didn’t run as fast and as far as you could, the minute you had the chance.

  She wanted to stop thinking, so she found Candy Crush on her phone and devoted her next half-hour to the cause of colourfully animated mindlessness.

  Some kind of thud from above made her turn down the volume and sit up. What was it? The room had grown dark while she was playing, the moonlight not sufficient to cast much more than the palest wash on the uncarpeted floor.

  She sat, almost too tense to breathe, for a good five minutes. No further noises were heard.

  ‘A bird’s nest on the roof,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Or, oh God, maybe rats in the attic. More than likely. Ugh.’

  She got up to put on the light, opening the door to the hall in order to listen more carefully.

  Again, nothing.