And what if she didn’t have to?
‘I have to prioritize,’ she said, and she heard her tone become less pathetic immediately, less needy. That was good: this was the kind of woman a man like Ronaldo would want. Not a doormat who lay sobbing on a mattress, but a woman who could run a multinational company, who could put a condom on with her mouth while he told her how amazing it felt.
Bella had started to cry the moment his cock drove into her the first time tonight, because it felt so wonderful, so utterly right, as if, in that moment, she was complete; and because she also knew that the next morning she would be leaving this amazing sex behind. It wasn’t all she wanted in life. It couldn’t be. Much as she craved Ronaldo, the ambition which had exploded to the surface at her father’s challenge to his children was too strong to be denied, and it was going to push her onto that plane to Dallas tomorrow morning.
She had finally received her wake-up call. This handful of days had been, as Ronaldo had said, out of time. But she had always known that she couldn’t stay here forever. Apart from any business considerations, that would look so weak! Ronaldo had met her in her business persona with her PR by her side. Little Bella, running the Sachs hotels, he had exclaimed, shaking his head in disbelief at how much time had passed, how his childhood playmate had grown up to run the most important division of the company! What would he think if she babbled that she wanted to give it all up for him? That she would move to Chicago, since he loved it so much? Leave Thomas, forfeit her chance to become CEO of Sachs?
He wouldn’t respect her. And she wouldn’t respect herself. It was important, when you were being swept away by a man with the force of a tidal wave, to remind yourself that your own self-respect ought to matter even more than his opinion.
‘So here’s what I have to do,’ she said, and she sat up, taking the pillow and holding it across her body for comfort. ‘I have to get on a plane tomorrow and spend a few weeks going round the world like some modern version of Phileas Fogg. And then I get back to London and I work my arse to the bone for a few months.’
‘Not to the bone, please!’ Ronaldo protested. ‘I like it just as it is!’
He reached out and stroked her round bottom, which made her beam with pleasure.
‘And maybe –’ she was looking at the pillow now – ‘maybe you could come to London for a few days. I could put you up somewhere. Not a Sachs, of course, they all know me there, but . . .’
‘Bella.’ He frowned. ‘I’m not one of the heirs to the Sachs billions, but I make good money. You don’t need to put me up.’
‘Does that mean you’ll come?’
Her face lit up as if she was ten and he was twelve again, and he had said he would play at forts in the garden with her.
‘Yes!’ He was laughing. ‘Yes, I will!’
‘But – you know how you said this was out of time?’ she continued. ‘It has to stay that way until this project’s finished and the rollout goes okay – or doesn’t, and I need to do a frantic troubleshoot, which I don’t even want to think about! It’s so much for me to handle that I just can’t deal with anything to do with . . . Thomas,’ she said, ducking her head again, embarrassed to speak her husband’s name in this room so full of the sounds and scents of the sex she had just had with another man. ‘I just can’t.’
‘Bella, I’m not asking you to,’ he said earnestly. ‘I would never put you under pressure.’
Oh please, put me under pressure! she wanted to scream. Tell me you’re madly in love with me and can’t bear the thought of me being married to another man, going home to him, maybe to have sex with him . . .
Since they hadn’t said a word about Thomas this whole time, Ronaldo had no idea how curtailed and restrained her sex life was with her husband. Nor did he know about the challenge her father had set her and her siblings: he wasn’t aware of how stratospheric the stakes were with this project of hers. Bella wasn’t sure why she hadn’t told him. Maybe she didn’t want him to see her as so competitive. Or maybe it was the rose-tinted view he had of their childhood, him and the Sachs children, running and laughing and playing together in the glorious gardens of the Maida Vale house? Had she not wanted to destroy those memories by telling him how viciously they were now pitted against each other?
Ronaldo was looking at her with dark eyes full of sincerity, wanting to make sure that she believed his reassurance. She reached out and took his hand.
‘So, you’ll come to London,’ she said, the words filling her with happiness. ‘I’ll be working like a crazy woman, but I’ll carve out some time for us. And when my project’s all done . . . we’ll see where we are.’
