‘I have lube,’ he said, taking a small tube from the sink surround and squirting some into his hand, breathing on it to get it even warmer before he worked it between her legs.
‘Great! I’m so pissed off I’ll definitely need it,’ Charlotte said between clenched teeth.
As Bella had sensed, Charlotte was absolutely furious. She had planned this rendezvous with Lee as a delicious treat for herself: a reward if she won, a consolation if she lost. What she had not expected was to win, but to have the triumph whipped away almost immediately because all the bloody press wanted to talk about was Bella’s relaunch of her damn loyalty scheme! That wretched thing that would just cause way more trouble than it was worth; that no other hotel chain would touch with a bargepole because it would be so prone to glitches and problems; that Bella had only embarked upon in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to rival her sister for the prize of CEO: that was what had stopped the journalists from even offering her congratulations before they dived into asking about whether she was incorporating it in the Sash brand . . .
Lee coated her with the lube, his thumb circling her clit, making sure she was ready before she heard the condom wrapper rip open. She braced herself, knowing he was going to slam into her, that she would barely have time to feel him before he was driving hard inside. He knew exactly what she wanted: a quickie, hard and fast, the contrast between her family dressed up and respectable in the dining room while she was here with her skirt hoicked up around her waist, with her arse bared and him fucking her ruthlessly from behind. The toilet had a rackety old-fashioned extractor fan, which meant that she could make some noise, cry out as his cock drove into her and then keep moaning as her breath synchronized with his strokes.
Her hands were splayed out on the plastic sink surround, her head thrown back. She was watching herself in the mirror, him behind her, pumping hard. He knew better than to touch her hair or her face, to mess up her make-up in any way, because she would have to walk right back to the awards ceremony as if nothing had happened. He held her hips at first, controlling the rhythm, getting it precisely how he wanted it, and then he reached around her body, placing his hands on hers. She looked down at the dark hair on his knuckles and felt the wash of desire that always surged up in her when she saw his hands; it was visceral, absolutely conditioned into her now.
Her mouth was open. Normally she would have wanted his thumb in there so she could suck it, but her lipstick could not be smudged. She could only allow herself the cock inside her, reaming her out, a savage fucking which was exactly what she had told him she wanted a few minutes ago when she sent him a text telling him she was ready to meet, deleting it immediately afterwards.
‘You want to come?’ Lee panted in her ear.
‘I won’t – I’m too pissed off – seriously, my fucking sister—’ she managed to say.
‘Fuck your sister,’ he said, and she caught her breath in a laugh and said:
‘Yes, fuck my sister! Fuck her, I’m the one that won tonight!’
One hand came away from hers, ferreted under her skirt, burrowing under the folds and layers of stiffened fabric, found her clit and positioned his thumb there so he would push her onto it with every stroke.
‘You won tonight,’ he said in her ear. ‘She’s sitting there at the table and you’re the one who won, the one with her arse in the air getting fucked like a cheap tart – you’re the one who’s going to come from me fucking you. Let it happen – let go – let that anger work for you, make it a hate fuck—’
Deep inside Charlotte, these words stirred at her core, melting something, sending a surge of moisture over Lee’s fingers and thumb.
‘There you go! Tell me you hate me!’ he encouraged, feeling her reaction.
‘I hate you,’ she said, bucking back against him, making him groan as she took even more of him inside. ‘I hate you, you fucking bastard, I’m going to fucking kill you for doing this to me, I don’t even want to come—’
She didn’t. She hadn’t planned this. She had wanted a quick dirty fuck, like he had said, a fantasy of being a tart bending over a sink whose client was too cheap to spend the money for a room. Coming would soften her, make her too relaxed for the battlefield to which she would be returning in just a few minutes.
And yet . . .
‘I don’t want to come!’ she repeated, driving herself down harder, hurting her most sensitive areas, taking huge pleasure in it; this was a wonderfully masochistic moment, fury that her success at the hotel awards had been eclipsed by her sister. ‘Fuck you! I won’t come, you can’t make me . . . I hate you, I hate you . . . bastard . . .’
