Lord and Master Trilogy

by Jagger, Kait

  Stefan turned in his seat to face her, body language bristling with displeasure. ‘Do you understand why the Russian came to the Shard today?’ he gritted out. ‘Why he’s donated so generously to a charity of which you just happen to be the patron? Why he’s inveigled his way into my mother’s bedroom?’ Luna opened her mouth but he cut her off. ‘He smells weakness, Luna. The land, the trustees – those are pinpricks, nothing. But I will do whatever is necessary to protect you two and he knows it. I chose not to involve you in this because your involvement is exactly what he wants. Already, it is forcing my hand. I cannot avoid meeting with him now, to listen to his ridiculous offer, and to reject it in words clear enough that they will penetrate even his thick Russian skull.’

  ‘And you’ll do that meeting like you’ve done everything else,’ Luna said bitterly. ‘Without me.’

  ‘Stop, Luna,’ he said wearily. ‘Stop picking a fight with me.’

  Tilly was waiting for them, slouched over the saddle of her bike on the gravel drive, when they pulled up in front of the portico shortly thereafter.

  ‘You look pretty,’ she said when Luna came to put her arm around her.

  ‘I have calls to make,’ Stefan said to Luna, briefly tugging Tilly’s ponytail before climbing the steps into the house.

  Luna watched him go, hands clenching at her sides, then turned to her small companion and forced herself to smile. ‘The builders have started working on the Dower House,’ she said. ‘Shall we go take a look?’

  Chapter Ten

  Perhaps Luna should have anticipated the call that came from Karoline Lundgren less than twenty-four hours after Rafe’s reception, wherein she announced breathlessly that she was coming to London the following week. ‘A flying visit, is that what you would say? I thought perhaps we could meet for tea at The Ritz. Nowhere here in Sweden does tea the way you English do…’

  Luna opened her diary, surveying the afternoon’s worth of commitments she would have to cancel to make this possible. ‘That would be lovely,’ she said. ‘And you’ll stay here at the house, I hope?’

  A girlish laugh. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. Viktor has a pied-à-terre in Belgravia. I will stay there.’

  Sitting across from Stefan’s mother in the Palm Court at The Ritz, a traditional afternoon tea complete with finger sandwiches, scones and pastries laid out before them, Luna chose not to draw a connection between Karoline’s sudden display of congeniality and the fact that her son was currently across town in the Bloomsbury offices of Derwent & Co., the estate’s lawyers, meeting with Putinov. Equally, she chose to ignore the two members of his security team, the one with acne scars and another with a lantern jaw and a completely incongruous diamond earring, standing guard at the hotel’s entrance.

  And she and Karoline didn’t speak of the Russian elephant in the room, not at first. No, they spoke in pleasant generalities, the older woman detailing her morning’s shopping endeavours in Knightsbridge, the latest adventures of her two Siamese cats, Borr and Burri, and the wonderful times she’d had recently with her many friends in Stockholm.

  ‘All of them are asking when the wedding will be, and all I can say is…’ She widened her eyes and gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘“I don’t know, I don’t know! I am only the mother of the groom. I’m sure I will be the last to hear.”’ To which Luna smiled gamely, volunteering nothing. Karoline didn’t seem to expect an answer anyway, and soon moved on to other subjects.

  As the older woman chattered on, Luna found herself studying her, idly envisioning the beautiful bride Karoline herself must have been, back in the day. She was still an extremely attractive woman, one who could easily pass for a decade younger than her fifty-two years. Luna had seen photos of her taken around the time of Stefan’s birth, when she had been utterly stunning. Softer, less polished than she was now; the type of woman a man like Sören Lundgren might deny his entire nature in order to pursue.

  Karoline was looking at her expectantly and Luna realised with a start that she’d missed some important turning in the conversation. ‘But this is all so silly,’ she was saying, ‘Stefan’s refusal to so much as be civil with Viktor. I had hoped that you might convince him to behave more sensibly.’

