‘Is she going to join in, do you think?’ Nicole asked, brightening up a bit. ‘You know how much I like to play with another girl.’
‘God, no,’ Angel said flatly. ‘Even if Christine would want to, that’s simply not possible. It has to be all romance, hearts and flowers, true love and monogamy forever, at least as far as she knows. I’m supposed to be making her fall in love with me and knocking her up in quick succession – or even the other way round. The main thing Granny Viv cares about is a great-grandchild. She’s made me promise to have my sperm frozen – I presume so that if the cancer knocks me off, that’ll be her second line of attack.’
Nicole raised the glass to her lips. The flaming Negroni blended with the colour of her negligee and robe, a striking contrast to her matt-beige skin and silky black hair. ‘Who saw this coming when you decided to give yourself cancer!’ she said rather bitterly.
‘Certainly not me!’ Angel riposted. The light was behind him, which gave him an advantage. Eyes narrowed, he took in Nicole from head to toe, but this time with no sexual motive at all. He was assessing her mood, her unexpected reaction to the news, working out how best to handle his co-conspirator.
‘I’m just surprised,’ she said, walking over and curling up opposite him on the wide window seat, ‘that you didn’t mention you had a girlfriend who was the perfect contender for this role. That would have kept it in the family! We could have played the loving couple, maybe even faked a pregnancy . . . it would have been so much more plausible than this idea that you seduce some little nothing from an auction house in a couple of weeks and convince her to let you do her bareback . . .’
But she stopped, because Angel was laughing so hard that he had to set down his glass on the lacquer coffee table.
‘What?’ she said crossly. ‘What did I say? I’m simply suggesting that it would have been a much better option! As your girlfriend, I could have slipped into the middle of a lot of things . . . got more closely involved with all the ins and outs of the pre-sales . . .’
‘Darling!’ he said, when he could speak again. ‘Look at yourself!’
He gestured at the seductive picture Nicole made in her silk and velvet lingerie.
‘Do you really think I could trot someone who looks like you over to Granny Viv as the woman who’s going to make me turn over a new leaf and go respectable?’
Angel was not going to say out loud that Nicole’s entire appearance signified high-class call girl or professional mistress, but it was most definitely what he was thinking. Vivienne, an astute judge of character, would have sniffed her out in seconds.
‘I wouldn’t dress like this to meet your grandmother!’ Nicole said indignantly. ‘I’m not an idiot!’
‘Even in your best demure dress,’ Angel said gently, ‘you ooze sex, sweetie. A man doesn’t settle down with you. He asks you who you want to share for a threesome, and gets stuck in. As it were. Come on; you don’t want to be taken for wife material, do you?’
Nicole frowned as much as her Botox would let her, which meant two tiny parallel lines forming on either side of the top of her nose.
‘I could act it!’ she snapped crossly.
‘She’d run a background check on you,’ Angel said in a happy inspiration, as he could see that Nicole was taking his comments in a worse spirit than he had intended. ‘And that would be bound to pull up at least some of your activities in Hong Kong. One of the things that makes her so keen on the auction girl is that she’s so respectable and career-oriented. You should have heard her banging on about her ideas on the plane! I must say, a lot of them were very good, but she never shut up for a second. And Viv seemed to be eating it up with a spoon. She thinks the girl’ll make an excellent candidate for motherhood. She likes her work ethic – says it’ll balance out the fact that I haven’t got any.’
The mention of a background check had stopped Nicole dead in her tracks; she bit her lip, perfectly well aware that this was the last thing she wanted to happen.
‘So what’s the plan?’ she said eventually, drinking more of her cocktail.
‘A two-pronged attack,’ Angel said, fishing out his pack of Davidoff cigarettes from his jacket pocket. ‘First, I go and get my sperm frozen, or whatever it is they do with it, in case I pop my clogs. This is all by the by, of course – I’m not actually going to do that, but I’ll tell Viv I have. She wants to know that if I die, she can buy some eggs, squirt it in them and make some grandbabies. Ideally, however, she’s hoping I’ll stick around, turn over a new leaf with a nice girl, and bring the brats up myself as a doting father.’
