What started softly soon became more passionate. They devoured each other’s mouths. Meanwhile, Axel’s hands roamed the exquisite curves of Madeleine’s body. She sighed happily as they moved slowly from her waist toward her bottom. They moved to the bedroom and soon he was undoing the buttons at the back of her plain black mourning dress. Madeleine lifted her arms obediently so that he could pull the dress off over her head. Axel gave a murmur of appreciation as he took in Madeleine’s expensive pewter-colored silk and lace underwear. His fingers traced the edge of the balconette bra that lifted the perfect white orbs of her bosom. Her nipples were already tight and hard.
While Axel dipped his head to kiss the soft skin of Madeleine’s décolletage from the notch at her throat to the bow between her breasts, she worked at undoing the buttons on his shirt, eager to feel his bare chest against hers. Soon they were both completely naked. Chest to chest. Skin on skin.
Axel briefly caught Madeleine’s eye and grinned before he parted her long slim legs and dipped his head down between them. The touch of his tongue on her clitoris sent an electric shock right through her. She was already aroused. Kissing Axel was enough to have done that.
When it became too much to bear, Madeleine pulled him up to lie down on top of her. She parted her legs around his body and felt his penis resting hard against her pubic bone.
She slid her hand down between them and sought out his erection. Meanwhile, Axel’s fingers had moved to the silken tuft of her pubic hair. Madeleine couldn’t help gasping as she felt him make contact with her clitoris again, sending more shivers of arousal up and down her spine like sparks.
Now all Madeleine wanted was to have him all the way inside her. Not just his fingers. She wrapped her hand around his penis, gently moving the soft sheath of his foreskin backwards and forwards while her other hand massaged his balls. It wasn’t long before he was hard enough for Madeleine to tilt her pelvis toward him and slowly guide him in.
She had never felt such pleasure as she did in that moment when her body relaxed around Axel’s penis and he began to move. Madeleine wrapped her arms and legs around him and held him so close it was as though she had started to melt into him. She loved the way he kept kissing her or buried his face in her neck. She loved the taste of the sweat on his skin when she kissed him back.
He moved slowly at first. She moved in time with him, rising up to meet each of his thrusts. Their breathing grew heavier as the pace quickened. Madeleine dug her fingers into Axel’s buttocks, pulling him still deeper inside.
After a while he flipped her over so that she was on top. Her hair shaded his face like a veil. She balanced above him so that they were touching only where he entered her, teasing him until he had to roll her over again.
She came right before he did. Her orgasm electrified her. Her entire body seemed to dissolve as she started to come. He came quickly afterward; the sound of her ecstasy tipping him over the edge.
“I have waited for that for a very long time,” Axel sighed as they lay in each other’s arms.
“Me too,” said Madeleine, realizing in that moment that it was true. “Me too.”
When Geoff, Madeleine’s boss, called from London the following morning to tell her that they were definitely going to lose their jobs in the takeover, Madeleine wasn’t half as disappointed as she expected to be.
“Don’t worry, Mads. I’m not going to take this lying down,” Geoff assured her.
I will, thought Madeleine, placing her mobile phone on the bedside table and sinking back into the pillows with an expression that was approaching beatific.
“Good news?” asked Axel, as he snuggled against her side.
“Lost my job,” she said simply.
“If it means we’re going to see more of you out here in Champagne,” he said, “then I’m glad.”
Madeleine certainly didn’t feel bereft as, later that day, Axel helped her chop through the brambles into the Clos and assured her that, though her father hadn’t been properly tending the vines for quite a while, all was not lost.
“Buds,” he said, beckoning her closer to one of the sticks she had assumed was dead. “A new beginning.”
CHAPTER 8
The fifteenth of April was a very special day in the Morgan-Tarrant household. Exactly a year ago Christina and Bill had celebrated their marriage in the artfully wild garden of their luxuriously appointed Malibu beach home.
Given the bride and groom’s status, the wedding was a hotly anticipated affair. To put the press off the scent, caterers and wedding planners set the scene for three identical wedding parties at three venues in the Greater Los Angeles area: a hotel, the beach house and the Bel Air estate belonging to the director of Bill’s most recent movie. Celebrity guests were informed of the actual location just hours before the ceremony began, whence they were whisked from a rendezvous point at the Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel to the beach in a fleet of blacked-out limousines.
When they reached the beach house, the guests were disgorged from their cars beneath a pink ribbon-trimmed gazebo that shielded their identities from the press helicopters that were somehow already circling overhead. Since the couple had done an exclusive deal with Hello! magazine for the photographs of their nuptials, cameras and even mobile phones were banned. A few days later, one of the papers carried a small gossip piece in which a grande dame of Hollywood “anonymously” objected to the way she had been frisked by the security staff. “I don’t even know how to use the camera function on my Motorola!” she complained. An ad campaign for the phone company, in which the actress did learn to use her picture function properly, swiftly followed.
Just one prettily impromptu shot sneaked out; taken on a phone that had somehow made it through the X-ray machine provided by the security company that provided machines to international airports, it was a photo of Christina and Bill at the altar, having just exchanged rings. They were leaning together over their joined hands, foreheads touching, smiling deep into each other’s eyes. This was the photograph that would appear every time a magazine ran an article that mentioned the couple as an example of a successful celebrity marriage. Christina loved that photograph. It was taken from her best side.
