by Robin James
Arsenio grunted as he opened his own zipper and impatiently fumbled down his trousers and underpants far enough to free his genitals. His penis was a large, solid, desperately needful animal craving for release. As with one hand he guided it in her, he slid the other beneath the loose edge of her blouse, under the lacy bottom of her skimpy bra, and grabbed her breast with a savagery born of almost two years’ abstinence.
His roughness echoed the frantic need which had grown within her. Though she squealed as he groped and twisted her breast it was not from the slight pain he was causing her; it was a lustful pleasure noise. She had been damp between her legs ever since, in the pub, she was filled with the urge to make love to him. Her vagina greeted his manhood with a welcoming contraction, then he plunged all the way into her until his testicles were crushed between the upper backs of her thighs.
It was crude and it carried with it the hint of violence, this home-coming coupling, this hungry man going at his horny woman like a dog at a bitch on heat – and it was not destined to last for more than the shortest space of time. Arsenio was banging it in and out of Kirsty so hard that the chair was rocking and the table was shaking. Her auburn tresses were dancing around on either side of a silver platter, and he could see the reflection of her wide eyes and her gleaming little, white teeth behind her slack, drooling mouth before, as orgasm rushed upon her, she screwed her lids shut.
There was no way Arsenio could have held himself back, even had he wanted to. Twenty-two months’ need for a woman had built inside him a mountainous frustration. Seconds later, as Kirsty raised her head and howled at a corniced corner of her room, all that frustration flooded from his testicles and into her with his semen as his hips slammed into her bottom so powerfully that the open bottle of wine and both the candles crashed over.
They stayed, panting, sweaty, locked together like that, unmoving for long moments until their heartbeats began to settle down. Then, hands on her buttocks, watching his action, savouring it, he slowly withdrew his wilting penis from her.
‘Wow,’ she groaned, as she slowly straightened up from the table. ‘Oh, wow.’ She brushed her hair back from her face. Her jeans fell below her knees to concertina on her shins.
Arsenio was zipping himself away. His gaze drifting to her pussy as she turned around and pulled up her knickers, he said, ‘Sorry to take you like that. To be so quick.’ He shrugged. ‘It just had to be, you see?’
She gaped at him. A lightning screw it might have been, but it had been extraordinarily fulfilling, the most incredible she could remember since the last occasion with this most attractive man – the prowess of her latest lover notwithstanding. She felt utterly drained, positively satiated. Her knees had gone weak and wobbly.
‘Sorry?’ she echoed as she lethargically reached for her jeans. ‘Has being banged up turned your brain? Christ, it was great. It was marvellous.’
He grinned lazily. ‘I’m glad. Hola, Kirsty.’
‘Hola – what was it – El Asesino?’
He didn’t take that so lightly. ‘It wasn’t how I was christened. I am unhappily stuck with it for life.’
She buckled her belt. ‘Have you killed many people?’
‘Please don’t ask.’
‘All right. Sorry.’ She remembered how there had been two cleaning women in the House of Lords on that infamous night and that they had been rocketed to pieces. She had told herself at the time that it must have been an accident, that he could not have possibly known about them. She decided it might be prudent not to comment on this. She recalled the roast. It was still less than an hour since it had been ready, so it would warm up nicely. Moving to him, she snuggled into his arms. ‘Hungry?’ she asked him.
‘I will be again, very soon. Then I’m going to take you to bed and fuck you long and slowly.’
She sighed, and planted a warm kiss on his lips. ‘You better had. But right now I’m talking about hungry for food.’
‘The table was set for two. Who was he?’
‘Was, is all you need to know.’
‘Right.’
‘How would you like some roast beef?’
‘Have you any idea what I’ve had to endure in the way of food these past two years?’
‘You’d like some roast beef.’ She broke away from his arms. Her eye fell on the table. There was half a bottle of expensive claret over the cloth, a huge red stain. ‘Why don’t you change the tablecloth, open a fresh bottle of wine and light the candles? You know where everything is. I’ll fix dinner in a trice.’
