Killer Affair

by Rebecca Chance

  Caroline remembered those confessionals very, very well indeed.

  ‘I didn’t want to be alone either,’ Frank eventually said against her shoulder.

  She had thought he was falling asleep, hadn’t expected him to say a word. She whispered back: ‘I was scared you wouldn’t stay with me. I’m so glad you’re here.’

  ‘It’s been so tough,’ he mumbled into the pitch dark, where he was finally safe enough to confess to a sympathetic listener how isolated and sad he had been feeling these last few weeks. ‘With her never getting in touch, literally as if the kids and I didn’t exist any more. Not a word from her. Nothing. I’ve been so lonely.’

  Caroline reached around to touch the hand that was lying on her hip, and stroked it comfortingly. Frank’s fingers twined around hers, holding hands with her, and she felt his lips touching her shoulder in a light kiss.

  ‘I didn’t realize how lonely I was,’ he said. ‘Touching you, holding you . . . it’s what I want. Someone to hold at night, every night. I’ve been missing that so badly.’

  Caroline’s hand, clasped in his, pulled his up to her lips so that she could kiss his fingers.

  ‘I keep thinking, what if she doesn’t come back?’ he said, the words sounding as if they were being dragged out of him. ‘What if the only thing I hear from her is a letter from her lawyers? And if she hasn’t been bothered enough to get in touch by now, do I even want her back?’

  Caroline smiled into the darkness. She was picturing Frank’s iPhone, his Gmail, the messages and emails that must have pinged so frequently against the blocks she had set up before Lexy went to Switzerland, the letters she had removed from the hall table and burned, ritually, in her bathroom. It was a delicious pleasure to be able to smirk with triumph as Lexy’s husband lay beside her, telling her he wasn’t sure about the state of his marriage.

  Lexy, who had nicknamed her Ghost Mouse. Lexy, who had everything Caroline wanted. Lexy, whose husband’s hand Caroline was holding as she lay beside him naked.

  Without saying a word in response, Caroline lowered their linked hands until Frank’s palm was resting on her breast. Their hips were not touching, but soon, very soon, she knew his body was stirring, could feel his breathing get faster, shallower, his heartbeat speeding up. He shifted, and the head of his cock butted against her buttocks; she let out a moan and edged herself backwards, just fractionally, pressing into it.

  Frank becoming excited again so fast was no surprise to Caroline, one of the reasons she had pushed so hard to have Frank come back to her bedroom was because Lexy had frequently boasted to Caroline about Frank’s sexual prowess.

  He wants it all the time, she’d said. It’s like being married to a horny teenager. I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong – I’m really horny too. We’re at it like rabbits! But Frank uses sex like a tranquilizer. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t gamble. Working out and sex are his two big things. He’s got to do both on a regular basis or he gets a bit mental.

  It hadn’t remotely occurred to Lexy that her ghostwriter was not just listening, but internalizing every single word she said, bitterly resenting Lexy for not just her great good luck but her willingness to show off about it. Caroline didn’t need this level of detail for the book. Frank had stipulated from the start that details of their private life were off limits; he would appear on the show with good humour, be filmed in family scenes, but absolutely not shoot anything intimate between him and Lexy. Other reality shows put the stars’ sex lives very much on display, filmed scenes with them naked in bubble baths, making out; the wife surprising the husband in sexy lingerie, the husband, oiled up, doing a stripper routine for the wife clad in just a skimpy thong.

  Lexy would have done all of this and more for ratings, but Frank was the sticking point. Their sex life was not put on television, and it would not feature in the book either. So there had been no need at all for Lexy to overwhelm Caroline with unnecessary details about her wonderful husband with his big cock and strong sex drive, to make poor, single Ghost Mouse listen to this torrent of bragging. Caroline had sat there silently, burning up with envy, imagining herself married to Frank, having sex with him all the time, anywhere, everywhere; sucking his cock with the technique Lexy described for the book; letting him do anything he wanted to her, anything at all.

