Instead she concentrated on moving her hips, gyrating them against him as he bucked and rode himself deep inside her. Arcing her legs, she rubbed her heels against his thighs, savouring the warmth of his skin as she gripped him with her hands. He was rutting like a ram, ploughing her for all he was worth, but while his technique left something to be desired she was glad enough to be fucked by such a handsome fellow.
Indeed, he surprised her by lasting longer than she had expected. After letting him fuck her from above, following some ten or fifteen minutes of this she pushed him gently with her hands, silently motioning for him to lie down and let her ride on top—her favourite position. As she gripped his erection with one fist, supporting herself on the bed with the other hand, she rubbed the tip of him against her wet lips before sinking down, groaning as he filled her once more.
She wasn’t sure how long they continued, though it was long enough to cum before his face took on a comical aspect that almost made her laugh, the sinews of his neck and shoulders tightening as he clenched her forearms. “Oh fuck!” he yelled out. “Oh, shit! Ik kom!”
And cum he did, a swelling inside her that made Karla twitch and moan as she rolled her hips around on him, grinding down so that her clitoris would press against his pubis. “Fuck!” she gasped quietly, her eyes clenched shut and her breath coming in short, sharp spurts.
When she flopped down beside him, breathing heavily, she let him stroke her hair for a little while as she recovered her senses. That was a seven out of ten, she thought to herself: decent enough, and exactly what she’d needed today, but not one to mark down in the annals of Karla Pietersen’s life. She’d only ever met a nine out of ten three times before. That was dangerous: you were always tempted to go back to a nine. Christ knows what she’d do if she met a ten.
“How was it for you?” he asked. She almost groaned at the question, but instead she smiled brightly.
“Perfect.”
He smiled back at this, but then frowned as she pulled her naked body from the bed and began to hunt round for her clothes on the floor. “Do you have to go already?” he asked, a little petulantly.
She looked back at him and forced her face into a sympathetic expression. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said. “I have things to do.”
His face fell at this and he rolled onto one arm. Now that was a nice arm: muscular, but not too much. He could have done with a few less business lunches, however, considering those pounds on his belly. Karla congratulated herself on finding this man at just the right time of his life. A couple more years, she reckoned, and he would become the dull and stolid bourgeois he was destined to be. She had no doubt that while she would forget all about him in a month or so—this fuck blurring into the many similar ones she had enjoyed in the past and was determined to enjoy in the future—he would always carry with him the memory of this afternoon in a hotel in Amsterdam.
“Surely you have time for one more,” he said, his voice becoming a little ominous. Karla suppressed a sigh. She’d got what she wanted, now it was time to get the hell out of here. She blindly clasped her bra shut and slipped into her knickers and skirt, not even looking at him.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were the kind of man to keep count,” she said a little tartly. Her blouse, where was her blouse? Ah, there! Good, not too crinkled. Those few creases would fall out by the time she met with Maarten—it wouldn’t do for him to have any suspicions. Her afternoon stud was watching her from the bed, a surly expression on his face when she glanced back at him. Oh dear, she thought to herself. This is where the mood spoils. It also occurred to her that she could do with a shower, but that would have to wait.
“What’s the problem?” he asked. “Got another man to fuck, whore?”
Now that had her attention. “What did you just say?” she asked, her voice sharpening into a stiletto.
“I get it,” he said. The boy-man had returned, but this time he was just irritating rather than delectable. “You’ve got another client to see. Well, don’t let me hold you up on your busy schedule.”
By way of reply, she crossed to the end of the bed where he’d let his jacket fall. She could let fly with invective—but she didn’t really have time for a scene. Instead, she lifted up the jacket and reached inside the pockets.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked. His voice was becoming distinctly ugly now. Karla ignored him, however, her fingers quickly hunting until, triumphantly, they found what she was looking for.
