Authors: Roberta Latow
‘Well, in my book that’s immoral. How can you justify taking a man’s or an organisation’s money while you are working out how to approach a problem, create a design, in order to get a job? Why should the Trust or any other client pay for the completion of work that a client assumes is part and parcel of his contract? Why should we pay for your mistakes and your inadequacies? Are they not your firm’s obligation? Some of you here are even hiding behind RIBA guidelines which a client is obliged to accept when signing an agreement.
‘Oh, yes, I have read the fine print, and I am outraged. No wonder you architects go over budget by millions, completion dates are nearly always impossible to meet and in many cases ruin your client as a result, not to mention giving your profession a bad name. You design architectural dreams that are in many instances obsolete before they have even been completed, or just plain unsuitable as these are. And what recourse do your patrons have?’
‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ said a furious Jim Koley of Koley and Martin, the American entrants. He rose from his chair and was followed by his associates who quickly gathered up documents and drawings.
Carlos was once more on his feet asking, ‘Please, Mr Martin, Mr Koley, sit down.’ Reluctantly they returned to their chairs. ‘This competition is a disaster. Financially, it has been a costly exercise for all of you. That, however, is not my fault. You cannot play the
champagne socialist with such poverty as we are dealing with here.’ There were muffled comments around the conference table. They did not deter Carlos.
‘A costly lesson is what we have had here but I hope we have, at the very least, all learned something from it. I repeat, architects cannot afford to be champagne socialists with the lives of people whose only hope is sheer survival. You were not dealing with governments here. Politics did not count. This is a huge
help
project. Nothing more, nothing less. You had a chance to participate in a human disaster, as real saviours. How could you have missed the mark so completely?
‘Now time has run out for us all. I will choose nothing entered in this competition. How and why the selection committee could have recommended these entries I will have to consider seriously. Since I have the final say on all the Trust’s projects, you have my final word.’
There was silence in the room. The ticking of a French ormolu clock topped by a magnificently sculpted bronze rhinoceros that once had graced a mantle in Louis XIV’s favourite palace seemed to now hold the attention of everyone in the room. It chimed the quarter hour. The exquisite sound seemed to break the silence that had fallen after Carlos’s tirade. The contenders began rising from their seats, the Duke from his wing chair. It was a woman who spoke. ‘Mr Arriva, you could simply have said no. None of you is good enough. That would have sufficed.’
Only she had had the good grace in those few words to admit failure, and to reprimand him for having lost control as a result of his disappointment. She was, of course, right. One well-composed sentence was all it would have taken, but losing contact with Cressida, and the impossibility of declaring a winner to the competition, had been one disappointment on top of another and had made him lash out. That and the fact that he knew Cressida or Sami Chow should have been given the commission. His behaviour had been self-indulgent and counter-productive. It was evident from their faces that they had taken none of what he’d said on board. Their egos were too far adrift.
He walked round the table to the tall slender woman dressed in a black linen suit over a white cotton tee shirt, a daisy pinned to her lapel, round tortoiseshell eye glasses worn low on the bridge of the nose. She had grey frizzy hair. Liver spots on her bony hands declared her a woman of a certain age. The fierce intelligence in her eyes gave her a certain authority. He lowered his head. Taking her hand in his, he kissed it. It was with some sadness that he said, ‘You are quite right, Miss Clare.’
The Duke joined his son and together they walked from the room. The old man remained silent but graciously patted his son on the back.
‘I shall fire the entire selection committee,’ Carlos told his father.
‘Well, that’s a good thing. And the project? Those fools have lost us a great deal of precious time.’
‘We’ll probably get it done. No, not probably. I will see to it personally that we get it done twice as fast. I will give the commission to Cressida Vine Associates and Chow and Inglese Partners jointly. What I should have done in the first place.’
Carlos walked his father to the Duke’s vintage Rolls-Royce waiting at the curb in front of the building and saw him safely into it. After waving him off, Carlos returned to the building and went directly to his secretary. ‘I want the selection committee in my office first thing in the morning, and find me Sami Chow and Cressida Vine. I want to talk to them as soon as possible.’
He seemed very much his old self. All the fire and passion and anger of his tirade gone out of him, he was in control of his disappointment. Somehow blowing up in the conference room had been good for him. Even his anxiety at being out of touch with Cressida had been put into perspective. He knew instinctively that she would never let him down.
Carlos opened the door to his office. She was standing at the window, her back to the room. Very quietly he closed the pine-panelled door and leaned against it. He had forgotten about her.
