Killer Diamonds

by Rebecca Chance

  But at this, her eyes narrowed. Realizing quickly that talking about how much she wanted sex with him when she was throwing a massive hissy fit about what he had just done to her was not the best tactic, he halted and reassessed the situation.

  No sex talk, he thought. That’s just pissing her off. Time to bring out the big guns. It was time anyway – no point waiting any longer . . .

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘I love you, Christine,’ he said, his voice soft now, hypnotically convincing. ‘I think I fell in love with you almost as soon as I met you. You’re so different to the other women I’ve been with, so genuine, so real. I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time, but I was worried that you’d think it was too fast. You must have known, though? You must have known that you were the one for me?’

  He leaned forward, careful not to seem intimidating, or as if he were going to lunge for her and start throttling her again. His eyes were wide and so magnetic that she couldn’t look away, despite her intense confusion at this declaration of love from the man who had choked her hard enough to leave bruises all round her throat.

  ‘You’re the one,’ he repeated. ‘I mean that with all my heart, Christine. I’m in love with you. I want to marry you. I wanted to propose before I left for the expedition, but I thought it would be too much for you with how hard you were working on the auction, and it wouldn’t be the right time. I wanted it to be the best moment of your life, not something that would stress you out. In fact –’

  God, this is good, he thought smugly. This is great. I’m the king of improvising under pressure. Look at her! She’s absolutely dumbstruck – the stupid cow believes every single word!

  ‘– I was going to propose on New Year’s Eve, at the stroke of midnight, after the auction,’ he said. Even by his standards, this was superb, and it was hard for him not to smirk at his own cleverness. ‘Celebrating everything you’ve achieved, starting the new year together, hand in hand. Vivienne knows how I feel about you – she’s been my confidante, and she’s over the moon about it! She was so hoping you would say yes and let her help to plan the wedding . . .’

  Christine almost dropped the mug she was holding; it wobbled dangerously, rattling as she set it down on the table, her hand shaking in shock. Just as with the sex earlier that evening, everything seemed to be flipping around. One minute she had been having an amazing time, the next he’d gone crazy and started to strangle her. And now this conversation, which she had thought would end with him accepting that she was breaking up with him, had taken the most bizarre turn. She couldn’t speak but it wasn’t because of her sore throat; she was struck dumb with amazement that Angel had just proposed to her.

  ‘I’ll never touch you in a way you don’t like again,’ he was saying fervently. ‘I’ll always ask you in advance, well in advance, if there’s anything new I want us to try. I’m so sorry Christine – I never meant to hurt you! I just wanted to make you happy, make you come, give you the best time imaginable! My God, this is not how I imagined telling you I loved you, let alone proposing marriage! I’ve fucked up so badly!’

  Angel’s hands were clasped in front of him pleadingly, but he wasn’t coming towards her, trying to touch her, kiss her, use his devastating physical attraction to convince her to listen to him; he was behaving as respectfully now as he had failed to do earlier. And he looked incredibly beautiful, and equally contrite.

  ‘School fucked me up, Christine,’ he said quietly. ‘Sexually, I mean. I’ve hinted at it before, but I didn’t want to tell you what really went on there. I was too ashamed, too embarrassed of what I went through. If I told you half of the things they made me do, you’d be horrified. Orgies, teachers with students, every kind of experimentation you can imagine. I was very young when Granny Viv sent me there, and I didn’t stand a chance. What we did today – what I did to you – that was so normal at school I didn’t think twice about it. The things that went on – the things that were done to me . . .’

  He shuddered.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, his head ducked as if in shame. ‘You’d never look at me in the same way again. I don’t want you to see me as a victim. And I wasn’t just a victim, either. I became a participant, a willing one. When people do sexual things to you, part of you starts to like it, even to crave it. It’s sex, after all. I found myself wanting them to keep doing those things to me, perverted though they were. I was at the age when you’re curious about sex, wanting to experiment. And my God, I got dropped into the lion’s den! Be careful what you wish for! There wasn’t an experience in the world they didn’t try there!’

