The Pleasure Seekers (21 page)

There was a heated discussion going on around the
table and barely anyone paid any attention to their leaving. A table of nearly fifteen people often had someone popping up to go to the kitchen, the loo, to leave in a huff or change their seat. Laurence was one of the people who did pay attention to Brandon’s and D’Arcy’s leaving the table together so early on in the evening. He had Caroline next to him and was happy with her, in love actually. She gave him the things he had missed when living with D’Arcy, that certain Englishness that he loved but periodically ran away from. She was less free, more harnessed to life as written in the rule book of family, background, the acceptable face of any given social structure. She was bright, she was beautiful, she was sexy, and he was finding love on the rebound.

It was over for D’Arcy and him, and yet when she walked away with Brandon Ketheridge he wanted to stand up and pull her away from him. He missed her; didn’t want her, but didn’t want to lose her either. He was resenting the very same thing now that he had resented when he had been living with her: D’Arcy Montesque had more of him than he had wanted to give her. He turned away and kissed Caroline, caressing her hair.

Brandon was holding D’Arcy’s hand as they walked across the port towards Elefherakis’s house. ‘You do know what this is all about?’ he asked.

There was tremendous sexual energy vibrating between them; he could hardly keep the passion and the desire from his voice. D’Arcy liked his forthrightness, it added a shiver of excitement to the already thrilling prospect of an erotic tryst to remember. They had rounded the point and there was no light except from the stars and the moon, a
soft low light cascading down the flight of stone steps that led up to Elefherakis’s house. She slid her arms round his neck and placed her lips upon his and kissed them, licked them, slid the point of her tongue between them. His lips parted and there was a sense of their devouring each other in the kiss that followed. She wrapped a leg around him and he placed his hands under her skirt and caressed her bottom, helped to hoist her by it up on to him and there she remained, clinging to him with both legs wrapped tight as a vice around his waist.

D’Arcy’s hands had already undone the buttons of his shirt and were roving over his chest. She liked his body, it was taut and virile. She stopped her kisses only long enough to tell him, ‘Yes, I would say I do know what this is all about, what we’re all about.’ Then, gripping his hair tight in her hands, she placed her lips once more upon his.

He took over the kiss while tearing her silk bikini pants from between her legs. With one hand he was undoing his jeans; his other hand fondled the cheeks of her bottom. His fingers searched between those voluptuously round, firm, globes and under them until he found those most private of orifices. He so adored to master a woman, and knew so well how to excite. He teased them and fondled them, and took the first of the flight of steps to the house while doing so.

Their kisses were deep and searching. The warmth of their mouths, the taste of each other on their tongues – softness and warmth overwhelmed them, while his fingers were doing the work of exciting lust for them both. When she was moist and smooth as silk and he felt her giving
into their kissing, and his playful and very sexy intrusions, he lifted her away from his body only enough, in one fell thrust, to impale her on him. She threw back her head, gasped, and the colour came rushing to her neck and face as she came. She couldn’t speak. To open her mouth would have been to allow a scream of pure delight. The pain and pleasure, the agony and the ecstasy, of being taken over by such an exquisite sensation would have demanded nothing less of her. Instead she bit into the skin on the back of her hand.

‘Kiss me!’ he demanded.

She obeyed, and he continued going up the steep steps with her thus: clinging to him, kissing him, impaled upon his sex.

There was nothing tender or sweet about the sex they had together that night, but it was thrilling, erotic. A kind of sexual madness took them over. Both aware of that, they revelled in it, didn’t want it to stop. They were on a sexual odyssey, an epic adventure, they were going on a series of wanderings in an erotic land. This was the beginning of a long and adventurous journey.

For his part Brandon had never met a woman so ready for such a journey. There seemed to be a fire in her that smouldered, was instantly ready to be fanned into a huge hot flame. She wanted it all, to taste, to experience every aspect of sex. She was a woman experienced in lust, and yet . . . it was as if she could go no further in her life until she had made this journey with him. He admired her, felt respect for her, even a little love for the courageous D’Arcy Montesque. He knew he could take her to the
edge of depravity and she would enjoy it and come to no harm.

D’Arcy had thought almost from the very minute they gazed into each other’s eyes that there would be no turning back from this liaison with Brandon Ketheridge. Now as the dawn light spilled into the room and across the four poster bed she knew it to be true. He was indeed a libertine in every sense of the word. He was licentious, a man who did as he pleased, a sexual free-thinker, hungering for every new sexual experience he could find. Never before had she felt the need as she did now to know that side of sex, to experience it and come out the other side of such an affair as she would have with Brandon.