How lovely and sensuous she looked in the afternoon sunlight. He could see her voluptuous body clearly defined through the cream-coloured linen skirt she wore under a short honey-coloured linen jacket. Her legs, shapely and long and shod in high-heeled tan kidskin shoes, excited his imagination. He would most certainly bed her, a decision made before he had even seen her face. She was sexual, she oozed the erotic, the way she stood so still, one shoulder thrown back, her hands holding a wide-brimmed coffee-coloured hat. There was just the merest indication that the jacket she was wearing was thrown open. She could not help but have heard him enter the room. Yet she never acknowledged his presence. It was erotically provocative the way she was just waiting for him to make all the moves. He focused on her shoulders, the long, slender and very elegant neck, the short, shiny hair, several shades of blonde. Short but masses of it, all soft curls and waves.
Carlos had been assured that he would not be disappointed, and he wasn’t. Her mere presence seemed to charge the room with sexual tension. Her reputation, a well-kept secret among a select few, had preceded her: one of the most expensive, elegant, bright and depraved ladies of the night. Her client list boasted several select names, all titled, wealthy, with the occasional head of state. She was high born, into the
French aristocracy, a femme fatale who chose her clients as carefully as most women would choose a husband. Independent and clever and reputed to have rejected several offers of marriage that most women would have jumped at: a prince of a more than acceptable European royal household, a Japanese whose political career would have been ruined by such a marriage, an Italian industrialist famed for his womanising and a more important name than the president of his country.
It had been he who had passed her on to Carlos. ‘She doesn’t do one night stands. She’s more the transient mistress, keeping several clients on at the same time. She can torture a man with her insistence on that. It takes some getting used to. She’s dangerous – part of her attraction. Decadent as no other woman I’ve ever known. After a few liaisons with her you begin to wonder which of you is on call. As for the sex, I’ve never known a woman like her. Oh, and her favourite jeweller is Van Cleef & Arpels, Fendi for furs, and she does like to shop!’ The smile never left his face while he spoke.
It was all Carlos knew about her, and it was enough to intrigue him. He remained where he was and announced himself by clearing his throat. Quite slowly, she turned round to face him. She was so beautiful she nearly took his breath away. He had expected beauty, great beauty even, but she was much more than that. Her skin was fair, cream-coloured, with an almost translucent quality to it, so taut and so smooth. His friend had never mentioned that she was Eurasian. French plus Malay or Chinese. No more than a quarter Asian was his guess. Her eyes were dark brown and large, with long dark silky eyelashes, round and yet set at an intriguing slant. The nose, the lips, the high cheekbones, the prominent chin with the slightest cleft in it … she was as if chiselled by a master sculptor. It was a proud and arrogant face, incredibly sensuous, and there was about her an aura of the eternal female that Carlos felt drawn to.
Her jacket was open, revealing just a hint of her naked breasts. Only the swell. The size, the firmness, had to be imagined. The lapels of her jacket rested easily over her nipples. She still had not said a word to him, made not one provocative move except to turn around. He could feel his excitement rising in his loins. He read her body with hungry eyes and was delighted that she should whet his appetite by merely presenting herself to him. He smiled.
Carlos Marias Arriva was a very handsome and sexy man, one who attracted most women, much the same as this Eurasian beauty was attracting him. She returned his smile. And in it he could see that she was not displeased with her new quarry. And game being hunted by her was just what he felt himself to be. That realisation amused him,
seduced him even further. His first words to her were: ‘Do you like to travel?’
‘Very much, if it’s with the right travelling companion. Otherwise I prefer to travel alone.’
‘Have you ever seen Cape Cod? Been to Africa?’
‘Cape Cod, no. Some of Africa, yes.’
‘I’ll take you,’ he told her. ‘I take it you are available, you would like to go with me?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Carlos was for a moment distracted by her voice, sensuous, soft, like thick golden honey, and with only a trace of a French accent lurking behind an upper class English accent. He guessed Oxford rather than Cambridge. She was indeed a most exceptional hooker. Her hesitation took him by surprise. ‘Not sure?’ he queried.
He approached her. She was so tantalising. She removed her hand from her hip and nonchalantly opened her jacket that little bit more to reveal her breasts fully.
They surprised him, like everything else about her. More fulsome, raunchier than he had imagined from the mere glimpse he was afforded when first she turned around to face him. They were intriguing breasts that stirred his senses, made his imagination take flight. Voluptuous certainly, soft and supple-looking, yet firm and high and fleshily exciting. Especially so for the large nimbus surrounding a small bud of a nipple being a pale and shiny pink. He wanted to suck on her nipples, to take her breast in his mouth, to know the taste of Romi Richebourg.