  Demur. That was what Luna would normally do. Deflect and distract, move the conversation in another direction. But something about Karoline’s chiding tone got her back up. ‘And I had hoped,’ she replied gravely, ‘that you would convince Mr Putinov to abandon his interest in Arborage. It is neither appropriate nor welcome.’

  That set Karoline back. Clearly not how she thought this little chat would go. She leant toward Luna abruptly, her charming façade briefly slipping. ‘You think I should be defending my son’s interests here in England, I suppose,’ she said, eyes glinting. ‘His ancestral birthright.’

  Luna blinked, taken aback by the weight of derision in Karoline’s final three words. ‘Your son’s birthright is important to him,’ she replied cautiously. ‘He considers it a solemn responsibility and an honour.’

  ‘Strange that his father did not,’ Karoline hit back, reaching for a scone. ‘No, Sören was only too happy to walk away from his birthright when it suited him, and leave our son to manage on his own.’ She lifted a hand. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to judge Sören as I do. But surely, by choosing to refuse the marquesship in order to enjoy a carefree life with his lover in Stockholm, he has denied our son the same freedom to live as he wishes.’ Carefully slicing the scone through the middle, Karoline began spreading clotted cream on each half. ‘If Stefan were thinking more clearly,’ she said, ‘he would see what Viktor is offering for what it is: an opportunity.’

  ‘You understand nothing about your son if you believe that.’ The words, harsh and censorious, were out of Luna’s mouth before she could stop them and for a moment they knocked Karoline’s girlish, vapid mask straight off her face. Her nostrils flared. A faint blush bloomed along her perfect cheekbones.

  But then she reached for a cut-glass jam pot and calmly, deliberately spooned jam on top of the clotted cream. And slid her plate toward Luna, saying sweetly, ‘You must share this scone with me. We ladies must ration our treats.’

  *

  ‘She really has you rattled, doesn’t she?’ Jem said with a sympathetic shake of her head, elbow resting on the top of her desk, feet perched on the base of her office chair.

  Following her encounter with Karoline, Luna had practically stumbled out of The Ritz, making her way half in a daze to Shoreditch, to the person who understood best what it was like to deal with difficult future mothers-in-law. She and Jem were sitting alone in Rod Studios’ empty offices. Rod and most of his staff were attending a trade fair in Birmingham, Stefan’s mobile was going straight to voicemail, and Luna couldn’t bring herself to go home. Not the way she was feeling now.

  ‘I made a hash of it, Jem,’ she moaned. ‘I let my temper get the best of me.’

  ‘Sounds to me like she asked for it,’ Jem said.

  ‘Yes, well…’ Luna trailed off. Though she didn’t regret quashing Karoline’s attempt to recruit her to Viktor’s cause, she’d been chagrined to discover that the older woman’s observations regarding Sören came perilously close to her own. Much as she idolised Stefan’s father, somewhere in the back of her mind she’d long felt that he took the easy path, refusing to become Marquess and expecting his son to fill the breach. Her conversation with Karoline also cast Stefan’s mother in a different light, less the besotted girlfriend doing her lover’s bidding and more as a parent defending what she believed were her son’s best interests. Or at least, this is how it seemed. Luna wasn’t sure she could trust her instincts where Karoline was concerned.

  ‘I offended her,’ she concluded glumly. ‘And if she complains to Stefan about it… I’m supposed to be helping him, not making his life more difficult.’

  Jem made an indignant face. ‘You are way too hard on yoursel
f,’ she scolded. She was wearing a little denim pinafore over a sheer black body stocking, her lips painted cerulean blue, nails neon yellow, and right now she looked like a fierce, pint-sized avenger hell-bent on protecting her friend.

  ‘I—’ Luna began.

  ‘Ah ah,’ Jem raised her palm, pulling her mobile out of the pocket of her pinafore.

  ‘It’s just—’ Jem cut Luna off with a hissing sound, thrusting her palm forward in a ‘talk to the hand’ motion as she punched in Rod’s contact details and waited for him to answer.

  ‘Hello, lovey. Just letting you know I’m shutting the office early.’