“If you’re looking for a prostitute,” she said tartly, “I hear there are plenty to find in Walletjes, or perhaps de Pijp is more your scene. In any case, I wouldn’t let your wife know, if I were you.” She flung the gold band down on the bed.
It was too easy. His face collapsed and he shuffled forward. “Hey,” he said, attempting to sound emollient now. “I didn’t mean it. I was just joking.” She ignored him however, buttoning her blouse and walking back to the table where she’d hung her jacket. Sliding it on, she saw the other ring where she’d left it.
“You don’t mind if I take this, do you?” she said, smiling with an acid sweetness, her eyes hard. “You didn’t need to buy it in order to fuck me—I was going to have you as soon as I laid eyes on you. However, in this case, I think it’s a useful if we agree this is my fee to keep silent, don’t you?”
The look of shock on his face was all the answer she needed. She had no idea who his wife was—searching for the ring in his pocket had been a gambit that had paid off, a means of short-circuiting any argument. Nonetheless, when he nodded dumbly she gave a curt nod of her own, acknowledging his response, and slipped the diamond ring onto her finger.
It was his turn not to look at her as she picked up her purse and left the room. She’d partially expected the brief scene at the end to have soured her mood, but if anything a little burst of anger on her part added some vim to her step as she made her way to the lobby of the hotel. It turned out that in the end she’d got exactly what she’d needed—a fit of temper had combined with a rather pleasant orgasm to clear the tensions that had been building up in her recent dealings with Maarten. Now there was someone who was hard work, but she needed him for the time being. She pulled out her phone. Damn! He’d tried to call and now she was late. Never mind: he would have to wait. Not all of her pleasures could be dependent on him.
To distract herself from the frustrations that inevitably arose when she thought about Maarten, she turned her attention to the latest, oval-cut rock on her finger. Well, that was one unadulterated pleasure the day had brought. She could just make out the small inclusions that marked the deep structure of the diamond, but then her well-trained eye was used to finding such things. No one else but an expert would notice it and she was still pleased with her unexpected gift. At least it would cover her expenses if things with Maarten didn’t work out.
Chapter Two: Maarten
Maarten tried to hide his irritation as the engineer stood in his way for a moment. His natural hypersensitivity had been becoming almost unbearable over the past few weeks since he had agreed to this preposterous scheme with Karla, and sometimes he thought the stress would be the death of him.
On a daily basis he could almost feel his blood pressure rising, and the symptoms of hypertension would be sure to bring on a heart attack if he continued this way—or a stroke at the very least. Sometimes he would break out into a sweat for no apparent reason, and a tic would begin in his pale cheek, the skin always too pallid no matter how much he went out into daylight. Not that Maarten was much of one for spending time out of doors.
No matter how much these various afflictions plagued him, however, one thing was always the same. His hands would never tremble. He could be suffering nerves that signalled the end of the world (by which he meant one of the all-too-many migraines with which he was plagued) but his hands would remain as steady as the gemstones he cut for Boeckman’s. Rock solid was a thoroughly inappropriate metaphor for his hands: they were more solid than rock, the h
ardest of which yielded to his expert touch.
The price he had paid for that skill was a psychosomatic feebleness that had affected nearly every other aspect of his physique and temperament. Maarten Kropp had never been a boy to attract much attention: he was on the small side of average in terms of height, with arms and a chest that never seemed to develop no matter how hard he tried to perform in the gym at school (which, admittedly, wasn’t much). His voice was a little too high-pitched for a man, and though his face was more plain that ugly, it was at once something that was immensely forgettable for most people.
That was another reason why he was so irritated with the engineer who stood in his way, a panel to the circuits that powered Boeckman’s security open to the wall. As the man stood, a foreigner from the sound of his voice (why couldn’t it be like the old days, when Dutch jobs went to Dutch people? Damn that bloody EU!), he towered over Maarten and gave a brief, apologetic smile that made his strong, handsome face even stronger and more handsome. Maarten swore under his breath as he passed by, clutching his case in both arms and refusing to look at this preposterously good-looking stranger.
