A Rage to Live (5 page)

‘Why?’ she asked him.

‘Let’s just say you don’t inspire confidence.’

Now they were locked together and not merely by what they saw in each other’s eyes, but by something enigmatic. Cressida had trouble controlling the passion building in her. She steadied her voice. It was a bold and provocative thing to ask but she could not help herself. ‘What
do
I inspire in you?’ And having asked him that, she turned her gaze from his and went to lean on the terrace’s balustrade and look out across the bay.

He stepped up behind her. ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to find out,’ he told her, in a calm, controlled voice laced with sexual promise.

She felt his hands upon her shoulders, warmth as their bodies touched: his chest pressing against her back, the tight stomach, strong loins sensuously but ever so subtly rubbing against her. He caressed her
shoulders and ran his hands, ever so slowly, down over her arms to cover her hands and remove them from the balustrade she was clinging to. His arms resting over hers, he raised them, stretched them out from her sides and caressed them through the sensuous silk crêpe-de-chine. He ran his hands over them slowly, teasingly, again and again. One second she could feel the strength and warmth and passion of the man against her, flesh to flesh, hardly realising there were clothes keeping them apart. The next, only his caressing hands, arms, taking possession of nothing more than her own hands and arms.

Leaning back into him, she caressed Kane now with teasing, taunting, subtle movements of her own: a rubbing of her body up against his. She released her arms and slipped them behind her, around him, to hold him tight to her. She could feel his immediate reaction, the swell of him rising to the occasion, his wanting her. He, too, enfolded her in his arms, but not to hold her tight to him, only to busy his hands with caressing her hips, her thighs, the soft and tender flesh between her legs which she spread just that little bit further. A natural reaction: a making ready for closer intimacy, a message to him that she was his for the taking.

Kane turned her around now to face him. Completely enchanted by her sensuality, a certain bravura she was displaying, he studied her face for several seconds before he leaned forward and placed his lips upon hers. With immense tenderness, he slipped his pointed tongue between them and slid it back and forth until he felt them involuntarily part. He licked them now with his tongue, nibbled at the soft sensuous flesh. The taste of the soft satiny inside of her lips was like a trigger to his imagination: the taste of her cunt lips. He stopped. One intense gaze into her eyes before he caressed her cheek with the back of his hand and swept her off her feet and into his arms to carry her into the house.

Her arms around his neck, Cressida rested her head on his shoulder and licked the smooth flesh behind his ear, bit teasingly on its lobe. He placed her on her feet in front of the fire. She watched him lay several large logs on it then kick away a large oblong ottoman.

Cressida wanted to say something, do something, move a hand, take a step: but it was as if she was frozen in time, made dumb by her own lust. It was governing everything she was feeling, all her actions. All life and being, ego and vanity, vanished. She was nothing but her own libido craving sexual release, all things erotic in communion with the man she had always loved and had always lost. The pain and pleasure of being with him once again was in itself an excruciatingly sensual experience. She was tense with desire, expectation, unbridled lust.

Kane turned his attention back to Cressida. Though there were no
words from him either, he was speaking to her in every action he took, in every look he gave her. The pleasure she saw in his face, the lust, the hunger to possess her, were so evident that they added to the sexual tension building in a crescendo of erotic desire. She was exactly where she wanted to be. In the full flood of being alive, where the banality and cruelty of life doesn’t interfere with living and dying in the arms of the man you love.

He was standing squarely in front of her now. She was his and he knew it, but what he didn’t know was why the challenge to seduce her was still there; that for him the chase was still on. He would have her, in every lustful way he wanted her, there was that kind of sexuality about her. And yet there was something challenging about her too. He watched her move her arms back, spread her fingers to warm the palms of her hands by the fire. Otherwise she was as rigid as a cardboard cut out, but with a fast-beating heart, blood running hot for him. Oh, yes, he liked that. He liked her.

