Текст книги "Seduce Me"

Автор книги: Georgia Le Carre

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Seduce Me

Georgia Le Carre

Cover design: http://www.bookcoverbydesign.co.uk/

Editor: http://www.loriheaford.com/

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Seduce Me

(Book 4 of The Billionaire Banker series)

Published by Georgia Le Carre

Copyright © 2014 by Georgia Le Carre

The right of Georgia Le Carre to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-9928249-7-6

You can discover more information about Georgia Le Carre and future releases here.

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Contents

Blake Law Barrington

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Lana Barrington

POV

Blake Law Barrington

I rub my hand down my cheeks and chin, and return the shaver to its holder. In the mirror there is nothing but me. The way I came into this world. Naked. For an instant I frown at myself. Last night I dreamed again. Of that time when my hands were small and covered in blood. I try to recall the details, but the dream is gone.

No, not gone. Of course not. It never goes. It hides inside a faint net of tension.

I turn away from my reflection and that feeling that something inside is broken and awkward, and walk into the shower. I close the door and, standing out of the trajectory of the spray, turn the knob. It comes powerfully alive. I let the water heat up before I step into the hot cascade. It sluices over me. The water is sensuous and forgiving.

I close my eyes and the water washes away my sins.

There is a small knock on the door.

I turn around and open the door. For a moment we simply look at each other. Her hair is loose about her shoulders and tousled. There are faint lines on her upper arms made by the creases in the sheets. Otherwise she is perfect. She steps inside and I open my arms to envelop her.

God, I love this woman.

She pours liquid soap into the palm of her hand and smears the soap across her breasts.

‘You’re asking for it,’ I tell her.

‘Since the day I met you,’ she says softly.

I smile.

She smiles back. In the clouds of steam around us, her eyes are dark. They move slowly down my body and come to rest on my cock. It is hard and ready for her.

I spin her around. She lands neatly on the frosted glass, on her hands and elbows. Her cheek presses into the glass and her hips tilt up to receive me. I plunge into her. She gasps. I love that involuntary sound. I always ram her harder than necessary just to hear that sound. The sound is the beginning and the end of my possession of her. That’s my sound. I own it. The day she stops making that sound something inside me will die.

Our wet bodies make aggressive slapping sounds as I fuck her hard and fast. The need to go deeper and deeper into her makes me lift her clean off the floor. I travel faster and faster into her silky tightness until I explode deep inside her.

When I turn her around we stare at each other, both of us panting hard. Then I get to my haunches and pulling apart her pussy lips suck her clit quite cruelly while I watch her writhing and moaning helplessly. I’m good at this and she comes quickly with a high-pitched cry. I stand and guide her back into the middle of the water.

As the water pours over us I kiss her. Her mouth is sweet and warm. For a while I lose myself in the sweetness of that kiss. Then she is moving away. I grab her hand.

‘He has great timing that son of yours,’ she says with a laugh, and opening the door slips out. I listen, but don’t hear anything other than the towel being pulled off the rail, and her footfalls as she leaves the bathroom.

A mother’s ears are special.

I turn off the tap and reach for a towel. I dry myself briskly and pad over to the adjoining room. Sometimes, Lana will bring Sorab into the dressing room while I dress. That day she doesn’t. My clothes are already laid out and a pair of socks lovingly hung on the radiator. They are warm enough to heat even a heart as frozen as mine. I pull them on quickly.

I have an early appointment with India Jane, the wedding organizer. I told Lana that I didn’t want her to get involved in the planning for the wedding because I didn’t want her to have the crazy stress that brides go through, but that is only partly true. The real truth is I want it to be the kind of wedding that Lana would never organize for herself, not only because she doesn’t know how to—her upbringing means she cannot even begin to comprehend the kind of ostentatious extravagance I have in mind—but also because one needs to be super spoilt to want something like that for oneself. And Lana simply isn’t.

Unknown to her, her wedding is going to be the biggest society event of the year. Invitations are going to be rare and precious. Not because I want it—I’d marry Lana in a bathtub tomorrow, and not give a shit—but because I know the knives are out for her. Anything less than a massive wedding will diminish her in their eyes. And she doesn’t need that. Those patronizing harpies could oppress you in their sleep. But I’ll get every one of those stuck-up bitches to accept her as their equal if it is the last fucking thing I do.

And to that effect even my mother is not being invited.

Yeah, she is pissed off, but she’ll get over it. It may sound drastic to you, but you don’t know my mother. She has the ability to ruin the entire wedding with one carefully chosen word! She can throw you a line and a hand grenade at the same time. I don’t want to be decoding the nuances of her barbs.

