Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Okay, I can’t shag her, he said to himself. And she can’t shag me. But we can hang out, get to know each other, can’t we? There’s something about her I genuinely like, quite apart from the fact that she’s insanely sexy.

  Jesus. What am I saying? It’s like I want to be friends with a woman. When has that ever happened to me? But I like talking to her. She makes me laugh. You’d never be bored with her, that’s for sure.

  Pa’s a bloody lucky guy.

  Yes, that was the line to take. She was going to be his father’s wife. Absolutely nothing could happen between them that was not appropriate behaviour for a stepmother and stepson. That insane kiss was a one-off; there were plenty of other girls in the world. He knew that better than anyone. When he got back to London he’d go through his phone and line up a bevy of lovelies who were bound to distract him from the image of his stepmother-to-be with her hand on the waistband of his jogging bottoms.

  In fact, why wait? He could start right now. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started to scroll through names. It was a positive roll call of models, actresses, It girls, reality TV stars from Love in Chelsea, girls with long hair and longer legs who smiled more in a minute than Adrianna did in a day, and every single one of them would be delighted to hear from him. That was what he needed: some uncomplicated, no-strings fun with cheerful, chatty girls who were thoroughly up for it, and whose antics would banish the image of the glacially poised, laconic goddess who would become Mrs Jeffrey Sachs in a few months’ time.

  When she did, Bart decided, he would start calling her ‘Mummy’. It would be a passion-killer for him, and, if he didn’t miss his guess, would annoy her tremendously.

  And if Bart was actually looking forward more to seeing Adrianna’s reaction after the wedding when he called her ‘Mummy’ for the first time than to rendezvousing next week with Daphne from Love in Chelsea, who was a lithe twenty-five-year-old with a concave stomach, sexy belly-button piercing and a vivid imagination, he did not admit that to himself as he started to saunter down the drive, cheerfully anticipating a shower, a shave and a lavish cooked breakfast.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘You’re back! And very sweaty!’ Jeffrey said gleefully, taking off his glasses.

  He was sitting up in bed, propped up by a pile of pillows, an almost equally large pile of Sunday newspapers beside him, through which he was working his way. The sports sections were discarded on the floor. Jeffrey, as befitted a hotelier, focused on the business and lifestyle sections. Next to him was an iPad on which he was also reading the New York Times and Washington Post; Jeffrey was far from the stereotype of the pensioner befuddled by modern technology. Before meeting Adrianna he had been quite a prolific tweeter. Now, however, he was on social media much less, as his spare time was mainly spent with his adored fiancée.

  He stared at her worshipfully as she crossed the living room of their master suite. She stood just inside the bedroom doorway, her tall, slim body outlined very clearly in the tight-zipped exercise jacket and leggings. In the latest fashion, a series of mesh insets were slashed into the opaque fabric, wrapping snakelike around her legs. It was a very odd look, as only a very specialized fetishist would want to see the back of a woman’s knees revealed through black mesh set into exercise tights. Still, if anyone could carry off an eccentric clothing trend it was Adrianna, whose body was perfect for clothes: slim, lean, with strong shoulders and slim hips.

  Even the obviously enhanced breasts were in relative proportion to the rest of her, rather than being comedy melons. Adrianna had known that the kind of rich man she wanted to snag, while requiring her to have a bosom, would prefer a look which skewed more towards elegance than vulgarity. Besides, she worked out regularly, and did not want breasts that were big enough to be an encumbrance as she did so.

  ‘Did you run very hard?’ Jeffrey asked, his eyes bright as he looked her up and down, taking in with relish the visible dampness at her hairline and her throat.

  ‘Very hard and very fast,’ she said. ‘I am very sweaty.’

  ‘Show me,’ he said, leaning forward eagerly.

  Walking to the foot of the bed, Adrianna unzipped her lightweight jacket and dropped it on the carpet. Underneath, she was wearing a racerback top which showed off her beautifully sculpted shoulders. Jeffrey licked his lips, watching her reach down to the hem of the top and start to peel it off, wriggling as she worked the built-in bust support over her breasts.

