A Hard Bargain (13 page)

Going away? Why? Where? What the hell? What happened to her?

“May I?” Nicholas is holding out his hand, clearly wanting to see the text. Numb, confused, I hand my phone over to him. He scans the message then glances back at me. “From your expression I guess you didn’t know she was planning a trip?”

I’m shaking my head, frowning, confused. And really worried now about my friend.

“It’s too late to find out anything more now, but I’ll check with Dan tomorrow if you like, and let you know how she was when she left here. And if she told him anything about going away. Okay?”

He tips my chin up and smiles at me, and my stomach does one of those little flips it’s been practicing all evening. He really is incredibly beautiful, and I desperately want him to be my Dom. Just for a little bit longer. Or maybe just occasionally—I’ll take what I can get.

Instinctively I start to sign the word ‘please’, only to find Nicholas’ smartphone back in my hands. I manage to find the notepad app for myself, and quickly write my last plea.

Please, won’t you reconsider? Not for money, just for

Nicholas doesn’t let me finish. Folding his hands around mine, he stops my scribbling. I look up at him, knowing what his answer will be. He’s smiling at me, a little sadly now, but I know he means what he says.

“I’m sorry, but no. That’s my last word, it’s not happening. I don’t train subs anymore, not in any serious way. And you need someone who’ll take a lot of time with you, time that I just don’t have. If it’s any consolation though, I’ve really enjoyed your company this evening. Really, seriously enjoyed it. You are beautiful, responsive, and you’ll make a wonderful submissive. Remember everything I told you, Freya, everything you did learn tonight, and hang on to the wristbands. They should come in useful. And if we meet up here in the future, I’d love to scene with you again. If you want to…?”

If I want to?
In that moment I know I don’t want to submit for anyone else. Not ever. If he won’t teach me, then I just won’t be learning. There would be no point. I nod, finally accepting that at best I’ll have occasional evenings with Nicholas Hardisty, if I’m lucky. And meanwhile he’ll probably be having a great time topping other much more experienced and rewarding subs, and eventually he’ll forget about me. He shrugs into his own leather jacket and tucks the helmet under his left arm. Slipping his right arm across my shoulders, he turns me toward the exit. We walk slowly down the front steps of the big old converted house and crunch our way around the graveled path toward the large car parking area at the rear of the building. The only cars there now are mine and a couple of staff vehicles, and I spot what must be Nicholas’ motor bike close to the entrance. It’s a huge black beast, looks very powerful, suits him really.

Sure enough, he dumps the helmet on the seat of the motor bike and asks me which is my car. I point to my pride and joy, a rather lovely—even if I do say so myself—maroon red Aston Martin Vanquish, and I feel rather than hear the sharp intake of breath.

“Shit, that’s some serious car. Yours?” The incredulity in his voice is strangely satisfying—at least now he might believe me that I could have laid my hands on the twenty-five thousand I offered him.

I simply nod, and walk toward it, the keyless sensor in my bag unlocking the driver’s door with a welcoming click as I approach. The headlights come on automatically too, illuminating the entire car park.

Nicholas is walking slowly around my shiny toy, viewing it from every angle, all admiring whistles and perplexed expression. I just stand and wait, and eventually he’s back beside me, shaking his head in bewilderment. Now this he definitely did not expect. And I’m perversely glad to have at last succeeded in stunning him into silence.

“That’s one seriously lovely car, Freya. What did you say you do for a living?”

Naturally, I don’t answer.

“Freya?” he hands me the phone again. “How come you’re driving this? It must be worth around two hundred grand…”

£189,950. I bought it three months ago. Do you like it?

“Yes, I fucking like it. But how…?”

I won the lottery.

And on that bombshell I decide to leave him. I hand him his phone back, flash him a brief smile and slip into my car. He’s still watching me in amazement as I press the launch control button to switch on the ignition and smoothly purr out of the car park. I’m trying for a dignified exit, and I think I hit the spot.

Chapter Six

The drive from Lancaster, where the Collared and Tied club is, to Kendal, where I live, normally takes about an hour, but at this time the M6 is clear and I can put my foot down. The purr of the Vanquish is barely audible, even at upwards of eighty miles an hour, and I have to keep telling myself to slow down. Supercars like this one are tempting targets for motorway police and I don’t want to be stopped. I’m not dressed for it, despite my sensible mac. I just want to get home and lock myself in my apartment for a few days—or maybe weeks—to savor my memories, lick my wounds and generally get over this evening.