They were now gazing into each other’s eyes. Nothing was hidden. He removed the tweed jacket he was wearing and dropped it on the floor. He unbuckled and slid the brown alligator belt through the loops on his trousers and casually raised it above Cressida’s head to place it around her neck, the two ends dangling over her breasts. He didn’t miss the tremor of excitement that passed through her. Had she imagined the sting of that leather against her soft tender flesh?

She watched mesmerised as he now, more hastily, wrenched his tie from around his neck, and unbuttoned his shirt. He pulled it from his trousers. Cressida closed her eyes for a few seconds, trying to compose herself. Seeing his naked flesh, the strong, muscular physique, loosened what little control she had over her desire for him. When he removed his shirt, to drop that too on the floor, he stood on one leg to raise the other and unlace and dispose of one shoe and sock. She was suddenly aware that Kane knew he had her sexually enthralled and that he was deliberately seducing her further with his strip tease. With any other man, she might have been able to play the sex seduction game, give him as good as he was delivering, but with him it was impossible. She was capable of nothing less than total submission, to him and her own fiery sexuality.

When she opened her eyes he was stark naked, his ample penis erect, the handsome and considerable scrotum containing within balls large, voluptuous and irresistible. She gathered them in her hands and caressed them, stroked them lovingly, and then lowered her lips to kiss them. Holding his penis in both hands, she fondled it while she sucked the scrotum into her mouth, and licked it, and rolled the balls within the sac around with her tongue. The taste of him was like an
aphrodisiac. The sweet scent and warmth of his genitals only added to her enjoyment. The texture of soft loose skin, moist with her saliva, to suck on that was incredibly erotic. It created in her a greater hunger for him, sent her imagination soaring, her fantasies of sex with him wild.

He ran his fingers through her hair several times. Held her head firmly in both his hands and watched her while she devoured him. So very hungry, he thought, enjoying every bit of her hunger for him. He kissed the top of her head and then very gently, reluctantly, removed her from him, raised her up and gathered her to him.

‘You’re wonderful. That was delicious,’ he told her, his voice husky with lust. He placed his lips upon hers and kissed her deeply, sucked on her tongue and bit into the soft, warm and wet inside of her lips. When he stopped his kisses, he bit her hard on the chin, feeling a need to leave his mark on her. There was something animal-like about the little act, territorial maybe. He followed that love bite by caressing her face and giving her a broad happy smile. She returned his smile with her own.

There was a tacit understanding in those smiles that passed between them. From that moment on they were together, partners in all things sexual that they were about to experience. Kane found that incredibly erotic and rare. His interest in this woman was strangely important to him. The sex that was always a priority in his life, every erotic act, every orgasm, the many, many women he enjoyed – rarely were they anything like as outstanding as this woman appeared to be. He had the good grace to laugh to himself. He did have a tendency to believe that about nearly every woman he fucked. He enjoyed falling in love for as brief a time as a great sexual encounter lasted; it added a frisson to the sex.

Kane raised her hand and then lowered his head to place a kiss upon it, the perfect continental kiss. Then, placing it at her side, he raised the tails of the soft bugle bead belt around her waist. Slowly, very deliberately, he untied the knot and slid it from around her to let it slip from his hands on to the floor. Cressida undid the nearly invisible hooks on her hip. The skirt of her dress remained in place. She dropped her hands to her sides. That would be her only concession to disrobing. He was both enchanted and amused that she wanted him to undress her. He must discover her, take her as she had taken him. She was his for the taking, but she would not give herself away.

That was unusual, a subtle but telling difference from his experience with most women. Interesting. And so was she, very. He liked the mystery, the boldness of her break-in, her inability to hide her sexual attraction for him, how he felt in her mouth. Who had taught her to
handle a man so well with her tongue, the sucking sensation, to give and take such pleasure in the act she had just performed? How could she have known it was one of the forms of sexual foreplay that crazed him with lust?

