Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Bart shrieked in fear as he saw her coming for him, fist up like an avenging fury. It was his turn to react instinctively in a matter of seconds, and all he could do was duck down. Luckily for her, he wasn’t quite fast enough, and her blow glanced off the side of his head. She had put so much force into it that it would have sent her spinning off-balance, maybe even flying to the ground, if it had not connected.

  As it was, she took a few more paces until she could halt, carried on by the speed at which she had been running. She blew on her fingers ruefully, then shook them out as she turned and looked at her stepson-to-be, who was now rising from the crouch into which he had dropped, his expression very wary, holding up his hands in the universal gesture of surrender.

  ‘I’m really sorry!’ he said. ‘Please don’t hurt me any more!’

  He rubbed the side of his skull.

  ‘You hit hard,’ he observed ruefully.

  ‘I would not have hit your head with my fist on purpose,’ she said equally ruefully, still shaking her hand. ‘That’s stupid. A skull is stronger than fingers. I was going for the neck.’

  ‘So I take it you don’t like surprises,’ Bart said.

  ‘The light is behind you,’ she pointed out. ‘I could not see your face until I was too close to stop.’

  Bart shook back his very distinctive fall of golden hair.

  ‘You couldn’t hazard a guess?’ he asked politely.

  This drew a reluctant smile from Adrianna.

  ‘Okay,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t like surprises.’

  They stood looking at each other for a long moment, blue eyes to green, almost the same height. Eventually she said:

  ‘So? Why did you ambush me?’

  ‘I was out jogging too,’ Bart explained. ‘Or rather, I should say that I was out jogging. You were running like you were being chased by a serial killer. Do you always do that?’

  ‘Maybe I run like I am a serial killer chasing someone,’ she said, deadpan as always.

  Bart laughed. Writers have often commented poetically on the beauty of some women’s laughs, comparing them to silver bells or bubbling fountains. It is much rarer to see a man’s laugh praised in print. But Bart’s was wonderful, completely infectious, the best possible indicator of his open, friendly nature; it was a laugh that in crowded bars regularly had people turning to see what the joke was, hoping to join in, wanting to be a part of whatever delightfulness was amusing him so much.

  Even Adrianna, with adrenalin still spiking through her and a hand sore from punching him in the side of the head, found herself smiling in response.

  ‘You are a fucking idiot,’ she said to compensate for having smiled at him. ‘You say you were out jogging, but that’s not true. You were hiding behind a tree.’

  ‘I was out jogging,’ Bart said patiently. ‘But then I saw you tearing around the boundary wall like Road Runner – at first I thought you were a cheetah, you were going so fast! – and I thought it would be nice to – well, surprise you. Trust me, that’s the last time I do that.’

  Balancing adroitly, Adrianna bent her right leg, reached behind her with her right hand and caught the ankle, pushing the foot into the buttock, stretching out her quad.

  ‘And why did you want to stop me?’ she asked. ‘Out here, far away from the house, where no one can hear what we’re saying?’

  Bart ambled over to the closest tree, leaning back against its wide trunk.

  ‘If you pull in over here, as it were,’ he said, making a beckoning gesture, ‘not only will no one be able to hear what we say, they won’t be able to see us either.’

  It was, indeed, the perfect place to have an entirely private conversation, as on either side of the drive was nothing but grass, stretching out to the wall on one side, blending eventually into an ornamental Italian garden on the other side of the house. There was no cover. Nobody could possibly have approached without being spotted immediately. Even if, in the manner of an actor in a comic spy film, someone had tried to dodge from one linden to another to sneak up on the two of them, the angle at which Bart had positioned himself meant that he would have seen the movement.

  Adrianna looked back towards the house while still balancing on one foot, a feat of difficulty that Bart fully appreciated. Then she turned back, lowered her right foot, strolled over towards him, enough so that she was no longer visible from the house, and proceeded to repeat the stretch on the other side.

  ‘So?’ she said, a woman of few words.

  ‘I want you to push Daddy to appoint me CEO of Sachs,’ Bart said, managing for once to match her conversational style.

