Lace (65 page)

Got it!

It was Griffin Lowe of Orbit Publishing. He hadn’t been on her list, but someone high on it must have brought him. Briskly she moved over toward him. “It’s Mr. Lowe,
isn’t it? Can I introduce you to anyone?”

“No, thanks. I came with the Javitses but I don’t think I’m staying. It’s my second day with contact lenses, and they’re fighting back. Why don’t we split and
have dinner?”

“Because I’m working.”

“No need to, if I say you’re not.”

“I’m sorry, but no.” Judy walked away with just a hint of rudeness. She didn’t need that kind of rich man’s power play and didn’t appreciate it one bit.

She was the last to leave. After settling the details of the bill with Luigi, she stood under the awning and was about to ask for a cab when a maroon Rolls Royce drew up and the back door
opened. “An offer you can’t refuse. A lift home, with no strings. We know the address.”

She laughed and climbed into the back, which was fitted out like a small living room and smelled discreetly of real leather.

She didn’t ask him in and he didn’t suggest it. The car simply drove off into the night and Judy headed for a hot tub, rather sorry not to have had the opportunity to turn down
Griffin Lowe again. . . .

T
HAT WAS THE LAST
she heard of him for six weeks, then he telephoned at seven-thirty on a Monday morning to ask her to
dinner on the evening of her choice. She said, “You must be crazy! Is this business? Because it certainly isn’t pleasure.”

“Look, I
know
you get up early. It’s whatever you care to make it. Sure, I use PR firms.”

“Okay, how about Le Chantilly at seven this evening.”

She wasn’t surprised to find Griffin Lowe an interesting and entertaining companion. Of course she had ordered his clippings file sent up to her office, but everyone in the media world
knew about Griffin. His publishing empire included a great deal of profitable trash, but also two of the the best magazines in America. Everyone knew that Griffin was a tough, clever bastard who
didn’t care what anybody thought of him, which was just as well; they knew he could bring off brilliant, surprising business coups. They knew he had his own sense of rough justice, and that
he was a forty-five-year-old, well-known womaniser. Oh, yes, and they knew he was married, with three children—or was it four?

Griffin Lowe sat across the velvet banquette from Judy and they ate lobster bisque, roast lamb with watercress salad followed by caramelized, sliced oranges. Then as they sipped their coffee,
Griffin gently took her hand under the table and Judy almost died of shock. Was this not 1968, when the up-to-date standard approach was “Hello, do you feel like a fuck?” And was she
not a thirty-five-year-old figure of emerging womanhood, strong, direct and adult? So was she
really
experiencing that old familiar feeling in the pit of the stomach as if she were back in
school again?

Yes.

They sat there for over an hour just holding hands and saying nothing. Judy didn’t move out of the restaurant, she floated. After the driver had helped her into the waiting car, Griffin
murmured, “You must be wondering if this is my standard approach. I just felt happy holding your hand, so I didn’t want to stop. Now d’you want this to go any further or
not?”

“Well, perhaps just to the elbow.” He leaned over and took her in his arms. Judy suddenly felt his mouth pressed on hers, his arms crushing her body, his breath on her cheek, his
fingers in her hair.

She couldn’t remember getting out of the car and into her apartment. She only knew that her hands were shaking as Griffin slowly unzipped her black velvet dress and it fell to the floor of
the living room. He pulled her to him and again she felt his mouth on hers, his firm square hands sliding gently down to the small of her back, pressing her body against him until her knees shook
so that she could no longer stand. Then he gently peeled off her sheer black pantyhose and laid her, still trembling, on the yielding soft cushions of the couch.

Shivering with pleasure she yielded to his touch, his fingers, his mouth. Then he, too, was naked and she could smell and feel the warmth of him against her.

He lifted her in his arms. He put her down on the silk sheets of her bed, then, savoring each moment, they abandoned themselves to slow, sensual lovemaking.