A little later, as they tucked into the beef, Arsenio asked Kirsty, ‘What did you think when you discovered I was a terrorist?’
‘It was an incredible shock. I thought I was going to go out of my mind. I didn’t know what to do – but then there was nothing I could do. I waited for some sign from you. When there was none, and I realized I was probably never going to see you again, I was deeply, deeply sad. I can’t begin to tell you how much.’
‘I imagined you were going to be very angry. Indignant that I had been lying to you for those few months, living a double life. Shattered to discover that I was a wanted terrorist.’
‘But I was in love with you, Alberto. Arsenio. Of course, in the light . . . I reassessed my feelings. They had got more complicated, but they didn’t go away. I couldn’t stop loving you no matter how much I wanted to.’
‘Stick to Alberto. I’m your Alberto.’
Thoughtfully, she washed down some beef and roast potato with wine, studying him as he ate. ‘That’s how it was, Alberto. That’s how it is.’
As they were finishing, he asked her, ‘So how is the job?’
She carefully laid her knife and fork together on the plate. She said to them, ‘There was no job, darling,’ then raised her eyes to his.
‘What do you mean, there was no job? Of course there was a job. You were a secretary.’
‘I was a secretary, yes, once – to a lawyer. But I gave that up long before I met you.’
‘Yes. And you were a secretary in some other company or other.’
She finished her wine. The coming confession was perhaps going to be more difficult than she had imagined. ‘Like you, my darling,’ she said, slowly, ‘I was not exactly as white as the driven snow.’
He shook his head at her, totally puzzled. He lit a cigarette, a habit he had acquired in Parkhurst and one which he was determined to give up. She did not smoke. ‘I don’t understand you, Kirsty. I mean, you went out to work every day. Promptly at eight-thirty in the morning, you left. You always kissed me and told me you loved me.’
‘And? So did you go out. You were always dressed when I left, finishing your coffee. Where did you go, by the way?’
‘Here and there. Meetings. Planning things. I had an anonymous little flat in Soho Square where I stow away my many identities. I still have it. I have another in Barcelona, under a different name. The police never broke me. The anti-terrorist police have never found out more about me than my real name and nationality. I am Arsenio Cruz Conde, and I am Venezuelan.’
‘I know. I read everything that ever appeared about you.’ She frowned. ‘It’s going to be difficult to stop calling you Alberto.’
‘That is one thing I don’t want you to do. You must not get into the habit of calling me Arsenio.’
‘No. I do see why.’
He put out his cigarette. She was beginning to clear away the plates, musing as she did this about exactly how she was going to tell him her dark secret. As he watched her, a fresh heat began to invade his loins. He got up, went to her in the kitchenette, where she was putting the plates in hot water, and took her by an upper arm as his other arm encircled her waist and he reached up to fondle her breasts – no impatient, greedy, mangling grab this time, but a gentle caress.
‘What we two are going to do right now,’ he said quietly into her ear, ‘is we are going into your bedroom, we are going to undress one another until we are quite naked, we are going to make love for an hour
– or maybe two – and afterwards you will explain your little mystery to me.’
The telephone was ringing. She ignored it. It was almost certainly him. A tight little knot formed deep in her belly. Her loins twitched. She flattened her hand over the crutch of his trousers, gratified to discover a hardening bulge there.
‘You want to get into my knickers again? So soon?’ she asked wickedly, her voice sexily throaty, her hand squeezing.
‘It’s been at least half an hour.’
The next five minutes were in no way as controlled as he had anticipated. In her bedroom, fires of passion again raged. In their craving for each other’s bodies they almost tore each other’s clothes off. But once he was inside her they settled down.
They did not make love for two hours, but it was not far short. Afterwards, lying naked by Kirsty’s side, flat on his back, watching a ceiling which, French style, she had papered with a tiny flower print to match the walls, he asked her what she had meant by not having been going to work.