He lit a cigarette.
‘This particular girl isn’t mandatory, of course,’ he added. ‘But she ticks all the boxes, and because I’ve scared Granny Viv shitless with the cancer diagnosis, and the idea that I might not have much time left, she’s doing everything she can to throw us together. If she’s happy with the auction house, the plan is for me and Little Miss Christine to work on the research together, so I’ll have something to keep me grounded while I’m sick, using Granny Viv’s charming phrase. Meanwhile, I’m taking Little Miss out to dinner, working my magic, fucking her seven ways to Sunday with condoms that I’ve put a hole in, and Bob’s your uncle!’ Angel took a drag on his cigarette.
‘She’ll be on the pill, surely?’ Nicole said dubiously.
‘Darling, I don’t want to knock her up, do I!’ Angel said, throwing his arms wide rhetorically. ‘That’s Granny Viv’s take on things! The whole condom idea was hers, naturally.’
‘My God! She really is a piece of work,’ Nicole said with grudging respect. ‘She actually suggested you poke holes in condoms?’
‘Yes! You see?’ Angel’s eyes narrowed. ‘No one bloody believes what she’s capable of but me! I’ve seen her in action and I know exactly what she’s like. She’s utterly unscrupulous.’
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? Nicole thought, but was far too sensible to say out loud.
‘So you’re not going to knock her up, but you’re going to sweep her off her feet?’ she summarized instead.
‘Exactly. Oh, and Granny Viv doesn’t want me to tell her anything about the cancer diagnosis either, of course,’ Angel said airily.
‘She’s using this poor girl like a surrogate without even telling her!’ Nicole said, reaching out for a cigarette. ‘For all she knows, she could be pregnant in six months by someone who’s about to die!’
‘I told you!’ Angel said, his voice rising. ‘I told you what she’s like!’
‘So . . . is she attractive, this Christine girl?’ Nicole said in a faux-casual manner that didn’t deceive Angel for a second, but did at least succeed in distracting him from his anger and resentment towards his grandmother.
He drew on his cigarette and considered Nicole thoughtfully. It occurred to him that she seemed to be assuming quite a lot on the basis of a very short reacquaintance. They had never been boyfriend and girlfriend at school; fixed pairings had been unusual there. He had barely seen her since, just bumped into her at the usual round of parties from St Moritz to St Tropez; and though they had had sex whenever the occasion arose, they had been nothing more than fuck buddies.
Now, in the space of barely twenty-four hours, here she was: installed in his apartment, proposing a complex scheme to wrangle kickbacks for access to his grandmother’s jewellery, and acting as if they were long accustomed to plotting together.
Angel didn’t trust Nicole as far as he could throw her. He had no automatic assumption that she would, as she had promised, split the commission from Lil’ Biscuit and Silantra fifty-fifty; but then, nor did he intend to cut her in equally on anything he might be able to make without her knowledge. And now that he would be working on the auction preparation so closely, his opportunities for kickbacks had expanded still further – which was ideal for him, but less so for Nicole.
‘Oh, she’s perfectly nice-looking,’ he answered, in a careless way that matched the tone of the question. ‘
Viv wouldn’t accept anything less mingling with her own precious genes.’
In his opinion, Christine was much better than nice-looking. At the least, she definitely had potential, although her clothing was much more buttoned-up and dowdy than Angel preferred. His mental observation that Nicole looked like a high-class call girl, elegant and slutty in equal measure, had been entirely favourable. That black dress Christine had been wearing the night before at the Hotel Tylösand had been horrendous, more suitable for – he searched in his head for a dowdy profession, and settled on the most stay-at-home, dandruff-covered one he could think of – a female crime writer’s rare night out than a young woman with an excellent figure visiting a chic hotel.
