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‘Oh, no, Robbie, don’t let him overtake you.’ Emerald stood up on her toes to urge on her son but it was too late, Robbie had already allowed a determined red-faced little bruiser to push past him to the winning post. Emerald sighed. He had the double handicap of his own sweet nature and having been raised by Amber.
Normally Emerald did her utmost to avoid these occasions–grubby little boys and their dull parents were not her idea of fun–but on this occasion, with the Vogue article in mind, she had felt obliged to put in an appearance.
‘Darling, over here,’ she called out as Robbie looked round, searching the crowd. But either he hadn’t heard her or he was ignoring her because suddenly a huge smile crossed his face and he set off at a run, heading not for her, Emerald realised, but his grandmother.
‘Smart boy,’ Drogo, still at her elbow, murmured.
‘Well, that’s something your genes will have to work overtime to produce if you go ahead and marry Glum Gwen,’ Emerald told him smartly. ‘Imagine having children with those awful cold squidgy fingers just like Gwennie’s father’s.’ She shuddered. ‘You’ll have to be careful where they put them as well. You don’t want a quiverful of little coroneted thieves, Drogo, who all take after their grandfather. Everyone knows about the money Henry’s borrowed from people and never repaid. You should have married that last model you were dating, the one that went off with that pop singer.’
‘Same old Emerald,’ Drogo told her. ‘Always ready with the bitchy remark. But I suppose that’s what happens to a woman when she’s been disappointed in love and life: she becomes all sour and bitter.’
Sour and bitter. He made her sound like a dried-up old spinster, which she most certainly was not!
She was only in her mid–well, OK then, her late–twenties, for heaven’s sake, and in the prime of her life. But as Max had rather unkindly reminded her last night, she was not eighteen any more and girls who were eighteen were far more forward and available than she had been at that age.
Max. The heat of last night’s desire had only been damped down within her, not extinguished, and the mere sounding of his name within her thoughts was enough to have her need for him clamouring into fresh life. Emerald had never wanted any man as much as she did Max. He both aroused and infuriated her. Every time she thought she had him mastered and under her control, he proved to her that she had misjudged her power over him. He angered her and aroused her in equal measure, and Emerald knew that she would not be content until he was down on his knees admitting to her that she meant more to him than any other woman had or could. Only then would she be satisfied. Only then would she be ready to give him up.
She was seeing him later at Annabel’s. She’d tried to persuade him to pick her up from her apartment so that they could arrive together and make a statement as a couple, as part of her ongoing fight to enslave him and bend him to her will, but he’d refused. Emerald wasn’t used to men refusing her. She was the one who did that to them. With any other man she’d have sulked until he’d given in, but with Max she’d known that no amount of tantrums would work and that he wouldn’t back down. That alone had been enough to sharpen her interest in him.
Max was different from any of the other men she’d slept with. She’d known that he would be different from the first minute she’d seen him. That had been at Annabel’s too. Everyone who was anyone went there. He’d been with a crowd that had included members of the Tony Armstrong-Jones and Princess Margaret set. He’d stood out from the other men as well as slightly apart from them, in his mohair suit and well-polished Church’s brogues, his suit, like his smile, sharper and skilfully tailored to enhance his maleness.
She’d wanted him even then, caught off guard by the fierce surge of her own lust. He’d been with one of an endless stream of dolly-birds with equally endless legs who filled Annabel’s, and the beds of the men who went there.
One look at her had told Emerald that the girl would be no competition. She didn’t have her looks and she certainly didn’t look as though she had her sexuality–or her need–Emerald had recognised, watching the way the girl, thin and with a Sassoon haircut, had pouted and then pulled sulkily away from him when he had reached out for her.
Emerald had kept on watching them, deliberately so, smiling mockingly at him when he had finally felt the heat of her gaze and had looked back at her. There had been no need for her to do any more. Men, or at least the kind of men who appealed to her, always recognised her sensuality.
Annoyingly he hadn’t been lured to her side to light her cigarette for her as she’d expected. Instead–and this had been something she’d definitely not experienced before–he’d returned her mocking smile, and had then produced two cigarettes, lighting them both and then holding them to cup his girl’s face and kiss her slowly before handing her one.
Emerald now dived into her handbag to remove her cigarettes, remembering that incident. Her hands were shaking nearly as much now as they had been then, with the sexual excitement watching him had brought her. Max specialised in making every public act he performed with a woman resonate with a sexual intimacy.
