The Rose

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Much better.” He grinned. “Oh, by the way, I did something else you’re going to be very angry about.”

  “What now?” she asked.

  “I found your note.” He pulled the envelope from his jeans pocket and opened it.

  “You read the note from David?” she asked.

  “I did.” He wrinkled his nose. Why was that so bloody adorable? She ought to be clawing his eyes out, not thinking of ripping his clothes off.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “But you shouldn’t be angry at me for reading your note. It was out in plain sight under a book on your side table. And when I see a note, I have to read it. It’s a religious precept,” he insisted. “Catholics eat fish on Friday during Lent. Muslims must give alms to the poor. Erotic cultists have to open secret notes they find.”

  “I’m filing that information away in the same mental folder as the one that holds your ‘sex with a cloud’ comment.”

  August rolled onto his back and propped his bare feet on the arm of her love seat.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, pointing at the ceiling, then her. “It was really more of a thick fog than a cloud.” He turned his head and looked at her. “So it’s David Bell who’s blackmailing you.”

  August held out the note to her as if she didn’t already know what it said. Lia stood and snatched the card from him.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  “The mural painter? The next Rex Whistler?” Lia nodded. “Don’t know him personally. What the hell could you have done to a muralist to make him come after you for a million pounds? Break his paintbrush?”

  Lia sat back in the chair and started to raise her legs, planning to sit lotus-style. She quickly put her legs back on the floor and clamped her thighs together.

  “I left my knickers on the floor of your office, didn’t I?”

  “I brought them back,” August said.

  “Where are they?”

  “Gogo grabbed them from me. They’re, ah...on the floor.”

  Lia peeked behind her chair and found her knickers, now damp with dog drool and full of teeth marks, on the rug.

  “Lovely,” she said. “Just lovely. You break into my house. You read my letters. You let my dog eat my knickers. It’s really a good thing you’re attractive or I’d sack you.”

  “You won’t tell me about David Bell?” August asked. “Before you sack me?”

  Lia tugged her skirt a bit to cover herself. “I told you everything you need to know about him.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You said he was older than you, yes? How much older?”

  “Twenty years older.” She waited for August to blink or raise an eyebrow. Nothing. The man was hard to shock.

  “And when did you sleep with him?”

  “Four years ago.”

  “You were seventeen and he was thirty-seven?” August asked.

  “You have run the numbers correctly,” she said. “Well done.”

  “I’m not just a pretty face,” he said. “Though I am that, too.”

  Lia smiled, hoped he’d drop it. He didn’t.

  “Go on, Lia. Tell me all.”

  Lia wanted to tell him. It shocked her how much she wanted to tell him, though she’d told no one in her life about her and David. Not a soul.

  August came and sat at her feet, then kissed her bare thigh.

  “What was that for?”

  “For you.” He smiled up at her. “I need to know the truth and you need to speak it. This is what therapy is, Lia—telling our story to someone who will listen and understand. Tell me your story. Let me help you.”

  Hard to say no to a beautiful man sitting at her feet. Hard to say no when she thought maybe she had finally found someone who she could maybe, possibly, trust.

  “David couldn’t make it in New York apparently. Art scene’s murder there, I hear. Mum met him at a showing and took pity on a fellow New Yorker exiled to England. She and Daddy invited him to dinner one night,” she said, pressing on before she lost her courage. “Mum absolutely loved his work, so...to surprise her, Daddy hired David to paint a mural in Mum’s bedroom. He worked for weeks on it the summer I was seventeen. A mural takes forever, especially a big one. They moved him into the house. They set up showings for his work, paid his travel expenses, set him up with potential clients. They were perfect patrons, the sort any artist dreams of having. Daddy even got him a commission from Prince Charles for a mural at one of his charities.”

  “What about you?” August asked.

  “He taught me some sketching techniques,” she said. “Every evening. He said I was good.”

  “Ah, the art teacher. That old story.” August nodded sagely.

  “He was so...” She stopped to catch her breath. “Oh God, he was handsome. He called me Ophelia. Made it sound so pretty the way he said it. I wanted to marry him,” she said. “How insane is that?”

  David Bell was a perfect-looking man. Her ideal. At least, he had been when she was seventeen and good biceps in a tight T-shirt, unruly ginger hair and intense brown eyes could turn her head. His clothes were always paint-spattered. Always. Jeans and white tees covered in a rainbow of paint. She’d found that sexy once. After a few years, however, Lia realized the paint splotches on his clothes had been an affectation as ridiculous as a man wearing a tuxedo all the time—Look at me, Mr. Very Serious Artist, too busy painting to stop by Tesco and pick up a clean shirt.

  “One day during our art lesson,” she continued, “I admitted to him that I was in love with him. I just said it, not expecting anything. I tried to make it a joke, told him, ‘David, you might have noticed I’m madly in love with you, but I hope that won’t make things awkward. When I try to seduce you, feel free to ignore me and carry on with your life.’”

  “Very smooth. That would have worked on me.”

  “It worked on him, too,” Lia said. “He came to my room that night about midnight.”

  “How was the sex?” August asked. She appreciated his matter-of-fact manner about the whole ordeal, asking questions, not judging her.