Her sexual advance on him had been exciting. He sensed it was her way of telling him that even better, a whole lot better, was yet to come. He liked her enormously for that, for showing him she was actively a part of this erotic coupling. There was more to them than the sex, he could feel it to the marrow of his bones, but that could wait. The sex and nothing else was what they were about now. For them, in this moment of time, that was everything and nothing else mattered. He knew that now as he reached out to open the wrap-around skirt of her dress. Even as he felt the sensuous crêpe-de-chine in his hands, he was aware of a special quality about her, of how she was holding his interest, keeping him intrigued by her sexuality. How far down the erotic path would she let him take her? He needn’t have posed that question. He instinctively knew the answer. To the very end.

As he undraped her, he could actually feel the sexual tension in her body. She was rigid with it.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, delight showing in his eyes. Naked, she had an even greater body than he had already admired clothed. He reached out once more to tuck the dress, which still hung on her shoulders, behind her breasts and hips, the better to view her. He had expected seductive satin or silk undergarments; instead he had found her stark naked beneath her elegant dress. Yet another sexual turn on for him. He found her incredibly voluptuous with her high, round, full breasts, the unusual pale pink, so smooth, almost lustrous, cone-shaped nimbuses culminating in long and beautifully formed nipples. The narrow waist and slender hips. Her voluptuously fleshy mound of pubic hair so blonde as to make him think, at first sight, that it had been shaved away. And the slit that cleaved it? Long and provocative, wherein he would find the soft, warm, welcoming, cunt he intended to master.

Her naked, raunchy, yet somehow grand and elegant body was made even more refined, more sexually seductive, by long legs and slender feet shod in high-heeled sandals. Arms and shoulders still draped in the cream-coloured crêpe-de-chine only accentuated the lady and the slut combination that always captivated his imagination.

Hers was a hauntingly beautiful body. He knew before he slipped the dress from her shoulders and walked around her, that she would be no less intriguing from behind. He was not disappointed. The curve of her bottom: so firm, tight, high. Delectable orbs made for fondling, cheeks to be toyed with, guardians of that other mysterious orifice to
enter and take possession of. Oh, yes, he would seduce her there too. With care, he would tease and excite that tight and sensitive place for both their sexual pleasures. She was perfect, made for all kinds of sex. She was an adventure.

Kane was aroused further now at the very thought of entering her there and coming. He would not be satisfied until he came, filled her with his orgasms. And her own? He intended that she should have many. What joy for him to see her come and delight in her lust, to slake her thirst for orgasm, to be the instrument of her pleasure, deliver her into the kingdom of ecstasy. That was all he could think of: sexual ecstasy, sexual oblivion, to die to all else but that moment of pure bliss. He was like a man possessed.

She would not resist. She wanted nothing less from him. It was implicit in her silence. Obvious in her eyes, in every breath she took. Incredibly, he knew that was not mere male fantasy, but a hungry truth.

He viewed her back and broad shoulders. She was glorious. As he kissed her shoulder and the middle of her back, ran a pointed tongue down it leaving a snail’s trace of moist, warm saliva there, and placed a kiss upon that small place where the orbs of her bottom met and the crack between them began, she became the whole world for him. She had seduced him with her body and her soul.

Chapter 5

The fire was no more than cold embers, the room streaming with sunlight. Cressida leant on one elbow, listening to the muffled sound of the ocean lapping the beach, the birds in full song. She was watching her lover sleep. She hardly dared breathe for fear of waking him.

‘I don’t know who you are, how you come to be here. I only know that we have found each other and I’ll never let you go.’ His last words before he fell asleep. Those very same words he had spoken once before to her, and then vanished from her life.

If only he hadn’t said them. It was those words that snapped her back to the reality of who he was, who she was, what they had never been together. Before he had uttered them, he was no more to her than a man enthralled with a woman he wanted a sexual adventure with. She was a woman who wanted him, and nothing more than to die to the world with him in sexual bliss.

