by Fiona Walker
‘We can even visit one of the few remaining cheese farms,’ Milo told her.
‘Oh please let’s not,’ she shuddered. ‘No cheese.’
Milo laughed, putting his arm around her. But then, as Giselle ducked down to play with the little Dutch dolls that he had given her that morning, he lowered his voice and turned to Nell. ‘You must end this silly affair.’
She took his gloved hand and felt to the hard band around his third finger through the leather. ‘And if I do, will you leave your wife?’
‘You know that won’t happen.’
She stared murderously out at the grey sea. No matter how many times she had asked him that question over the years, he gave her the same answer.
‘I will never stop loving you,’ he offered truthfully.
‘Love has no security.’ She turned to look at Giselle, so full of sweetness, not twisted and spoiled by disappointment like her mother.
‘Leave him,’ Milo urged. ‘He’s made you so unhappy, my darling. He’ll be losing the most beautiful girl in the world, but that’s just his hard cheese.’
She nodded and let a small, sweet smile drift on to her lips. ‘He’ll be very cheesed off.’
‘You’ll have to go Caerphilly.
She nodded. ‘He probably Camembert it.’
They stole a long, giggling kiss while Giselle played at their feet.
Sylva knew that her chosen bikini was a sure-fire winner – baby blue and sheer with a halter neck that emphasised her magnificent chest and shapely shoulders, and tie-sided micro shorts that skimmed her buttocks at just the right height to tantalise with two peachy curves. The tiny triangle tops and Brazilian-cut tanga bottoms all stayed firmly in her drawer, vetoed as too unflattering while she was so thin, although she did lend some to Hana who didn’t have a swimsuit. Hana stayed submerged to her chin at all times, mortified.
But nothing could look as silly as Mama’s outsize bathing dress and bright pink flower-petal hat.
Sylva, who had allowed herself to start eating again and whose body was consequently zinging with energy, was still so svelte that she made everyone else look like goliaths, even the children with their puppy fat and round, happy faces.
Dillon, in baggy knee-length surf trunks and a fortnight’s beard was far from the lean, buff, gym-fit star that had recorded the sexy ‘Two Souls’ video a year earlier, and today he had made no effort whatsoever, compared to the hours of work that had gone into getting Sylva ready for this casual family play-date. She’d waxed and bleached and epilated, she’d exfoliated and moisturised and fake-baked, she’d manicured and pedicured, wrapped and face-masked.
Sylva and Mama had planned the day like a military operation, well aware that this was their best and possibly only chance of a romantic coup. With Nell away visiting a friend, they had an open target.
Pom, Berry and Zuzi were having a ball, overseen by Hana, while two of the nanny army looked after the boys and Mama prepared to launch her floating offensive like huge pink war ship, cutting off Dillon and Sylva from vital supplies.
‘Let’s have a game of water polo!’ Mama clapped her hands above her head, bingo wings flapping. ‘The little ones, Bozka and Dalena will join me as one team, and Hana and the girls are the other team. Sylva and Dillon can find prizes for the winners and runners-up, and Bohemian champagne for us all.’
Nobody ever questioned Mama, such was her self-assured tyranny, and so a somewhat puzzled Dillon led Sylva along the glass-roofed corridor that ran through one side of the smallest kitchen garden and linked the pool complex to the main house.
‘What plants are these?’ She pointed to fruit trees trained to neatly espalier their budding branches along the old south-facing wall beside them.
‘Apricots.’
‘They must produce amazing fruits under glass like this.’
‘Not bad, but you should see the old Victorian hothouses. They’re something else. Cost a fortune to renovate, but it’s like a tropical climate. We already have grapes ripening in there.’
Hearing Mama’s imaginary cry of ‘go’ in her ears, Sylva knew that she had her cue.
‘Show me!’ she urged.
‘We’d have to go outside.’ He looked down at his wet trunks, paired with just the open shirt and Crocs he’d thrown on to walk to the house. She was still in only her bikini and white flip-flops. It was barely above freezing beyond the glass.
‘Oh, let’s go!’ Sylva purred, her nipples already standing to attention at the thought of the cold air. ‘That can be the water-polo prize – home-grown bunches of grapes. How perfect is that?’