He nodded.
‘That sounds good,’ he said. ‘In fact, it sounds great.’
Suddenly, Bella asked herself: Why shouldn’t the CEO of Sachs be based in Chicago? Just because head office has always been in London, that’s no reason in itself to keep it there. Remember all the studies showing how dangerous the thinking ‘we’ve always done it that way’ can be in business!
After all, Chicago was a major metropolitan city in one of Sachs’s main markets. The more she thought about it, the more reasonable the idea sounded. It would certainly reduce costs: the London office was very expensive to run. Of course, this was just a wild idea, one she wouldn’t mention to Ronaldo, not for months. It was bound to freak him out, make him see her as desperate, the kind of person who would throw aside a five-year marriage for someone she had spent a mere five nights with, childhood playmate or not . . .
The expression in Ronaldo’s eyes changed. His brows drew together in a frown, and her heart plummeted. Had he changed his mind so fast?
‘Do you smell . . . burning?’ he asked, sitting up.
Bella knew instantly what it was. Her Louboutins had long since been kicked off. She threw herself off the bed, skidding slightly in her stockinged feet, and ran over to the recessed dressing room, partly concealed from the bedroom by a half-wall. The ceramic tongs the hairdresser had left still plugged in, expecting her to come back and finish her hairstyle, were on the heat mat, which couldn’t catch fire, but the smell was pungent by now. She pulled out the plug, sagging with relief that Ronaldo had noticed it before anything truly bad happened.
‘Everything okay?’ he called from the bed. ‘You need help?’
‘No, I just forgot to switch off my hair tongs when you rang the bell,’ she lied, walking back into the bedroom, feeling very sexy in her stockings. ‘Didn’t you notice that half my hair was done and half wasn’t?’
‘Baby, I just see you,’ he said fondly. ‘I honestly don’t give a shit about your hairdo.’
‘Hah! You would if it didn’t look nice!’ she said, thinking how funny it was that men genuinely believed that they didn’t care about how well a woman had done her hair and make-up.
‘Tell you what, let’s have a bath,’ he suggested. ‘In your huge marble tub with the jets that go into all sorts of interesting places. We’ll get your hair soaking wet and then you can see exactly how much I mind about how it looks as I soap you all over and sit you on my lap . . .’
Ronaldo swung his legs off the bed, stood up, held out his hand to her, his cock heavy, rosy-tinted, in its thick nest of black hair. She shook her head in disbelief that he was indicating he’d be good to go again so soon after their recent bout. He was like a sex machine.
‘And then we can order half the room-service menu,’ she said happily, taking his hand. ‘We’ll be starving. I’ll tell them I want to test out the food and wine, to explain why there’s way more than there should be for just one person. It’s my turn to get dinner. You’ve been paying for everything.’
‘Well, okay, you can pay just this once,’ he said. ‘I demand foie gras, lobster, the works! And very fine wines! In fact, let’s crack the minibar and have champagne in the bath.’
As she agreed enthusiastically, he looked down at her with a half-smile.
‘You know something crazy?’ he said. ‘For a second back
there when I smelt burning, I thought it might be us – like we actually set the bed on fire! Crazy, right? I’m clearly going to have to try much harder next time!’
PART TWO
Chapter Thirteen
Two months later
The bottle-green Aston Martin DB11 barely slowed down as it turned through the gates that opened onto the wide avenue, lined with mature linden trees, that led up to Vanbrugh Manor. Bart whistled tunelessly between his teeth as he shot down the straight drive, which had been designed to make the approach to the majestic, sprawling stately home as impressive to the visitor as possible.
Some landscapers had chosen, centuries ago, to slow down the arrival at country houses in order to build the anticipation, sending carriages on a winding fairy-tale journey that allowed brief glimpses of the mansion through carefully planted, increasingly wide breaks in the foliage, building to a dramatic reveal of the final vista. Vanbrugh Manor’s architect, however, had eschewed the magical build-up in favour of a much more direct statement of power. It was impossible to reach the end of the drive and start the loop around the gravelled turning circle without being made vividly aware that its owner, almost certainly, had infinitely more money and status than you did.