She broke, spasming onto his thumb, her hips pounding a crazy tattoo against the sink, hearing him spit out curses, his hand digging into her frantically as he let go himself, shooting inside her. They were both swearing, a stream of insults and hate words. Charlotte tried to keep her eyes open, to watch the whole scene, to store up yet another memory of their wild sexual encounters for when she was masturbating on her own or having sex with Paul, layering a darker, nastier, much more exciting tinge onto Paul’s gentler, slower rhythms.
‘Fucking bastard!’ she practically sobbed, collapsing onto the sink but still keeping enough self-control to make sure she didn’t touch it with her face, that her hair was still in its artfully disordered bun on top of her head. Lee was pulling out already, careful to keep his cock away from the folds of her skirt. She moaned in distress as he came out of her, missing him instantly.
But he was right. There was no time to waste. She straightened up, checking her hair, dabbing with a piece of toilet paper to blot the sweat that had formed on her cheekbones. Taking a deep breath, her skirt still bunched around her waist, she stepped over to the toilet for a quick wee. Lee, dragging toilet paper from the roll, wadded some up and handed it to her, then took another handful to clean himself up, wrapping the used condom in it.
‘Hope I gave satisfaction, ma’am,’ he said, grinning at her.
She stood up and flushed the toilet.
‘Keep that sticky cock away from my skirt,’ she warned him as she let the folds fall, rearranging them with a few deft, practised flicks of her fingers, the fabric falling neatly back into place.
‘Yes, milady!’ he said, putting both hands over his penis and pulling a comic face as she whisked over to the door. ‘Hate me still?’
‘So much,’ she said over her shoulder, and she wasn’t lying. It was, exactly as she had known it would be, much harder to pull herself together now that she had had an orgasm. She was dizzier, softer, melted, distracted. Swivelling, she turned on the cold tap and ran her wrists underneath it for a moment or two, cooling down. And then it was more than time for her to leave.
‘I’ll ring you,’ she said, unlocking the door.
‘Make it soon,’ he said.
She threw him a wonderful smile over her shoulder.
‘Next time I’m going to make you suffer,’ she said. ‘That’s a promise.’
Taking the swiftest of glances down the passage, finding it as empty as ever, she swept out, back to the corridor again, her skirt swirling around her ankles and her heart beating a crazy tattoo which seemed to parallel the movement. She re-entered the dining room as the award for which Bella’s Sachs chain was nominated was announced. Marriott was the winner, and as she slipped back into her seat again, politely applauding, she leant across the table to Bella and said: ‘It’ll be you next year!’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw her father beam approvingly; her statement had been for his benefit. Beside him, Adrianna, that inscrutable creature, glanced at her for a moment, her face as smooth and expressionless as ever.
‘Aww, thanks, Lottie!’ Bella said, her face open, her smile seeming quite genuine.
It probably is, Charlotte thought. For all her hard-headedness in business, Bella tended to think the best of people in her personal life. She had certainly done so for Thomas, that dry stick of a husband who had acted as if he were deca
des older than he was. Bella had attributed the best motives to everything he said, seemed to find even his dullest utterances interesting, looked at him as lovingly as if he had actually had a personality worth caring about.
Charlotte had always assumed that Bella must have a major father complex. It could be the only explanation for her picking Thomas, of all people. Charlotte wondered whether Bella had noticed that people had expressed barely any regret for her loss of Thomas. Charlotte had heard this absence multiple times: Sachs employees gushing with sympathy for Bella’s situation, but struggling to muster up anything positive to say about Thomas himself beyond a rather feeble observation that she must really miss him and they were so sorry for what she was going through.
And with her husband in a coma, her twin was positively flourishing! Look at Bella now: she must have lost half a stone. Someone had finally told her to get her hair and make-up professionally done for big events, and Charlotte was willing to bet that a stylist, either a private one or a consultant from a Knightsbridge department store, had been involved in picking out that dress for her.