A year later, Christina Morgan and Bill Tarrant woke up in separate bedrooms in the three-thousand-square-foot penthouse suite of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. Christina took a couple of calls on her mobile and answered a few e-mails while sipping Earl Grey from a bone china cup. She stood at her window and looked out at the view. Ocean mist. There was nothing to see. She heard the sound of the Cartoon Network drifting out from Bill’s room and considered going in there. It was their anniversary after all. But she decided against it. She needed to wash her hair. It was especially important to look good that day. That was what she’d told Bill the night before when he started making advances.
“I need my beauty sleep, darling.”
Bill had no idea how much work went into being one of the world’s most beautiful people.
It was another hour or so before the anniversary couple greeted each other in the shared sitting room. Christina held out her cheek for a kiss. Bill responded perfunctorily.
“Are you wearing that?” was the first thing Christina said to her husband of precisely twelve months. She was wearing a dress by Zac Posen, her current favorite. Bill was wearing ripped jeans and a khaki T-shirt that had definitely seen better days.
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Bill asked. “You want to tell me what I should wear?”
“No. But … ” Christina felt the rising frustration as yet another mundane exchange threatened to grow into a fight. Why did he always have to be so difficult? This was not what she’d signed up for.
“Don’t worry. The magazine is bringing the clothes,” interrupted Bill’s towheaded personal assistant, Teak, who had just stepped out of the private elevator that went directly from lobby to penthouse. “Car’s waiting,” he said.
The happy couple boarded the elevator
back downstairs.
Their silence continued all the way across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the 101 toward Napa Valley. Well, not silence exactly. Both Bill and Christina took calls from other people. Christina’s agent, Marisa, had news of an advertising campaign for a Japanese sportswear line. Bill’s manager, Justin, gave him an update on box-office figures for his latest film. They were good, though he had been knocked off the top spot by the sequel to the previous year’s surprise hit: a wholesome teen movie about two kids who befriend a drug-addled prostitute and keep her in the basement of their parents’ chichi townhouse. If they weren’t taking calls, the famous couple simply stared through the dark-tinted windows at the scenery passing by. When they arrived at their destination, however…
Bill leaped out of the car first and raced around to open Christina’s door before the driver could get there. Christina stepped from the car sporting an enormous smile, wrapped her arms around her husband and planted a lingering kiss on his cheek. Bill grinned back at her: “still crazy in love after all these months,” their expressions said. The camera caught it all.
“Could you put your hand on his face so we can see your engagement ring?” the photographer asked.
Christina’s engagement ring—an enormous canary yellow diamond set in white gold—was legendary. It was said that it had originally belonged to Mumtaz, wife of Shah Jahan and inspiration for the Taj Mahal. Teak had done some research that seemed to confirm the diamond’s provenance.
A year after the Morgan/Tarrant wedding (a.k.a., Hollywood wedding of the year!), Hello! had commissioned a new photo shoot of the couple, which would be accompanied by a nice big piece sharing their views on the secrets of a happy marriage. The setting was inspired.
“The first anniversary of a wedding is traditionally celebrated as the ‘paper’ anniversary and Bill Tarrant certainly honored that tradition when he handed his exquisite supermodel wife, Christina Morgan, ownership papers on his anniversary gift to her: the Villa Bacchante,” the article would report.
“Situated in the Carneros region of California’s famous Napa Valley, the Villa Bacchante is twelve thousand square feet of Tuscan-style home set in forty acres of vineyards. As you can see from our pictures, Christina was certainly surprised by her husband’s extravagant present. But she was definitely delighted.”
“To own a vineyard has long been one of my fantasies,” Christina told Hello! magazine. “As you know, I was raised on a farm in Iowa and I always dreamed that one day I would get back to the land. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty!”
For the benefit of the magazine’s readers, Christina and Bill spent the rest of the day posing all over the Villa Bacchante and throughout its gardens in clothes by Armani, Zac Posen and Michael Kors. They posed in the vineyard. They posed by the huge “living flame” fireplace in the “family” room (which was fired up for the shoot though it was seventy degrees outside). They posed in the kitchen and the living room. They even managed a coy pose by the Jacuzzi bath in the master en suite, wrapped in matching white bathrobes, each of them toting a flute of champagne.
Bill took a slug from his.
“It’s just a prop, Bill,” said Christina.
The crew from Hello! magazine laughed at the friendly married banter.
The photographs looked great. The natural beauty of the vineyards really set off the designer clothes, even if it was too early for grapes. (The stylist taped a couple of bunches of black table grapes bought at “Whole Foods to one of the vines for the purposes of a more impressive close-up.) Despite that, everyone agreed it would make a wonderful spread. At the end of the shoot, Bill and Christina sat down with the journalist in the garden of this, the newest of their four “palatial” homes.
“What are you going to grow here?” the journalist asked.
“Grapes, I guess,” said Christina. “It is a vineyard.”
“I mean, what kind of grapes,” the journalist persisted.