This was, of course, exactly why Jeffrey Sachs had selected it from the array of extremely expensive mansions in the Chilterns that an outwardly smooth-mannered but inwardly ecstatic estate agent had shown him and Jade a decade ago. Jade had decided that, to further her very active social climbing, she needed a country house not too far from London in which she could regularly entertain weekend parties of the great and good while building bonds with the Cotswolds country set. She had made it clear to the estate agent that her priority was to find somewhere that would take her guests’ breath away, price comparatively unimportant.
The Savile-Row-suited young man had earned a stratospheric bonus at the end of that year, and it was well deserved; he had executed his commission perfectly. Externally, Vanbrugh Manor was a Georgian gem with an excellent historical pedigree, but internally it had been updated to twenty-first-century standards. All the bedrooms were en suite, with bathrooms executed to five-star-hotel quality. There was a screening room, a fully equipped gym, and an array of kitchen gadgets that would enable a chef to produce meals deserving of a Michelin star: industrial ovens, a walk-in freezer, sous-vide machines and a ten-thousand-pound, state-of-the-art ice-cream maker.
None of the older Sachs children had ever been invited here before. Since Jade had only let them in the door of the Warwick Avenue villa for a scant couple of hours now and then, there had been no question of their being permitted to stay at her country home. But the regime change had brought many unexpected consequences, and a couple of weeks ago the four children had been taken aback to receive emails from someone styling himself as the personal assistant to Adrianna Rootare, inviting them for a two-night stay at Vanbrugh.
Or rather, three of the children, plus Samantha. Conway’s name had been pointedly excluded from the list of email recipients. Jeffrey was still furious with him for the scandal which had dragged Adrianna’s name and Jeffrey’s divorce, by association, onto the front pages.
In a swirl of gravel, Bart brought the Aston Martin to a halt at the foot of the entrance steps and jumped out, standing back to take in the sight of his father’s country house. The whistle was audible now, and openly appreciative. This wasn’t Castle Howard, Woburn Abbey or Alnwick Castle, one of the great British stately homes which were so huge and sprawling that the owners needed their own suite of rooms to which they could retire to enjoy a slightly more private life when they were not hosting dinner parties for fifty people. It did not, for instance, boast a series of state apartments for entertaining royalty, plus its own theatre.
Built on a smaller scale, it was essentially a family home. Still, it had a full-sized ballroom, as well as acres of ornamental gardens, a croquet lawn and tennis courts and a heated swimming pool. And it was a beauty. Even Bart, who regularly stayed at the most lavish private homes in the world, could not help but be impressed by the exquisitely restrained Georgian architecture, elegantly symmetrical with its red brick and stone facings and its high windows.
As the car pulled up the front door swung open, and down the shallow flight of steps came a young man dressed in a simple black two-piece uniform, cut rather like a masseur’s.
‘Hello!’ Bart said cheerfully; having been educated at the best schools and visited aristocratic friends from a young age, he knew that it was considered very middle-class and vulgar to be aloof with the staff. ‘I’m Bart Sachs. Here for the weekend.’
‘He knows,’ said a heavily accented voice from the entrance hall, and Adrianna appeared in the arched doorway. From this angle, her legs, clad in white jeans, seemed to go on forever, helped by the wedge-heeled ankle boots which gave her an extra four inches of height; a dazzled Bart followed them slowly upwards, past the narrow waistline of the jeans, emphasized by the belt, a thin strip of orange patent leather from Hermès. Tucked into the jeans was a matching Hermès orange sweater which clung to every curve of Adrianna’s upper body, and in her ears were diamond studs, set in rose gold, that were so comically large they looked like market-stall accessories worn by a character from EastEnders or Coronation Street.
Jade, wanting very badly to fit in with the Oxfordshire county set, had bought Barbours and Husky hunting jackets and Hunter wellington boots as soon as she became the chatelaine of Vanbrugh Manor, eschewing London chic for the low-key country look. One glance at Adrianna, who oozed glamour from every pore, made it clear why Jeffrey might have decided to trade in a wife who had originally been a very sleek, fashionable art gallery consultant but tried to morph into a hunting/shooting/fishing stereotype which was not at all his taste.