Dowdy, podgy Bella was now looking more and more like a boss. Groomed, sleek, suitable for promotion; not just a drudge who toiled away in the shadows, keeping her head down, working on the boring bread-and-butter side of the company. As Charlotte sat back, reaching for her glass of wine, she took stock of where she stood in the competition with her siblings. Had Conway’s reconciliation with Samantha swung Jeffrey back towards the assumption that his older son would be the natural head of the Sachs Organization? Or was he truly ready to promote a woman to head of the company?
If he was, Charlotte would have taken it for granted that she would be the one chosen. But look at all these journalists who had flooded over after her win to ask her, not why she thought she had triumphed tonight, but about whether her hotels would be incorporated in her bloody sister’s fantastically exciting new scheme! The ceremony was winding down, some diners already pushing back their chairs, wanting to head for the bar, stretch their legs, circulate and network. And that freed up the journalists and bloggers, a horde of whom were surging over to their table. It was obvious by the direction they were taking that they were almost all heading in Bella’s direction – Bella, who had lost that evening, rather than Charlotte, who had won . . .
She glanced over at her father. Suddenly he looked very tired and frail, as if he had expended all his available energy on keeping alert and attentive during the awards. His shoulders drooped, and there were shadows under his eyes and cheekbones that she had not noticed before. His hand reached out for Adrianna’s, and it looked like an ancient claw on the white tablecloth, veined and bony, grabbing for his fiancée’s elegant, manicured fingers like a predator eager to consume a tender morsel of flesh.
He’s old, Charlotte thought with a little shudder of shock. Daddy’s really getting old now.
It had been less noticeable when Jeffrey was with Jade, Charlotte realized. Jade’s style had been pared-down and unshowy. Her appeal to Jeffrey had been as an intellectual, black-wearing art gallery consultant, with an austere haircut and practically no make-up, dressed in artistically draped Japanese designer creations. She gave him artistic credibility as he made the transition from hotel mogul to art collector and patron and museum gala attendee, a definite ascension of the social ladder to high society. When Jade had decided that she wanted to transition, in her turn, to county lady in Huskies and Barbours and Hunter wellies, she had remained as bare-faced as before, her skin now more weatherbeaten. She was still striking because of her strong bone structure, but she looked her age, late forties.
Jeffrey had the regular pattern of trading in his wives for an entirely different model two decades younger than the last one. But this time the contrast with twenty-something Adrianna was deeply unflattering to him. How much more sensible his friend and contemporary Rupert Murdoch had been when he decided to settle down with the sixty-year-old Jerry Hall, a beautiful woman who, however, was not so eerily smooth, so completely devoid of any visible signs of ageing, that she made him look as if he had one foot in the grave!
Frail as Daddy seems, he’ll definitely survive long enough to make his decision about the CEO job, Charlotte thought, watching Adrianna help him to his feet as effectively as she had guided him to lean on her while she accompanied him to the table. Adrianna’ll make sure of that. If necessary, she’ll walk him down the aisle to make sure he gets there, even if he drops dead at the altar – after he’s said the vows, of course.
‘Bella?’ a journalist from Style Travel said eagerly, sitting down next to her as chairs cleared, Sachs executives rising to their feet as their boss stood up. ‘Can I ask you a few questions about this new scheme you’re rolling out? Believe me, it’s all the industry’s talking about!’
Jeffrey’s head turned slowly, deliberately. It was like watching an elderly vampire, about to climb into his coffin in the early hours of the morning, scent a fresh blood source and register his interest. Even as Adrianna began to guide him across the room, he looked back at Bella and the Style Travel writer, his skin sagging and grey under the unflattering lights of the conference centre dining room, but his eyes bright with renewed interest and calculation.
