Suddenly, Christine’s bottom digging painfully into the hardback book was the least of her concerns. She was blacking out so fast she barely even had time to panic. Her hands came up to push at his arms, dark spots dancing before her eyes. She tried frantically to keep them open even as she struggled to breathe; sight and breath seemed inextricably linked, as if losing one would also mean the loss of the other.
Christine had always known Angel was stronger than he looked. The hands around her neck were a vice, closing inexorably. Her fingers reached up, trying to pry them off, but it was like pulling at the iron bars of a gate. The dark spots swelled fast, merging into blackness. Her head felt as light as a balloon as the oxygen deprivation hit.
Her body went limp in Angel’s grasp, her eyes fluttering closed, and as soon as it did, he released the clutch on her neck, holding her loosely now to keep her head upright. The whole time, however, he continued fucking her, maintaining a steady, even rhythm that he would be able to keep up for a long time. The frenzied need with which he had entered the room was entirely channelled into this, one of his favourite games, and one at which he had had a great deal of practice.
After a few seconds, Christine’s body convulsed as she gasped for air, her eyes snapping open. As soon as this happened, Angel lowered one hand between her legs and strummed her in the way he knew would make her come. The convulsions started instantly, her whole body throbbing with the powerful orgasm. Angel laughed out loud as he watched her eyes snap open wide. She looked absolutely overwhelmed by what was happening to her, the sheer intensity of all this sensation.
‘I told you you’d love it,’ he said. ‘You come so fucking hard after a choke! God, look at you!’
Christine couldn’t respond. Her entire body was in spasm, her bruised throat was struggling for air, her eyes were rolling up so that she could barely see. And all the time Angel was driving his cock in and out of her, overloading her with stimulation. His shirt was damp, beads of sweat standing out on his chest, his cheeks hectic with colour. He was right: she was coming with such force she thought she might faint again from the strength of it.
Desperately, she struggled to keep conscious as the orgasm and Angel’s cock rocked her back and forth. When it finally subsided, and she’d managed to catch her breath to some degree, she tried to get some words out, to tell him to let go of her, to stop, that it was all too much; but she couldn’t. Her throat hurt too badly. She was in shock. And then once more his hands closed around her windpipe, carefully avoiding her carotid artery, his thumbs shutting off her air supply again, and she panicked even more, thrashing wildly.
She was weaker, however, with much less ability to fight. Her heels drummed uselessly against his buttocks, and he took that as encouragement, not that he needed it; when she came round again, it was to another explosive orgasm. She was dizzy beyond belief, dazed, confused, experiencing the orgasms now as a kind of erotic torture.
Angel had always mixed pain and pleasure, psychological as well as physical, gradually breaking her into his range of tastes and play, teaching her to understand, if not enjoy, the way the two could be blended. This was way beyond anything he had done previously, however – not just unexpected, but utterly terrifying. Although she knew that he wasn’t planning to kill her, just playing with her in a cat-and-mouse game, the panic felt just the same as if he were genuinely in the process of murdering her. The total loss of control, the violent assault, the orgasms he was forcing on her were turning her own body against her, so that she appeared to consent physically when she would never have done so verbally.
Tears formed in her eyes and started to trickle down her cheeks. Christine would have been even more horrified, if it were possible, to realize that the sight made Angel’s cock swell even more. He wasn’t normally a tear fetishist. There had been people at school who had absolutely got off on it: one boy couldn’t come until his partner was sobbing, had insisted that his girls wear loads of black eye pencil, guaranteed to run down their faces in spectacular fashion as they cried from a good spanking.
Some childhood memory he’d been obsessed with recreating, as Angel remembered, its roots in something dark and dirty and sad, as with so many freakish desires. He had been a ridiculously handsome young thing, a French count called Gilles with a sexy accent and an excellently sized cock. There were plenty of girls who longed to cry for Gilles; in the hopes of enticing him they would pile on the MAC eyeliner until they looked like they had black eyes, and spider their eyelashes with non-waterproof mascara.
