‘Try it again,’ he said after he’d put the plugs back in.
She got in and he could hear her turning the key, but the engine was completely dead.
‘I think it’s something electrical,’ he said, putting the bonnet down and coming round to her. ‘I can’t do anything more in this darkness. Where are you going?’
‘To London.’ Her eyes were wide with panic and her lips were quivering. ‘I wish I’d come earlier when it was light or waited till the morning.’
Few men would be callous enough to leave any woman alone in such circumstances, but Toby was moved more by her face, body and what could come out of gratitude than by protective instinct.
‘Well I was only going as far as Canterbury,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I’m going to find a hotel there for the night. You could come there with me and we could ring a garage in the morning?’
‘I can’t afford to stay in a hotel,’ she said wistfully. ‘I’d better stay here with the car until it’s light.’
‘I’ll pay for you,’ he said impulsively. ‘Come on, you can’t stay here. It will be freezing and anyway it’s not safe to be out here all alone.’
She smiled, a wide, warm smile as if touched by the gallant gesture, but then she shook her head.
‘I can’t.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s very sweet of you, but I can’t go off to a hotel with a man I don’t know.’
Toby flashed on his most brilliant smile.
‘I’m an officer in the army,’ he said. ‘You can look in my passport if you like. Toby Stratton’s the name and I assure you I’m only concerned about you being alone out here in the dark.’
Telling girls he was an officer always had the same effect: their eyes widened, tension vanished, almost as if he’d flashed a police identity card.
‘Well if you’re sure.’ Her smile came back, as trusting as a child’s. ‘I’m Carla Clayton. I could phone my dad from the hotel. He’ll come for me in the morning and he’ll give you the money then.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’ Toby grinned. ‘Now let’s push this off the road and lock it up. I’ve driven all the way from Germany and I’m tired.’
He couldn’t believe his luck once she was tucked into his car beside him. She said she worked as a dental nurse in London, and she was going back to her flat in Chelsea after spending a few days at home with her parents.
‘I share with a couple of other girls,’ she said. ‘My dad’s always saying I should join the AA if I’m going to drive long distances, but I never thought something like this would happen.’
‘It’s fate,’ Toby laughed, putting the music back on. ‘I wanted some company and now I’ve got it.’
‘You really are nice, Toby,’ she said, putting her hand on his thigh. ‘I’ve never met an officer before, only squaddies.’
‘I think you’re the prettiest girl I’ve seen in a long time.’ He liked the feel of her hand on his leg, the smell of her and that long black hair tumbling over her shoulders. ‘The girls in Germany are all big beefy types.’
‘I thought men liked girls like that,’ she said, seductively batting her eyelashes. ‘You know, big bosoms and stuff.’
‘Not me.’ He put his hand down on top of hers. ‘I like them small and dainty.’
Carla was easy to talk to. She seemed to know a great deal about astrology and suggested that Arians like him were well suited to the army life and compatible with her sign of Leo.
‘Then we were fated to meet?’ Toby smiled, flattered by her opinion that he was courageous, tough and headstrong, as well as terribly handsome.
‘There are no chance encounters,’ she said seriously. ‘I believe our lives are mapped out for us at birth, and there is a purpose for everything.’
Toby pulled up outside the County, a commercial hotel in Canterbury. One of the attractions of this place was that they employed a night porter, and they didn’t ask too many questions.
‘I’ll just go and see if they’ve got rooms,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a minute!’
He came back a few minutes later and opened her door.
‘They’ve only got a double room.’ He made himself look anxious. ‘I said we’d take it because I doubt whether there’s anywhere else open now. I’ll sleep on the floor if it’s a double bed.’
He expected her to protest or at least to look perturbed, but instead she smiled at him.
‘Our fate!’ she said, her small, perfect teeth very white against the red of her lips. ‘I don’t think I’m cruel enough to make you sleep on the floor!’
Toby’s heart quickened as they walked in. To him the way she’d slung her tapestry overnight bag over her shoulder, her leggy, self-assured stride, were indications she wasn’t a timid virgin and that she was used to decent hotels. He liked the fact that she was a little older than him, that her dress and shoes were of the expensive kind. She was his kind of girl!
It was an old-style hotel, with thick traditional carpets, prints of hunting scenes on the oak panelling and a small bar just off the reception area with leather armchairs and highly polished low tables. The bar was closed and a grille pulled down on it. Even the lights had been dimmed.
‘Room 202,’ the porter said. He was a portly man in a dark suit and as he handed over the key and told them the room was on the second floor, he looked over to Carla and smiled warmly. ‘I’m afraid you’re too late for room service now. But there are tea-making facilities in the room.’
‘I’ll just phone home,’ Carla said as she came up to Toby and handed him her bag with almost wifely poise. ‘You go on up. I’ll join you in a moment.’
Toby was glad of an excuse to go on ahead; he needed to get the strapping off his chest. As Carla went off towards the phone booth, he bounded up the wide staircase.
The room was comfortably ordinary. Pleasant enough not to be seedy with an orange candlewick bedspread that smacked of cosy familiarity. A wide double bed, a desk-cum-dressing-table, a small alcove with a rail and coat hangers, and a washbasin. He dumped both their bags on the bed and went out again to find the bathroom, leaving the key in the door.