Besides, there is no real point to inviting her: I already know exactly what her relationship with Lana is going to be like. I imagine her well-groomed hands folded in her lap, her face bathed in a wry smile as she nimbly laces Lana into a narrow relationship of superior and inferior. And from that submissive position Lana will never again be allowed to move away.

So: she’s not coming. And for that matter neither is Marcus. Their absence more than anything else will demonstrate to the rest of them that if they are planning on taking sides or sucking up to anyone it had better be to Lana.

I shrug on my jacket.

Here’s the deal:

I know Lana wants me to give you my version of the events, but honestly, do you really want to hear about a wedding from a man’s point of view? Weddings are for girls. The minute India Jane starts moving her jaw from her usual English expression of subdued agony and starts discussing matching boutonnières my eyes start glazing over.

The next best person would be Billie, but what she thinks of weddings and the people who indulge in them doesn’t bear repeating, so, we are left with the other bridesmaid, Julie Sugar. I have only seen her once, very briefly, so I can’t say I know her, but Lana grew up with and speaks very highly of her, and I trust Lana’s instincts, so I’m going to leave it with her.

I understand that you don’t know her, but you’ve bought the ticket for the show and you might as well go in with an open mind. You never know—you might enjoy it.

Master Sorab Barrington requests the pleasure of your company

at the wedding and reception of his parents

Lana Bloom

and

Blake Law Barrington

at the Old Church, Woburn, Bedfordshire on Sunday 18th May 2014 at 2.00 p.m.

followed by a reception at Wardown Towers.

One

Julie Sugar

Yes, it is true: I hate Lana Bloom.

But it is also true that I agreed to be her bridesmaid.

The why of why I agreed to play bridesmaid is startlingly simple—she has something I want. The why of why I hate her is not too complicated either. It began as envy, many years ago. You see, she was everything I was not and wanted to be.

As a child her perfection and beauty had to be seen to be believed—straight black hair and the biggest, most innocent blue eyes you ever saw, while I was an ugly, ungainly thing topped with a bizarre mop of curls. She was perfectly formed and I was… Well, my nickname used to be Fatty, and when they were being kind, Fatso.

I had no drama. Drama followed her like a well-trained pet. Her mother was always dying, but never did. Her father went to work one day and never came back. A pedophile tried to snatch her. Drama, drama, drama. It was never-ending.

Oh, and I should add, Billie Black, the coolest girl in school and the one person I was dying to befriend, became her best friend. But, I guess, my real hatred for her began when—

‘Julie,’ my mother bellows from downstairs.

‘What?’ I yell back.

‘I got you a donut.’

‘I’ll come and get it,’ I shout, quickly scampering off my bed and landing on the floor with a soft thud. I hear her heavy tread pass into the living room. I unlock my door, run down the stairs and stand at the foot of them. From this vantage point I have a view of the kitchen and the living room.

On the kitchen table I can see the thin, white paper bag with the donut in it. In the living room I see a woman. A huge woman. The last time she weighed herself she was nearing four hundred pounds. That was nearly a year ago.

She looks like a mountain of lard held together by a thin layer of human skin, pasty white and stretched so tight you can see all her veins, green and working themselves to death to service the large needs of her body. She collapses backwards into the sofa. The springs are gone but three cushions squash obediently into the shape of her massive arse.

Under her tent-like, gray T-shirt she wears no bra, and two broad flattened pieces of flesh lay over her stomach. Where the shapeless T-shirt ends her meaty elbows begin. They bloom into club like hands that clumsily fan out into fat red sausage-like fingers. The sausages are clutching a greasy paper bag that she brings up to her chest. Her hands do not reach higher. Her neck bends and she buries her face in the first Jamaican pattie of the three she will have bought: they supersize them especially for her at the bakery down the road.

She is my mother.

She lifts her head—her lips are covered with a coating of greasy brown gravy and her mouth is so full, her cheeks bulge. She chews exactly three times and swallows. ‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she says.

‘Yeah, I see it. Thanks,’ I say, but do not move.

She nods, bites off another chunk of pastry and returns her gaze to the TV screen. Next, she will reach for the two liter bottle of Coke and guzzle from it. She goes through a bottle a day. Not taking her eyes off the TV she stretches for the bottle.

I go into the kitchen. The place is an unbelievable pigsty. There are many days worth of dirty dishes to be done and a coating of grease and grime everywhere. The cooker is so encrusted with spills, stains, and dirt that there is not a speck of white left on it. The linoleum floor is thick with crud and the dustbin is in need of emptying. It stinks.

I stop breathing.

When I was younger I used to come home from school and clean, but as if my mother and brother prefer to live in filth it was almost impossible to keep the grime and dirt away. I stopped when my brother acquired a dog.