  Did Lexy know, when she told Caroline all these details, that Caroline was in lust with her husband? Often, Caroline had thought that Lexy did. It would have been different, maybe, if Lexy were warning Caroline off because she considered Caroline a rival. That would have been flattering, in a backhanded kind of way.

  No, it had been much worse, Caroline decided. Lexy had been absolutely oblivious to Caroline’s feelings, incapable of imagining that drab little Ghost Mouse was capable of attracting Frank for a moment; she had been showing off gleefully to someone she felt was beneath her in every way. It had been obnoxious, insufferable. She deserved to be punished for it. She deserved to have her silent, intent listener take everything she had been told and use it to seduce Lexy’s husband.

  After all those confessional tapes of Lexy’s, Caroline knew, better than Frank could possibly imagine, what he wanted. She took his hands and pressed them once more to her full, bare breasts.

  ‘Please,’ she sighed. ‘Hold them, hold them tight . . . God, I love it, I love to feel you squeezing them like that!’

  Frank would seriously just walk around the house holding my boobs if he could, Lexy had said. I wake up and he’s got his hands round them. I go to sleep and he wants to hold on to them till he passes out. And when we shag, he’s always at my tits – fucking them, motorboating me, everything you can think of. Just can’t leave them alone.

  Frank let out a deep grunt as he grasped her breasts, started to knead them, play with her nipples.

  ‘I love having my boobs played with,’ Caroline said, wriggling her buttocks even closer against his cock. ‘Oh my God, yes, like that . . . oh Frank, you’re so big . . .’

  He shifted down the bed, climbing over her, his lips finding her nipples again, licking them, mouthing them, as Caroline’s hips started to buck.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she moaned, ‘I love it when you kiss my tits like that!’

  Tell guys how much you love what they’re doing, Lexy said. They can’t get enough of that, trust me. Then you can ask ’em to do what you want much more easily, because they think everything you’re saying is totally positive.

  Frank was kissing down her stomach now, his hands firmly clasped around her breasts. His knees planted themselves between her legs, pushing them wide, and she moaned louder when she realized what was going to happen. She was clean and fresh from the Jacuzzi; she had no embarrassment about him going down on her, not since she had broken through her previous limits, learned how to ask Riz for what she wanted. She spread her legs and tilted up her hips and as his mouth closed around her she pumped against it and thrashed her head and let the sensations build as she closed her hands over Frank’s, squeezing her breasts still more, delighting in the fact that she knew that her crotch was exactly how Frank liked it: neatly trimmed, but not shaved.

  Frank doesn’t like a woman to be hairless, Lexy had said. He’s always says how creepy that is – only a perv would fancy that, he says. I had to grow my pubes out for him. Tidied up, but a natural shape, you know? Not a landing strip or anything too fake-looking.

  And certainly, the way he was eating her out could not have been more enthusiastic.

  ‘Just this once more,’ Frank groaned after she had come again and again, kissing his way back up her belly, reaching down to his straining cock, guiding it between her legs as she gasped eagerly. ‘God, you’re so wet . . . just this once more . . . I’ll pull out in plenty of time, I promise – I just need to fuck you once more . . .’

  ‘I can suck your cock,’ she moaned. ‘I want to suck your cock . . .’

  ‘I need to fuck you now,’ he said with great conviction, and she switched gear immediat
ely.

  ‘Yes, Frank, please, please, do it!’ she sobbed. ‘Please, fuck me, please, I want it so bad!’

  She had realized already that a shift had happened. She was still pleading for her needs, but now he was vocalizing his too.

  ‘Just once more,’ he said, hissing between his teeth, lifting her, pushing her back so she was half-sitting up against the pillows; this way he could hold her breasts as his cock slid into her, starting to pump away. ‘Oh, fuck, yes, I need this, I need this, just once more . . . I need to be inside you . . .’

  Caroline wrapped her hands around his muscled, hairy forearms, more glad than she could say that it was too dark for him to see the swell of her stomach in this position. She was as limp as a rag, drunk on happiness, as she held on to him, as he worked up a rhythm, pounding away at her; she had come so much already that just lying here was more than enough for her. Frank’s scent was all around her, his hands heavy on her breasts, his knees holding her legs wide as his cock thrust inside her.