  ‘Why should I?’

  She was watching him very carefully now, analysing every little movement, every inflection and tone.

  He said: ‘Okay, for the purposes of this conversation let’s assume that Conway’s out of the running – Pa certainly seems dead set against him, doesn’t he? Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Charlotte and Bella are both Daddy’s girls. They hate him for treating our mother so badly, but they’re still desperate for his approval, even if they won’t admit it. You may be behaving like the ideal hostess this weekend, but they’ll still resent you because you’re younger than them, more beautiful than them, and getting married to their father. Perfectly natural, I suppose, when one puts it like that,’ he added, shrugging. ‘Can’t really blame them. But if one of them gets power, I’m betting that they’ll do everything they can to screw you over.’

  Adrianna lowered her left foot and started to stretch out her calves against the tree, still with her eyes fixed on his face.

  ‘Especially if you have kids,’ he said. ‘I know Jade’s pushing for her boys to get a degree of voting stock in the company as part of the divorce. It’s tied into the family trust, which means that we have a stake in it. Pa’s lawyers are negotiating a payoff for the four of us to get us to sign the papers. He’s hell-bent on getting that divorce as soon as he can, obviously, so he’ll throw money at us to get us to do it.’

  Adrianna nodded briefly; she knew all about the divorce negotiations.

  ‘And when that happens,’ Bart continued, ‘it means that there’ll be six kids in the trust. Our quarter still has the majority, of course, if we stick together, and I can’t imagine any one of us siding with Jade’s boys. But if you have children too – which you’re bound to do – then the odds start ticking up, don’t they? What if you have two, and you insist on them being part of the trust too, and Pa’s still infatuated with you so he twists all of our arms until we agree? Then what if your kids team up with Jade’s as a voting block? Suddenly the trust looks a lot less . . . trustworthy.’

  Adrianna’s eyebrows rose as she stretched her triceps, one elbow up, one down, hands clasped behind her back.

  ‘I know,’ Bart said rather smugly, correctly interpreting her expression as surprise that he was able to analyse the situation this clearly. ‘People think I’m the most awful dimwit, bumbling through life like something out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. But I’m not a complete idiot. I can look ahead and see how things might turn out. And I’m telling you, the girls will be a lot harder on you and your kids than I’d be. Did you see how Bella went after Jade with that cushion? Whacked the hell out of her! And you should have heard what Charlotte said to her afterwards. Practically flayed her with her tongue. Not pretty at all, let me tell you. Called her kids “brats”.’

  He pulled a comic grimace.

  ‘Trust me, if one of the twins gets made CEO, they’ll never give you a fair shake. Daddy won’t be around forever, and to have Charlotte or Bella gunning for you won’t be at all comfortable.’

  ‘What if I don’t want kids?’ Adrianna asked, stretching her other arm now.

  Bart burst out laughing.

  ‘Of course you’ll have kids!’ he said easily. ‘Every woman who marries a rich guy has at least one kid. It’s her insurance. You get a house, child support, all the good stuff – way juicier in the divorce. I know a friend of Ma
’s who’s pulled off what she calls the Holy Trinity – three by three separate husbands. She’s absolutely rolling in it, apparently.’

  ‘So you’re saying I’m a gold-digger?’ Adrianna said, leaning back against the tree.

  ‘Well,’ Bart said, ‘to partially quote the song, I don’t see you messin’ with no broke . . . um, bros.’

  Unexpectedly, this was what cracked her up. She started to laugh, the first time Bart had ever seen her yield to a spontaneous emotion. Her beautifully sculpted features softened, her green eyes flashed; she bent over, propping her hands on her thighs, cracking up.

  ‘Your accent!’ she managed. ‘Oh, that was very good!’

  ‘Bit rich,’ Bart said sulkily, ‘considering you’ve got one of your own. Okay, so maybe I don’t do the best American-rapper accent in the world, but I don’t think it warrants out-and-out hysteria.’