Then it became impossible.

It is exactly like one of those homes on that How Clean Is Your House TV series where those two busybody expert cleaners, Kim and Aggie, go to really dirty houses to help clean them. Sometimes I watch the show just to see if I can find a home dirtier than ours. Once they had this woman on who had, like, fifty cats living in her basement flat and that was real bad, worse than our flat.

I snatch the paper bag off the table and, without touching anything else, run up the stairs. I close and lock my door and look around the room. Shades of pink, neat and scrupulously, scrupulously clean.

I take a deep breath, let the scent of green apples filtering out of the air freshener plug-in fill my lungs, before I go to my bedside drawer. I find a plate and put it on top of the bedside cabinet. Then I take the donut out of the paper bag. Jam donuts are my most favorite thing in the whole wide world. When I was a kid I could eat a whole Sainsbury’s packet of six in one sitting.

I lay the paper bag on the plate and the donut on top of it. Then I sit on the bed and look at it. At the sugar-dusted layer and the lovely reddened bit where you can see where they have piped in the jam. I think of it in my mouth. The rough grains of sugar, the thin fried skin, the deliciously doughy bit beneath, and finally, the sticky squirt of sweet jam on my tongue. Saliva fills my mouth.

I swallow hard. I remember my science teacher once said that the desire to eat is instinctive, a mechanism of evolution. A newborn babe knows to turn its head towards a nipple. Without food the species would die.

A shiver passes through my body.

I open the bedside drawer and from a box of disposable gloves I extract one. I pull it around my right hand and flex my fingers, feeling the stretch in the glove. Using the gloved hand I pick up the donut and squeeze it as hard as I can. Jam splats onto the paper bag underneath. I open my hand and let the compacted mess in the shape of the inside of my fist drop onto the paper bag, and look at it emotionlessly.

Disgusting.

Like those anti smoking ads where they put out a cigarette in a fried egg. Nobody would desire such a thing. Not even I. There: once more I have conquered the evolutionary desire to eat. I take off the glove and crush it together with the destroyed donut inside the paper bag and bin the whole thing in the wastepaper basket.

Then I take out a notebook from the drawer. Carefully I tear a page. I tear a small piece from that page and put it into my mouth. I chew carefully and slowly before I swallow the fairly tasteless mush. I eat five pages before the hunger pangs die away. I close the book and put it away. Feeling virtuous I go to the weighing machine and stand on it. I take a deep breath and look down.

Idling under eight stone.

Good.

I shift my weight around and the needle remains constant.

Very good.

I have to be extra careful with my intake of calories today because tomorrow I am having lunch with Lana and Billie. I look to the windowsill where I have stood Lana’s wedding invitation with its bespoke caviar design across the inside of the envelope.

Then I turn towards the wall opposite my bed.

It is entirely covered with photos of Jack Irish. Some I have blown up.

Oh yeah! That’s the other reason why I hate Lana Bloom. On my thirteenth birthday with the whole of my newly thirteen-year-old heart I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with Jack. And deeply in love with him I remain to this day.

Unfortunately, he is under the mistaken impression that he is besotted with her.

Two

I wake up early the next morning. There is no fogginess to clear away. Immediately it hits me. Today I am not going to work but am having lunch with Lana and Billie, and afterwards, we are going for Lana’s fourth and most probably final fitting for her wedding gown. Billie and I will also be trying on our bridesmaid’s dresses for the first time. I leap out of bed. There is so much to do. I strap on my sports bra, pull on a pair of black leggings and tie my hair into a ponytail high on my head.

Quick glance at the bedside clock. Nearly 7.00 a.m.

I spread a yoga mat on the carpet and a towel on top. Sitting on it I begin with some warm-up moves—slow, deep stretches. Then I lie down and do double my usual quota of stomach exercises, making sure that with every sit-up I punish my muscles mercilessly. I bound upwards energetically, take a sip of water from a plastic water bottle, and, alert to my rapidly increasing heartbeat, skip five hundred times on the spot. I come to a stop and, panting hard, wait thirty seconds. Then I continue skipping as fast as I can for another thirty seconds. I do the start and stop thing seven times.

By now I am drenched in sweat, my muscles are screaming and I am exhausted. I stick my headphones on and with music blaring into my ears I give over to twenty minutes of non-stop aerobics. I take off the headphones and slow down with thirty minutes of Callanetics. I do a hundred repetitions of each of the deliberately micro-small sets of movement. Every tiny contraction causes me burning pain, but it does not deter me until the entire routine is complete. I stand up and wipe the sweat dripping off me with an old towel.