And I need to chase up Summer. I haven’t forgotten her, and maybe this Dan will be able to shed some light on that. But I have a more pressing problem.

I’m in love. I know it, I don’t know how, but I just know it down to my toe nails. Tonight, I fell in love with Nicholas Hardisty. And he doesn’t give a shit about me. Well, not much of one. He likes me well enough, enjoyed fucking me and apparently wouldn’t mind doing it again sometime. But I’d need a lot of work, and he hasn’t gotten time for me. That hurts, even though I know I’m not entitled to expect anything of him. He made me no promises and if I’m honest he didn’t seem in the least bothered really about whether or not he saw me again. Despite his kind words as we collected our coats, it was obvious by the time I drove off that he was a great deal more impressed with my car than he was with me.

Shit, what a mess!

It’s four twenty in the morning as I let myself into my apartment by the River Kent, just on the outskirts of Kendal town center. It’s a lovely spot, and I bought this place soon after the Euromillions cash hit my bank account. It was the first thing I bought in fact.

I could have moved away, could have gone anywhere I liked I suppose. But I like it here. I grew up in Cumbria, in a less salubrious part of it to be fair. Downtown Barrow-in-Furness is not exactly an idyllic spot. My first home was in an industrial wasteland made up of grotty, corrugated, pre-fabricated workshops and warehouses and tiny workers’ cottages. After my parents died, when I was about three, me and my gran lived in one of those little cottages. It was tiny but big enough for just the two of us. I loved it because I could walk to the seawall from our house and I could stand looking out across the sandy flatlands of Morecambe Bay and imagine it was the Sahara desert. Or a lunar landscape perhaps. A ten-year-old’s imagination has no boundaries, no limits.

Which is more than can be said for the life span of an elderly woman with a forty a day habit and lung cancer. My gran became ill when I was ten. She coughed a lot, but she always had and at first I took no notice. But she lost weight as well, and became so tired she was often still in bed when I got home from school. And still my ten-year-old brand of relentless optimism told me it would pass, no need to worry, old people were like that sometimes. Then the doctor started coming, and he came a lot. My gran rarely got out of bed, and nurses started arriving too. I got into the habit of cooking my own tea, and getting myself up for school, and still I clung on to the notion that things would be fine. They had to be fine. There was no alternative. It was just me and Gran, so she couldn’t be really ill. Could she?

But she could, and she was, and eventually the day came that she had to go into the hospital. And she was never coming out. She knew it, and somewhere at the back of my ten-year-old mind, in that place where I’d buried the truth because it was too awful to look at, I knew it too. And Mrs Johnson, the social worker who came to pick me up as the ambulance pulled away around the corner of our street with my gran in the back, certainly knew it. She was very kind and sweet, and she tried hard. Too hard. She was a lot too jolly for my liking, and she explained that I needed someone to look after me now, until something could be worked out. She was careful not to suggest my gran might get better, that I might go home again to our little two-up two-down near the sea in Barrow. Instead, she dropped me off at a large house in Ulverston, handed me over to a motherly woman by the name of Margaret, and told me she’d be back to see me soon.

The social worker did come back. Once or twice. She always asked me how I was, and if I’d been to see my gran at all. It was Margaret though who actually took me to the hospital, then to the hospice where my gran was spending her final weeks. It was Margaret who sat beside her bed with me for hours at a time.

And it was Margaret who came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and whispered to me that I had to get dressed and come with her. It was Margaret who explained that there’d been a call from the hospice and we should go there now. I was shaking as we drove in silence through the thick, deepest darkness that comes before dawn, the ten miles or so to the quiet, peaceful hospice on the outskirts of Kendal. My gran’s personal carer was waiting for us and welcomed us inside, ushering us quickly to my gran’s small, cheerful room, more like a cozy hotel than a hospital. Margaret told me I didn’t have to go into the room if I didn’t want to, but that she really thought I should. I did too, however awful the next few hours were going to be. And I trusted Margaret by then, so I nodded and reached for her hand. The carer left us there, murmuring that she’d be close by if we needed her.