  Angel flicked up a swift glance through his thick lashes to check how this was going down with Christine. To his great satisfaction, he could see that she was reacting just as he had hoped. Clearly, she needed more than the proposal; she hadn’t fallen into his arms, hadn’t burst into tears and said she was the luckiest girl in the world and yes, yes, she would be his bride. So he had made another lightning-fast calculation. He would deal with the sex issue about which she was being so tediously bourgeois by pleading extenuating circumstances, playing the victim in an attempt to elicit sympathy from her.

  It was working perfectly. Her eyes were wide with shock. For the first time since she had opened the front door, there was no anger and resentment in her eyes. Instead, he detected both growing horror and compassion at what he was telling her.

  ‘Christine, I’m trying to be completely honest with you,’ he lied smoothly. ‘You deserve that. Here’s the truth: the worst part is that by the end of my time at school, I enjoyed absolutely everything. I was completely taken over by the sex games that were played. Nothing was off-limits, nothing. What I did to you today was done to me more times than I can count, and I was a good student. I learned how to do everything that had been done to me. I took pride in it, pride in those special skills the older pupils taught me. And that’s what warped me, what made me capable of doing that to you today.’

  He put a throb in his voice for the next part.

  ‘I don’t know where the limits are any more,’ he said sadly. ‘Today has shown me that. I need help.’

  Tears were pouring down Christine’s face, tears for the little boy who had been so ill-treated and abused. The sight reminded Angel of how she had cried as he choked and fucked her on her office desk, and the memory gave him an instant erection. God, he’d come so hard, shot right up inside her, flooded her with hot spunk and champagne! It had been a truly excellent fuck. And if the stupid bitch weren’t so ridiculously middle-class and inhibited, they’d be doing it again right now, her sitting on that table with her legs spread so he could ram his cock inside her, his hands wrapped tight around her throat, the orgasms ripping through her one after another . . . she’d loved what he’d done to her, the hypocritical bitch!

  That was the whole bloody problem in a nutshell: she’d loved it so much, she’d got an attack of the guilts afterwards. Some of the kids at school had reacted like that at first, before they settled into things. But not Angel. He’d taken to everything like a duck to water. His nickname had been Oliver Twist at the Chateau, because he’d always asked for more.

  He shifted to make sure she couldn’t see his erection, feeling that it wouldn’t quite chime with the sob story he was selling her.

  ‘I can’t expect you to forgive me,’ he continued, after he’d let her cry for a while and managed to get it to wane by thinking about his grandmother. That did the trick fast. ‘I can only tell you I love you and I need you. I can’t believe I did this to the woman I love.’ He shook his head, his expression sorrowful. ‘I’m so fucked up,’ he went on, his voice cracking. ‘I’m damaged, maybe beyond repair. How could I ever think that you could love me back?’

  Angel calculated that he’d done enough; it was time to make her come to him. And the way you always did that with a woman was by walking out the door. He stood up.

  ‘I’m going, Christine,’ he said. ‘I should never have come here.
I’m too messed up, and you deserve so much better than me. You deserve a man who can give you the moon and the stars, not a damaged bastard like me. Even if you loved me like I love you, I wouldn’t be worthy of it.’

  Too far? he wondered. Too romance novel? But no, she was looking at him now, full-on, her eyes yearning, her face wet with tears. As he headed for the door, making sure that he trod a careful loop around where she was sitting, she made a sound that was almost a grunt; it would have been a cry if her throat hadn’t been so damaged. She flew out of the chair and ran towards Angel, grabbing his arm to stop him leaving.

  ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you at school!’ she managed to say. ‘So sad . . . so wrong . . .’

  ‘Oh Christine, I don’t deserve you!’ he said, bending to plant a swift kiss on the top of her head. She was hugging him tightly, both arms wrapped around his waist. ‘You’re my good angel!’