And she had, they both had, many times, during their several hours together. She could not explain to herself, nor did she want to, the enormous sense of love she was feeling for him, a completeness in herself, how great it was to be alive. She felt life pulsating – no, more like pounding – through her, all around her; more profound, more rich than she could ever have imagined.

Cressida had been unable to hold back her many orgasms. She had ridden out on them into hours of uncontrollable lust and pleasure with Kane. What joy, what bliss, unimaginable happiness. But his words, those last words to her?

She wanted to reach out and touch him, tell him again, as she had so many times during their hours of heated passion and their careening towards sexual overdrive, ‘I still love you, I never realised how much, my love, my life.’ But now there was hesitation where there had been none: no will, no need, to hold back. She believed his words, that he meant every one of them. Only this time she was older, wiser, and no longer took words and sentiments as promises. For Cressida Vine, only actions spoke true.

She closed her eyes for a moment, using them like a camera to snap and store his picture. She would carry it in her mind to look at for
always, as others might glue it in a scrapbook and gaze on it as a memory. She remained where she was, as she was, looking at him for several more minutes, revelling in the joy and wonderment of two people in love. One minute, hours, a day, a lifetime, it didn’t matter. Just to be there even once, as she had been with Kane, was everything.

Very cautiously, she eased herself away from him and rose from the cushions they had been lying on on the floor. Gazing down at him, she placed her hands together as if in prayer and put them over her mouth and nose, her thumbs under the chin. A strange gesture, a contemplative one. She inhaled deeply and held her breath. She caught the scent of his body, the sweet scent of sex and come, and held it for as long as she could. It was dizzying and divine, and she was made suddenly aware of the taste of him still in her mouth, of how he had filled her with his orgasms and how she still carried his seed within her. She had it all. All she had ever wanted. She had returned to New Cobham less than twenty-four hours before, and had found it still to be her place of happiness, what she had yearned for. Profound contentment, all her ghosts laid to rest.

Hollihocks. It had to be eight o’clock or after, Hollihocks was hers. She quietly went about the room and then the terrace picking up her dress and shoes. Hastily she dressed, hitching up her skirt as she had before when she had started out on her magnificent odyssey.

On the long flight of wooden stairs down to the beach she found Kane’s briefcase, a large, old-fashioned leather case stuffed full of music scores. She thought of him carefully leaving it there and stealing up the stairs to confront a burglar. It brought a smile to her lips. She turned round and looked up the staircase, half hoping he would be standing there. He wasn’t. She walked around the briefcase and continued down the stairs.

The sun felt good, even the sand was warm under her feet. She began to run towards Hollihocks, but stopped about two hundred yards from the house. There were several flowering bushes, unusual ones she could not identify but thought might belong to the Mountain Laurel family. She carefully broke off several branches of shiny dark green leaves topped by clusters of white blossoms and ran to the beach house with them. She inched her way quietly up the stairs, through the vast living-room, to lay them down on the cushions next to the still sleeping Kane.

On the beach again, she once more headed for home. She half ran, half walked the distance, and felt drunk with the joys of life, like someone who had conquered a mountain, someone inebriated with the success of having achieved their objective. How far away could the realisation of her dreams and ultimate happiness be?

At the top of the stairs zigzagging up the cliff from the beach, while standing under the wooden portico, she stepped into her sandals and looked down. A quick glance to the beach and the bay, and then she walked briskly towards Hollihocks. It had all looked so different in the dark, by the light of the moon. Now, under the morning sun, the hedgerows, the moors, in the distance the house, were all more beautiful than she remembered them.

As a child she had never thought of Hollihocks as a large compound, a much envied and admired estate, it had just been home to her. Now she glanced across the forty-five acres in some surprise. How grand a place it was. She passed the lane that led to the stables and paddock, the greenhouses. Another lane that led to the guest houses, and finally she was on the drive leading to the main house. She rounded a bend in the road and could see at a distance the moving vans lined up. Hers or Carol’s, it was difficult to distinguish.