It had been a school trend that gradually got out of hand until finally, even the notoriously permissive headmistress had been forced to announce at assembly that she had had quite enough of half the female students of Chateau Sainte-Beuve making themselves up to look like Gothic Barbies, and she was banning heavy eye make-up for the rest of the term. She had glanced pointedly at the English literature teacher when she said this; the teacher was sporting enough kohl around her eyes to make it clear that she too would be happy to cry black tears for Gilles.
Angel hadn’t previously cared one way or the other if his sex partners cried at the exquisite torture he applied to them. But there was something about the tears falling over Christine’s childlike face, filling the round blue eyes, blurring the sprinkling of freckles over her hot red cheeks, dripping into the wide O of her mouth as she gulped in air, that clenched his balls and made his cock even harder.
How Tor would hate to watch this, Christine coming over and over again as she sobbed, as Angel choked her and screwed her brains out! A vivid fantasy of Tor strapped to Christine’s desk chair, unable to move, straining at his bonds in rage and frustration as Angel’s hands closed once more round Christine’s neck and tears spurted from her eyes, sent Angel over the edge sooner than he had planned. He roared in pleasure as the hot sperm gushed from him, mingling inside Christine with what was left of the Pol Roger. And as he came, he found himself fantasizing about pulling out his cock and letting Tor have it smack in his face, shooting all over him.
‘Shit,’ he grunted at this wonderfully pornographic image. ‘Shit, that is so fucking hot!’
In Angel’s imagination, Tor bellowed his fury as Angel came on his face, shaking the chair with his efforts to break free. It was fantastic. Angel almost regretted killing Tor before he’d managed to make it come true.
‘Oh, bollocks,’ he muttered as the spasms subsided, realizing that he had kept Christine under too long. That was what happened when you did a gram of coke and drank a lot of brandy shortly before you started fucking: you got carried away He’d gone to his club after meeting Nicole, celebrating her clever plan, already counting on the millions they’d score from stealing some carefully selected pieces of Vivienne’s jewellery, bumped into some friends and spent the time partying with them, working himself up to a height of sexual tension before arriving to get his release with Christine.
He took his hands off her throat immediately, careful to support her head. It had only been fifteen seconds, at his best guess; he’d seen people out for longer than that for no ill-effects. Red marks were beginning to form on her neck, thumbprints that would be bruises tomorrow. She’d need a high-necked top; but it was winter now, that wouldn’t be a problem.
He slapped her face lightly to bring her back to consciousness, one smack on each cheek. Christine stirred, letting out a long, guttural rasp for breath, her chest heaving, her eyes flying open as if she had been resuscitated with a vigorous bout of CPR. She flailed in Angel’s grasp, her hips pounding upwards, sent into orgasm yet again as her body slammed back into consciousness. The spasms sent his cock sliding out of her, dripping on the carpet, but he remained between her spread legs, arms round her, holding her up.
‘That was amazing, wasn’t it?’ he said complacently. ‘You’ll see – when we do that again you’ll come like that every single time you wake up. It’s an automatic trigger. I helped you along the first few goes, just to get you into the swing of things, but pretty qu
ickly your body just starts doing it on its own. They were massive orgasms, weren’t they? You looked like you were having the most fantastic time.’
Christine let out a long, hacking cough. Angel took the bottle from the desk, pleased to see that there was still some champagne inside it.
‘Mmm, it tastes of you,’ he observed, drinking from the bottle neck. ‘Want some?’
Christine shook her head.
‘Still a bit overcome,’ Angel commented with the voice of experience, finishing the Pol Roger. ‘I do envy girls, I must say – you get the multiple orgasms. I’d almost rather have those than a cock, much as I love fucking people.’
Christine was struggling to speak, her words coming out as if her throat were coated with sandpaper.
‘I didn’t . . .’ she managed. ‘I didn’t want . . .’