  It was a huge relief that she could no longer see his face. Keeping up that sombre, pious, apologetic expression had been torture, especially when he was furious at her hypocrisy. She’d come more times than he could count! She’d spread her legs for him, panted like a dog, bucked like a horse, come like a nun finally getting a proper seeing to, the dirty, stupid, pathetic little bitch!

  And then she’d forced him to enact the most ridiculous contrition scene. Angel was amazed at some of the nonsense he had just spouted. He’d sounded like a hero from one of those novels women loved, where the handsome young billionaire had a secret past full of appalling abuse that had scarred him so badly only the love of the impoverished, innocent virgin could melt his hardened heart and teach him true love. Jesus, she really was a stupid bitch if she’d fallen for that . . .

  ‘Prince Charming’, that old man in the flat below hers had called him. Well, this Prince Charming was willing to bet that the Ugly Stepsisters would be much better fucks, much less complaining and whiny, than bloody dishrag Cinderella here. The less attractive ones were usually much more sexually adventurous; they knew they couldn’t rely on their looks to keep a man’s interest, so they developed excellent skill sets. The Ugly Sisters would almost certainly double-team him with great enthusiasm, peg him senseless, give him a really thorough spanking – do some of the work for a bloody change, unlike this one, who simply lay there without ever thinking that perhaps he’d like to get fucked, just for once. She was too selfish to even put a finger up his bum! And then she had the nerve to complain when he got a bit carried away!

  He couldn’t dwell on his grievances, however. He pulled himself back from the brink, drawing in a deep breath that he knew Christine would read as his emotional distress at the revelations he had just made to her. He had really pulled out all the stops in his plea. He couldn’t afford to lose her, not now – not when things were so precarious financially. Not only would his marriage to her trigger his grandmother to fork out a heavy wodge of capital; but for his and Nicole’s latest scheme to work, he needed Christine to still be in place at Berkeley as his loving girlfriend, not an estranged, resentful bitch, chippy about having some bruises on her neck instead of on her bum.

  ‘Can I hug you back?’ he said softly into her hair, not a trace of his thoughts showing in his voice. ‘Would that be all right? I don’t want to do anything that you’re not sure about.’

  She nodded against his chest. He enfolded her in his manly embrace, just like the hunky billionaire in the romance novels. My God, he’d have to pretend to go to therapy now, be endlessly contrite, bring her bloody bouquets. Would he have to read some of those damn books to work out what to do? Didn’t the heroes of those novels spend half the time brutally ravishing the heroines over their own desks and giving them multiple orgasms, anyway just like he’d done with her that evening? What the fuck did the stupid bitch want?

  Christine was pulling him towards the sofa; he could safely assume that this meant she’d fallen for his story hook, line and sinker. Thank God for the milligram of alprazolam he’d taken a short while ago. He normally just took half a pill, but he’d been so hyped up after the coke and the sex and the stupid bitch’s hysterical freakout that he’d known he’d need more than usual to calm him down.

  Still, Angel really hadn’t expected that she’d make him work this hard. He’d assumed that an apology, followed by some light teasing about her overreaction, followed by a coy admission from her about how much she’d enjoyed being throttled and fucked to all those world-class orgasms, would fit the bill. Instead, she’d refused to let him in, made him shout like a barrow boy in the street in the freezing cold, forced him into a humiliating speech painting himself as a pathetic victim, and practically trapped him into an engagement where every sex act was going to have to be fairly vanilla, because she’d probably throw fits now every time he wanted to leave a mark on her.

  Christ, if this marriage actually happened, he’d have to make so many compromises . . . watch her get pregnant twice, pretend to be excited both times about seeing her body become distorted and unpleasantly swollen, her breasts leaking . . . ugh . . . and then the stinking babies around the house, too . . . he’d have to invent some childhood trauma, blame his inability to bond with the babies on the separation from his mother, make it all Granny Viv’s fault yet again . . .

  Angel sank down on the sofa, still doing the manly embrace bit, letting Christine’s head rest on his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll do anything,’ he said, channelling Prince Charming again – the modern Prince Charming, the one with the whip and the heart of gold. ‘I’ll get help. I’ll give you all the time you need. But I’ll never stop loving you.’