She heard a car. It stopped next to her. ‘Excuse me, ma’am. Can I ask who you are, what you’re doing here?’

‘I’m Cressida Vine. I live here.’

‘Not for ten minutes, you don’t, ma’am,’ he told her matter-of-factly. ‘Hop in. Might as well go home in style, Miss Vine. Hi. I’m Sheriff Cornwell.’ He shoved a huge hand out through the window and gave her a broad smile. ‘This here is my deputy, Harvey Brown. You jump in the back seat, Harvey.’

Cressida was still settling herself in the front when the sheriff said, ‘Went to the inn, thought I’d pick you up.’

He seemed to be waiting for an explanation as to why she hadn’t been there. Once a policeman, always a policeman, she thought. She didn’t mind, she was too happy to mind about anything. This was her world now, and the sheriff was a part of it. The last link in the chain of events to coming home.

‘I didn’t stay at the inn last night.’

‘Well, your moving vans did. Right in front. Arthur woke up, nearly had a heart attack. Arthur’s a very nervous proprietor, one of our best customers. Never been partial to real life obstructing his view. Now had it been a horse and wagon, well, that would have been a different story.’ He looked at Cressida and gave her a wry smile.

She liked him. He was upfront, straight about people, and not taken in by them. She could believe that everyone else in New Cobham liked him too. He seemed to be a big man by the way he filled the driver’s seat nearly to the roof of the car. Not only in his physique: broad shouldered, several inches over six feet tall. The open and handsome smile was big, too. He had that all-American rugged look of a man that knew his way forward, like some frontiersman crossing the prairie, or
a militia man from the back woods, who fought for his rights, as, she imagined, his forefathers had done. He looked more than just a sandy-haired, nice guy, with a lopsided smile and dimples in a big face and furrows in just the right places to make him impressively attractive. His nose was that of a Roman centurion. Was there more to this man than the plain old sheriff role he was playing? A question that came and went in a flash. What Cressida deduced, from this first encounter, was that he was not that big, but a man with strength of character. A powerful presence that ran the town and district very well indeed.

‘Is he very upset? I really don’t want to bother anyone.’

He looked at Cressida once more. Again that lopsided smile. ‘I wouldn’t count on that, Miss Vine.’ He said, then added, ‘But don’t fret. I moved ’em out of his sight, and it gave Arthur something to fuss about for a few hours.’

Oh, yes, very upfront, she thought, not having missed his sharp observation. If Cressida had not seen some of the town folk and their reaction to her, had she not been to the country club dinner dance with Sami, she might have thought his comment uncalled for, a rude insinuation. She thought it best not to pursue his remark. Instead she asked, ‘And the vans? Where are they now?’

‘Right behind us.’

Cressida turned to look past Deputy Harvey in the back seat and through the rear view mirror. Sure enough there they were about two hundred yards behind the unmarked police car, ‘Then those pantechnicons in front of the house are my step-mother’s?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘Oh,
merde
!’ exclaimed Cressida with a sigh. ‘She’ll drag this out to the last minute, and then some.’

‘No. Just the last minute.’

Cressida looked at the sheriff. He returned her gaze and she was reassured that he would remove Carol Vine swiftly and with as much dignity as possible. She was feeling warm and unbuttoned Sami’s jacket. Only then did she realise how foolish she must look, arriving to evict her step-mother in evening dress. Though she could do nothing about that, she could about looking dishevelled. Quickly, she repaired her face and brushed her hair. Cressida slipped out of Sami’s dinner jacket and untied the beaded belt, arranged her dress so that when she walked from the car it would be its proper length, then retied the belt. Her explanation, though she knew it was not called for, ‘I was at the country club dance last night.’

‘I know.’