‘Honey and lemon and rum,’ Angel said knowingly, dropping the empty bottle into the waste basket. ‘Always the best thing after you’ve been grappled. We’ll get you a hot toddy at mine. I’m fairly sure I have lemons.’
Christine shook her head again. Despite the pain of her bruised larynx, she was determined to speak; she brought up her hands, pushed Angel back so she could slide off the desk and stand. Her features contorting with all the emotion she couldn’t put into her poor throttled voice, she said:
‘Never. Never coming back with you again. It’s over.’
Chapter Nineteen
London – later that evening
‘Christine! Christine, you have to let me in! Christine, please! I know you’re in there! I’m not leaving till I get a chance to talk to you!’
Angel and Christine had never spent any time at Christine’s flat. Angel had only visited it once, in fact: that first time when he had taken her home in the limo, after their flight back from Halmstad. Why hang out in a cramped one-bedroom flat in Acton when they could be in Angel’s sprawling Knightsbridge penthouse instead? So although Christine had had a key to Angel’s flat and the code to the apartment block’s front door after barely a week together, he had never needed the same access to her place. Now she was extremely grateful for this – and also that, as a security measure for a woman living on her own, she had chosen to rent a second-floor flat rather than a garden or ground-floor one.
Unable to get in, Angel had been ringing her doorbell for the last twenty minutes, pleading into the intercom. With no success, he had escalated his attempt to see Christine: he was standing in front of the house, calling up at her, and the neighbours were starting to notice what was going on.
‘Christine, I know you’re in there!’ Angel yelled. ‘Please, I just want to talk to you! We can’t leave it like this!’
‘What the fuck is going on?’
The man who lived below Christine, a grumpy old codger who rarely seemed to leave the house, had shoved up his sash window and was leaning out. Christine had been standing behind her half-drawn curtains, but now she peeked around them, feeling more confident now that there was a witness. Despite it being November, Angel wasn’t wearing a jacket, just the white shirt and black trousers he had donned for the memorial service, his throat bared to the chilly autumn night. His fair curls were pushed back from his handsome face, and his eyes were glowing like precious stones, his expression agonized.
‘Jesus,’ the grumpy man said in shock. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m in love with the woman who lives above you,’ Angel said seriously.
‘You what?’
‘Christine!’ Angel called. ‘Christine, please just come to the window so I can see you!’
The two girls who shared the ground-floor flat cracked open their living-room window.
‘Um, hey, can I help?’ said one of them, and then, involuntarily, as she took in the sight of Angel: ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ echoed her flatmate, face pressed to the window. ‘Wow. You are gorge.’
Christine knew which one it was: Jenny. Always pissed in the evening, too drunk to find her keys, banging on the window to wake up the other one, Laura, to let her in. From the sound of Jenny, she was well on her way: she was slurring her words. Christine pushed her window up a little, cold air flooding in, and leaned out. She couldn’t continue ignoring Angel, not with the whole house involved, but she couldn’t call the police on Vivienne’s grandson, either. There was the sale to organize, and Vivienne was not likely to want Christine working on it if she’d had Vivienne’s grandson arrested for harassment . . .
Her throat was still sore, but she had been sucking cough drops and, yes, drinking honey and lemon and rum since she got home. Much as she hated to admit it, Angel had been right: the drink was soothing the bruised lining of her oesophagus. So she could croak out without too much trouble: ‘I’m sorry, everyone. Angel, please go away.’
‘Christine!’
Angel’s eyes lit up, his arms opened wide. It was like Romeo seeing Juliet at her balcony, and Jenny positively cooed to see it.
‘Please let me in!’ he begged. ‘Please, Christine, just for a few minutes!’
‘If you don’t let him in, I bloody will,’ Jenny slurred.
‘Shh!’ Laura said furiously. ‘Shut up, you pisshead! Christine, are you okay?’
‘I won’t go till I see you,’ Angel said. ‘I’ll sleep in the car if I have to. Please, Christine! Please let me explain what happened!’
‘It’s Prince Charming who needs to shut up,’ said the grumpy man. ‘I’m not having him out there all night yelling.’