  Christine raised her head at this, her face so damp and smudged with tears that he risked removing one arm from around her and using the cuff of his shirt to blot them away.

  ‘I’ve made you cry so much today,’ he said so tenderly that, not for the first time, he thoroughly regretted not having become an actor. He had inherited not just his good looks from his grandparents, but their histrionic talent as well. My God, he had managed to turn this entire situation around, convincing Christine that he was a damaged soul madly in love with her – and he had improvised the whole thing! Not for the first time, he was hugely impressed with himself.

  ‘Please don’t shed any more tears over me, Christine,’ he said nobly. ‘I’m not worth it.’

  ‘You are!’ she said, as he had known she would, and she turned her head to kiss the wrist that was dabbing her tears. ‘You are! What happened to you was so wrong . . . so bad . . .’

  She hacked out a cough, which lasted a while. Angel thanked God he’d throttled her so hard that last time; it meant she couldn’t spill out an endless stream of nonsense about him being a victim.

  ‘Can’t believe your grandmother sent you to that place,’ she managed. ‘So sad for you.’

  ‘As long as I have you, I’ll be the happiest man in the world,’ he said. ‘I love you, Christine.’

  He knew she didn’t love him, of course. He was no fool. She was dazzled by him, by his looks and charm and money and famous family. Women were programmed by society to want that exact combination, after all. But she wasn’t in love with him, and if Tor had still been alive, Angel would have been seriously concerned about convincing her to marry him. Christine had never looked dazzled by Tor; she had looked as if she genuinely liked who he was as a person. Which was exactly what Angel needed to achieve to prevent her from finding out about himself.

  It’ll only be for a few years, he thought, even as he gave her his very best smile. Worst-case scenario, if Nicole’s plan doesn’t work and I really do have to marry this stupid bloody vanilla bitch, it’ll only be for a few years. And then I’ll push her off a mountain.

  This time, he decided, he wanted his victim conscious as she fell. Rolling an already-unconscious body over the edge of the cliff had been satisfying at the time, but now Angel looked back, it was undeniable that the experience would have been infinitely more pleasant if Tor had been screaming in fear as he realized what
was happening to him.

  Oh yes, Christine would know exactly what was happening when Angel gave her that shove. After all those years he’d have spent playing the reformed playboy, the damaged billionaire trotting out every cliché in the book for this bitch’s benefit, the least she could give him in return was the sound of her wailing all the way down to the ground.

  Chapter Twenty

  London – one month later

  Something was wrong. Christine had just finished her last appointment of the day, and even as she said goodbye to the client, a nagging voice in her head was telling her that some aspect of what had just happened had been . . . off. Wrong. She couldn’t think why; the meeting had been a great success. But ever since, she had been pacing back and forth across her office, wondering what on earth about it could have triggered this strong sense of unease.

  She glanced over at the rings lying on her desk, displayed on the black velvet tray on which she had shown them to the potential buyer, a multimillionaire hedge-funder. He had been especially eager to view the unusually set inverted round-cut diamond that had been given to Vivienne by Randon Cliffe; the provenance was hugely important to the client, who wanted to present it to his trophy girlfriend when he proposed to her.

  He had viewed others, but clearly his heart was set on the inverted diamond, and Christine had high hopes of negotiating a good price for it. At this level, money didn’t matter as much as owning something no one else could have, purchasing bragging rights.

  This would be the hedge-funder’s second marriage, the old wife discarded for a new version half her age and half her weight who, the hedge-funder had blithely recounted to Christine just now, didn’t even know who Vivienne Winter and Randon Cliffe were. She was, however, he had told Christine, a ‘dead ringer’ for the young Vivienne, and he had been delighted by the photographs Christine had produced, sourced from Vivienne’s photo stash, taken for a German magazine, in which Vivienne was holding her hand out to show off the ring, twisting it to make sure the camera caught the unusual setting of the stone.