  She bunched the top up and let it fall on top of the jacket, trying to minimize as far as possible the contact of moist, sweat-sodden Lycra with the very expensive carpet. Jeffrey was so careless about his possessions that if she had said she didn’t want to mess it up by getting it damp and smelly, he would have laughed at her. But Adrianna hated not taking care of the lovely things that now surrounded her. It was disrespectful to their beauty and the price that had been paid for them. She couldn’t imagine being able to take them for granted, no matter how much Jeffrey encouraged her to do so.

  Because this lavishness and luxury was very new to Adrianna. She might have been wearing a designer cocktail dress when she met Jeffrey – bought on final sale, of course – and working in the extremely sleek and chic surroundings of Farouche. However, like so many young women who knew how to present themselves as glossily as if they lived in Mayfair or St John’s Wood or Notting Hill, and who only ever travelled by cab, the truth was that she lived six travel zones away, a journey of two tubes and a bus back to a small rented room in a house that the owner had converted almost back to the days of single-room-occupancy tenements.

  As Eastern Europeans surged into London, armed with their excellent English, their polite manners and their willingness to work long hours for less pay than the locals would accept, enterprising landlords had seen the trend and reacted accordingly. Adrianna’s landlord had been a Romanian who had realized that all his tenants wanted, at the end of a lengthy shift and a gruelling journey, was to come home and crash. They were saving their money for a mortgage deposit or sending it home; they did not want to spend one extra unnecessary penny on rent.

  So he had converted his houses accordingly, keeping a small, basic kitchen, but turning the rest of the rooms into studios, each with a built-in sink. There was one shared bathroom plus an extra toilet. Most of the tenants bought little fridges and portable electric mini hobs, as food left in the kitchen could not be relied on to remain there until its purchaser needed it, and besides, no one ever cleaned the place up.

  It was the polar opposite of the apartment blocks for overseas students springing up in the centre of London, with chicly designed individual living pods, cleaned by professionals several times a week, communal kitchens, and bike racks and gyms in the basement. So many young foreigners flooded into the capital every year, with such a disparity in their incomes. Most of the ones from Asia had parents who could afford to send them to university and put them up in custom-built luxury flats situated close to their colleges; the majority of the ones from the Eastern bloc lived in squalor and competed desperately for minimum-wage, long-hour jobs in Costa and Pret A Manger.

  Adrianna shivered at the thought of ever going back to that room in the Romanian’s house. There had been no way to keep it fully clean, since the house hoover never worked properly and the carpet tiles had stains crusted into them which never came out, no matter how hard she scrubbed. She spent money she couldn’t afford on diffusers and plugins that could only do so much to counter the smells of her fellow tenants’ cooking, let alone some of her fellow tenants. She couldn’t trust the expensive clothes she needed to wear for work to the house washing machine, so she sponge-washed them for as long as she could get away with before finally taking them to the dry cleaner.

  And when she came back from a run, she would have to strip off her workout gear and wash it straight away, again by hand. There was nowhere to put it, no ventilated laundry hamper in the bathroom which the staff would empty every morning, sorting through the dirty wa
shing, removing the cashmere and wool and silk from the pile and ensuring it went through the most delicate cycle in the Miele machine, washed only with Sicilian-lemon-scented liquid which Jade had imported in bulk from the Parisian manufacturer at thirty-five euros a bottle.

  Once you had lived like this, you could never go back to scrubbing your sports bra in a small sink while hoping that it wouldn’t rain for a few hours, until your exercise clothes, pegged to the little plastic rack hooked outside your bedroom window, would stop dripping enough, at least, to be brought inside. Adrianna was fully prepared to do whatever it took to ensure that the enterprising Romanian’s stained, smelly room receded still further in the rear-view mirror.

  She was standing now in her sports bra and leggings, her skin glossy with sweat. Jeffrey licked his lips again.

  ‘Keep going,’ he said.