She had about her a cool professional manner, and yet there was too an ‘I’m not available to you yet’ look to her. He walked behind her as if to help her off with her jacket. Her scent was of jasmine and rose and lemon and lily. She was delectable. She turned before he could achieve his objective and handed him her hat. Never taking her eyes from his she closed the linen jacket and secured it seductively, one bone button at a time. ‘In my profession it is always business before pleasure. A policy I have always adhered to.’
He almost smiled, he was so amused by her. She sat on the end of the desk and crossed one leg over the other. ‘A week, ten days,’ he told her. ‘I like to travel with a woman, and I would like it to be you this time.’
‘I’m not sure I’m available.’
‘And what would it take to make you available?’
Romi Richebourg slid sensuously off the desk and walked around it to sit in his chair. She looked at him, gazing directly into his eyes, then without any further hesitation she removed the pen from the holder on
the desk. She took a piece of his notepaper and wrote something down. Tearing it from the pad and rising from the chair, she walked round the desk once more and handed it to him.
‘When my bank confirms that you have transferred this amount to my account, I will make arrangements to be free, and yours exclusively.’ She smiled at Carlos. He raised her hand and lowered his head to place a kiss upon it, then still holding it he led her round the desk yet again, this time to stand beside him. Carlos used the intercom.
‘Miss Rivers, get Sir Henry Maplethorp at the bank for me, please.’ He replaced the receiver and sat back in his chair. They remained silent, Carlos assessing this quite remarkable woman who demanded fifty thousand pounds for her favours, and was about to receive it.
Cressida was struggling out from under a luscious, dreamless sleep. A peaceful body and soul coming alive to the excitement of another day. Eyes still closed, she gave a sigh, then a soft whimper. She was trying to remain where she was, in a state of half sleep. She sensed deep within her womb a tingle of anticipation, as if something quite exquisite was happening. She stretched her legs, tensed them and moved them a little further apart – and was fully awakened.
Instinctively, almost imperceptibly, her vagina was grasping and letting go, grasping and letting go. With every contraction her grip strengthened, was held longer. Another whimper, and another sigh. Cressida raised her hands and covered her eyes with them. She could feel the beat of her heart quicken, and writhed with the pleasure of every erotic sensation. Removing her hands from her face, she stretched, first her arms and then her entire body. Easing herself on to her side, she opened her eyes. She saw his face only inches away from hers and was aware of the warmth of his body lying up against her, the pad of his finger moving round and round on her clitoris. She came and almost immediately came again, an orgasm even stronger than her first, then another more potent yet.
He bent his head close to hers and whispered in her ear, ‘Good morning,’ then placed his lips upon hers. Cressida was still in the throes of orgasm. She put her arms around his neck. His kiss was deep and filled with passion. He sucked her lips, her tongue, the roof of her mouth, as if unable to get enough of the taste of her. Her body tensed. She trembled, her face flushed, she tried to hold back a piercing cry, the sound of sexual ecstasy. He placed a hand over her mouth and mercifully there was a crescendo of come that was long and violent and delivered her into a state of utter bliss. Once spent, she relaxed and went limp in his arms. They kissed again: a frenzy of more tender, sweeter kisses now. He moved from her lips to her breasts and down to her mound, and his tongue searched out her clitoris. He nibbled and sucked on her labia and drank from her cunt.
The pleasure she derived from him was like an aphrodisiac for Kane. He seemed unable to get enough of her. Nothing would have given him
greater pleasure than to exhaust Cressida with her own orgasms. He enjoyed enormously the control he had over her. It excited in him fantasies of the many ways he could control her sexually. It also raised in him a curiosity to know who had taught her so well how to enjoy her sexuality? How he would have liked to have had her as a virgin, to have taught her himself the joys of all things sexual.
He inched himself away from her, the better to look at her. She was on fire. He liked that. Would that she could be consumed by the sexual fires burning in her. Hers was an unashamed sexuality. She gave in to it with gusto. Here was a luscious libertine who held nothing back. It surprised and excited him. She was confusing to him because she gave everything, let herself go, wallowed in her own sexuality like some well-paid whore. And yet, like a grand lady with a sense of her own dignity, she held something back from him, something he sensed was only for herself. She was the seductress when all along he thought he was the seducer. That amused him. She was a challenge, even when he had her as his sexual slave.
He rose from the bed, naked, rampant, very much the man she had dreamed about for so many years. It seemed extraordinary that she should be with him. There was something not quite real about their being together. For one moment, she even wondered if she would wake up and the last twenty-four hours be no more than a dream.