He was ecstatic. It was easy enough to pull a girl but often he had nowhere to take them. A double bed was luxury and it had been weeks since he’d last had a woman. Just the thought of unzipping that white dress, her slim body and her long legs, sent shivers down his spine.
It hurt to pull off the plaster and it left an angry red mark across his chest. He used the toilet, buttoned up his shirt again, tucking it into his slacks, and put the bags of heroin into his jacket pockets.
In the room he hung his jacket up on a hanger, and he was just drawing the curtains and switching on the light by the bed, when Carla came in.
‘Dad was grumpy with me,’ she said with an impish grin that implied she didn’t care. ‘But he said he’d meet me here at seven in the morning and take me back to the car. I’d better not let him meet you, though. I lied and just said a married couple had dropped me off here. I’ll nip back and give you half the money for the bill.’
‘You needn’t worry about that.’ Toby went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Your company is enough.’
‘Oh Toby,’ she sighed, leaning against him. ‘You are nice. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
Her words made him feel good. She was grateful, yet not gushing, happy to be in his company.
Toby put one hand under her chin and lifted her face to kiss her. As his lips met hers he felt an instant surge of passion and knew this was going to be a night to remember.
‘You kiss beautifully,’ she murmured, moving her head back just far enough to look into his eyes. ‘I’ve been a very lucky girl tonight.’
‘It’s me that’s lucky,’ Toby said, elated by her lack of coyness. Her dark eyes glowed in the soft light and her wide mouth was asking to be kissed again. He drew her close to him, savouring the warmth of her slim body against his as he ran his fingers down her long silky hair. ‘You c
an’t imagine how good it feels to hold a woman in my arms after months of being shut up with other men.’
He kissed her again and she melted into him, her mouth as eager as his own, hips undulating with pleasure. As his fingers reached for the zip of her dress, she purred and pressed herself closer still and when he touched her bare back she shuddered sensuously.
‘I ought to be ashamed of myself.’ Carla laughed softly as her dress fell to the floor, revealing nothing beneath it but the tiniest pair of white lace panties. Her breasts were firm and round with big dark nipples and she took his hands and placed them on them, sighing with delight. ‘But I’m not ashamed. I want you.’
She arched her back and purred as he cupped her breasts, her nipples hard beneath his fingers as if demanding more. As he bent to kiss them, she caught his head between her hands and groaned in delight, her hips gyrating against his pelvis, making him so hard it was almost painful.
‘I love having my breasts sucked,’ she said huskily. ‘Do it harder, it makes me all wet.’
He moved with her back to the bed, lowering her on to it and unfastening his trousers.
Carla’s moans were becoming louder, her hands scrabbling to pull his shirt from his trousers as he feasted on her breasts.
‘I want to feel your skin against mine,’ she murmured in his ear, hands pushing at the waistband of his trousers. ‘Take your clothes off.’
Toby tore his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. He had never wanted a woman more – the sight of her breasts, the slight curve of her belly, dark public hair nestling beneath the sheer lace of her panties and her tongue flickering over her lips inflamed him. He had to stand to unlace his shoes and step out of his trousers and pants and she was looking at him lasciviously, the way girls did in blue movies.
‘It’s so big,’ Carla gasped, reaching out to touch his cock with reverence.
Toby closed his eyes and knelt on the bed as she stroked it. She had the kind of touch that belonged in wet dreams: sure, practised and so sensual he was afraid he just might disgrace himself by ejaculating at any minute.
‘What’s that?’ Carla reached up one hand and touched the mark on his chest where the strapping had been.
If nothing else, it broke the spell in the nick of time.
‘I had a broken rib,’ he lied. ‘I only got the strapping off this morning.’
‘Poor Toby.’ She laughed softly, sitting up on the bed and kissing the mark, at the same time removing her panties in one swift movement. ‘I shall be very gentle with you, then!’
Lying down again, she drew him down beside her and placed his hand on her pussy.
‘Touch me there,’ she said huskily, arching her back towards him.
Girls were usually a disappointment to Toby. They flirted and teased, but often backed off at the last moment. Not once had he ever met anyone who took the initiative as she did. But as his fingers slid into her and she groaned deeply, the slippery heat proved too much and he had to enter her. In just a few strokes he came, and as he lay on top of her he felt that same sense of shame he often felt with women.
He could hear her still panting. She was moving under him in that so familiar way and though he had never concerned himself before with women’s satisfaction, this time it made him feel guilty.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered against her neck. ‘I was too fast.’
He waited for the usual lie – that it was good for her, or he was the best she’d ever known – but to his surprise she just purred in his ear.
‘We’ve got all night,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll show you ways to please me and I’ll make you hard again.’
Toby was in heaven.
Other officers had spoken dreamily of women like Carla, but he’d never truly believed they existed. She was sensual, loving and giving, yet bold enough to insist on what she wanted.
She took his cock in her mouth and sucked it till he was hard again, then sat astride him, only letting the tip of him inside her.