  ‘Okay,’ Adrianna said finally, standing up and wiping her eyes. ‘I am a gold-digger. Okay. I say I don’t want kids, you don’t believe me. Okay. It doesn’t matter. I will not divorce Jeffrey. Maybe you don’t believe that either, but it’s true. I want to be part of . . . everything. So I am very interested in the question of who becomes the CEO.’

  ‘I don’t want kids either,’ Bart said, ‘by the way. I won’t have ones who’re battling with yours for part of the trust, or control of the company. But I wouldn’t mind being filthy rich and powerful, I must admit. And I’d like to see my siblings settle down and stop looking like they’re going to tear each other’s throats out. I actually think I could manage that as CEO.’

  He looked serious for a moment.

  ‘Just to say, FYI, Con would be quite the opposite. He’s a bossy bastard. Giving him supreme power would be a disaster – he’d lord it over me and the girls and drive them insane with rage. Quite genuinely, I don’t think he should get the job. We’ve had one psycho authoritarian running Sachs for decades – we don’t need another.’

  He grinned.

  ‘It would piss all of them off, I know, because they’ve always thought I wasn’t any good at business. But that would be quite a lot of fun too.’

  ‘Your father is still very angry with Conway,’ Adrianna observed. ‘Because of me. He thinks that because Conway was having an affair with a prostitute from my country, it makes me look like one too.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think anyone actually said she was a—’ Bart started.

  ‘Believe me,’ Adrianna said, shaking her head. ‘I know that . . . girl. She is definitely a prostitute.’

  ‘Um, fair dos, then,’ Bart muttered as she went on:

  ‘If I tell Jeffrey that I am fine, it does not matter to me, he will relax a little about this,’ Adrianna continued. ‘But if I say that I am very upset – because she is a prostitute, so that part is true – Jeffrey will keep being very angry with Conway.’

  ‘And what are you going to do?’ Bart asked intently.

  She looked straight at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly.

  ‘Pa would much rather hand over the company to a son, not a daughter,’ Bart said. ‘He’s very old-fashioned that way. Did you hear him telling Charlotte she should have been born a guy?’

  He was speaking on autopilot, however. His lips were moving, he was making sense, but he could barely hear his own voice, and he doubted that she was fully aware of what he was saying, either. They were staring at each other now in a way that was unmistakable. The air between them was as charged with electricity as if a clap of thunder was about to sound, a storm break overhead.

  ‘What if you get the job and make a terrible mess of it?’ she asked, still in that soft voice.

  ‘Then I make a mess and eventually get kicked out,’ he said, shrugging. ‘It won’t be any skin off your nose. You’ve got nothing to lose by supporting me. Or even just smoothing the way for me. Why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ she echoed, and now those two words took on an entirely different meaning.

  Bart pushed off the tree and took a couple of steps towards her.

  ‘I’m getting married to your father,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on his.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to marry you.’

  ‘I don’t want to marry you either,’ Adrianna snapped back. ‘You are pointless. A pretty toy for someone. You do nothing useful.’

  ‘Bit harsh,’ Bart said.

  She snorted a little laugh. ‘Bit harsh,’ she repeated. ‘I love this English way of talking. If someone stabbed you in the stomach, you would probably say “bit harsh”.’

  ‘You know what?’ Bart said, taking another step towards her. ‘I probably would.’

  He shoved his hands into the pocket of his sweatpants and looked from side to side briefly, making sure that no one else was out in the early morning, walking through the dewy grass. Then he leant in to kiss her. Just his mouth, no other contact.

  The storm might have broken, a flash of lightning overhead followed directly by a clap of thunder, the heavens opening, rain pouring down; if it had, neither Bart nor Adrianna would have noticed. Their senses were entirely focused on the soft, sweet kiss, surprisingly romantic, their lips meeting tentatively, their breath warm in the cool morning air. Adrianna moved towards him, deepening the contact, and he felt the tip of her tongue touch his, a perfect, intoxicating moment.

  He sighed in pleasure, opening his mouth, trying to coax hers further open too. After her exercise, her lips tasted delicately salty. Her hand touched his chest, slid slowly down to his belly button, feeling his abdominal muscles jerk and tauten at the contact, hollowing in as if they wanted to make it even easier for her to keep going.