Cressida had no curiosity as to how he knew. She closed her evening bag and slipped its strap on to her shoulder. Walking into her house
dressed as she was posed no problem for her, she was quite at ease about it. Not quite the morning dress code on Cape Cod, but she was groomed well enough and looked sensational, and why should she not greet Hollihocks looking great, and chic, and so very, very happy? It was after all one of
the
occasions of her lifetime, coming home. Her last thought on the subject as the car pulled past the vans, obviously all loaded and ready to go, and drew up to the entrance, was of Byron. He would have adored the idea of her walking into Hollihocks as if she were going to a grand dinner party. He did so love the rebel in her.

The sheriff cut the motor, and turning to Harvey, ordered, ‘Harv, you run back and tell those New York City boys to stop at the end of the drive and make room for these moving vans to get by. They can pull up here when we tell ’em.’

Harvey all but sprang out of the car. Cressida placed her hand on the door handle. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked Ed Cornwell.

Before Cressida could answer, he shook his head from side to side. ‘Oh, no. Four minutes, Mrs Vine has four minutes more. You sit in this car until I tell you it’s safe for you to come out.’

‘That sounds just a little dramatic, Sheriff.’

‘Ah, dramatic, is it? Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. But I’ll tell you what
is
dramatic – having the first eviction in the history of New Cobham. Nasty too.’

Cressida’s face flushed red. ‘Let’s get this straight, Sheriff, I never wanted it to come to this. I have fought for two years for it
not
to come to this. The onus is on my step-mother.’

‘No, I don’t think so, miss. The onus was on Byron. He may have loved her, she may have had a lot of good qualities, but he should have pitched her out years ago. Being a gentleman and a scholar stopped him, so now it falls on me to do the deed. You do as I tell you and wait in the car.’

That silenced Cressida. For the first time ever someone understood the relationship between Carol and Byron Vine. She gathered that he might even have more than just an inkling of Carol’s hatred of her. A secret hidden so well and for so long brought into the light to win her an ally. The shock was like being winded. All she could think to say was, ‘You knew my father?’

‘We’d been fishing friends for nearly fifteen years.’ He said no more, merely opened the car door and walked up to one of the movers. Cressida followed him, but only with her eyes.

‘Who’s the boss of this outfit?’

A big bruiser of a man came up behind the sheriff. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘The sheriff of this county.’

‘That’ll do, Sheriff. What can I do for you?’

‘You all loaded?’

‘As far as I know. Just waiting for instructions to hit the road.’

‘You got ’em. Hit the road.’

‘Is that official?’

‘That’s official, buddy.’

‘Can I check with the lady?’

‘You and your men, pull up those tail gates and hop in the cabs of your vans,
I’ll
check with the lady.’ Then, turning to his deputy who had come running from his last instruction, the sheriff delivered another. ‘Harv, you come with me.’

A shrug of the shoulders, a shouting of instructions, and the men were making ready to leave. The sheriff and his deputy were mounting the steps to the front door of Hollihocks. The door stood open. Ed Cornwell rang the bell. He had to ring it a second time before Carol Vine appeared and greeted him with nothing more than, ‘Ed.’

‘Mrs Vine.’

‘Hello, Harvey.’ She was polite but stony-faced.

‘Mrs Vine.’ And Harvey tipped his hat.

‘Are you loaded up, Carol?’ asked the sheriff.

Carol Vine said nothing. She was staring defiantly at Ed Cornwell pinch-lipped. He nodded his head. ‘Gonna be like this, is it?’ he mumbled to himself. Staring right back at Carol, he gave an order to his deputy who was standing behind him. ‘Harv, you go tell those boys they’re loaded, and I want them rolling off this property
now
.’

Harvey was off at a near run.

Ed Cornwell then said, ‘Carol, it’s after eight o’clock. You no longer have the right to be on Miss Cressida Vine’s property. You know I’ve got a court order to evict you. Now we can do this the hard way or the civilised way. Which is it gonna be?’