Fuck, I need to up my game, Charlotte realized with a sinking heart. Everything she had done up till then, all the work she had put in, had clearly not been enough. This evening had been supposed to be her triumph, the culmination of all her scheming and planning. Conway had been exposed as a cheater who made Jeffrey’s new relationship look seedy by association; Bart was a joke, Bella a plodder. Charlotte, however, was the award-winning creator of a fantastic industry brand, which had been duly recognized tonight with the award sitting in front of her. She should be the obvious choice for CEO of Sachs, and yet . . .
Charlotte was extremely clear-sighted: there was no mileage in fooling herself. Ever since that day when Jeffrey Sachs had allowed his mistress to throw his first wife and their children out of their home, Charlotte had sworn that she would never allow anyone to blindside her the way her mother had been blindsided. She ran her marriage, her career, her family; on the major decisions in each of those arenas, her opinions were the only ones that counted. Now it was only too obvious that she needed to take the reins of her ambition and drive it as she had never done before.
And it’s because of Bella and this bloody points scheme! she thought bitterly. Who saw that coming? What if her twin actually pulled it off?
Charlotte looked over at her sister, who was chattering away to Style Travel and other journalists who had flocked to take Jeffrey and Adrianna’s seats. It was an impromptu press conference, the attention entirely focused on Bella even as Charlotte sat with the huge, eye-catching award in front of her.
Something had to be done. And Charlotte, reaching for her phone, knew exactly what her next move needed to be.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The days after the Style Travel awards ceremony passed in a positive whirlwind for Bella. That night, when she returned to her suite at the Sachs Piccadilly, it took only five minutes for Ronaldo to appear; he had flown in from the States that night, landed just a few hours ago, and had been waiting in his room for her text summoning him, sent the moment she walked in the door. Carrying flowers and champagne, beaming from ear to ear at being reunited, he exclaimed with such flattering enthusiasm at the sight of her in her beautiful dress and make-up that she felt as if it had been she who had just won an award, not her twin sister.
For the next three days, her home office, which she had set up in the dining room of the suite, was entirely unused. Bella, who had been working pretty much around the clock, gave herself a much-needed holiday for those evenings. She would have loved to go to the spa with Ronaldo, book couples’ massages in the suite, have a cocktail together in the piano bar, but of course that was impossible. She could not even have dinner out with him; although there was nothing odd about her catching up over a meal with a childhood friend wh
en he found himself in London on business, she knew that she would be absolutely incapable of sitting across a table from such a handsome man while maintaining the kind of neutral behaviour that would allow her to get away with this cover story.
And, she thought blissfully, neither would he. His joy in seeing her again was so unabashed, so obvious, that it would be all too clear to the waiters and fellow diners that, as her husband lay in hospital being kept alive by machines, Bella Sachs was out on a date.
What she would do when it was time to reveal her relationship with Ronaldo, she had no idea. How long would it be necessary to wait? The more time that passed, the less likelihood there was of Thomas regaining consciousness. Bella’s plan was to consult in due course with a PR team who specialized in maintaining celebrity reputations.
They cost a great deal, of course. This kind of PR was the most expensive, but it would be worth every penny, and she couldn’t entrust something of this delicacy to the Sachs in-house press team. The in-house team was very efficient, but reputation management was not their speciality, and frankly the work was above their pay grade. As in all professions, gradations existed based on skill and connections and ability to manipulate the public. Sending out press releases to travel journalists, throwing parties to promote new hotel openings, was on a much lower level than the ability to pull strings behind the scenes, block negative stories, plant positive ones, and spin the facts until they blurred into a dizzy whirl, resolving miraculously into a shape that was as flattering as possible to the client who was paying them.
Unquestionably, this story could be told well and plausibly. Ronaldo, reading in the press about the tragic misfortune that had happened to the husband of his childhood playmate, would contact Bella to offer sympathy and condolences. They would arrange to meet up the next time he was in London or she was in Chicago, and Bella would be greatly comforted by this renewal of their friendship as she mourned her husband. Gradually, as the prognosis for Thomas to make any kind of recovery became increasingly grim, Bella would lean on Ronaldo for support and their relationship would morph into something more intimate.
Bad Twins Page 26