It was Margaret who sat with me at my gran’s bedside for the final two hours of her life, and it was Margaret’s gentle hands on my shoulders that lent me the courage to smile when my gran briefly opened her eyes for the last time. She looked straight at me, then at Margaret with an expression close to pleading. By then, though, my gran was well beyond the point she could have any further effect on my future, and as she closed her eyes for the last time, I sensed that she let me go. And it was Margaret who held me as I sobbed when my gran finally, mercifully, stopped breathing.

I was to learn later how Margaret had agonized over that decision, over whether to wake me up and take me to the hospice to see my gran that last time, but eventually she’d decided I should have the chance to say goodbye. She was right, of course. Margaret was still there, holding my hand at my gran’s funeral, attended only by the two of us, by Mrs Johnson and a couple of my gran’s old friends from when she’d worked at Woolworth’s in Barrow town center. And it was Margaret who eventually took me home again to her lovely old house in Ulverston and let me cry in my room for two days.

On the third day she came into my room, and this time didn’t just leave me some food on a tray, give me a little cuddle and leave. This time she sat down on my bed, made me sit up, and she wiped my eyes with tissues. I tried to push her away, I wasn’t ready yet, but she was having none of it.

“I can’t even start to imagine how you’re feeling, sweetheart, so you’ll have to tell me. Eventually, if you want to. But just in case you’re wondering, if it might help, I want you to know you have a home here, with me, for as long as you need it. You can stay with me for good, or if you want I could ask Mrs Johnson at social services to look for a different long-term foster place for you. If there’s somewhere else you’d rather live…?”

I remember I gazed at her, through my swollen, red and tear-filled eyes. She looked all hazy and blurred, as if I were watching her through a glass of water, and utterly, utterly wonderful. Even though I didn’t really expect to be allowed to stay with her, over the weeks I’d spent in her big, rambling old house I’d not been able to help loving her. Just a little, because she was so kind. And because she cuddled me a lot and made me nice food every day. But I was sure they’d make me move—I thought she’d want me gone to make room for some other little kid who needed her more than I did. So at first I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t take it in. Did she mean what it sounded like? That I wasn’t in the way, that if I wanted to I could stay?

I didn’t answer her. I didn’t ever tell her I wanted to stay. I just stayed. And stayed and stayed and stayed. Until a year had gone by, then another year. Other children had come and gone during that time, but I just stayed.

When she wasn’t rescuing sad and lonely little girls Margaret was a quilter. She made beautiful, intricate quilts out of tiny pieces of fabric, most of which she designed herself. She made quilts as presents for people, for exhibitions, for special occasions. And she taught me how to make them too. It’s a wonderful, restful pastime, and I love being able to take a pile of worthless looking scraps of cotton and work them into something stunning. It’s something else I can do in silence, on level terms with any other quilter. With Margaret I made quilts for shows and I won prizes, became quite well known in our little circle.

The years rolled smoothly by, and I was settled with Margaret. I went on to secondary school, where they gave me a dedicated tutor all for me, because I was so ‘special’. I couldn’t speak, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, I was ‘looked after’ as well. One time I saw the phrase ‘multiple disadvantages’ on a report in my tutor’s file on me, and I wondered who she was writing about and how this other kid’s papers had gotten into my file. I never felt disadvantaged, and surely being ‘looked after’ is a good thing? It definitely is if the looking after is done by Margaret Maloney, who eventually filled in the forms and formally adopted me when I was fourteen.

I’ve never called her ‘mum’ and I never will. She’ll always be Margaret as far as I’m concerned. But she means the world to me and that won’t change, even though she now lives in New South Wales with George. George, short for Georgina, is an Australian restaurant owner she met on holiday in Tunisia a couple of years after I moved in with her. The two women hit it off and corresponded endlessly after they returned home. They continued to meet once or twice a year in various exotic parts of the globe over the years that followed, often with me in tow. It took me a while to work out the true nature of their relationship, but by the time the penny dropped, I adored George and it never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about their set-up. They finally formalized their civil partnership a couple of years ago, and Margaret moved to Sydney. I suspect she’d have emigrated a lot sooner but for me. She wouldn’t leave me, wouldn’t uproot me, and she steadfastly put me first. It wasn’t until I hit the Euromillions jackpot, and moved out of her house in Ulverston to take up residence in my own fancy apartment that she finally put up the for sale sign and made arrangements to move Down Under.