  Three minutes later the two of them exited onto the street below. ‘Time to consume some alcohol,’ Jem said firmly, sliding her hand into the crook of Luna’s arm and giving it a quick squeeze.

  They were halfway across the street when it struck with stomach-dropping force, the sudden, dizzying lurch that made Luna momentarily lose her step. Not déjà vu, but a memory she kept carefully stored in her imaginary apothecary chest, of another time Jem had linked arms with her, half a lifetime ago.

  Back when she hadn’t deserved it, or Jem.

  *

  During the winter after Luna’s father leapt to his death in Newbury train station, an unprecedented tidal wave of bulimia swept across St Catherine’s Preparatory School for Girls – a grim tsunami of bile, body dysmorphia and pubescent self-loathing that left St Catherine’s headmistress entirely at a loss.

  Her school counsellor having recently resigned, the headmistress faced this onslaught alone. Her teaching staff could shed no light on the matter, and the victims themselves, when they could be convinced to talk, refused to point fingers elsewhere, looking no further than the fat girl in the mirror.

  Stellaluna Gregory was not among the epidemic’s casualties, but she was another worry for the headmistress. Following a disastrous visit to her estranged grandmother that ended with Luna absconding after just one night, she had presented herself in the headteacher’s office, sitting small, silent and intransigent in a straight-backed chair before the desk. No, she would not explain where she had been for the remaining five days of her trip. No, she would not willingly return to her grandmother’s house – if compelled to do so she would set a torch to it. No, she had nothing more to say.

  When their interview was finished, Luna returned to her tiny dormitory room and sunk, practically collapsed, to the floor in front of the wardrobe. She stared at herself in the mirror, at her white-blue eyes, the image of her father’s, and her long, dark, curling hair. Her grandmother’s hair.

  ‘Are you sure, sweetheart?’ the hairdresser in Chieveley said the following month, imploring the child sat in her chair, swathed in a gown, to reconsider.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Luna said.

  And, ‘Keep it,’ she said shortly thereafter, leaving twenty-eight inches of hair behind her.

  The hair was not enough, though, not nearly enough to keep the reality of Luna’s new life at bay. Seven stages of grief, that’s what the useless counsellor had said there were, but she’d been as wrong about that as everything else. For Luna there was only one never-ending stage of silent, howling grief that started ten seconds after she woke up each morning – ten sweet, shimmering seconds before she remembered herself, remembered her losses – and ended when she went to bed at night and immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. She wished she could sleep forever.

  No, other things needed to change, and soon enough they did. An older girl, a willowy, perfect Chelsea blonde who’d never taken much notice of Luna before, walked past her on the quad one day and made a remark to her friends, something about concentration camps and nits. And though Luna kept walking, never breaking stride, the fine hairs on her neck stood up as though vibrating to the tine of a tuning fork.

  A day later, Luna appeared beside the older girl in the locker room, studying her impassively. ‘What?’ the girl demanded, caustic and flustered. At which point Luna stood on tiptoe, leant into the girl till her lips were millimetres from her ear, and whispered two words. And God spoke, from Luna’s lips to the girl’s finger, which ended up down her throat that very night. Thus did Luna Gregory discover her new calling.

  Perhaps it was inevitable, after this, that she would be drawn into Isabelle Wellstone’s sphere, a useful little tool like her. Though at first Bella hadn’t known quite what to do with her. Initially, she tried to enlist Luna in the collective attacks she and her very closest friends meted out to her enemies, the bitchy trolling and sly shunning. Once Luna made it clear that she preferred to work alone, however, the two of them fell into a mutually satisfying partnership, whereby Isabelle identified her next target and Luna took care of the rest.

  It was just too easy. Those two little words of hers worked on the fat and non-fat alike, the latter being mortally afraid of becoming the former, and the former being easy prey for one prepared to be merciless. Of course, there were a few, a very few, who weren’t worried about their weight, but with them Luna simply prodded at other weaknesses. It was all in the delivery, she found; brevity and dispassion were all.

  And God, the joy – the fierce, clawing joy – she felt each time another face blanched, then flushed, after a whisper from her. It was like a drug, and Luna’s waking life soon became a constant quest for more of it.