She had him exactly where she and Mama wanted him: at home, relaxed and unaware that he was walking straight into a trap.
Unable to resist showing off his beloved hothouses, Dillon led her to an arched door in the old wall, slid the bolts and latch and warned ‘Brace yourself!’
Whooping, they crossed the larger of the two walled gardens, racing along the pebbled tracks that divided raised beds, dug-over for winter and insulated under piles of rotting manure. Lashed by icy rain, they jumped down terraced steps two at a time, dived between scratchy, topiary box obelisks and finally made it to the door to the first of the two interconnecting hothouses occupying the garden’s south wall.
Inside it was indeed sub-tropical, the thermometer on the wall reading over seventy. It was hotter than the pool complex.
Shelves groaned under the weight of orchids and other wintering exotics. Nectarines and lemons were starting to form absurdly early on branches against the walls beside them; above their heads, vines hung with fat grapes, already turning the deepest of reds. Sylva reached up, but was a good foot too short.
‘Here – let me.’ Without thinking, he put his hands around her and lifted her up like a ballet principal. She was as light as a feather. His fingers almost met around her tiny waist. But before he could settle her back down again, two slender legs slipped around his hips and gripped tightly as she plucked a grape and held it to his mouth.
Laughing, embarrassed, he ate it, expecting a sour burst of sharp acid in his mouth, but it was as sweet as Muscat and honey. She fed him another and he stepped backwards, off-balance until his shoulders found support against a peach tree trunk.
‘You know I have a girlfriend.’ He gave her a mock-critical look.
‘And we both know that’s as good as over.’ She popped a grape in between her straight white teeth and fed it to him.
Up until that moment Dillon still would have struggled to say whether he fancied Sylva Frost or not. So much about her was anathema to him: her fakeness, her brassiness and vulgarity. But the moment those plump, glossy lips touched his, the sexual kick that rocketed through him at a voltage he hardly knew existed told him there was no going back.
She was breathtakingly adept. Like a very carnal monkey, she took hold of a peach tree branch, braced her feet against the wall and, a weightless shaft of golden muscle and glossy skin, reached down to loosen his trunks.
Afterwards, Dillon wished that the shame of knowing his staff were so close by, along with her family and any number of people that could have stumbled upon them had not heightened the excitement, but that would have been lying. The thrill of being at home, surrounded by all that was familiar yet having this new, exquisite woman lowering her beautiful body against his and slotting his cock into the sweetest, wettest, most skilful pink booty it had ever plundered was almost overwhelming. He felt like Adam being seduced by Eve. It seemed utterly right, and the liberation it granted coursed through him as he climaxed.
Sylva couldn’t keep the smile off her face when she and Dillon finally made it back to the pool laden with grapes and bottles of the sweet Bohemian champagne her mother loved so much that she’d brought her own case along today.
Mama was still bobbing about in the pool, which surprised her. And surely there hadn’t been that many children before? Not of all those different colours; it was like a Benetton advert. Some of them were frightening
ly familiar, along with the oriental man in the hand-made suit perching on a sunlounger, manicured fingertips steepled against his nose as he scrutinised Sylva. And Mama, purple in the face, was giving out distress signals. It seemed they had unexpected company:
Beside her, Dillon let out a groan. ‘Oh shit – it’s Dad.’
Sylva’s heart revved.
‘There you bloody are, you little rascal!’ hailed a gravelly voice of such achingly familiar depth and timbre that it could have been whooping over the sound system at the start of a live concert recording.
Cigar poking from his mouth, face wizened as a date but still sexy as a demi-god, with the towering blank-faced Indigo beside him, the Rockfather had come to visit his son for only the second time since his relocation. ‘Dillon, my boy!’ He swaggered forward to give his heir apparent a double handshake and look approvingly at Sylva in her bikini. ‘How come every time I call by, you’re squiring a piece of top skirt, huh?’
‘Dad, the kids!’ Dillon hissed, but his father waved away the warning and held out his hand to Sylva. ‘No need to introduce yourself, Trouble. I should be calling my lawyers, by rights, but you are far too gorgeous. Wow.’ As a mark of his respect he lowered his dark glasses for only the second time in almost a decade to look at a woman more closely, the last time having been Indigo on their wedding day. ‘You. Are. Choice. The pictures don’t do you justice.’