‘Rub me here,’ she said, taking his hand and showing him where she meant. ‘Gently, it’s very sensitive. Oh that’s nice!’
She moved away from him each time he got too excited. She lay beside him and made him watch as she masturbated herself, then got him to do it for her. The smell of her was driving him wild, each kiss sending him further and further into oblivion, but now he wanted to please her more than he wanted release himself.
‘Lick me there now,’ she said fiercely, catching hold of his head and drawing it down to her pussy. ‘That’s wonderful. More, more.’
It was a thrill being the one to give pleasure and, spurred by her moans and sighs of delight, Toby found a new dimension in lovemaking which until now had eluded him. Carla was bucking beneath him, saying the kind of things he’d only ever heard men boasting of and when she shouted out she was coming, he knew she really was.
‘Fuck me now,’ she lay back panting, her arms reaching out for him. ’You were wonderful and I want that big cock inside me.’
He had never felt such heat before, or such closeness with another person. Each kiss was longer and deeper; her legs and arms held him so tightly he never wanted it to end. It was like a volcano erupting when he finally came and spasms of exquisite pleasure brought tears to his eyes.
‘That was the best, the most wonderful –’ Toby shut his eyes tightly, trying to hold back his tears, wanting to tell her he loved her because no other girl had made him feel the way she had. He rolled off her and pulled her into his arms, tenderness welling up inside him, the need to explain so great, but he couldn’t find the words.
Her body fitted into his so perfectly. He still wanted to touch and stroke, to kiss her. But most of all he wanted to ask if it was the same for her.
Carla knew how it was for him. She could feel it coming through his silky skin, the touch of his fingers and his lips. She wished this wasn’t just a job to her, that she didn’t know he was a shit of the first water who had to be taken down.
Putting her heart and soul into lovemaking came naturally: she’d been working as a call girl for five years. But she didn’t get many men as physically perfect as Toby Stratton and she wished she hadn’t sensed that deep need in him.
She lay in his arms, feeling his fingers gently playing with her nipple, and wondered why a man with so much going for him should have become such a bastard.
But George had paid her good money for this job and she mustn’t start feeling sorry for Toby now. Once he was asleep, as he soon would be, she must get up and find the heroin, put it in her bag and be ready when George arrived at seven.
‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ Toby whispered against her hair. ‘It’s like a door opening and showing me something beautiful I didn’t know was there.’
‘You must have done.’ She laughed softly. ‘A man like you!’
Those were practised words she’d said to many men, said glibly while inside she was laughing at herself for stoking their vanity. The public school ones like Toby were usually hopeless cases, so proud of their background, their superior education and so hidebound by warped morality and unhappy childhoods that there was no way to get through to them. The most she could achieve from such men was the certainty that they’d keep call girls like her busy for years.
But Toby was different. He was still so young, innocent enough to think she was just an ordinary girl, naïve enough to believe this was dawning love. If she had met him in different circumstances she might be tempted to try and hold on to him, but that was out of the question.
Carla’s home wasn’t in Dover, with a loving father who would pick her up in the morning. She was Carol Muckle, a girl from Dagenham who had run away from home to avoid the attentions of her mother’s latest boyfriend when she was only fifteen. If anyone had told her ten years ago that she would one day fool men into thinking she came out of the top drawer, she would’ve laughed at them. Secondhand clothes, a hideous cockney accent – she couldn’t even hold a knife and fork correc
tly. All she had in her favour was a pretty face, a good body and a hatred of poverty.
It was Donald Withers who had changed her into Carla Clayton. A forty-year-old accountant whose passion for young girls was equal to hers for money and luxury, he may have thought of her as a sex slave when he set her up in a little flat in Stoke Newington, but three years later she had reversed their roles. True, she still put on a gym slip and navy blue knickers for his pleasure, plaited her hair and let him play out schoolroom games, but he was the slave, not her. She made sure she got a big allowance each week, or he didn’t get so much as a finger in her knicker elastic. He paid for her to have elocution lessons and she insisted on eating out in good restaurants, and weekends away in smart hotels. By the time Donald was ready to trade her in for a younger, less worldly model, Carla had savings, a wardrobe full of expensive clothes and the equivalent of a degree in lovemaking. A couple of years as a receptionist in several top London hotels gave her all the confidence and inside information she needed; then she branched out on her own, doing the job she had trained for, pleasing men and getting paid for it.
But now as Toby nuzzled into her neck, she was reminded of times when she too had wished for the kind of love which would wash away all her more shameful memories.
‘I’ve just used women,’ he said softly, his voice full of regret. ‘But perhaps it’s not too late to change.’
‘Of course it’s not.’ She ran her hand over his smooth chest. She knew of course that anything he felt tonight, whatever painful confessions he made, would be wiped out when he discovered he’d been set up. But all the same she wanted to reach inside him and discover what made a man with so much going for him resort to drug smuggling and even murder.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said softly, stroking his face. ‘Lovemaking is a good time for sharing secrets. If you’re embarrassed tomorrow you don’t have to see me again.’
Toby had already forgotten the image he had cultivated over the years. Carla had peeled a layer of his act away and he rather liked the naked sensation.
‘You don’t want to know about me,’ he whispered.
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