  Her headmistress, who was no fool, began to see a pattern in Luna’s daily movements and the trail of self-harm in her wake, so she called Luna into her office, her veneer of iron authority cracking slightly when Luna sat in the straight-backed chair and gave her a ghost of a smile. Here we are again.

  No, Luna said, she wasn’t aware of all the girls coming down with eating disorders and other nervous complaints. No, she had no idea how it had started. And no – Luna looked pointedly down at herself, her small, insignificant self – how could she have anything to do with it? But, Luna ventured speculatively, she could imagine the challenge this situation must present to the woman in charge. All those sick girls, all those parents wanting answers, parents on whose largesse St Catherine’s depended…

  Luna walked out of her headmistress’s office calm in the knowledge that she was untouchable now. Perhaps, she thought, she should end her collaboration with Isabelle. Perhaps, soon, she would.

  In the interim, she watched with interest as Bella began to line up her next victim, one of her – oh, the delicious cruelty of it – one of her own larger circle of friends. A bright, friendly girl named Jemima Evangeline Mitford, whose laugh sounded like crystal glasses chiming together, who loved Vivienne Westwood and doodled manga characters in her workbook. A nice girl, too nice for the likes of Isabelle and her pack of bitches.

  Luna could see them eyeing Jemima Evangeline up, rolling their eyes to each other when she said something particularly ingenuous, exchanging predatory looks every time she left the room. Isabelle hadn’t given Luna the nod, but it would come soon, Luna knew it. She’d even started covertly studying her target, nonplussed but by no means disheartened to discover that Jemima Evangeline suffered from no insecurities about her appearance. Coming, as Jemima Evangeline did, from a loving home – with sisters who picked her up from the gates of St Catherine’s every day and a mother who appeared to text her hourly, ending every text with xxoo – there were no easily exploitable family issues either.

  How frustrating! Jemima Evangeline was a puzzle, a girl completely at ease with herself and her life. Maybe Luna would just have to settle for the truth, when the time came to whisper in her ear. Your friends only pretend to like you.

  Luna was still weighing up her quarry when she arrived for her maiden visit to Arborage House, that fateful spring half-term. She was distracted, she later told herself, beguiled by the beauty of her surroundings and the strange rush of longing that ran through her every time Isabelle’s mother, Lady Wellstone, was near. So distracted she never suspected that before the week was out it would b
e she, not Jemima Evangeline, who was ostracised from Isabelle’s inner circle for sins against the alpha bitch.

  Though, had she known what lay in wait, Luna would have behaved just the same.

  *

  Luna stepped out of the lift into Stefan’s Southwark penthouse at dusk to find him sitting in near darkness, watching the lights come on across the Thames. ‘I’m warning you now,’ she said, leaning against the wall and kicking off a shoe, which skittered across the limewashed floor, ‘I am slightly tipsy.’ She toed her other shoe off and it went bouncing after its mate.

  ‘I’m well on my way to joining you, never fear,’ came his disembodied response, accompanied by the sound of ice tinkling, a glint of amber in a cut-glass tumbler.

  Luna made her way somewhat unsteadily across the room, waving her hand as she approached him in his armchair. ‘Budge up,’ she commanded, collapsing between his legs and propping her feet up between his on the ottoman. Relaxing her head against the crook of his neck, she huffed out a quiet sigh of contentment. ‘You smell nice.’

  ‘You too.’ Another tinkle of ice as his arm curved up around her head and he took a slow swallow of Scotch, his larynx moving against her cheek. ‘How was afternoon tea with my mother?’ Luna hesitated, and he laughed softly. ‘Bad enough that it had to be followed by drinks with Jem?’

  She took a deep breath and said, ‘Your mother believes that Arborage has been forced upon you. That you should welcome Viktor’s offer to take it off your hands, and the freedom his money might buy you.’

  ‘Interesting,’ was all he said.

  ‘I’m afraid I was very sharp with her, Stefan.’ She tilted her head upwards, till her nose touched his jaw. ‘I’m afraid you will hear of it.’