  They kept kissing as her fingers reached the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, slung low on his hips, her thumb circling his belly button. He wanted her to go lower so badly that his hips jerked towards her, a silent plea; but the next thing Bart knew, he was practically kissing the tree. Adrianna had ducked down between his arms and slipped away. His hands slapped against the wide trunk of the linden tree for balance, the blood rushing from his head to his groin so fast he felt dizzy.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said to the tree. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything to put my marriage in trouble,’ Adrianna said, stepping back to the tarmacked drive, her voice full of amusement. ‘But I will think about what you said about the future, and the CEO job. I am impressed. You surprised me twice this morning.’

  Bart knew she didn’t mean the kiss; that had come as no surprise to her. He turned his head to watch her as she jogged away, her buttocks high and superbly muscled in the tight exercise leggings, her hips slender as a model’s. The ponytail bounced with every step.

  She did not look back. He doubted that Adrianna had ever looked back in her life.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said devoutly to the tree as he peeled himself away from it. He still wasn’t sure if he could stand unsupported; he turned round, resting his back against the trunk. His cock stood up like a fully engaged handbrake on a manual-drive car, and just as hard.

  Bart looked down at it. Where was he going to go with this thing? He could barely walk; his balls were swollen and aching. Once more he glanced from side to side, making sure that the field was completely clear. The huge entrance gates were closed. In the old days, someone would have lived in the gatehouse, their accommodation free in return for their being available to open and shut the gates at any hour of the day or night.

  Nowadays, of course, there was an electronic panel set into one of the pillars, with a code to enter and a buzzer to press if you didn’t have it; but this was the main entrance, for the owners and their guests, and Bart, in selecting this location to ambush Adrianna, had known that no one was expected at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Any deliveries would be routed through the back approach road to the servants’ entrance.

  So as he reached into his sweatpants and, with a groan of anticipation, extracted his swollen cock, he felt very confident that he could take care
of his extremely pressing physical need without anyone being the wiser. And it didn’t take long. His cock was already moist with pre-cum; one spit into his palm, eyes closed to imagine Adrianna’s face, Adrianna’s mouth, Adrianna’s buttocks, Adrianna’s hand sliding over his cock – just a few strokes and he was hissing between his teeth to make sure he didn’t shout out loud as the hot sperm started to gush through his fingers, dripping to the ground.

  He smiled drowsily, imagining his come sizzling as it hit the cold dewy grass. The orgasm had hit him hard, exploding as if she had reached inside him and dragged it out herself, and he thanked God for the tree trunk behind him. Not only was it safe concealment from the house; without it, he was pretty sure, he would have fallen over when he came. His knees were still buckling.

  God, what a woman! He shook his cock as best he could, and then ducked down, grabbed a handful of wet grass and wiped himself off. A couple of blades of grass clung to his damp cock as he stowed it away in his briefs once more and drew in a long, deep breath, shaking his head in disbelief about what had just happened.

  Stepping back onto the drive, he couldn’t help looking down it for a glimpse of Adrianna, even though, at the speed at which she travelled, he knew that she had to be long gone. And he couldn’t help wondering whether she was doing what he had just done, ducking into a downstairs loo as soon as she was back inside the house, pulling her leggings down to her knees, slipping her hand between her legs, strumming herself until she, too, exploded.

  Was she thinking of him? Pretending it was his hand making her come? She unquestionably wanted him: he had seen it in her eyes, tasted it on her mouth, he had known it since she had gently teased him on their first night here. He had already pulled on his cock in the shower yesterday, imagining Adrianna coming to his room, sinking to her knees, taking him in her mouth as the water poured down over them and he shot into her mouth, getting her wet inside and out . . .

  He had to stop this line of thought right now. It was simply too risky to even contemplate starting an affair with the woman with whom his father was obsessed; she was clearly even more aware of that than he, having much more to lose. Bart’s trust fund was beyond his father’s control. Adrianna’s financial security, however, was entirely in Jeffrey’s hands, and she was never going to risk losing that.