When she had gone home she had relived his actions in the privacy of her bedroom, only this time she had been the one he had been kissing, not the stupid girl who had been with him. She could still remember how she had felt, lying naked on her bed, with the bedside lamps turned down low, her body spread across the heavy Irish linen sheet embroidered with her personal monogram, the E of Emerald entwined with the L of Lenchester, the whole surrounded by laurel leaves and surmounted with a small ducal coronet, to which, of course, she was not strictly entitled, being merely the daughter of a duke, but then she had always been prepared to break the rules to get what she wanted.
And she had wanted Max, so very badly that she had shivered with aching excitement just thinking about him as she lay there, her naked body and the bed dimly reflected in both her dressing table mirror and the full-length pier glass to one side of it, the low lighting giving the image a hazy, nebulous, almost Pre-Raphaelite sensuality.
She had taken her time stroking her body as she had wanted to imagine Max stroking it, admiring the smoothness of her own flesh, imagining his male pleasure in it, her heavy-lidded gaze observing the dark thrust of her nipples with triumphant pleasure. Emerald loved her breasts. They were the exact shape that fashion demanded, not too big and not too small, tip-tilted and firm, but it was her nipples that made them so sensually alluring. Large and dark, they looked almost as though they should belong to someone else, a woman with a fuller heavier figure, their sexuality intensified by the fact that her breasts were so prettily feminine. Men adored them. Emerald had easily been able to imagine how a man like Max would react to them; how they wou
ld arouse him to licking and sucking them with greedy pleasure, whilst she repaid the favour by reaching equally eagerly for his prick, his cock, the thick hard organ of her own pleasure. How she loved rolling those words around her mouth, tasting them with her lips, enjoying their erotic coarseness; words that were unacceptable on the lips of a well-brought-up woman, just as the desire thinking them aroused within her to treat the organ itself in the same way she was treating the words that described it, rolling her tongue around it, lapping at it with her tongue, sucking on the heavy sac of flesh below it before taking it into her mouth, was also something that no truly respectable woman should know about, never mind actually do.
What a thrill it had given her to imagine such a scene, to survey mentally, at first with warm languor and then with increasing urgency, the private images being unveiled for her enjoyment inside her head.
Of course it hadn’t been long before her hand had slipped down her body, her fingers smoothing past the soft hair that masked the mound of her sex, to slide into her own wetness, stroking the receptive flesh slowly and teasingly at first, her rhythm quickly increasing, along with her heartbeat and her breathing, until her body was jerking against her expert touch, her eyes finally closing as she commanded her imagination to create for her the presence, the man she really wanted, so that it was he who touched her, who drove her, who captured her with the power he had over her to give or withhold her ultimate release from the savage ache of her pleasure.
Now, remembering that evening, Emerald gave a satisfied sigh of triumph.
Of course, merely imagining Max possessing her was nowhere near enough to satisfy her for very long.
There was no point in Emerald’s book in being well connected if one did not use those connections.
By lunchtime the next day she knew virtually all there was to know about him. According to the information that was in the public domain, he was a crook turned gangland enforcer, now an entrepreneur with his fingers in some very rich pies indeed, which was how he had come to be accepted by society. According to the underground information Emerald had garnered, he was a man of incredible sexual prowess and stamina, whose charisma and charm had taken him into the beds of a long string of socially prominent women. His preferred choice was married women who wanted to stay married, and intense sexual liaisons that burned out at high speed and were always ended by him. Emerald had heard that he was rumoured to have a photographic collection of his conquests that would appal any censor, and that he was ruthless in getting what he wanted–both in and out of bed.
Everything she had learned about him had increased her appetite for him. It was fashionable to break the old rules and taboos, and to ignore the old social barriers. London’s top nightspots were filled with swaggering young men with cockney accents and sexual machismo, unashamedly parading in front of society women whose husbands believed that sex inside marriage was simply for getting themselves an heir.
London was the place to be, and the King’s Road rather like a private and exclusive club for those ‘in the know’. The very air was ripe and loaded with the smell of sex and youth. Girls and rock musicians hyped up on amphetamines, the former to keep them thin and the latter to keep them awake, took to the drug-induced effect of an increase in their sexual appetites like ducks to water. And men like Max watched and smiled their crocodile smiles, waiting for the chance to feed.
He was a user, and some said an abuser, and so despite the fact that he had piqued her interest, initially Emerald had dismissed him as a potential lover, and with difficulty she had put him out of her mind. After all, there were plenty of other, far more worthy contenders for her favours.
She’d had an appointment that morning with the Harley Street quack who supplied her–and half of London, she suspected–with the amphetamine ‘diet pills’ that kept her as sleek as any eighteen-year-old, and then she’d gone for a late liquid lunch in a popular and upmarket Sloane Street pub, which was where she’d seen Max again, standing at the bar.