Most of his colleagues, for all that they paid attention to him, attributed Maarten’s latest round of nerves to his most recent job. The Wallenstein diamond was something of a coup for Boeckman’s. Although one of the older companies in Amsterdam, they had seen their star decline amidst the glare of De Beers and others. The Wallenstein, so named after a small, long-overlooked mine in South Africa where it was found, had been part of a ten gram lump of almost pure diamond. Boeckman’s had paid a substantial fortune for that rough rock and had set their best craftsman onto it. Working between the flaws and tiny inclusions, Maarten had created a perfect diamond, preserving almost half of the original stone in a twenty carat gem while lesser artisans had formed the rest into pieces of almost as perfect art.
The Wallenstein was the most important thing to occur at Boeckman’s since the war (and Maarten suspected for more than a century). A very rich client—some boorish rap musician apparently—was lined up to buy it, and in the meantime the diamond merchant was beefing up its security system.
All Maarten could think of as he hurried past the tall, broad-shouldered engineer, however, was that he was running late for his meeting with Karla. That and the fact that the briefcase he hugged to his chest as though his life depended on it contained the biggest act of treachery he had ever committed in his not-very treacherous life.
He still couldn’t believe he was doing any of this. Of immediate concern was the fact that he was apparently smuggling out what could have been a very precious item. Everyone at Boeckman’s was so obsessed with the Wallenstein however that, ironically, many of their more mundane security procedures had slackened. Actually, the item he carried was of itself not especially valuable, but had any expert eye seen it they would immediately have suspected more nefarious plans.
And they would have been right. That thought alone made Maarten’s face begin to twitch, and beads of sweat formed above his eyebrows. Despite this, the guard at the door waved cheerily to him—he was always such a nervous, funny little man that any agitation he showed today was utterly unsuspicious. Maarten smiled weakly back and pushed at the door before sucking in cooler air and crossing to where his car was parked.
Once inside, he began to hyperventilate. God! He couldn’t go through with this! He would have to tell Karla that it was all too much.
Karla. Divine Karla. The thought of her made him hyperventilate even more. He looked down at the briefcase on the seat next to him and groaned, taking a handkerchief out of his neat jacket pocket to wipe away the sweat on his face. She was the reason he did all this, and while he tried to convince himself that he did all this because she wanted him, in his heart Maarten Kropp was not so much a fool as to believe that. If he did not go through with their plan he would lose her, and she was more important to him than any diamond, even the Wallenstein.
It had been two months since he had met Karla, in a bar where he often drank. He’d been alone that night. Whenever he reminisced over their first meeting (which he did regularly), he added the detail ‘that night’, but the truth was he was always alone. It was a quiet place, and no-one spoke to him other than the barman to acknowledge his regular order—a white beer and a rookworst smoked sausage with mashed hutspot.
He hadn’t even looked up at first when she’d came and sat beside him. No-one spoke to Maarten Kropp, and that was the way he liked things. He couldn’t ignore the elegant hand that reached out for a drink, however, particularly because of the bracelet she wore—square, asscher-cut emeralds set with quarter-carat diamonds in silver.
“That’s quite impressive,” he said between mouthfuls of sausage and potato mash.
“Is it?” Her voice was foreign, Scandinavian, but so sweet-sounding that he had turned his meagre professional interest from the bracelet to her face.
He’d forgotten to close his mouth and some of his sausage had dropped back onto his plate.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
She was small and graceful in stature, with an oval face more perfect than a gemstone. Her eyes were emerald and her hair a deep coppery colour. For anyone else, these would have been poetic observations, but for Maarten they were metaphors drawn from his trade. He could evaluate the value of a gem almost immediately, and though he had no experience of women he knew instantly that the woman who sat beside him was worth more to him than all the females he had ever met put together.