He gathered her into his arms and raised her from the bed, putting her on her feet. How lovely and lascivious she was. Kane walked behind her and caressed her back. He kissed the cheeks of her bottom and eased her slowly over the bed. ‘I want to take you this way,’ he told her. She leaned over and placed her arms on the white linen-covered mattress, crossed them at the wrist and laying her head to one side upon them. Prone, ready and waiting for her lover’s advances. His caresses were tender. It felt so good to be coveted by Kane. Sensual flutters of anticipation when he licked and bit her teasingly on her bottom, fondled her with hands and words of adoration for her body, her sexuality. He was eloquent about her cunt, the moist lips that guarded it. Gently, slowly, he took possession of her, wanting Cressida to feel every nuance of his fucking. His penetrations were so deep she could feel the tip of his penis pushing hard against her cervix. The joy she felt being riven by him was boundless. To be filled so completely by cock, unrushed, long and exquisite intercourse, sex at its best, one of the best rewards life can deliver. For Kane, to be maestro of cunt with a glorious woman, to have great sexual intercourse such as he was experiencing, was for him like music, life at its best.
His hands were now firmly clenching her waist. He leaned further over her and rested his face on her back as he quickened his pace. She
came several times. ‘Kane, Kane, you’re wonderful, sublime. I can’t stop coming. I don’t ever want to stop coming. Kane your cock. It’s so large, so thick, the knob’s so beautiful.’ Things said to excite and please any man, but that was not a deliberate intention. It was no more than how Cressida felt about Kane and sex with him. She was merely telling him how grateful she was to be riven by him, to be sharing the sexual experience with such a passionate, erotically adventurous man as he. Her imagination took flight in pursuit of the erotic games he promised they would play together.
If her body inflamed him, and it did, her words of praise and the occasional lewd remark reached down to the darker side of his nature. His lust for her became stronger, more violent. He thrust faster and faster. She came several more times before he exploded in a powerful orgasm where he lost control of himself and called out in hot passion, bruising her flesh, so tight was his grip on her. Spent, without any hesitation, he swiftly withdrew from Cressida. She felt the thrill of his warm sperm and her streams of come mingle and stain her cunt, her clitoris and the inside of her thighs. She was thrilled by the sensation but at the same time immediately missed the strength of his cock filling her so completely. She wanted him back.
He pulled her off the bed and into his arms, then around to face him and gaze into his eyes. If only he could have said ‘I love you’ before he laid them both together on the floor. He crushed her hard against him as if he wanted to seal her to him. But that only lasted for a minute. Lust and passion were waning for him. She sensed him willing himself away from her.
They were on their sides, she against his chest, her bottom settled in against his now flaccid penis, legs against legs, feet entwined, wearing each like a second skin. Hearts racing together to the same beat. That was the way they dozed off.
The next time she opened her eyes Cressida was lying on the bed, a sheet drawn over her. He was leaning against the bed post. ‘Are you as happy as I am?’ were his first words to her.
‘I don’t know, you’ll have to tell me how happy you are.’ She smiled at him and eased herself up against the pillows. ‘It’s as if I’ve been with you all my life, and what is it – twenty-four hours? I know that’s one of the ways I feel. Oh, and hungry, that’s another way I feel. Ravenous. You never feed me, and always leave me hungry.’
‘Who said I’m leaving? And by the way, it was you who ran away, just remember that.’
‘And now?’ she asked.
He was fully dressed and ready to leave, but she had got it wrong. ‘I’ve been standing here watching you, not wanting to wake you, for
I don’t know how long. Like a young fool seduced by something beautiful and somewhat inexplicable. Are you a siren? Will I wreck myself on the rocks?’
‘How strange you should think that about me. Is that why you’re not lying here next to me?’
‘No. Actually it’s because I don’t want to compromise you,’ he told her as he walked from the foot of the bed to sit down next to her, stroke her hair and kiss her lightly on the lips. ‘I’ll meet you at the Candy Kitchen as fast as you can get there.’ He left her without another word but with another kiss, a gesture of love and affection. Why did she feel it was almost in spite of himself? That he loved her but was fighting it.
As he walked from the room Cressida was sharply aware not of a lover, not even of a passionate man she had spent hours of erotic togetherness with, but of Kane Chandler. The man the world knew and admired. His charisma, the power of his personality, the rich dark side of his sexuality only lightly veiled by his fame, his musical genius – that was all he was showing her now. She tried to shrug off a sense of loss for the man she had always wanted. The man whom she had been one with for a few hours. A twinge of sadness. Strange, because she was so very happy. Time, she told herself. Maybe all they needed was time together. In time maybe he would remember that he had loved her once before. He could acknowledge her as a part of his life, as he had been a part of hers. She knew instinctively they were in love. A day, a week, forever. It didn’t matter. As long as they could confess to each other that they were in love. It was a great feeling being in love again. Unexpected. She had never dreamed, not for many, many years, since she had healed herself, that they would ever come together again.