  She reached behind her and unclasped the bra. It was a huge relief to take it off, as its straps and band were saturated with moisture from her run. And the same with the leggings: the wide waistband, double fabric, also damp through; that had always been the hardest part for her to dry at home, with the worry that before it eventually did dry it would start to stink of mildew. Yes, there was a launderette, but those big machines ruined Lycra, and she couldn’t afford to keep buying exercise clothes, even from Primark . . .

  The leggings were peeled down, her thong coming with them. Jeffrey held out his hand eagerly, and she tossed him the thong even as she kicked off her ankle socks; her trainers had been left downstairs in what was apparently, very appropriately, called the ‘mud room’ in this country. Naked, pushing aside her fastidiousness at leaving her workout clothes on the carpet, she walked around the bed to the head of it. Jeffrey, having thoroughly sniffed the thong with an expression of ecstasy on his face, was eagerly throwing back the coverlet and scooting over to sit on the edge.

  Adrianna closed her eyes. His lizard hands caught her hips, pulling her in, and his dry scaly tongue started to lick her, darting into her belly button, tasting the salt sweat there, caught in its whorls and folds.

  She could not understand his craving for her sweaty skin; to her, after exercising, it always felt spongy, as if it had soaked up too much liquid. But Jeffrey loved it. And at least he wasn’t requiring a reluctant girlfriend to work up a sweat on a regular basis, as she already had a regular exercise routine which she thoroughly enjoyed. Merely sitting in a sauna would not have been good enough; he wanted the specific smell and texture of skin that had been encased in Lycra for a minimum of half an hour as the wearer exercised as hard as she could.

  He would lick her all over, from head to toe, and he would end between her legs, sucking and licking and almost snuffling with excitement, no longer like an old greedy lizard but a boar in the forest undergrowth, rooting for acorns and bulbs. Mostly, this was all he required. Afterwards, he would have her lie down, and he would perch as best he could above her like a wizened old elf, satisfying himself over her prone body.

  Mercifully for Adrianna, Jeffrey was unable to manage penetration. His heart was not strong, and his doctor had strongly advised him against using Viagra or Cialis. How many gold-diggers had rued the day when pills for erectile dysfunction were invented! In the old days, when you seduced a wealthy gentleman over seventy into leaving his wife and children for you, pretty much all you needed to do was put on shows for him, play with yourself, possibly get in a friend or two every now and then as an extra treat for him to watch.

  But nowadays sugar daddies wanted it all, the full monty. They expected feats of gymnastics even as you tactfully helped them into position, braced yourself to support them as well as yourself, listened to them complain about their creaking hip replacements, and kept a smile of delight on your face as you bounced around on top of them, cursing the inventor of those pills with everything you had. Adrianna knew perfectly well that if her ex-colleagues, not only at the bar but other places she had worked, had met a billionaire whose main requirements were for them to work out as hard as possible and then let themselves be licked from head to toe, they would get down on their knees on this very luxurious carpet and thank God in gratitude with tears running down their faces.

  Yes, she had hit the jackpot. The companies with whom she’d held credit cards were less lucky, as they were no longer making a small fortune in interest from her. Those cards were paid off and cancelled. Jeffrey had given her an Amex Black, which had no limit.

  Eyes still closed, Adrianna visualized that credit card, as she usually did while Jeffrey’s lips closed over first one nipple, then the other, his hands eagerly squeezing her round breasts like a child with a toy that would squeak if you pressed it hard enough. Unfortunately, however, her recent encounter with Bart was still fresh in her mind, and the Amex Black faded, replaced by Bart’s face going suddenly serious as he leant in to kiss her.

  He was irresponsible, a playboy, feckless, unreliable. If he had walked into Farouche and asked her out, she would never have accepted, because he would have been wanting only an affair. He was not marriage material, and she would not have settled for anything less. But the memory of his soft lips kissing her so sweetly, his flat abs contracting in pleasure as she stroked down them, made her moan despite herself.

