We look at each other, both of us so deeply in love with the little person we have created we have become foolish with it.
He takes a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry I … er … fainted.’
I laugh. ‘Yes, how did that happen anyway?’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. I can look at my own blood and the blood of other men, but I can’t fucking see you spill blood. It just made my head spin, and before I knew it I was gone.’
‘Oh, Noah.’
He comes forward and kisses me gently. ‘You were just amazing. I’m so proud of you. I just can’t believe I missed it all.’
‘Never mind, next time—’
He frowns. ‘Next time? You want to go through this again?’ he asks incredulously.
‘Of course. Sergei needs brothers and sisters. I don’t want him to be an only child like me.’
‘No,’ he says decisively. ‘I think you suffered enough. I don’t think we will have any more kids. We can adopt. There are so many kids that need a good home.’
‘No way. We’re having at least four kids, maybe five, and if you want we can adopt a couple too, but the next time I go into labor you can stay close to my head.’
‘We’ll have to talk about this,’ he says darkly.
There is a knock on the door and Baba comes in holding a covered bowl of food. She frowns. ‘Why is that baby not swaddled?’ she demands immediately. ‘First you break custom by going out and buying clothes and toys for the child before it is born, now you don’t want to swaddle the baby?’ she tuts with displeasure.
I giggle. ‘Mama didn’t swaddle me and I turned out okay, didn’t I?’
‘That remains to be seen,’ she says, pretending to be sour but beaming with joy.
‘Where’s Mama anyway?’ I ask.
‘She’s coming. She met the doctor and decided to have a word with him.’
At that moment my mother comes into the room.
‘Oh darling, well done.’ She rushes to Noah’s side and peers at the baby.
‘Oh, my goodness me. He’s so beautiful.’
‘Yes, he is the most beautiful boy in the whole world.’
Epilogue
Noah Abramovich
Half A Century Later
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQop_qs4xV4
How Long Will I love You?
I press the soil around the tomato seedling, water it, and sit back on my haunches. It’s mid-morning and the Sicilian sun is already hot on my back. I pull the cowboy hat low on my brow and stand. Straightening my aching back I start walking back towards the house. Tasha should be home soon. Ivan, our second son, came over to take her to the market to buy crabs for lunch.
I pass by the olive grove where all Tasha’s dogs are buried. Every single one and there have been many. Even Sergei. She had his body exhumed and brought it here to be buried close to her.
As I walk, I see our daughter, Tatiana — who should be in her own home today — running towards me, and I immediately freeze. Then I start running towards her too. We meet near the wooden swing that Tasha and I sit on to watch the sunset while we eat and drink vodka.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask, catching her by her forearms. Her eyes are red. She has been crying.
‘It’s Mama,’ she pants breathlessly.
It feels as if my heart stops with fear.
‘What has happened?’ I demand.
‘Ivan has had to take her to the hospital. She slipped on a wet patch in the market and fell.’ Her eyes fill with tears. ‘Oh, Papa, Ivan had to carry her because she couldn’t walk. He’s been trying to call you, Papa, but no one answered the phone.’
‘I was working on the land.’ I pull her along with me. ‘Come on, let’s get to the hospital now.’
‘Your hands, Papa.’
I look at my hands. They are streaked with soil. I wash my hands in the kitchen then we get into her car and she drives us. The hospital is nearly forty minutes away. I try to call Ivan repeatedly, but his phone is shut off.
‘They probably don’t allow phones at the hospital,’ Tatiana says.
‘Can’t you drive faster?’ I ask my daughter.
‘I’m going as fast as I can, Papa.’
Inside I am cold. I start praying. Please, don’t let her be in pain. Give me that pain. I can bear it better than her.
In thirty minutes we reach the hospital and rush in. We ask at reception and they point us to where Ivan and Tasha are. We rush to the emergency ward and I see her lying on a gurney. She looks so small and vulnerable. I rush to her and she smiles at me through the pain.
‘My life, my life,’ I whisper.
‘It’s only a sprain, but I was trying to persuade them to give me some morphine anyway,’ she says with a grin.
Tears of relief come to my eyes. Oh, God! I cannot even begin to imagine my life without my Tasha. She used to tease me by calling me the strong and silent type. I don’t mean to be quiet, but when I speak she stops talking, and my ears ache for the sound of her voice.
‘I thought your leg was broken. Tatiana said Ivan had to carry you,’ I say.
‘You know what Ivan is like. He’s worse than you. I could have easily walked, but of course, he insisted on carrying me. It was embarrassing, actually.’ She scrunches up her nose. ‘People probably thought I was too old to walk on my own or something.’
I touch her face, running my fingertips on her cheeks. ‘You are the only seventy-year old woman I know without any wrinkles.’
‘Have you been looking at a whole pile of seventy-year old women again?’ she asks with a laugh.
‘I haven’t looked at another woman since the day you sneaked into my office in your sexy pink cardigan.’
‘Oh, you old flatterer, you.’ She laughs and it makes my heart beat slower. She’s fine. She’s fine.