When she finished telling him he digested the information – which had perhaps been one of the biggest surprises of his life – for a long time. Then he chuckled. The chuckle turned into a guffaw, and then roars of laughter. Tears came to his eyes.
She frowned. ‘It’s not so bloody funny,’ she told him.
His laughter calmed down. ‘Oh, but it is, it certainly is,’ he spluttered through it. ‘It’s hilarious. Me being so very cautious not to make the slightest slip in front of you, you carefully hiding your real life from me. Both of us a picture of respectability. Both of us villains without the other having the slightest clue.’
‘I’m not a villain,’ she protested.
‘Tell that to the jury.’
It was her turn to laugh. Then she said, ‘So you see, I had more than one reason for not getting in touch with you after your arrest. I could hardly afford having the police coming around here, asking me lots of questions, turning the place upside down. They’d find all my special gear, my credit cards. Christ, almost everything I own is stolen one way or the other. I . . . ’
He was laughing again, loudly enough to shut her up. Through it, a word at a time, he got out, ‘We seem to be the perfect couple. The perfect bloody couple.’
4
Everything had gone as smoothly – and as anonymously – as she had desperately hoped it would. In her convertible Mercedes she had driven her close friend, Carolyn Parker-Reed – a tall, slim, attractive blonde bearing so striking a resemblance to herself they might have been sisters – and the children to Stansted Airport, where a Lear jet belonging to American billionaire industrialist Travers Bonnington had been fuelled and was waiting to whisk them down to Llanera, an airport south of Gijón, in the north of Spain. From there it had been a short hop in his private helicopter to Bonnington’s 210-foot luxury cruiser the Mirabelle, moored in the calm waters of a bay off Salinas, some twenty-five kilometres west of Gijón.
There could hardly have been a more ideal hideaway for a princess constantly hounded by paparazzi, and who was arguably the most sought-after magazine subject in the world. The summer weather was ideal: bright-blue skies and a gentle breeze to take the bite out of the sun. The sea, a dazzling blue, was clear and cool, and they were so far from anywhere that it seemed perfectly safe to take a tender into the small harbour at Salinas with the kids – Diana nevertheless heavily disguised in dark, granny glasses and wearing a short black wig – to dine now and again on the excellent local seafood in a small bar-restaurant.
She had been there for five days, having a most restful time, developing a tan, swimming often, enjoying the delightful company of her backgammon fanatic of a host – he had once got through to the semi-finals in the world championship at Las Vegas – and his bubbly young wife, and making full use of the extensive leisure facilities of the Mirabelle – the games room, the gymnasium, the ski boat, the jet ski.
The Princess of Wales was beginning to feel perfectly unwound and – for her, a rare eventuality – utterly contented.
However, somehow – for they possess a legendary collective nose akin to that of a pack of foxhounds – some Spanish paparazzi had got wind of her presence.
It was just before lunch. There had been a rising wind. To the north, the Bay of Biscay was beginning to cut up rough, but in their bay it was still only a little choppy. Diana and Carolyn Parker-Reed – the eldest daughter of the Home Secretary – the two boys with them, had been taking it in turns to man the wheel of the speedboat, and to water-ski. Carolyn was driving, and Diana, topless, was skiing when the princess noticed that a small speedboat with what looked like four men in swimwear was approaching them fast. It was rare for there to be any other boats apart from fishing boats in the area, but as far as Diana was concerned when she first spotted it, it was no more than an irritation. Then, as it closed in, she saw the dreaded evidence of the profession of those on board: the black snouts of huge telephoto lenses pointed in her direction.
Frantic, Diana yelled and waved her arms, signalling to Carolyn to stop the boat. She sank down into the protective water, slipping off her skis. Only her head, and the floating skis, were above the surface as Carolyn closed in to pick her up. She managed to put on her bikini top, which Carolyn handed to her, before scrambling into the boat – but she did not secure it properly and as she hauled herself over the side it was torn off.