Ed Cornwell had a lady friend, Derinda Cobb. They had been an item for six years now. He took her to all the civic social functions he was obliged to attend: fund raisers for the boy scouts, the ambulance service, the town’s football matches, and so on. She was his lady for the movies, a dinner for two, and once a year, a weekend in Boston for the policemen’s ball.
She lived with her three teenage children at one end of town in a pretty eighteenth-century cottage, all she received in a nasty divorce settlement. Ed Cornwell lived alone in a larger house built at the turn of the century at the opposite end of town, on Twinings Lane, overlooking Twinings Pond. He had not left it even when he had been widowed or the last of his three children had left home. It was a white clapboard house with faded teal blue shutters. From the upstairs rooms you could see beyond the pond and out to the ocean. The squawking of seagulls was a continual accompaniment.
Derinda was matron at the New Cobham Infirmary. They fucked on Sunday and Thursday nights, never on holidays. Occasionally in an afternoon when she could take some time off and the children were at school. On Saturday nights, if he wasn’t working, he took Derinda and her children out to the Pizza Paradise Parlour or some other fast food emporium in Brewster or Eastham, then a movie or bowling.
Every Monday morning, at six, they followed each other, she in her car, he in his, from his house into town and to the Candy Kitchen. There they breakfasted with Jenny and John Sharples on bacon and sausage, scrambled eggs and hash brown potatoes, and blueberry muffins washed down by mugs of strong black coffee. Right on seven o’clock they all shook hands and the sheriff walked his lady to her car. They parted more like two old friends than lovers and he went his way to the police station and she went hers to the infirmary. That was how the sheriff happened to be passing the New Cobham Inn and saw Kane Chandler leaving the building. Interesting.
Ed pulled his car up to the curb, switched off the ignition and watched Kane get into his station wagon. Then predictably the car would not kick over. The old engine strained and groaned, attempting to spring to life. Ed grimaced. He watched with some amusement as Kane hit the steering wheel with his hand and left the car, slamming the door. Kane looked up at the inn and then struck out on foot for the Candy Kitchen. Where else would he go at seven on a Monday morning?
So that was the man with whom Cressida Vine had spent her first night in New Cobham, and now her second. Nothing like starting out with the town’s celebrity womaniser. Ed raised an eyebrow. He would have thought Cressida Vine would have been smarter than to become another notch on a famous belt. First a Chinese man, then a celebrity, and she had only been in town twenty-four hours. Wayward husbands, once they got hold of that bit of gossip, would not be far behind.
Ed searched the ashtray and found a decent-sized cigar stub. He lit it up, sat back and decided to wait and confirm his assumption. He didn’t have to wait long before Cressida appeared. There she was, crossing the still dew-covered grass instead of taking the brick path that led to the street. A lady in a rush to meet her lover. Was she too a lady in love or was that bloom on her face merely sexual infatuation? Was she no more than a star fucker? They’d had quite a few of those passing through New Cobham looking for Kane Chandler; even some local ladies who tried to keep secret their lust for him. He had thought there was a lot more than that to Cressida Vine.
Unconsciously he slapped the steering wheel and chomped on his cigar. That bastard Kane Chandler, how did he do it? He always got
the hottest, most interesting, in some cases sensational women. Ed turned the key in the ignition, the police car purred into life and he swung it away from the curb and tracked Cressida, staying a discreet distance behind. She broke into a short run, slowed down to a walk, and then broke into a sprint. She stopped fifty yards from the entrance to the Candy Kitchen and composed herself. She fussed with her hair and then strolled nonchalantly through the door and into the diner.
The police car cruised slowly past the restaurant’s window and Ed saw Kane rise from the booth where he had been sitting. With outstretched hands, he took hers in greeting and placed a kiss on her cheek. Old friends? Maybe to those other diners getting their Monday morning together over breakfast in the Candy Kitchen, but not to the sheriff. New lovers was what he tagged them.
‘Waffles and maple syrup, sausage patties, black coffee, and lots of orange juice,’ ordered Cressida.
Kane told the smiling waitress dressed in jeans and a crisp white shirt, ‘Muesli and black coffee for me.’
‘Do you watch your diet?’ asked Cressida.
‘Only sometimes. You look surprised.’
‘I think I am. Not so much about the muesli, but that I know nothing about you. Only a few hours ago I thought I knew you down to the marrow of your bones. Everything about you. Who you are, what you are, your very soul. Now suddenly you sometimes diet, eat muesli. The reality is I know nothing about you that’s not carnal. How strange.’