But he wasn’t going to be fool enough to tell Nicole that he was very much looking forward to peeling off Christine’s boring outfits, finding out the precise dimensions of the nicely shaped curves that lay beneath them, and ravaging those curves in every conceivable way. He imagined his dick deep in her mouth, those big blue eyes wide in concentration, her cheeks sucking in as her lips and tongue worked his shaft.
Instantly, his cock hardened. Oh yes, having to fuck Christine on his grandmother’s instructions would be no hardship at all. He had seen a sprinkling of freckles over the modest décolletage revealed by Christine’s demure cocktail dress, her bare arms; as he contemplated exactly where more might be scattered over her naked body, hidden in her secret clefts and declivities, waiting for him to find them, his balls tightened too. Angel was an eternal seeker of variety.
Even if he hadn’t found her attractive, however, Angel would have seduced Christine simply for the pleasure of cutting out Tor, whom he had always intensely disliked. There was something so bluff and hearty about Tor, so jolly and cheerful, which women seemed, inexplicably, to find attractive. Being practically the same age, the boys had been forced to play together as children after Vivienne had taken custody of Angel. It had seemed like a perfect idea for her to visit Sweden as regularly as she could so that her grandson and godson could play together while she continued her affair with Tor’s grandfather.
Typical Vivienne, Angel thought sourly. Pretending she was dragging me over there for my welfare, when in reality it was all about her convenience. I hated every moment. They kept making me play outside with Tor, and I bloody hate the outdoors. It’s dirty and messy and you’re always getting scratched.
Tor had been the most enthusiastic of hosts. His physical competence and sense of fair play had always annoyed Angel intensely, as had Tor’s persistence in attributing the best motives to Angel’s bad behaviour. Tor’s sympathy and consideration for Angel’s status as an orphan after Pearl’s death, his insistence that Angel have first choice in playing with Tor’s toys, had often made Angel want to punch him in the mouth. And Vivienne had never stopped praising Tor’s lovely manners, his patience with Angel, his willingness to share – all of which had naturally infuriated Angel even further.
His visceral dislike for Tor would probably never have abated: Angel could hold a grudge forever. But Tor’s achievements as an adult were salt rubbed into Angel’s wounds. Tor was regularly in the news, his handsome, smiling face in newspapers and magazines, his arm round a brave amputee whom Tor had helped achieve their dream of reaching the South Pole, or skiing down Everest, or something equally pointless. The sight made Angel want to punch Tor in the mouth all over again.
It had been obvious last night at the spa how interested Tor was in Christine. Angel hadn’t seen that light in Tor’s eyes since they were eight years old and Vivienne had given Tor a Scalextric set, an order custom-made for him, based on the roads around Tylösand. Angel had done his best to systematically break as many pieces of that set as he could, and Tor had forgiven him every single time, which had driven Angel near-insane with suppressed fury.
Oh yes, Tor had been as enthusiastic when he looked at Christine as he had been at the age of eight, holding the miniature red pick-up truck that had the same licence plate as his father’s, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. That in itself would have been enough to make Angel want to swipe Christine away from under Tor’s nose – just as he had ‘accidentally’ pulled the licence plates off the truck and buried them in the garden. He’d turn Christine inside out until she forgot there was any other man in the world but him. And every time he shot in her mouth and watched her swallow it down eagerly, every time he heard her beg him to fuck her in the arse, scream as he lubed her up, slid in his cock and started to pump her like a cheap whore, his physical pleasure would be immeasurably heightened by his triumph over a man he had always, frankly, hated.
Angel wondered whether Tor had fucked Christine already; he thought it unlikely. Tor prided himself on being a gentleman, and they had only met yesterday afternoon. He would have limited himself to kissing Christine at the door to her room. It wouldn’t have mattered to Angel – in fact, he would positively have preferred it if he was following Tor. Smugly, he felt sure that his experience in an extremely wide range of sexual activities would beat out his childhood rival in this adult field of competition. He would have enjoyed doing to Christine everything that Tor had done: better, longer, with extra twists.