Teak, Bill’s PA, flicked through a folder and announced. “Most of the vineyards here are given over to pinot noir. The Carneros region is particularly suited to the grape and the Villa Bacchante has long been renowned for its sparkling wine, modeled on the famous Blanc de Noirs champagnes of France in Europe.”
The journalist nodded approvingly.
“There are production facilities to make a hundred and fifty thousand bottles per year,” Teak concluded his spiel.
“One hundred and fifty thousand bottles?” Now the journalist was really impressed. “And you’ll be involved in the winemaking process yourselves?” she asked.
“Of course,” Bill and Christina assured her.
“Though I wouldn’t want to drink any wine made from grapes pressed with Bill’s gnarly feet!” said Christina, to add a bit of authentic teasing color to the piece.
The interview then moved from wine to the couple’s more urbane projects. Bill talked about his new movies; he had three blockbusters coming up that year, filmed back-to-back in Romania. Christina talked about the clothing line that she had been asked to design for H&M.
“I mean, I’m not actually going to design it but I am coming up with the overall concept.”
“You’re quite the Renaissance woman,” said the journalist.
Christina looked at her blankly.
“Modeling, wine, fashion design … ”
“Oh, yes. I love all that stuff.”
“Well, I think that about covers it.” The journalist turned off her digital recorder. “Thanks, guys. I should be able to pull something really good out of this.”
“We’ll be sent the copy for approval, of course,” said Christina.
“Of course.”
Half an hour after the last of the Hello! crew had gone, Bill and Christina got into their limousine and were driven to San Francisco International Airport. Bill went with Teak to New York and Christina returned to LA.
Christina was furious. What kind of anniversary present was a vineyard? It was Bill’s dream, not Christina’s, to get back to the land. In the many articles that had been written about her enormous success, Christina had often romanticized her childhood in Iowa, but the truth was she couldn’t wait to get out of there. She thanked God on a daily basis for the looks that had brought her the crown of Miss Teen Dairy which gave her the courage to move to New York, where she got a nose job that slimmed her little bobbed snout into something more suitable for the pages of Vogue. After that, she never looked back. She’d certainly never been back to Des Moines.
But she had to admit the Villa Bacchante had made a fabulous backdrop for the anniversary photo shoot and Bill’s super-geek PA had assured her it was a wonderful investment. When the estate came onto the market, fifteen buyers put in a bid for it, Teak said, which was why Bill had to pay so much over the asking price. One of those fifteen other buyers would almost certainly pay even more than that to wrestle it back from Bill, especially with the Hello! spread as a marketing tool.
“You better be right,” Christina told the little smartass. Teak had a literature degree from Harvard and she was convinced he was only working for Bill so that he could write a warts-and-all exposé when his contract ran out.
Back in the Beverly Hills house, Christina prepared for bed. It was a long process involving three different kinds of dermatologist-prescribed night cream for the different “zones” of her face. The ritual was very important to Christina. She knew she was lucky to still be doing so well at the age of thirty-four. As one of her fellow models had pointed out, the only models who continued to get covers after that age were usually subtitled “fabulous at thirty-five” like it was some kind of miracle they hadn’t gotten moldy. Just a few days earlier she had heard a British fashion photographer describe Gisele as “aging like a fine wine. That’s been left too close to a radiator.”
And so Christina kept up the nightly routine that supplemented six-weekly visits to her dermatologist for Botox, micro-dermabrasion and intense pulsed light laser therapy. You name it, she
was having it. There had been just one night in the past ten years when she hadn’t taken off her makeup and applied some kind of anti-aging serum before her head hit the pillow. It was the first night she ever spent with the man who would become her husband …
Bill and Christina were introduced by Christina’s agent, Marisa. Marisa was a superficially abrasive but ultimately kindhearted New Yorker who took the pastoral care of her models so seriously that she often went so far as to find them suitable husbands and wives.
What Christina didn’t know was that Bill had flicked through Marisa’s modeling agency book as though it were a mail order catalog and requested introductions to three girls who caught his eye. Christina also didn’t know that she was actually Bill’s third choice. The two girls he chose ahead of her were both attached.
Still, Marisa set up a dinner party in Los Angeles and invited both Bill and Christina to attend. Christina hadn’t been single for all that long. She’d recently broken up with a New York finance guy. And so, Bill would later tell her, when Christina walked into the party that night, she was looking a little wistful. “Like that pre-Raphaelite painting of the lady in the boat,” he said. They could neither of them remember the painting’s name or that of the artist but it didn’t matter. Though Bill’s status as a huge movie star meant Christina was automatically on the alert for a charm offensive, she was flattered to be compared to a classic work of art and by the end of the evening, Bill had almost convinced her that losing the “love of her life” was actually a lucky escape.
Having spent the previous month panicking that she would never find another man of the right caliber, Christina was delightedly surprised to feel that familiar tingle of arousal when Bill brushed her arm to draw her attention to something on the other side of the room. She didn’t even mind when he used one of the oldest tricks in the book on her.
“I can read palms,” he said, taking her right hand between his and stroking it gently. “And the lines on your hand tell me that you’re coming home with me tonight.”
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