He licked her secret places. He tried to lick her ear, but Judy jerked her head away—she couldn’t bear that warm messy wetness. But of course sex
was
messy, so she gave in,
surrendering to pleasure. He checked where else she liked to be licked, and they found it was almost everywhere. Then suddenly he grew fierce and so did she and they had a little wrestling match to
see who got on top and he allowed Judy to win, but somehow they fell off the bed and onto the red-fox spread and then she felt his fingers inside her, after which he rimmed her rather noisily and
she didn’t mind the warm messy wetness, not one bit. Then she twisted her body until he was powerless beneath her, or so it pleased them to pretend. She moved against him, driving him to the
same frenzy that he’d made her feel ten minutes before, then she pushed him back against the cinnamon silk pillows, then leaned back and grabbed his ankles. She felt his strength inside her,
his hard, hairy thighs beneath her ass, his fingers driving her wild.

She woke early, happy, and calm. Suddenly remembering the night, she jerked her head around and saw his winged black eyebrows. She felt an odd, new sensation.
She
didn’t want him to wake up.
When he woke up, he would leave. Immediately she felt suspicious of this new vulnerability. She felt possessive. Reminding herself that her bedmate was a
well-known womaniser, Judy slid out of bed, put on her dressing gown and fixed breakfast.

Griffin Lowe opened one eye, reached out one arm and tugged at her pink lace gown, then he pulled her down on the bed and murmured how he’d like to start the day, and it wasn’t with
breakfast. So she slid on top of him again and once more they melted into each other, her slight body on his strong, lusty one.

At last he said gently, “I told Carter to bring the car around at eight, so I’ll have to go soon. But I’ll be back.”

Then he showered and suddenly he was gone, leaving her breathless, incapable of thought, incapable of work, incapable of doing anything except to relive in her imagination every minute since
she’d met him.

Suddenly it occurred to her that this new sensation wasn’t merely carnal desire or passion. For the first time, at the age of thirty-five, she correctly suspected that she was falling in
love.

Unsummoned, Griffin now drifted into Judy’s thoughts when she least expected it, catching her off-guard during conferences and meetings. She wasted a lot of time gazing
dreamily into space, thinking of his skin, the way the back of his neck joined his broad shoulders, the soft hair on his forearms, the shape of his hands, the scar on his left hand (Why? There were
so many things to ask him), the warmth of his body. Griffin even knew how to undress erotically, that slow loosening of the tie as he looked steadily at her, removing his socks before his pants to
avoid that ridiculous, vaudeville view of hairy legs between shirt and socks.

In a rosewood drawer by her bed she kept a pale blue shirt that he’d worn, and when he wasn’t there, she pressed it to her face and inhaled the musky odour of his body.

Griffin immediately hired LACE for one of his new companies, pointing out that it would give them a reason to be together, which it did. Judy was surprised by his relaxed business methods. He
didn’t waste energy looking dynamic; at times he seemed almost idle. He would sit at a meeting in a gentle, almost apologetic manner, rubbing the side of his nose with his left index finger
as he questioned, commented, queried and encouraged other people, probing for every detail. Then he would sum up the entire meeting in three minutes. When Griffin Lowe went to a meeting, whether it
was a formal one in his gray suede-panelled conference room or a casual discussion with feet on the desk, everyone present seemed to think fifteen percent faster and better. It was one of the
things that Judy and he had in common.

He and Judy saw each other three times a week. At first they were discreet, but increasingly they became reckless. His wife must surely know, Judy reasoned, and so did Griffin.
“She won’t say anything, she never does,” he told Judy and she winced. She hated to think of herself as merely one of Griffin’s affairs.

There was a long silence.

“That was a very
shitty
thing to say,” she said, and she was only half-joking. She wanted to hurt him, the way those three words had just hurt and humiliated her.
“She never does.”

They’d had lunch at her apartment—smoked trout and half a bottle of Pouilly Fumée at the bedside—then Griffin showered, dressed and was now about to leave.

“
Very
shitty . . .” Judy repeated, turning to him with a wicked gleam in her blue eyes. “So I’m going to punish you so that you never hurt or humiliate me
again.”

Griffin went along with it—he could have kicked himself for saying those three words—as she led him by the hand back to the rumpled bed and shoved him down on it. With a forced
laugh—he was late for his next appointment—Griffin put a lazy arm up to pull her down against his chest, but she caught his wrist and said, “I’m going to tie you to the bed;
then I’m going to have my way with you. I’m going to punish you so that you will never, never be shitty and thoughtless with me again.”

She bit his forefinger hard enough to make Griffin jump with pain and surprise. Then she pulled off her maroon-silk dressing gown sash and swiftly tied his right arm to the headboard.