Her name was Karla Pietersen, and though she originated from Denmark she had been living in Amsterdam for several months, writing a novel (or was it a screenplay? Although he hung on her every word, Maarten often found it hard to pin down specifics where Karla was concerned). What astonished him most, however, was the way she listened attentively as he explained how the gems in her bracelet were cut, their provenance and the craftsmanship that had gone into the setting.
For the first time in his life, a beautiful woman listened to Maarten Kropp with respect and fascination, and the effect made him more lightheaded than any amount of white beer could have. He had not long finished cutting the Wallenstein and, as Karla listened, he couldn’t help boast about his latest work.
“It’s a masterpiece, I tell you! Those bastards at Boeckman’s say it’s the best thing they’ve had in decades, but in my opinion they’ve never had a diamond like that. It’s not just the weight, you see. Certainly, a twenty-carat diamond is rare but you can still find them if you’re willing to put up with a few flaws or a little colour. But this! This is the largest grade D I’ve ever seen—utterly clear.”
“Grade D? Surely that would mean it had to have something wrong with it,” Karla had said, pressing another beer on him. “I mean, wouldn’t grade A be the best?”
Maarten allowed himself a patronising chuckle. He almost patted her on her hand—her flawless, elegant hand—as she handed him his beer, but he wasn’t drunk yet enough to dare that. “A little trade secret,” he said. “We call the best diamonds grade D. But it was my skill that meant I could make it even better, utterly without inclusions—you know, those tiny flaws, some of them only visible when you look through a magnifying glass.”
“How fascinating,” Karla purred, leaning forward and staring at Maarten with deep green eyes. For a few seconds he forgot what he was talking about and began to stammer ridiculously. Then, to his shock, she reached forward and laid one of those cool, perfect hands of hers on his arm. “You’re so cute,” she observed with a smile. “And so very talented. I love talented men.”
To Maarten’s utter shock, she invited him for a meal the following evening—this time at a more illustrious restaurant. He would never have dared ask and he almost failed to show up the next night, experiencing something close to a coronary in the hour before the meeting was due to take place. But when he did finally go he experienced something wonderful—and completely unexpected. Here was a beautiful woman who laughed at
his jokes, who shared his opinions of politics and foreigners, and who was very demure in every way. Deep down, Maarten suspected that there was something wrong, that what was happening between the two of them was impossible, but he couldn’t resist the bonds he felt forming between the two of them. His soul had been hooked and he was destined to follow behind Karla Pietersen wherever she went.
Which was why, when she had suggested (following one of his many rants on the subject) that it would be a shame for a diamond as precious and rare as the Wallenstein to fall into the hands of an uncouth musician—if one could call such a racket music—he had come up with the craziest and most ridiculous plan of his life. It was more than a shame. It was a crime. If anyone was to have the Wallenstein diamond, it would be Karla.
Since he had met her, Maarten had alternated between exaltation and despair, and in some of the latter moments he had trouble recollecting whether he had actually been the one to conceive this plan. Then he would remember that she had refused to countenance it at first—although when he had agreed it would be too crazy she had come up with some particularly ingenious suggestions, eventually convincing him that it might just work.
Which was why he was now sitting in his car staring at a briefcase. Just as he had mastered the rock from which the Wallenstein would be formed, drawing from the interior of that rough rock a work of art as Michelangelo had discovered his perfect sculptures within Carrera marble, so he had now he had made another masterpiece that might just allow him to get away with the craziest plan of action he had ever embarked on.
The thought of that was enough to make his heart start beating so fast that he felt it would go into arrest at any moment. It took him fifteen minutes to regain anything remotely resembling a state of composure—and then he flew into a panic realising just how late he was going to be. Pulling out his phone he tried to ring her but there was no answer: no doubt she was already on her way to the restaurant where they had agreed to meet and now she would be angry with him. That caused him to go into a cold sweat as he started the car.
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