Chapter Eleven
He was utterly drained, thoroughly fucked. His cock had shot its load into the Marquis’s eager mouth, his arse had been drilled by the gentleman the Marquis had brought in to take his pleasure of the blacksmith’s boy who was their latest plaything – spotted as the Marquis rode through the village with his beautiful sister, Lady Maria, and summoned to the Abbey to be used in any way that might give pleasure to the lord of the manor and his friends. Sprawling on the feather mattress and the silken sheets, collapsed in a comfort he had never even been able to imagine, Jim’s eyes closed as he drifted off in exquisite release.
It was not just the physical satisfaction that was flooding through him, calming him even more than the effects of sinking a couple of pints of the powerful cider they served in the Northam Arms after a hard day’s shoeing recalcitrant stallions. It was that finally he was able to be himself – be recognized for the licentious, filthy pervert he truly was. Somehow, the Marquis had seen him, seen not the easy-going, hail-fellow-well-met, cheerfully lusty Jim who every father in Northam village wanted to marry his daughter; the Marquis had known in a flash, just looking in his eyes for a moment, what Jim really wanted to do not only with that daughter, but her brother too, and at the same time if they’d let him.
He had spent eighteen years of his life hiding from his desires, ashamed of them, treating the young women of Northam as delicately as if they were made of fine china, when what he was craving was to crack their arses with a strap and then have them do the same to him. And in his fantasies, the woman he dreamed of strapping him more than any of the others was the Lady Maria, with her white skin, willow-slim body, luxuriant blonde hair and tiny pointed breasts like—
‘Caroline! Carmen has a scarf made out of her own hair and her mummy’s!’ Laylah blurted out as she burst into Caroline’s living room. ‘Did you know that?’
Caroline slammed her laptop shut so fast that the desk bounced with the impact.
‘Laylah!’ she said, her heart pounding, partly from the sexual charge that had built up while she read her own extremely saucy writing, and partly from the terror that Laylah might have caught a glimpse of it as she tore into the room. ‘You can’t just come into my room without knocking! We all need privacy! What if I was on the loo or something?’
‘Well, you weren’t!’ Laylah said, putting her hands on her hips and tilting her head with a pert smile. ‘So what? Anyway . . .’
‘What time is it?’
Caroline looked at her phone. She had been getting ready to write a sex scene between Lexy and her babydaddy, Jamal, involving bondage, whipped cream, a douche and pegging. Jamal’s name had been changed, but it was very clear from the context which of Lexy’s previous sex partners had been a six-foot-five, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bottom to her top.
Jamal was a basketball player, and Caroline had had the brilliant idea to make the character in the book a wide receiver, an American football term that she had always thought very funny. Lexy had loved it, and had given Caroline so much detail about exactly how Jamal liked to widely receive that Caroline had had to listen back to it on headphones rather than just playing it back, in case anyone happened to come in.
Thank God I took that precaution! she thought, pulling out her earbuds. She hadn’t actually had Lexy’s narrative running; she’d just finished listening to it, and had thought that the best way to get into the swing, as it were, of writing a big sex scene was to warm up with one of her own.
And it had worked all too well. Caroline was distinctly hot and bothered, not at all prepared for the incursion of a small, bratty child at nine in the evening wearing mini-Uggs and a nightie with Me Princess, You Whoever emblazoned across her skinny chest in bright pink glittery lettering.
‘Carmen’s mum’s hair is lighter than hers so it’s in stripes on the scarf,’ Laylah babbled. ‘And she has a winter headband made out of her own hair, and mittens. Those are stripy too. Carmen’s mum tried to knit gloves but she said the fingers were too hard. You should put that in the book, about Carmen. No one else has a head scarf made out of her own hair and her mum’s, do they? Carmen says not.’
‘No, I don’t think they do,’ Caroline said in a daze. ‘It’s not really the kind of thing that—’
‘Mummy and Daddy are fighting,’ Laylah said, abruptly shifting tack and throwing herself down on the sofa.
The sitting room of the guest suite was generously proportioned, with a sofa and armchair set arranged around a coffee table to face out to the sea. Even if life at The Gables hadn’t included the delicious proximity of the handsome Frank in gym gear, it would have been an increasingly hard wrench for Caroline to leave the suite every Friday afternoon to head back to her London houseshare, with its grotty bathroom, mouldy windows, and the communal lounge that lacked enough sofas and armchairs for all the housemates to sit down comfortably at once.
‘You ought to be in bed,’ Caroline said. ‘Does Lina know you’re up?’
Laylah made a loud farting noise.
