The Sweet Caress (3 page)

Her defences now wholly gone, she came, and again, her only thought to accept everything that would keep her coming. There was nothing in life to compare with the
power and beauty that sex provided for her. There seemed no pain, no danger, no form of wickedness she could not endure for the ultimate thrill of soaring ever higher on wave upon wave of orgasms.

Devlin removed the leather cuffs from his wrists and placed them on hers. He stretched her arms above her head and secured the cuffs to the headboard of the bed. He made her comfortable with cushions and then teased her body with light lashes of the knotted silken cord. From the drawer in the bedside table he removed two silk chiffon scarves. he spread her legs so that she was open, totally exposed, then tied her to the bed posts. He used a long and slender jade penis carved with raised flowers slowly, deliberately, as he would have used his own penis in long and languorous thrusts. The flowers pressed into her cunt walls and she cried out with the pleasure. Her orgasms kept coming until Devlin saw that she had lost all control of her lust.

Through a haze she saw Pierre enter the room. He handed Devlin a leather whip with a carved ivory handle and took the silken cord from him. She came with the first sting of the whip on her flesh, and felt Pierre as he worked the silken cord into her, knot by knot, until she could feel it pressing against her cervix. She begged the men to stop, to let her catch her breath from the continuous stream of orgasms Devlin had wrung from her but that only excited a harder lash of the leather and a kiss from Pierre, the two men assuring her she was the most sensual woman alive and they loved her for it.

Dazzled by lust and love, she braced herself for what she knew was to come. She felt pain and an indescribable, infinite sensation of coming as Pierre, in one sharp movement, took her roughly and brought her off by withdrawing the silken cord, the knots burning and exciting those narrow walls of tender flesh.

Pierre’s rampant sex raised her off the bed and the two
men took her in turn. The moment Devlin took possession of her, she felt the violence and anger in his thrustings. ‘This is the ultimate way for you to go,’ he whispered as he slipped the silken cord round her neck and pulled it ever tighter.

She felt herself slipping away from life and struggled to call out to Pierre. She was sliding over the edge of reason and knew she could not endure any more from Devlin. Things would never be the same again. Her sexual life as she had known it was over.

But when she regained consciousness and found herself alone with Pierre, lying in his arms, she felt as she always did with him, that sex was worth dying for.

But then a chink of light entered her dark erotic world. Evil resides comfortably in darkness but dies in the light; suddenly she knew this was very wrong. Pierre was gambling her life for his pleasure; her sexual appetites were driving her over the edge of sanity.

She wondered when she had given up her life, her very soul for sexual debauchery, to kiss the devil and lie in his arms. She felt herself slipping away from that familiar dark and secret erotic world she had for years been living in. Her fear of losing it made her try to fight off her awakening but it was already too late, she had seen the light.

Pierre caressed her breasts and whispered obscenely exciting sexual things to her wrapped in words of love and adoration. He spoke glowingly of how Devlin had taken her roughly in a new and depraved sexual act.

She had learned to feel pride in herself for the courage she had to display with the man she loved, for Pierre adored her more with every erotic boundary she broke. But now she saw something in his eyes that she had never seen before. The love and adoration she had became so dependent upon had gone. In their place she saw only the reflection of her own love for him, and suddenly that too, was gone.

She tried to pull away from him. He tightened his grip on her. The realisation that he would have driven her sexually to death without a second thought horrified her.

Pierre understood. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the princess has awakened. Too bad. Too bad.’ There was a new hardness in his voice that made her tremble with fear. He knew it was over for them and suddenly this man she had allowed to mould her into what he wanted her to be terrified her. She began to struggle.

He called to Devlin who immediately re-entered the room. ‘You will take her, this time, in sex where there is no return,’ Pierre ordered him.

She struggled all the harder and Pierre slapped her hard across the face several times.

Jessica woke up screaming from her nightmare.

She had not reckoned on dreams intruding on her new life. Determined to keep her fear of Pierre in check, she reviewed the steps she had taken to vanish from her old life without trace.

The house in Newbampton had been her mother Alice’s secret, passed on to her, and she had kept her promise to Alice not to reveal its existence to anyone. Alice’s words were engraved in her heart and mind: ‘Rose Cottage must always remain our secret, Candia. One day it will be the saving of one of us.’