  If I can just keep this going, she thought, if I can just keep giving him what he wants . . . a wife with big tits who’ll fuck him twice a day . . . please, please, let me be clever enough and quick-witted enough to keep this going, so that when Lexy comes back he’ll be conflicted about who he should be with . . .

  As Frank pulled out, threw himself onto his back beside her, groaning as he came again, his sperm running down his sixpack, Caroline ran through a to-do list in her head:

  Buy a really slutty push-up bra

  Buy condoms

  Poke holes in them

  And, after a moment’s consideration:

  Ring Lexy’s pap agency.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A few days later

  ‘He’s shagging her. I don’t believe it. He’s bloody shagging my ghostwriter!’

  Lexy stared with utter disbelief at the photos on the gossip website. The headline was ‘Playing at Home?’ and the accompanying text read:

  While Lexy’s in detox, is Frank getting friendly with a younger woman? Pretty Caroline Macintosh is apparently a family friend who moved into Lexy and Frank’s £8 million Sandbanks mansion the day that the explosive story of Lexy snogging Deacon broke . . . Careful, Lexy, while the cat’s away detoxing, the mouse might be playing a game of his own!

  The photos told their own narrative, beginning with Frank and Caroline picking up London at daycare, then Laylah at school, all long-lens paparazzi shots. The two adults were casually dressed and doing nothing as overt as holding hands, but as Lexy scrolled through the series of pictures, she decoded every single signifier one by one, picking them apart until the entire situation was horribly clear to her.

  Firstly, the paparazzi had clearly been tipped off. There was no way that they simply happened to find themselves in Poole, outside first one location and then the other, set up in advance at the ideal angles to capture every interaction between Frank, Caroline and the children. And the tip-off could only have come from one individual. Frank would never have rung the paps in a million years, and neither would Lexy’s PRs: this was the worst possible publicity for her imaginable, another woman by her husband’s side, hugging her children as they ran towards her. Sometimes the tips came from someone in the household, looking to make some quick dirty money, but Carmen, the housekeeper, had always been entirely trustworthy, and the latest nanny – if there even was a nanny now, with Caroline seeming to have taken over – would be yet another newly arrived Eastern European with not the faintest idea that pap agencies existed, let alone how to call them.

  No, it could only have been Caroline who made the phone calls, and the reason was immediately obvious. Each photo had a caption beneath it, commenting slyly on the way Frank jumped down from the Range Rover first and went round the vehicle to open the door chivalrously for Caroline, the smiles between them as Frank hoisted London onto his shoulders, the way their hands touched as they strapped the kids into their car seats. Their body language was that of a couple, relaxed, a team, moving easily into each other’s personal space. They looked like a couple too, well-matched physically, both in great shape, wearing near-identical outfits, jeans and navy sweaters . . .

  ‘What the fuck happened to Ghost Mouse?’ Lexy said slowly as she took in all the details of Caroline’s appearance.

  Lexy had been aware, of course, that Caroline had been exercising and dieting ever since she came to Sandbanks. In the beginning, the ghostwriter had asked Lexy for a detailed breakdown of her own regime, and Lexy had answered all her questions very frankly, listing her tricks, her tips, her cheats, what worked and what didn’t, how she wanted to quit smoking but was scared she’d pile on the pounds, the lipo that she’d had after London’s birth, everything she could think of.

  Of course, Lexy had thought all the questions, all the scrutiny, were for the book. She’d had no idea that Ghost Mouse had been studying her, not just so that she could successfully capture her thoughts and voice and character on the page, but so that she could wait for the right opportunity to steal her life.

  How much weight had Ghost Mouse lost? How could Lexy not have noticed her slimming down and toning up to this extent? Looking back, Lexy could only ever remember Caroline in the same capacious, unflattering clothes that she had worn that first time she had come to Sandbanks for her interview: big sweaters, baggy skirts, so you couldn’t quite tell what the body underneath was like, but assumed it was as bulky as the layers indicated.