  “Painful,” she admitted. “And I didn’t come. He was nice about it, though. He promised it got better with practice. He held me after. That was lovely.” She gave August a wan smile. “He didn’t stay long, though. Said he needed to get back to his room before we got caught together. Mum and Daddy are pretty open-minded about sex, but their seventeen-year-old daughter with a thirty-seven-year-old man? Daddy would have killed him. Then Mum would have resurrected him just to kill him again.”

  “Twenty-year age difference,” August said. “Hard for modern parents to swallow.”

  “It happened in Ancient Greece all the time. Right?”

  “So did exposing unwanted baby girls to the elements.”

  A fair point.

  “Did you get caught?” August asked.

  “I wish. I wish that’s all it was. I’d be fine today if that’s what had happened.” She blinked back tears.

  August took her hand in his. He turned it palm up and caressed the lines on her hand, traveling them as roads with his fingertips.

  “Once wasn’t enough, of course,” she said. “I was in love with him. The morning after, I even gave him a lock of my hair.”

  “Traditional virgin offering in the Cult of Artemis.”

  “Was it?” Lia asked.

  He nodded. “Girls were supposed to apologize to Artemis when they lost their virginities. Artemis has always been such a cockblock.”

  “I should have listened to her,” she said.

  “What happened with you and David?”

  Lia took a long shuddering breath. “I left my room the next night, around midnight. I was going to his bedroom. I wanted to be with him again. If anybody caught me, I was just going to say I wanted a midnight snack. I th
ought I’d find David in his room, but he wasn’t there. I heard his voice outside the house. And Mum’s and Daddy’s. They were on the patio by the rose garden, talking. I went through the music room. All the lights were off in there and the door was cracked open. If the lights are off in the music room, you can’t see into it from the garden. They didn’t see me, but I saw them. And I heard them.”

  August stroked her wrist now, the beating veins, and she tingled everywhere he touched her. Was this a side effect of drinking from the Rose Kylix? If so, she was already regretting selling him that bloody cup.

  “I don’t know what held me back,” Lia said. “Why I didn’t just walk out and say hello... Something about the way they were laughing made me nervous. So I hid at the door and spied on them.”

  She could still hear their laughs ringing in her ears.

  Her mother’s laugh, like she’d just been pinched in a tender spot.

  Her father’s laugh, like he’d won a hand of poker and was raking in the chips.

  David’s laugh, like he’d gotten away with murder.

  “Mum was wearing this red-and-black dressing gown Daddy had got her for Christmas. She looked beautiful, as always. Daddy was there, too, sitting in a chair, Mum on his lap. David walked over to her with a rose he’d cut from the garden and presented it to Mum like a knight to his lady. And Mum took it from him and said thank you. And then David leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. A deep kiss. And Daddy said...”

  Something twisted in Lia’s side, a pain like a rose thorn lodged between her ribs and into a lung.

  “Daddy said, ‘Behave, boy. You had more than enough of her already tonight.’”

  “God, Lia...” August breathed. He sounded like he’d been punched in the stomach. She knew how he felt. Lia dug her fingers into the smooth leather of the armchair. The pain in her side was growing sharper, like she’d had to sprint for her life and had a vicious stitch. She couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t take a full breath, couldn’t move.

  “I already knew Mum and Daddy played around with other people—when I was old enough, they’d warned me in case I heard the gossip. I didn’t like it, but it’s their marriage, not mine. If they wanted to have threesomes or foursomes or tensomes, that was between them and whoever. But...ah, this was about me. It was...um...” She took a quick pained breath. “I thought I was going to die, August. I really thought I might die.”

  “Lia, Lia...” August said, kissing the back of her hand.

  Two hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Discovering David—who she would have gone off with to Gretna Green if he’d so much as crooked his littlest finger at her—had slept with her own mother the night after she’d given him her virginity had fundamentally altered Lia down to the very marrow of her bones. She had liked people before, trusted them, thought the world was a playground and she had no job other than to swing on the swings and slide down the slides, eat biscuits, pet puppies, drink tea—that was her life until then. But it turned out the playground was built over toxic waste, and seeing that kiss had sliced her open so that the poison in the soil seeped into her bloodstream.

  Lia didn’t trust men anymore. Her father alone was the exception to the rule, but even with him, as much as she loved and adored him... She never let her girlfriends alone with him. Not because she thought he’d flirt with them, but because...what if he did, though? She’d been accidentally betrayed by one parent. She didn’t think her heart could take it if it happened again.

  “What did you do?” August asked. His voice was soft, cautious.

  “Ran back to my room and threw up a couple times. Not the best way to handle it. I should have burst out and yelled, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ But I couldn’t do it. I was a coward.” Lia felt a fist in her throat. She didn’t bother to try swallowing it away. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  “No, not a coward. Not you.”

  “I was, though,” she said. “I couldn’t face him. I slipped a note under his door that said if he didn’t leave and cut off contact with my parents forever, I would tell them about us. Mum and Daddy know literally everyone who matters in the art world. They own all or part of at least twenty galleries in London, Glasgow, Dublin, New York and Los Angeles. They could have blackballed him if they’d wanted. Daddy’s got friends in the Home Office. He could have had David’s visa revoked. He could have ruined David’s life, easily. It was a real threat.”