  ‘You like that,’ her fiancé said into her breasts, his head between them now, his tongue licking up the dampness there, raising them so that he could access the even sweatier undersides. ‘You like that, don’t you?’

  And, thinking of Bart, of Bart naked, kissing her breasts, Adrianna summoned up all her self-control. She could not answer too enthusiastically. Jeffrey did not like any overt eagerness, she had learnt almost immediately. He wanted her aloof, poised at all times, a marble statue come to life, a goddess who had stepped down from Mount Olympus, whose physique he loved to worship.

  So she answered almost coldly: ‘Yes. It’s good,’ and went somewhere in her head that was far away, far from this lavish bedroom, this soft carpet beneath her feet, these lizard hands pulling at her, the lizard tongue lapping eagerly at her spongy flesh. A place where she and Bart were naked in a huge bed, lying head to toe, his balls in her mouth, his mouth between her legs, driving each other crazy with desire. When, eventually, Jeffrey pulled her to lie down on the bed, clambered over her, she was still picturing his younger son.

  And disconcertingly enough, there was something that helped her with that mental image. As often happened with family members, Jeffrey and Bart smelled unnervingly similar.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘I just wish we could have some time that wasn’t in hotels,’ Bella said wistfully into her laptop camera. ‘Or on screen. Something more – normal.’

  ‘I know, baby,’ Ronaldo said, sighing into his own laptop screen.

  He was sitting cross-legged on his hotel bed, his Mac propped in front of him. Bella had not realized previously how much travelling Ronaldo did for work. Ever since she had got back from her round-the-world tour, connecting with him had been a constant dance of time zones and scheduling, finding slots where both of them were awake and alone, which of course meant Thomas being away.

  That last was the trickiest condition of all, since Thomas, with basic animal instinct, had sensed his wife’s emotional withdrawal and was reacting accordingly. As Bella had realized at Vanbrugh Manor, after the years that she had spent pushing for more closeness from him, they had swapped roles: now she was withholding and he was pursuing. The walk in the grounds he had insisted on taking, so they could talk about their feelings, had been agonizing. He had not even been placated by Bella’s telling him that she was wearing the comfort knickers and that they truly did live up to expectations.

  During the walk, Thomas had kept asking how she was doing, and, with appropriate sympathetic marital concern, how the rewards points project was going. This had only served to make Bella realize with horror that not only did she not want to have sex with her husband, she had very little interest in talking to him either. She didn’t believe a word tha
t came out of his mouth; it was all too obvious that he was only acting like this because she had pulled away from him and he wanted to get her back, not because he cared. As soon as she became sweet, loving, needy Bella again, he would revert to the Thomas who cancelled weekends together at the last minute and thought that buying her oversized underpants would serve as compensation.

  Her attention outside of work was entirely focused on Ronaldo; her husband now seemed entirely irrelevant to her existence. Thomas had clearly picked this up, because ever since that weekend, he had been a nightmare. Clingy, needy, puppy-eyed. Thank God she had been able, quite plausibly, to blame the dramatic change to her usual behaviour squarely on her father’s challenge to his children and her determination to drive through an extremely ambitious revamp plan with a terrifyingly tight deadline. When Thomas reproached her for being distant, not sufficiently grateful that finally, after several years of marriage, he was ready to give her what she had always wanted, Bella simply answered that the timing was all wrong for her to have any kind of soul-searching conversation.

  And when he pushed for more, she flipped the tables and reproached him in her turn for choosing such a terrible time to finally try to give her what she wanted. She was neither rude nor hostile. She wasn’t even angry that it had taken her having a passionate affair outside the marriage for Thomas to act like a dog in the manger and try to court her back.

  When he told her that he’d realized how much he’d been missing her when she was away on her long trip, and had had barely any free time to get in touch with him, she smiled at him. It was a nice smile, but a distant one, the kind you gave to the porter at a hotel after he’d brought up your cases. So it was dismissive, too. The smile you gave someone that said: ‘Thank you for your help. You can leave now.’