‘Course not,’ she said. ‘She’s Skyping her boyfriend and crying, like she always does in the evenings. I got bored and couldn’t sleep so I went out of my room, and I heard Mummy and Daddy shouting. Daddy said that me and London are out of control and Mummy said I’m just like she was when she was little and Daddy said that’s a nightmare ’cause Grandpa Don spoilt her so much this is why she’s like she is now, and Mummy got really cross and shouted that Grandpa loves her best in the world and not to talk about him like that, and Daddy said that Grandma Margaret’s the brains of that operation if you ask him, and she should come here and whip us into shape instead of useless Lina, and Mummy said over her dead body as Grandma Margaret’s always so mean about me and London and our high spirits and Daddy said he agrees with every word that Grandma Margaret says and it’s not high spirits, we’re tearaways and we need a short sharp shock –’ Laylah finally ran out of breath.
Caroline commented, eyebrows raised: ‘You don’t seem very bothered! If my dad was saying I needed a short sharp shock—’
‘Oh, it’ll never happen,’ Laylah said breezily. ‘Mummy always wins.’
‘Laylah!’
Both Caroline and Laylah turned to the sound of Frank’s voice; he was standing in the open doorway, hands on hips, brow furrowed.
‘What are you doing up?’ he demanded. ‘You should be in bed by now! We kissed you goodnight and tucked you in!’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Laylah said, shrugging. ‘So I came to see what Caroline was doing.’
‘You’re not supposed to be bothering her!’ Frank said, throwing an apologetic glance at Caroline. ‘Come on, now, back to bed –’
But just then Lexy swept into the room, wearing a silk robe in shades of peacock blue and green which whirled around her slender limbs. The garment was so elegant, and clearly so expensive, that Caroline could not avoid sighing in envy.
‘Laylah darling,’ Lexy said loudly, bending down to hoist the little girl into her arms, ‘Daddy thinks I don’t spend enough time with you! So you’re going to sleep in my bed tonight and Daddy can go and sleep in yours, or wherever he bloody well wants, but he can’t share with us, because it’s girls only, okay?’
‘Okay, Mummy!’
Frank had to jump aside to avoid being whacked by Laylah’s feet as Lexy whisked their daughter triumphantly from the sitting room, her tone light but her eyes flashing and her jaw set in fury. The little girl looked equally smug, pushing back her hair from her face so she could pull a defiant grimace at her father, proving the point she had just made: that Lexy always won.
Frank stood there, half-leaning now against the door jamb, head lowered, his shoulders sagging. He looked utterly defeated. Caroline stared at him helplessly, not knowing what to say. She hated to see him so unhappy. But nastily, selfishly, she was also glorying in the sight of Frank brought so low by Lexy, who, Caroline was more convinced with each passing day, was not at all worthy to be the wife of such a wonderful man.
Frank pushed slowly off the door frame, his eyes blank. But then he stopped again, clearly blocked; he wasn’t sure where he was going, now that his wife had banned him from their bedroom. It was almost like watching the tall woman at the party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s start to topple over, the moment where Holly Golightly famously puts her hands to her mouth and yells ‘Timber!’ as her friend crashes to the ground.
Frank wasn’t going to fall, but he was swaying on his feet as if he had been punched. And when Caroline saw that, she got up and practically ran towards him, wrapping her arms around him, embracing him, breaking through all her inhibitions, because against him were pressing her oversize boobs and her protruding stomach, not to mention the roll of fat between them on her upper torso. She hugged him as if he were her boyfriend and he had just been told that his parents had been killed in a freak accident.
Frank was only wearing a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, soft, well-washed fabric, nothing that could disguise the hard contours of his body. He felt like a bronze sculpture sheathed in velvet, and when his arms came round her, returning the hug, the smell of him was overwhelming. His curls tickled her ear and his body hair, twining over the neck of the T-shirt, rubbed against her skin. There was a light perfume of expensive herbal soap which, mingled with his own scent, made Caroline’s head swim and her limbs tremble as if she had drunk a whole pot of black coffee.
‘I’m sorry this is happening to you,’ she mumbled into his chest. ‘You don’t deserve it. I’m so sorry, Frank.’
His arms tightened even more. She could feel almost the whole length of him now, the long muscles of his thighs pressing into her much soggier ones. And he seemed not to mind at all, not to be repulsed by her body, even though it was so much less perky and tight and taut than Lexy’s.
‘You’re a really good friend, Caroline,’ he said, and to her shock, one big hand came up and stroked her hair. ‘A really good friend. We’re all so lucky to have you.’
He heaved a long sigh.
‘Fantastic with the kids, so easy to hang out with, great company . . . sometimes I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.’
Caroline didn’t think that Frank was aware he had switched from ‘we’ to ‘I’. And the fact that the transition had been involuntary made her cherish it even more. She knew she had to be the first one to pull back, so that Frank wouldn’t suspect she had an ulterior motive for the hug, but it took tremendous willpower to manage it.
Smiling up at him, she said:
‘It’s funny to think I’ve only been here a few weeks, isn’t it? It’s silly, but I’m already feeling a bit sad to think of the book getting finished and not being around all of you any more!’
And in those wonderful dark brown eyes, she saw, to her considerable delight, that Frank’s feelings about this eventuality were exactly the same as hers.