‘Christine, shall I call the police?’ Laura persisted.
Christine’s heart sank. That would be just as bad as her ringing them herself. And what if the press got hold of the story? Angel’s name was so famous, it could easily ring a bell with someone at the police station who wanted to make some money by ringing the papers . . .
‘No, thanks, it’s okay I’m coming down,’ she said.
She didn’t want to let him into the flat, but what else could she do? She couldn’t sit on the stairs and talk to him there, not with Laura and Jenny doubtless all ears to hear the drama – and with the responsible Laura probably also keen to make sure Christine wasn’t being abused by Angel. If they found out who he was, the story of him choking her – on the night of Tor’s memorial service, too – would be too juicy to keep to themselves. So she led him up the stairs and gestured at him to go inside, but left her front door open as an escape route. She indicated that he should sit on the sofa, across the room, and she took one of the kitchen chairs so that the table was between them.
‘Christine, there’s no need for this,’ Angel said gently. ‘I would never deliberately hurt you.’
Christine reached up to the high neck of the knitted sweater she had pulled on as soon as she got home, dragging it down to show him the marks in the soft hollow of her throat, reaching around her neck.
‘You strangled me!’ she said, putting huge amounts of reproach and disgust into those three words; her throat hurt her too much to form long sentences.
‘This is what I completely don’t get! I thought you liked it!’ he said, shaking his head in surprise. ‘You were coming so hard!’
‘That made it worse,’ she got out.
‘Worse?’ Angel’s hands went into his hair, tangling it wildly. ‘I don’t understand! How can that make it worse? You had such a great time!’
‘I was scared!’
The mug of hot toddy was on the table, and reluctantly, Christine picked it up; she didn’t want Angel to have the satisfaction of seeing that she was following his advice. But if she was going to have to talk, it made all the difference.
‘I didn’t want it,’ she said, after taking a long sip, wincing as the warm liquid went down; it hurt to swallow. ‘You strangled me.’
‘Not strangling – it’s choking! Breath play! Christine, you kept coming, you loved it when I put the bottle up you, you loved it when I poured champagne inside you and fucked you.’
‘The book hurt me,’ she said. ‘My bum on it. I have bruises.
’
Angel looked genuinely baffled. ‘I’ve often given you bruises,’ he said.
And that’s weird too!’
‘You can give me all the bruises you want,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Seriously, you’re more than welcome!’
Christine felt like pulling out her own hair. He genuinely did not understand what had happened, why she had got so hysterical in her office, threatened to call the security guard if he didn’t leave; he assumed that she had had a fantastic time just because he had made her come. But to her, as she had tried to convey, the fact that she had had so many orgasms made it worse, as if he had used her body against her. It felt as if she had been raped, made even worse by the fact that her rapist was completely convinced that they had shared not just a consensual sexual experience, but a truly excellent one. They were in two entirely different worlds.
‘Don’t want this,’ she managed. ‘Don’t want choking.’
‘But you had such a good – fine, okay!’
Seeing her furious expression, Angel swiftly changed tack, raising his hands pacifically.
‘Look, we don’t need to do it again,’ he assured her. ‘Ever, if you don’t want to. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you before I tried it. Honestly, I just didn’t realize. I’ve done lots of things that you really liked, and that I didn’t ask your permission to try beforehand, haven’t I? Like in the bath, when I put the soap up you and then—’
‘Could have said no then!’ Christine got out. ‘Or said stop. Could breathe!’
It was killing Christine that these were the longest sentences she could manage; she wanted to gush out streams of accusations, explanations of why what he was saying was so very wrong, but her throat simply wouldn’t let her.
‘I see that! I get it!’ Angel leaned forward eagerly. ‘I’m sorry! Of course you couldn’t! But we’ve always had such an amazing time in bed – right from the start, there was such chemistry, wasn’t there? I can’t keep my hands off you, and you always seem to want it so much . . .’
Killer Diamonds Page 33