I feel alive, strong and… prepared.

Taking a bucket full of cleaning solutions I leave my room—locking my bedroom door even though everyone is still asleep—and go into the bathroom. For about fifteen minutes as I do every day, I bleach and clean the sink, toilet bowl, shower cubicle, the tiles on the walls and the floor until they sparkle. Flushed and hot I step into the shower and turn on the tap. The shock of the ice-cold water hitting my head and shoulders makes me gasp. Just before my teeth start to chatter I twist the hot water tap and allow the water to become warm. The pleasure is indescribable.

Soaped and shampooed I step out and dry myself with a clean towel. Wrapping the damp one around my body and another around my head I make my way back to my room. It is almost eight thirty by now. No one else is awake and the flat is still and quiet. If I put my ear to any of the other bedroom doors I will hear slow, heavy snores.

I sit in front of the mirror and gently massage my toweled head. Scrubbing hard damages the hair shaft. When I pull away the towel my hair is a wavy blue-black mess in the mirror. I part my hair and peer at the roots to see if my true color, a soft brown that turns the color of golden syrup and wheat in summer, is showing, but it is not. For many years I chemically straightened my hair, but a few months ago my hair began falling out, so now I am down to hot plates every time I wash my hair.

I plug the hair straightener into the socket, the light comes on, and I set about applying a ten-pence-sized squirt of protective cream on the palm of my hand and working it into my hair. With the blow dryer set on medium heat I begin to dry my hair. I work carefully because it is only last night that I glued on my acrylic nails and I don’t want them ruined. They are long and pink and look good against my black hair. I adore them but can’t have them all the time; I work as a florist.

When my hair is dry I gather thin lots between my fingers and pass them through the heated plates. Twenty minutes later my hair is a shiny black curtain falling six inches below my shoulders. I apply some wax to the ends and turn my head from side to side the way they do in shampoo adverts. The curtain swings just like it does in the ads.

Pushing my eyelids open one at a time, I slip in my colored contact lenses. I blink quickly a few times. They settle in. I look at myself in the mirror. My dishwater color irises are now blue.

Blue eyes and black hair—just like Lana.

I lean forward and unscrew the cap of the foundation bottle. I apply a fine layer with a damp sponge, carefully working towards my ears and blending into my hairline. That done, I pat compact powder onto the base. I pick up a magnifying mirror and check that the job is flawless. It is.

Time for color. First the eyes. Resting my right elbow on the dressing table top to steady it, I slowly pull the eyeliner brush around my eyes minimizing the slight upwards slant. I do the same to the other eye. Already my eyes look as big and as straight as Lana’s.

Time to open them up: four layers of mascara. Using a combination of eye pencil and mascara and light feathery strokes, I color my eyebrows to match my hair. I tinge the apples of my cheeks with pink. Now for the hard part. I use a lip pencil and expertly draw my lips thicker than they are. The line is faultlessly even. I paint inside it. I wish I could afford those collagen injections that celebrities are always having done. But I can’t so this will have to do.

I lean back slightly and look at myself and feel happy with the heavily painted mask the world will see. I dress in a white lace top, a cropped pink and white candy striped jacket and a darker pink mini skirt.

I fasten a sparkly, three-row necklace of glass beads set in zinc and linked together like chainmail around my neck. If I had seen it in a store’s display case I would never have bought it, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it looks all that, but the Duchess of Cambridge wore one at the royal screening of Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom and all the papers and magazines called it a drool-worthy, stunning style statement. So I rushed to Zara and queued up to buy it. Just in time to snatch the second last one. It had only cost £19.99. What’s good for a Duchess…

Sourly, I wonder what Lana will wear now that she has all that money. She’ll probably come dripping in diamonds. I step into a pair of white court shoes with soft pink polka dots. They are difficult to manage. They are not tight, simply badly designed. But they were cheap and look like a pair I have seen Paris Hilton wearing. Slowly and deliberately, so as not to stumble, I walk towards the mirror. I look at my reflection and a flutter of nervous self-doubt begins in my belly.

I quell it—you’re not fat anymore.

I pick up a bottle of perfume and spraying it into the air on top of my head walk through the fine mist. I do this three times. For good measure I stop breathing and, facing the spray nozzle at my body, spray it all around myself.

I put my credit card and mobile phone into a small white Louis Vuitton handbag (fake, obviously) and stand before the mirror. My eyes are curiously blank. I gaze at my waist. Wasp tiny.

Not bad.

I turn back and look over my shoulder at the reflection of my derrière. That’s French for butt, by the way. I found that out in Marie Claire. The material is snug on my hard won, tantalizingly small rear.

Not bad at all.