Over the years mother and daughter had refurbished the house they had never seen. Their identity had never been discovered by those they retained to restore the house and care for it. For more than two decades Candia had hardly thought about Rose Cottage unless it was covertly to ship something to the place she and her mother had dubbed their ‘nest egg’. It became for her no more than a childish secret, a doll’s house she had brought along with her into the adult world. She lived life to the fullest, travelling extensively and enjoying an erotic life with Pierre, her
mentor in all things, while she climbed the ladder of professional and financial success. She was a dealer in ancient Chinese art and artefacts with her partner and sometime lover Yves Marmont, a handsome 36-year-old French baron. She cleverly invested the rewards from the success of their work in antiques for Rose Cottage and stocks and shares.

The secret of the house became a mere game she played in order to satisfy her mother’s paranoia: ‘Remember, you can only trust the men in your life if you are financially independent and can survive on your own. And Pierre? He is a danger to the woman he loves. His kind of love is thrilling but perverse. He expects his women to die for him so that he might begin afresh to conquer another.’ Candia shied away from her mother’s advice about the men in her life, but she continued to play with her ‘doll’s house’ for years after Alice’s death. It was a link to the strange relationship she had had with her mother.

Candia’s beauty and intelligence – she could seduce men with no more effort than a smile, a glance – gave her a power that had brought her everything she had ever wanted. But for all her sophistication, she was also strangely innocent about people. Just like her mother when she had been younger, Candia took the world at face value; she never looked beneath the surface for hidden faults or ulterior motives. When it finally hit her that she had no real life of her own but was held tight in Pierre’s grasp and that he would never let her go, the shock galvanised her into action. It took her nearly eight months to organise and make her escape but she had managed it magnificently.

It began with an early morning exit from Pierre’s bed in his mansion high up overlooking Hong Kong. Commercial and chartered planes, trains, and yachts took her through many countries until she finally walked off a yacht in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. She had evaded US passport control and customs with the help of the yacht’s captain who was happy to oblige a woman whose beauty
was more than matched by her financial generosity. Having disposed of all identification and clothing except for what she wore for the final lap of her marathon journey to Rose Cottage, she prepared to begin her new life. In the event it was when Cissie Atwood had handed her a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and Candia had told her lie that her new life had truly begun.

As she reviewed the recent events of her life, the horror of the nightmare receded. Facing the truth about Pierre and how he had abused her love had made her understand for the first time her mother’s paranoia about men. Candia’s disillusionment with her life and love and her anger with herself for allowing her independence and strength of character to slip away from her had opened her eyes to the true nature of another aspect of her life: her business partnership with Yves.

She discovered that he had been using their business as a front for drug trafficking. Appalled, her mother’s paranoia and penchant for secrecy came to the fore to save her. She never spoke to Yves of what she had learned; she simply walked away from their partnership as she walked away from Pierre, but only after she had stripped their company of her share of the assets. As a form of receipt for what she had taken, she left a letter in the office safe in which she disassociated herself from him and the company. These were not men it was safe to cross, but then she had always known that. She had thought that she could swim with the sharks because they loved her. Vanity? Ego? Lust and love? Pathetic, not worthy of her, was her judgement on herself.

Jessica placed her hands over her face and shook her head from side to side with a sigh. It was a sigh of relief. She had left all that behind her for Rose Cottage, a new life and the kindness of strangers, a slower, more humane existence which did not revolve round sophistication, greed, and power. She considered the lie she was going to base her new life on as justifiable, a matter of survival in a better world,
and she vowed, bad dreams or not, that memories would be banished. The past was over and done with; there was no turning back.

She went to the bathroom and turned on the taps, splashed her face with water and then slipped into her cashmere dress. Clasping the platinum belt buckle with its large and wondrous black opal round her waist, she was checking herself in the mirror when she heard the doorbell.
Her
doorbell,
her
house,
her
first visitor. A surge of happiness brought a smile to her lips as she skipped down the stairs and en route to the front door pulled more white dust sheets off furniture. They were still in her hand and dragging on the floor when she opened the door to see Cissie, Officer Raburn and a stranger standing on her doorstep, all of them bearing carrier bags filled with food.