The paparazzi were by now almost alongside, and brief, enormously valuable shots of the royal breasts were taken before Diana had again clipped on her top. She was furious. The language she flung at the photographers as, ceaselessly shooting pictures, they followed the ski boat back to the Mirabelle, could not by any stretch of the imagination have been described as royal.
Aboard the billionaire’s yacht, there was a brief, urgent conference as the rat-pack continued to circle. Observing the paparazzi from the French period-furnished stateroom as a second small boat came out to meet them, he saw something changing hands. The second speedboat immediately turned around and headed back towards the harbour. Travers Bonnington commented, ‘That’ll be the rolls of film, Diana. I’m afraid they’ll go jet service to Madrid and be on offer to the highest bidder by this time tomorrow.’
Diana sighed. On her face was a mixture of sadness, resign – and anger. ‘I was having such a super time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think the bastards would ever catch up with me out here. Why for Christ’s sake don’t they leave me in peace?’
‘It’s not going to be the end of it, either, darling,’ said Carolyn. ‘They’ll be swarming all over us before we know it.’ She forced a wry little smile. ‘My tits should be so sought after!’
Despite her concern, Diana managed a giggle.
‘I’m not going to give them the chance,’ Bonnington said. ‘We’re getting out of here now before your British scruffs fly in. Guarantee they’ll be here within a couple of hours or so and this quiet little bit of sea’s going to look like a Disneyworld lake on a Sunday afternoon.’
The waves in the bay were steadily getting higher and longer, rolling in to sweep the golden beach. The paparazzi’s boat was dipping and pitching in the swell, but they were still shooting pictures. Bonnington got through to the bridge on the internal line and ordered the captain to weigh anchor and head north-west. Twenty minutes later, the Mirabelle was cutting its way through steadily roughening sea, the photographers’ speedboat being buffeted on all sides as it followed. Ten minutes after that, as the Mirabelle, hardly disturbed by the sea apart from a gentle rolling, reached a comfortable cruising speed of twenty-two knots, the speedboat, tossed around like a cork and in danger of being swamped and sinking, gave up the chase. It turned around and began to head cautiously back towards Salinas, the paparazzi unconcerned about the soaking they were getting since, despite giving up the chase, they had secured pictures worth perhaps half a million pounds.
The Princess of Wales could, of course, have opted to take the helicopter back to Llanera and from there the Lear home to England
– and she was offered this facility by her ever-attentive host. But she preferred the alternative. Her days on the yacht had turned out to be sublime; she did not yet want to face again the harsh realities of her tough world.
Bonnington was delighted to continue to accommodate her in any way she wished. After a discussion with Diana and Carolyn Parker-Reed, during which the three of them pored over a nautical map, it was decided to head for an area of sea around the north-west corner of Spain, some twenty-one nautical miles off the city of La Coruña. The weather forecast for the following day was a return to calm seas and a continuation of the sunny, warm conditions. The Mirabelle could ride at anchor with only fishing boats coming anywhere near them there, and Diana and sons and her friend Carolyn could sunbathe, water-ski and swim to their hearts’ content until either the sea cut up rough again or they got thoroughly bored with it all.
5
El Asesino much preferred Barcelona to London. His hardened soul was in any case basically Hispanic, and he could live in the Catalonian city in the Spanish fashion, which meant warm, civilised nights where one could dine and drink – outside on terraces, if preferred – until far into the night, with a wonderful choice of first-class restaurants and selection of food and in an atmosphere far removed from the unemotional tawdriness of London.
Barcelona by day was a splendidly elegant city, with its wide, sweeping boulevards, many or which allowed a clear view from one side of the city to the other, its glorious parks and open spaces, its historic buildings – especially those designed, like the famous church of La Sagrada Familia, by Antonio Gaudí – its museums and art galleries, its throb and its bustle. The climate, too, was splendid, especially through spring and summer and into autumn, when it remained agreeably warm.