He tried to protest in a playful voice, going along with the game. He recognised the real pain behind her teasing tone of voice, and he also recognised that he wasn’t going to make his
next appointment. As she reached for his other wrist and wrapped a red silk scarf around it, he said in a resigned voice, “Aren’t you going to undress me first?”

“I’ll take off your shoes,” Judy offered, yanking off his handmade Italian loafers; she then tied his ankles to the bed with his beige silk socks, so that he was
spread-eagled.

“Oh, no,” Griffin said in a high falsetto. “No, no, no!
Not
Gestapo-style correction,
not
. . . the whip,
not
torture,
not
the studded leather belt
with the cruel brass buckle and the vicious stiletto heels and the swastika armband!” Groaning between laughs, he didn’t mind playing a masochist for once.

“Worse,” said Judy, disappearing into the kitchen and then appearing naked in the doorway with a pair of shears in her hand. As she headed for the bed, still with that wicked glint
in her eye, Griffin nervously said, “Okay Judy, I’m
sorry.
Now let’s quit fooling around. This ridiculous horseplay has gone far enough, and I’m late as it
is.”

“Oh, but I haven’t
started,
so I’m certainly not going to stop,” she said. And before Griffin realised what she was doing she’d slashed through the jacket of
his handmade suit.

“Judy!”
He tried to jerk himself upright but found, to his surprise, that he really couldn’t move. She started to snip through his silk shirt, imported the previous
month from Jermyn Street.

“Judy!
What
are you playing at?
You
gave me this shirt only yesterday. Remember?”

“A mistake,” said Judy calmly, carefully cutting into his left trouser bottom and slicing up, roughly, toward his groin. “You really did hurt my feelings, just then, so
I’m afraid I’ll have to upset your life the way you’re upsetting mine.”

Griffin started to simmer. He wouldn’t have minded if it were a Saturday, but he had a busy afternoon ahead, and after all, they’d just . . .

“You did come, didn’t you?”

“Shut up. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll make sure that you
can’t
talk.”

She put the shears down, picked up her tights, stuffed them in his mouth and gagged him with his tan silk tie. Then she carefully slashed up the other trouser leg and yanked away the debris of
gray flannel. For one second Griffin worried as the shears were flourished in the air and then slashed toward his boxer shorts. He started to give muffled yells for mercy. Whatever she was playing
at, it seemed the correct way to react.

“I’m going to punish you so that you
never do it again,
” Judy said softly. “I’m going to make you sorry! I’m going to make you suffer! There’s a
law against what I’d
really
like to do to you at this moment!” As she bent toward his cock, to his embarrassment, Griffin felt himself stiffen. She curled her tongue and flicked
it at his flesh with butterfly strokes. Griffin groaned with pleasure, whereupon Judy stopped. She scrambled off the bed and again headed for the kitchen, reappearing with a bottle of olive oil.
She said in a conversational voice, “You really should be more considerate, Griffin.”

Kneeling on the bed beside him, she tipped the whole bottle over him, and the oil ran off his body and onto the sheets. Judy moved to the bottom of the bed and started to massage his left foot,
carefully starting with the big toe and kneading hard under the instep, then going all the way up his leg with hard, oily strokes. He thought, She’s going to suck me off; that’s what
this is leading up to. But she didn’t. She stopped short of that point and started to rub his right foot, then expertly massaged his entire body until her hands were kneading the big muscles
on either side of Griffin’s neck. Occasionally she brushed the tips of her nipples across his chest as her thumbs pushed rhythmically toward his ears.

“
Now
you should be limp and acquiescent,” she said thoughtfully. Then she crouched over Griffin’s oil-slick body and with the tip of her tongue
just
licked his
stiff cock with little cat-licking-the-cream sort of licks, after which she knelt astride him and carefully stroked her clitoris with his cock, taking no notice whatsoever of Griffin, in fact,
treating him as a sexual object to bring herself to orgasm. Griffin was spread-eagled on the bed and she was sitting on top of him, so there wasn’t much that he could do about it. A muffled
groan escaped his lips. By now he was slightly purple in the face and highly excited as Judy very carefully knelt astride his hips and put just the tip of his cock inside her, then quickly lifted
her body so that it almost slipped out. After a few minutes of this teasing, she suddenly pushed it right in, and ground her body against his. Then, just as suddenly, she jumped off him.