  Caroline must surely have lost a couple of stone, Lexy realized. She must be a size ten or twelve now, everywhere apart from her boobs, which she had sensibly dressed down in her school pick-up outfit, knowing that any hint of cleavage would have her instantly targeted as a homewrecker. Her clothes were perfectly chosen for the occasion: slim-cut jeans skimming her thighs, ankle boots with a small heel to lengthen her legs, a V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt visible underneath it, the neckline of the sweater the most flattering style for a top-heavy woman . . .

  She’d learned all this from Lexy, her victim realized, looking back with a burst of delayed shock at the dawning awareness of the blueprints to her life that she had given Caroline. Dieting. Fashion advice. Exercise that worked for her physical shape. Make-up tips. Sex tips. Sex tips . . .

  ‘My God,’ Lexy blurted out. ‘Frank. I talked about sex with Frank, what he likes . . . I spilled my guts to her, I told her everything, everything!’

  And Ghost Mouse had taken full advantage, ably using so much that Lexy had told her, even how to tip off the paps and dress for a staged photo session that should seem entirely spontaneous. Caroline’s hair looked as if it were newly, subtly streaked. She had either had a professional blow-dry that afternoon or learned how to do an expert job herself, rollers and all; the thick, sleek, volumized mane fell around her face in a girlish style that made her look innocent and youthful. Her skin was so preternaturally smooth that Lexy suspected Caroline of having gone into her dressing room and used her BB cream and powder. It looked as if she had done some clever, subtle contouring with blush and shader, and was wearing fake eyelashes too.

  Although Lexy could see all the tricks Caroline had used, the overall effect was demure and unshowy, perfectly calculated for picking up someone else’s children from school in the company of their father. For signalling, in short, that she would make a far better mother than their real one, who was currently off on a Swiss mountain, doing some sort of detox diet, apparently quite happy to have caused a major scandal with the hottest ex-boybander of the moment, and then fled the country without even seeing her children first . . .

  ‘Well played, Ghost Mouse. And fuck you,’ Lexy muttered as she scrolled down the long page of photos, so many that it took forever for the screen to load.

  Because after picking up the kids, Caroline and Frank had taken Laylah and London to the local park. Sitting on a bench, Caroline had produced bottles of water, apple slices and healthy snacks, including what looked, according to the caption, like home-made m
ini pitta sandwiches from her Cambridge Satchel leather backpack – a bag with which Lexy would not have been seen dead, because it signified a no-frills, solid, maternal respectability which was a million miles away from her own style.

  She and Frank pushed London and Laylah on the swings, supervised them on the big roundabout, laughed at London’s attempts to run up the slide. Caroline even joined the kids in the huge round rope-woven swing, big enough for all three of them to lie there, clinging to each other, heads thrown back, as Frank swung them back and forth.

  It was surreal for Lexy to watch this, as if she had been in the photographs herself, only to have been Photoshopped out and Caroline’s image substituted instead. But if she were honest with herself, she had to acknowledge the impossibility of that happening. Lexy had never taken the kids to the park; she considered it was the nanny’s job to tire them out after school and bring them home with that burst of after-school energy thoroughly worked off.

  ‘Fuck you, Ghost Mouse,’ Lexy said again, the full significance of the nickname that she had given Caroline months ago slowly sinking in. Her target was beginning to understand that Caroline had not only noticed everything Lexy did successfully, but what she had failed to do. Ghost Mouse had identified every single one of Lexy’s weaknesses so that she could slip in a wedge and work it deeper.

  And the perfect place for the tip of that wedge had been the attraction between Lexy and Deacon. Ghost Mouse had observed that spark as they flirted at the reality TV awards show, been clever enough to remember it and suggest Deacon as a possible fake love interest for Lexy, flipping the suggestion made by Lexy’s PR team that it should be Frank to be tempted outside their marriage. How very astute of Ghost Mouse! She had moved impressively fast, hearing that idea in the meeting and using it almost straight afterwards at the lunch. It had been so well done that Lexy had practically thought she had come up with the idea herself.