  “Did he leave like you told him to?”

  “That day,” Lia said, “my parents had taken my brothers to London for a football match or something. David came to my suite and pounded on my bedroom door, screaming at me to face him.”

  “And you couldn’t?” August asked.

  She slowly shook her head. “Picture me. Seventeen years old, curled up on the floor, wrapped tight as a ball, crying. I was terrified he was going to break the door down and kill me.”

  “Kill you?”

  “You should have heard him,” she said. “He shouted at me and shouted and shouted... I will never forget the names he called me, the things he said to me. ‘I’m leaving, you jealous stupid bitch, you ugly boring nothing. Of course I fucked your mother. Who wouldn’t? She’s a goddess and you’re nothing compared to her and you’ll always be nothing, you little whore.’ And I just sat there on the floor with my hands over my ears, rocking back and forth and wishing I were anywhere but there. Then he left. That was it until last Saturday night when I saw him in the music room with Mum. Smiling at me.”

  August opened his mouth, no doubt planning on saying something comforting. She raised her hand to silence him.

  “It’s all right. I know I’m not as beautiful as my mother. It’s fine.”

  “Your mother is a lovely woman, but she is not a goddess.”

  “You know how my parents met?” Lia asked. “Daddy went to her little art gallery in New York to buy a painting from her—somehow she’d gotten hold of a painting of my great-grandfather, Malcolm. When she wouldn’t sell it to Daddy, he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder and carried her out to his car. They eloped just like that.” Lia snapped her fingers. “One day she was a New Yorker running a gallery. The next day she was an English countess. But that’s how beautiful Mum is—men take one look at her and want to carry her off. Nobody’s ever going to carry me off.”

  “Achilles and Briseis,” August said. “Now I see the appeal.” He kissed her knuckles. “Lia, I would choose you over your mother every time, every night for a thousand years. And my taste is impeccable.”

  “Thank you,” she said in a small voice. She shouldn’t have been happy to hear that, but she was.

  “David said what he said to hurt you, not because he believed it.”

  “He called me boring,” Lia said with a bitter half smile. “Maybe at seventeen I was. But I’m not boring anymore.” She couldn’t quite hide the pride in her voice.

  “Never met a boring madam,” August agreed. “Is that why you became one? To prove David Bell wrong?”

  She laughed softly. “Maybe? Possibly? Let’s just say when I was given the chance to have that very interesting career, I took it.”

  “So how does a wealthy earl’s daughter get around to starting her own, ah...gardening and tennis club?”

  “Georgy, of course.” Lia grinned. “We’ve been getting into scrapes together since we were toddlers. She heard about a party for some Hollywood bigwig who was in town to film a movie. They were trying to get as many pretty legal-aged girls at the party as possible. And it was at the Pearl Hotel. Had to go, right?”

  The Pearl was her great-grandfather Malcolm’s favorite brothel back in the ’30s, after all. She couldn’t resist a chance to get tarted up and see Old Number Thirteen’s former playground.

  “Nice party?” August smiled as if he already knew the answer.

  “Nice party,” she said. “I
met someone. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Load the party with pretty girls and horny men and odds are somebody’s going to get off with somebody else.”

  “How was the sex?” August asked.

  “Better than with David, though that’s not saying much. When we were about to leave the hotel room, he gave me his card and said he wanted to see me again the next night. I said I was busy. He said he had five hundred pounds to get me unbusy. I said I’d think about it. I didn’t need the money, but it was flattering. You know, my great-grandfather loved prostitutes. ‘Whore’ was a compliment when he said it. He only respected women who knew their own worth—no sane woman would let a man so much as shake her hand for less than a hundred pounds, and all that.”

  “Who was he?” August asked. “Your gentleman friend?”

  “An actor,” Lia said. “Great hair. Fantastic cheekbones. One of those congenial perverts. Too busy to date. Too horny to go without. You know the sort.”

  “I know exactly who you’re talking about. I did body shots with him in Malta last summer. Unless you’re talking about a different set of fantastic cheekbones...”

  Lia would never tell. She smiled a little to herself at the memory.

  “Georgy was so jealous. When I told her about his offer, that I didn’t want to do it again, she said she’d do it in a heartbeat, especially for five hundred.”

  “You offered her in your place?”

  “I let him know I was too busy but said a friend of mine might be interested. Texted him a pic. He texted back a thumbs-up. I told him I was the daughter of a very rich earl with connections everywhere, and if he didn’t want to get his face on the front pages of the papers for all the wrong reasons, he’d take good care of her. He swore he would. And he did. It was only after I’d set the ‘date’ up that I realized I’d sort of rather inadvertently...”

  “Pimped out your best friend to a near-stranger?”

  “Yes, that.” Lia winced. “Didn’t stop me from doing it again. Week after, he called me and asked if I had any other amiable friends for some of his amiable friends who were in town—five hundred an hour if they were pretty and could keep a secret. After that, it sort of grew and grew...until there were five women working for me and fifty or more men who were regular clients.”