Bart executed a flourishing bow at the sight of his hostess. As deadpan as she had been on their previous encounter, she merely nodded in greeting.
‘Everyone else here yet?’ Bart asked her, handing his car key to the young man, who got in and drove it around the side of the house, presumably to the garages. At this level of luxury living, it would have been unimaginable to actually see any parked vehicles, so there was no way for him to tell if his sisters had arrived.
‘Oh yes,’ Adrianna said, unsmiling. ‘You are the last person. You are late.’
‘I’m sorry!’
He bounded up the steps, and it was proof of Adrianna’s extreme powers of self-control that she was able to remain blank-faced at the sight of Bart in motion, golden hair flapping over his face, moving as beautifully as a pedigree show pony. Taking her hand, he kissed it like a courtier.
‘I keep wanting to call you milady,’ he said. ‘Can I call you milady?’
Adrianna surveyed him, those elongated green eyes revealing absolutely nothing about her reaction.
‘Yes,’ she said eventually.
‘A woman of few words! I like that,’ he said. ‘It’s very calming, somehow. Would you know what I meant if I said that this is all rather like an Agatha Christie novel? All the children summoned to the stately home, beautiful new fiancée to greet us, elderly Papa in his library . . . you aren’t by any chance expecting a Belgian guest, by the way? Egg-shaped head, big moustache? Or a little old lady in the village who knits a lot?’
‘No,’ Adrianna said flatly. ‘We have not invited Hercule Poirot. And there is no village, so no Miss Marple.’
Bart’s huge blue eyes widened still further.
‘My favourite is Death on the Nile,’ she informed him. ‘It is very sad, though. I always cry at the end. This is how I learned to speak English. I read all her books and when I did not know a word I would look it up in the dictionary. Come in. It is time for cocktails.’
She turned away from him, her magnificent curls bouncing against her shoulder blades as she led the way inside. Wordlessly, Bart followed her. The wedge heels made her so tall that it was very easy for him to watch her bottom move in the tight white jeans without being ob
vious about it.
‘Bart is here,’ she announced as she entered a large and very classically appointed drawing room.
‘About bloody time!’ Jeffrey barked from the prime position, a huge leather chesterfield at the centre of an arrangement of three matching sofas, the fireplace forming the fourth side of the square. A fire burned in the grate, apple wood sending up a delicate scent, a large, heavy brass club fender with green leather upholstery in front of it. Bart lounged over to prop his buttocks on it in classic dominant male style.
‘Hello, Daddy! Hi, everyone! This is quite the pad, I must say,’ he said, looking around the panelled room, taking in its excellent proportions, its tall windows overlooking the front of the house.
From the sofas, his two sisters looked at him rather warily over the cocktails they were holding. Thomas, Bella’s husband, gave his brother-in-law a nod of greeting, and Bart responded with a grin. Conway had always thought Thomas a dull stick of a man, but Bart found him perfectly pleasant. Mind you, it took a lot for Bart to find anyone unpleasant.
‘Samantha here?’ he asked.
He was particularly fond of his sister-in-law, who reminded him of one of his favourite teachers at school. Yes, he had had a crush on Mrs Stratford, and no, he wouldn’t dream of ever giving Samantha the slightest hint that her brisk, efficient manner and impeccably neat appearance brought him happy flashbacks to moments of self-love in the school showers, picturing Mrs Stratford in uncharacteristically dishevelled and revealing positions. But it always gave him a happy surge of nostalgia to see Samantha’s bright, lipsticked smile and smell her very ladylike Penhaligon’s floral perfume.
‘She’s giving the kids their dinner,’ Charlotte informed him, ‘with Paul and Posy and Quant. I must say, the nursery arrangements are very nice. And the chef has a spiralizer! Posy and Quant are in heaven.’
‘You and Conway married very well on the parenting front, didn’t you?’ Bart said, grinning, and then pulled a face. ‘Oops. Bit tactless under the circs.’
Bad Twins Page 15