‘It’s the truth. You were the most beautiful woman I ever saw and you still are.’
She smiles. ‘And you, Noah Abramovich, are the most good-looking fucker I ever saw.’
‘Are you being hot on purpose?’
She winks. ‘What do you think?’
‘We’ll see if you’re so cocky once I get you home, you saucy wench.’
‘Will someone wrap my damn ankle up quickly so I can get the hell home?’ she says grumpily, and then goes and spoils the effect by laughing that beautiful laugh of hers again.
The End
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CRYSTAL JAKE - BOOK 1
Published by Georgia Le Carre
Copyright © 2015 by Georgia Le Carre
The right of Georgia Le Carre to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN:978-1-910575-11-6
You can discover more information about Georgia Le Carre and future releases here.
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For
Samantha Bailey
Who wrote Stripped
&
Christian Plowman
who wrote Crossing The Line
Ha, ha, ha, bless your soul.
You really think you’re in control.
Well…
—Crazy, Gnarls Barkey
PROLOGUE
Crazy
‘NOOOOOOO,’ I HOWL, but there is gravel or grave soil in my throat, and nothing other than an ugly, dried-up rasp travels out of my mouth. My head shakes back and forth like a mindless wind-up toy. Even my body is denying the horror before my eyes. Without warning my knees buckle under me, and I find myself in a heap at the doorway of his flat. Frantically, I begin to crawl toward him, screaming, babbling.
I can’t lose him! Not him! Oh God, not him. Please. Not him.
Two feet away from his body and it occurs to me: this is just a nightmare. Of course it is. It has to be. Any moment now I’ll wake up. And the first thing I’ll do? Call him and tell him how much I have missed him, how much I love him.
I feel the floor scrape against my bare knees. It isn’t a nightmare. It is real.
We haven’t spoken for two weeks. I had exams and when I called his mobile, it went straight to voicemail… Shit excuse. I should have called again, I should have emailed. Why hadn’t I? I should have known.
I hunker down over his body, my pose ungainly, heavy, that of a suffering beast. My buttocks hit the floor and my legs fold up and cross under me. I press my fingers against my open mouth and stare at him. His lips and fingers are blue and the rest of him is ashen and still. He can’t be dead.
It can’t be real!
The stillness of a dead body is impossible to describe. And yet when you see it you refuse to believe it. You always think it is a trick. A mistake. A ploy…. But a needle is embedded in his arm, which is blackened with the skin stretched and unreal. It looks as if it belongs elsewhere. That is not my brother’s arm. I know my brother’s arm as intimately as I know my own.
My breathing is shallow and trembling. I suck a huge burst of air into my lungs and pull the offending needle out. My stomach twists. It should never have entered his body in the first place. I throw the syringe away. It hits something and rolls on the wooden floor. It also leaves a tiny hole in my brother’s flesh that does not bleed. I swallow hard. My hands are shaking badly.
That means he didn’t suffer, a voice whispers in my head. He did not even have time to pull it out before he was gone to wherever it is he went to.
Oh God! He is nineteen. He can’t be gone.
CPR. I should give him CPR. There must be something I can still do. I grab his shoulders and try to drag him across my thighs, but his body is so heavy, so cold, and so stiff and foreign that my shocked hands fly away from his shoulders as if they have touched fire. I gaze at him as he lies unmoving. The blood that ran without rest during his short life has stilled within his veins. Everything has cooled and hardened. He is like a piece of wood.
With a sob of intolerable, indescribable anguish I reach for him and with every ounce of my might I drag his cold, dead weight toward me and lift it onto my lap. I touch the soft brown hair that flops across his forehead and it feels different. His scalp has hardened and changed the lie of his hair. I caress his hair, his face, his hands. Holding his head pressed against my stomach I close my eyes and begin to rock him the way a mother would comfort her distressed baby.
But there is no comfort—his head is a hard, unfamiliar weight and the action produces an odd thud made by his stiff hand repeatedly hitting the floor. I stop. In a daze I look down on his face.
His mouth is open, the tongue—a strange, dull color—is pushed against his teeth. Without the healthy sheen of saliva it looks gross. I try to close his mouth, but it is locked open. His eyes are not fully shut and through the slits I see the whites. I try to lift a lid to see once more the beautiful blue eyes I have known all my life.
If I could at least see that.
But his eyelids are glued shut. They will not budge. Tremors shoot through my hand as I still the gruesome desire to force his eyelid open. When we were young we used to lick the salt from each other’s skin. I am suddenly filled with the strange desire to lick his skin.
I put one hand under his head and the other under his neck and I put his head on the floor. Then I scoot backwards until I am on my hands and knees and my face is hovering inches away from his. My head moves downwards. My tongue comes out. Inches away a voice in my head urgently cries, ‘No.’