Sylva smirked and offered him a grape, surprised to find that, even compared to the ecstatic shiver that had coursed through her when finally claiming Dillon, the charge that was shooting lightning bolts to her nerve endings now was immeasurable. The Rockfather was just so sexy. She cast a guilty look towards her children and then Indigo, but that smooth bronze face was giving nothing away.
Mama, meanwhile, was as wrinkled as the Rockfather from spending so much time in the geyser-hot swimming pool. A lifelong Mask and Pete Rafferty fan, she was quite gunned down by humiliation to find that the amazing opportunity to meet her hero was presented to her when she was wearing a pink bathing dress that revealed her sagging, blotchy body in all its decrepitude.
Hana, in her Brazilian bikini, was by the far pool ladder, loyally holding out the largest towel that she could find, her mother’s vast satin kimono over one shoulder in readiness, but Mama was too embarrassed to admit that she couldn’t actually climb the ladder and would need to wade out up the tiled steps at the shallow end.
Sylva took in the situation in an instant. As quick as a lifeguard spotting a drowning child, she appropriated the towel and robe and guided her mother from the depths with minimal cellulite, saggy bum and bingo wing flashing.
‘I got him, Mama,’ she whispered as she wrapped her up.
Mama’s chlorine-reddened eyes sparkled beneath her dahlia in bloom swim cap. ‘We must secure an invitation to the Abbey straight away,’ she hissed. ‘That way, he will see you as family.’
Sylva was thrilled at the challenge. It was her easiest yet. She and Pete had a lot in common, after all, and she knew the way to his door only too well. The Rockfather, meanwhile, wanted Sylva in his lair as fast as he could get her there.
‘You beat a public path to my door!’ he rasped huskily, ‘and now my private quarters are all yours.’ Then, aware that his wife was shooting him daggers, he raised his voice: ‘Bring the kiddies up to play with … ours.’ He always struggled with the notion he had paternity over the many children Indigo had acquired while he’d been away touring, much as she went out shopping for handbags and shoes. ‘I should get to know my granddaughters better, hey girls?’ he called to Pom and Zuzi, who burst out giggling while Berry scowled behind a sunlounger. ‘I love kiddies.’
For a moment, the whites of Indigo’s eyes flashed luminous with distrust, but then she reset the mask.
She stepped close beside Sylva who was pouring frothy wine into champagne flutes. ‘You want father or son?’ she whispered.
Sylva looked up sharply. ‘Is holy ghost not an option?’
Indigo’s mouth pouted into an oval.
Sylva looked at Mama, so puffed up with pride. ‘I want the son, of course,’ she lied. ‘But how?’
‘Watch me.’ Indigo melted away.
Two days later, with Mama dressed in bright orange Anna Sholtz crepe, a mohair wrap, patent boots and trilby, a get-up that she fantasised would make the Rockfather throw his skinny young model wife into the nearest skip and claim her as his own, the Szubiaks and Raffertys joined forces beneath the portico of Fox Oddfield Abbey, where two grand, zig-zagging stone staircases met in front of its imposing black gloss and glass Regency double doors. The eighteenth-century Rock Palace, freshly sand-blasted and re-pointed, looked as though it had only been built a week ago.
Dillon and Sylva had only spoken once since their hothouse play-date, and that was for the steamiest, dirtiest phone sex he could ever remember. But after he had hung up he’d thought guiltily of Nell, still in Amsterdam and blissfully unaware of events in Oddlode.
To Sylva it had been an unsatisfactory call, even though she’d made it in the first place. Mama had been breathing down her neck throughout, eager to find out whether he had ditched Nell, and Sylva had rung off none the wiser.
But today, as soon as they saw Pete swagger towards them waving a chastising finger, they were left in no doubt where the relationship was going.
‘You two lovebirds didn’t tell the father of the groom the good news!’ he tutted, kissing them both, his lips lingering on Sylva’s ear and cheek long enough to breathe, ‘Not too late to change your mind, Trouble.’