Sadly, however, it was now too late. Vivienne had summoned Angel to her suite immediately after dispatching Christine to pack her things. She’d briefed him not only on her expectations that he would, ideally, seduce and impregnate Christine, but explained that she had cleared the way for him by telling Christine that Tor was married. This was technically correct, but Tor and his wife had been separated for enough time that the wife had a new boyfriend, and they were currently working through a non-contentious divorce process. However, even if Tor tried to correct the misunderstanding, Granny Viv had apparently convinced Christine that he was a playboy who would do anything to get a woman into bed. Christine wouldn’t believe a word he said.
Angel had, reluctantly, to give Granny Viv credit. She was a nasty, devious old bitch with her hands too tightly wrapped around the purse strings, but she thought fast and effectively. With that well-calculated lie about Tor, she had ensured the road to seducing Christine was wide open to Angel. He imagined Christine’s white freckled legs in the same state, Christine’s fingers between them, strumming herself wetter and wetter as she pleaded for Angel to fuck her, and smiled as his erection butted against the seam of his trousers.
‘Nic, darling, seeing you in that ragingly sexy outfit’s given me the most enormous stiffie,’ he lied, tracing his hand over the outline of his swollen cock. ‘Why don’t you come over here and give me one of your signature blow jobs? That’d be just the thing to make me forget all about that boring little bitch.’
Nicole could not resist a challenge, nor an opportunity to mark territory that she seemed to consider rightfully hers. Finishing her Negroni, she tossed back her superb mane of hair and went down on her hands and knees, crawling seductively across the window seat towards him. Angel unzipped his trousers in readiness.
‘I’m going to suck you like a Dyson,’ she said, running her tongue around her lips.
She slid the middle finger of her right hand into her mouth, dampening it thoroughly, before removing it and giving him a narrow dark stare positively laden with naughtiness.
‘You’d better take those trousers right off,’ she purred, her eyelashes fluttering. ‘I’ve got plans for your arse, too.’
‘Oh, Nicole, you really are a treasure,’ Angel sighed, obeying her instructions and lying back on the window seat, his hips tipped up to give her full access.
‘Don’t forget it,’ she said with just a lacing of menace before her mouth closed around him just as tightly as she had promised, hot and moist. Angel sighed even louder as she began to work him with her tongue, her hand slipping below his cock, tracing up his perineum, provoking a series of moans from him as she started to trace circles round his arsehole.
‘Fuck, no, I won’t forget this,’ he groaned, his hips bucking, Nicole taking all of his dick into her mouth with the
practised ease of a woman who had learned to override the gag reflex at a very exclusive Swiss boarding school. ‘Jesus, you’ve got to be one of the best cocksuckers in the world . . . you should give lessons, you really should . . .’
Nicole purred again, the reverberations delicious around his cock, her hand splayed wide so that her thumb could tickle his balls. He wondered how to deliver the revelation that she couldn’t stay on in his apartment. He would have to court Christine as if he were the kind of man who had turned over a new leaf from his playboy days, and having Nicole slinking around the place in red silk lingerie wouldn’t exactly convey the necessary impression.
He’d have to think carefully about how to handle the eviction notice, though. He wanted to keep Nicole sweet, make sure she understood that he was being forced to do this because of his grandmother. Not only did he need Nicole’s contacts to broker the deals for Vivienne’s jewellery, but he would be loath to lose the opportunity to have regular sex with her. It was rare to find a woman every bit as perverted and debauched as he was, and he had been looking forward to having a great deal of fun with her while she was in London.
Her finger started sliding into him, reaching for the exact spot he was yearning for her to touch, even as her tongue lapped his cock as if she were licking the topping off an ice cream. He heard himself starting to moan, to plead for her to finish him off, to start sucking him hard, pump her head up and down the whole length of his cock, but he knew she would draw it out longer, because she would enjoy the sound of his begging too much to stop any time soon.
Yes, he’d have to tread very carefully with Nicole’s delicate ego. Because no way was that little milk-faced Christine going to be able to give him a blow job half as good as this one.
Chapter Eleven
Killer Diamonds Page 18