I stop and listen to peculiar silence around us. It is quieter than falling snow. On the tabletop I notice his fingerprints in the light layer of dust, and then something weird happens. For a second I clearly perceive myself not from inside my body but from outside, crouched over my dead brother, more animal than human. I recoil from the sight. And then the moment is gone and I lower my head and lick the last salt on the corpse’s skin.
It is the beginning of my descent into unfamiliar territory. A place you might call madness.
I’m afraid my stay was excruciatingly long.
Can’t read my, can’t read my,
No, he can’t read my poker face
—Poker Face, Lady Gaga
ONE
Lily
‘FIRST STOP, EDEN,’ says Patrick, with a quick backward glance, as he pulls the eight-seater minibus out into the lunchtime traffic. ‘Just give it your best moves, and no worries if ya don’t get picked because we still have Spearmint Rhino and Diamonds after that,’ he adds cheerfully.
He has a boyish face, full of charm and guile, but one look at him and you know. Weasel. And he drives like a mad man. The five of us hang onto our battered seats and smile distantly at each other. We are competitors who have been collected from the designated pick-up point outside South Kensington Tube station and are on our way to an audition. Surreptitiously, I watch them.
Traveling with me are a tall redhead, a black girl with a tight body, a life-size human Barbie doll with masses of blonde hair, a beyond believable tiny waist and enormous boobs, and a sleekly beautiful olive-skinned girl. Each one of us has a large shoulder bag. No doubt their bags hold the same things mine does.
A sexy costume, killer shoes, and strong stage make-up.
I gaze out of the window and digest the information that Club Eden is to be our first stop. Shame. I had hoped to practice my routine on a real life stage in one of the other clubs and see all the other girls’ routines before we got to Eden, but still, it is interesting to know that Eden has to be paying Patrick the highest commission to have first refusal. No wonder it has overtaken all the other strip clubs and become the club to be seen in even though it does not offer full nudity.
In silence we head northwards to the infamous King’s Cross area of London. Once it was synonymous with a grimy train station crawling with prostitutes, and rave parties in disused warehouses, but King’s Cross has cleaned up its act and fast become a cutting-edge hub for fashion and the arts, attracting even Google to set up its European headquarters there.
Club Eden stands sandwiched between two tall glass office towers.
Patrick drives past the large neon-lit bitten red apple logo and, turning at the next side street, enters the rear car park. He parks close to the back doors where a guy in a chef’s whites is sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette. He watches us through the smoke with uncurious eyes.
‘Here we are,’ Patrick announces, and switches off the engine.
We climb out, adjust our clothes, and follow him around the side of the building to the front entrance. As soon as we enter the glossy black, double doors and my stiletto heels leave their indent on the carpet, I feel a prickling sensation go up my spine. It is so strong it feels as if a spider is actually walking on my skin. Unable to stop myself I snap my head around.
Jesus!
Deeply tanned, badass black hair, and staring straight at me is the legend himself! Jake Fucking Eden. My heart skips a beat. Fuck me! His photographs have not done him justice. Dressed totally in black except for a pair of brown snakeskin boots, he is coming down a broad and rather magnificent stairway with the kind of effortless, lazy power of a tiger.
He is too far away for me to see the expression in his eyes, but the intense, barely leashed tension around him has a thunderstorm effect. It makes the air between u
s vibrate and crackle like electricity, taking my breath away and throwing my senses into high alert. My spine goes rigid and all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rise up like those of a cat that comes face to face with mortal danger.
For a few seconds we stare at each other, instant sexual adversaries.
Then I tear my eyes away from his and train them back on Patrick, who is holding open another door. Taking a deep breath I go through it. It leads into a dimly lit corridor. The air here is cooler. I look at my hands. They are clenched tight with pent-up energy. That has never happened to me before. I have never simply looked at a man and hungered to have him inside my body. The sensation is raw.
‘Changing rooms are through there,’ Patrick says swiveling his eyes toward another door farther up the corridor. ‘Meet me upstairs in fifteen minutes and I’ll introduce ya to the manager.’
Then he disappears in the direction we came from and the five of us troop into the changing rooms, which I cannot help noting are super clean and resemble those in a posh spa. The other girls immediately start unzipping their bags, but running into Jake Eden has unexpectedly and unfathomably unnerved and unsettled me, and I have to close my eyes and take a quick moment to compose my body, which is still clenched tight with arousal. When I open my eyes, my face is no longer flushed, nor are my eyes glittering bright. I have a task ahead of me. I look cool and composed.
As I open my bag and pull out my specially commissioned, easy to remove red dress my eyes flick over to the others. Already unrecognizably glamorous in a long, sheer robe with sequined edges, the redhead is stepping into sparkly gold shoes. Suddenly she is a six feet tall goddess. She is impressive to say the least. The black girl has taken off her bomber jacket and underneath she is ripped like a racehorse and wearing a black catsuit with fluorescent green and pink geometric patterns. I quickly slip into my dress and take my plastic red platform shoes out. While I secure the straps I notice that the life-size Barbie doll is dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform. She catches my eyes in the mirror and mouths, ‘Hiya.’
You Don't Know Me: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Page 18