‘What are you talking about, Dad?’ Dillon demanded, but Pete ignored him, playing mine host with theatrical aplomb.
‘The difficulty with having famous kids,’ he told Mama now as he steered her into his house with the cigar that was wedged between his fingertips smouldering at her shoulder, quietly burning holes in her mohair wrap, ‘is that the only way you find out what they’re up to is by reading it in the papers.’ He had champagne already poured into flutes on a long, polished oak side table in the Abbey’s marble-flagged entrance hall. He handed a glass to a positively skittish Mama, and reached for one brimming with orange juice to raise himself. ‘Congratulations, you two. My PR rang just now to tell me the Star has already been in touch saying you’re going to do it here, which is news to me, but you’d be most welcome for a modest, ahem, fee.’
Dillon looked at him questioningly. On cue his mobile rang. They could all hear Nell squawking in the background. ‘Bullshit, we are!’ he finally got a word in. ‘No, that’s tosh! I haven’t called because you’re in Amsterdam with Milo. Yes, I know he’s a friend, and Sylva’s a mate of mine. You know our kids all get on. Who called you? They said what?’ He strode away from earshot, his voice starting to hiss urgently.
‘What is this all about?’ Sylva asked Pete as the children were all ushered upstairs by the nanny army.
‘My son’s posh totty’s just heard you two are getting married,’ he said cheerfully.
‘We’re what?’
The faded blue eyes held hers for a lengthy pause. ‘It’s all over the internet, according to my PR, and it’ll be in all the papers tomorrow, darling. You and Dillon getting hitched.’ He gave her body a lingering look. ‘And I, for one, can’t wait to kiss the bride.’
Now it was Sylva’s phone’s turn to ring, shortly followed by Mama’s, Pete’s, Indigo’s and even two of the nannies’.
Only Hana, at the top of the stairs, had no phone call, allowing her to hastily shush Pom, Berry and Zuzi away from the shouting match that was suddenly firing up below.
For a moment Dillon glanced up at her, his blue eyes in turmoil. Hana managed a brief, reassuring smile and placed her hands on his daughters’ blonde heads, nodding at him to let him know they were in her care. He nodded back, then turned to the babbling, blustering family.
Before he could open his mouth his phone rang out again. ‘Tania – thank God! Why didn’t we know about this earlier?’
&
nbsp; On the opposite side of the vast entrance hall Sylva finished her call and turned to Mama. ‘The paparazzi have been all over the Amersham house since dawn. Now they’ve just turned up at Le Petit Château, so Pauline says not to go back there until she’s sent more cars here as decoys.’
‘Where did they get this crazy story from?’ Mama was delighted.
Beside them Pete cackled, making Mama jump and Sylva quiver.
‘No smoke without fire,’ he said hoarsely, proving his point by puffing on his cigar and winking at Sylva like Lucifer in a plume of sulphur.
Helping himself to more orange juice, he wandered out on to his grand front steps to breathe in an exquisite frosty morning and admire the Ferraris in his drive, so shiny and red against the snow-drops and frost.
‘The press linked me with Madonna once,’ he told Mama, who had followed him out like an eager pitbull. ‘One rag even said we was getting married, although she’s just a mate of my daughter, Kat, who designs shoes for her tours. We’re way too old for each other, of course – her toy boys’ and my ex-wives’ combined ages wouldn’t add up to one of our birthdays – but the publicity was a boost.’
Inside the house, Dillon was finding the situation far less amusing as he cut his call. ‘The papers are determined to run with this, whatever we say. Apparently the source of the story came from within the family – so close that they say it’s beyond refute – but of course nobody’s naming names.’ He glared through the doors to Mama, who was now puffing girlishly on Pete’s cigar.
Sylva meanwhile looked sharply across at Indigo. She gave a ghost of a wink in return.
‘We have to issue an immediate statement making it clear that this is a total fabrication,’ Dillon was saying in urgent tones.
‘Stay calm,’ Sylva soothed.
‘We have our children to protect here, our families and loved ones.’
His phone rang again. This time it was Fawn, considerably cooler than Nell had been, but nonetheless furious to have been awoken at dawn on set in Quebec with news that her ex-husband’s engagement had been announced while their children were staying with him.