‘This is Ben Wheeler, and we’ve brought you some things just to settle you in with. Just fancy, you living in Rose Cottage. Frankly, I’m agog,’ said Cissie who was obviously thrilled at the idea.

Ben Wheeler looked more dazed than surprised when he told her, ‘I and my firm have been looking after Rose Cottage for years and years, we take pride in it. The same cleaner has been coming here once a week, and so has the gardener. The rose garden has won prizes, you know, and is considered one of the finest, possible
the
finest rose garden in New England. Oh, I’m rambling on. What I mean to say is welcome to Rose Cottage and Tess, that’s the cleaner, will be along with her daughter Shirley later this afternoon to settle you in and show you how everything works. And do some dusting, I suppose; she would hate to be caught out with someone claiming the house and it needing a dusting. Well, I guess Rose Cottage must be as much of a surprise to you as you are to us since you have no memory of who you are.’

‘Jesus, Ben, you’re as subtle as an elephant!’ said Cissie.

Jessica smiled and said graciously, ‘How do you do, Mr
Wheeler.’ She put out her hand and there was much shifting of carrier bags and some nervous laughter as they shook hands. ‘Come in off the doorstep, all of you.’

Cissie’s eyes were wide as she walked round the hall and took in the quality of the furniture and carpeting. Jim Raburn just stood and gaped.

‘Cisse,’ said Jessica, ‘all this shopping, how kind of you, you shouldn’t have bothered.’

‘She didn’t,’ said Jim. ‘The sheriff had me go to the supermarket, it’s just outside town. She said stock up Miss Johnson’s kitchen at Rose Cottage, and she said to tell you she’ll pick you up after your lunch with Cissie. Where’s that going to be and what time do you think the sheriff should be there, Cissie?’

Cissie’s car was a white Oldsmobile convertible and the top was down, the heater going full blast to keep them warm. As they drove to lunch she chattered on, giving a short history of Newbampton and potted biographies of the townspeople they saw and those Cissie thought might be useful for Jessica to know. Jessica found the atmosphere of the town endearing, wholesome. The scent of autumn was in the air, youth and hope emanated from the students riding through the streets on their bicycles, wearing backpacks filled with books. Modern America hadn’t withered the town’s heritage, only enhanced it. The college’s powerful presence as a place of learning had somehow protected it from the bad and the ugly, in the same way that Oxford, her own university town, had been protected. She had indeed come home.

The two women had a delicious lunch of New England fare: creamy fish chowder with hot corn bread and lashings of butter, chicken pot pie with green peas and candied sweet potatoes, apple pie and homemade ice cream. Wiggin’s Tavern was a rambling building that boasted a long history – its first guests had slept there in 1680 – and it contained
one of the finest collections of Early American art and artefacts. It was still an inn of four-poster, canopied beds in rooms whose wallpapered walls were hung with Currier and Ives prints.

Cissie rambled on giving a history of the famous men and women who through the ages had taken rooms there. It smelled of beeswax polish and cedar, cinnamon and cooking apples, and wood smoke from open fires that crackled hospitably. Jessica had never met anyone remotely like Cissie. Both Jessica’s parents had been American but since the age of five she had lived all over the world and had never encountered the charming, small-town American custom whereby you are told everyone’s life story as soon as you say hello. To be open and direct was the American way, but American-born or not, her way, like her mother’s, had been reserved and most assuredly private.

Jessica was constantly stunned by the generosity of this young girl. Especially so when Cissie told her, ‘I’ve thought it over. You’ll have to get a job. You can’t just live in Rose Cottage and worry about who you are and what you left behind. You’ll need to earn some money. I know the house expenses are carried by the bank – hell, the whole town knows that – but that doesn’t put bread on the table. And I know you can’t have any money or I would have found you in Ned Palmer’s keeping warm and drinking hot coffee instead of sitting in the cold on a hard bench. I’ve got it all worked out, you can come and work part-time in our shop. We don’t pay much but we give our employees a discount on clothes and with your looks and style our clientele will take to you, although I doubt you’re a very good saleswoman.’