As she lay in bed with this stranger, she found her desire to be with him in such extravagant sex as he promised inexplicable. She knew she was acting out of character, or was she? She had the most acute sense of wanting to live, of being free and wanting to soar to heights she had never been to before. She wanted never again to close her eyes to other worlds, new experiences, out of a sense of fear. It was just as easy to walk away with one’s eyes open. If indeed she did want to walk away from something. Brandon, lust with a libertine . . . for the moment all she wanted to do was to stay by his side, enjoy his sexual life with him. She knew her strength, how solid a human being she was; she had nothing to fear. Before Arnold’s unfortunate death she might have shied away from Brandon, but not now. There had been a basic change in D’Arcy. She felt a responsibility for all her actions which she had never quite felt before, and had
no fear of that responsibility. She knew this odyssey she was embarking on with Brandon would somehow enrich her life, lead her one step further towards her place in the sun. Nothing could have stopped her from taking it.

Grey sky and a chilling rain – a perfect London afternoon. D’Arcy had always liked London, it was one of her favourite cities. She had only been with Brandon in Livakia for two days before he whisked her away. They had had breakfast and he had told her, ‘I’m leaving in an hour and you’re coming with me. Elefherakis has arranged for a boat and a car to get us to the airport.’

‘Just like that?’ she had said.

‘Yes, just like that,’ he had told her with a wicked smile.

And here she was riding in a taxi through Hyde Park, dressed in a smart linen suit, her passport in her handbag and no luggage, not even a toothbrush.

‘I feel like I’ve been kidnapped,’ she told him.

Brandon smiled and picked up her hand to kiss it. ‘Of course you do. That’s because you have been, for sex rather than ransom.’

It was true. She had known what he was doing before the boat had even left Livakia. It was a strange sensation for D’Arcy, this feeling of being a captive. D’Arcy, who valued her freedom above all else. D’Arcy, who had never enslaved herself to anything or anyone, and certainly not to a man for sex. Yet she didn’t question it. It was merely something she was doing, something that was happening to her, and she did not resist.

‘Some ground rules that you must obey. You’re mine
and only mine for as long as you want to stay with me, we want to stay together. No outsiders or friends to distract us from each other.’

‘That’s why you whisked me away from Livakia?’

‘Precisely why. Are you unhappy about that?’

‘No. If I had been I wouldn’t have come.’

He grazed her cheek with the back of his hand. Not once since they had first laid eyes on each other had that intense sexual feeling between them waned. It was there always, with every look, every touch of his hand upon her. Only hours after their first sexual encounter there was something else added to that feeling: affection for each other. Yet strangely even that affection was bound up in their erotic togetherness; that was the basis of it, that and what they were prepared to do with each other and for each other to satisfy the lust that was for the moment in command of their lives.

The taxi rounded Hyde Park Corner and sped through the park parallel to Park Lane. He pulled her closer to him and slipped his hand beneath her skirt. Already obeying him, she wore no undergarments. He had told her that was the way he wanted her as long as they were together and had proved to her several times why. Brandon wanted her open and ready for him, waiting to be taken instantly by him at any time and at any place. She stared at the back of the taxi driver’s head in fear that he would look in his rear view mirror and catch them, but she could not help herself. She wanted the sensation of Brandon’s teasing fingers deep inside her, his thumb working her clitoris as he drove her on with whispers, ‘Come, I want you to come, here, now!’

The moment he felt her body tense and she put the back of her hand to her mouth to stop herself from calling out as she came over his fingers, he held her in a hug as tight as he could and closed his eyes, to hide his own excitement for her and her sexual hunger.

She went limp in his arms and leaned against him. She had been holding her breath and now she wasn’t and her breathing was fast and nervy, her heart racing. He drew his fingers across her lips and she licked the trail of come off them then watched him lick his fingers, savour the taste of her.

‘You’re delicious,’ he told her.

Not many seconds later the doorman of the Connaught Hotel opened the taxi door and, shielding them from the rain with an enormous black umbrella, escorted them to the entrance. D’Arcy’s knees felt like jelly, she was unnerved and yet excited, unimaginably excited by the danger and the thrill of sex in the back of a London taxi. That and the fact that she knew that Brandon Ketheridge could make her do anything sexual and she would be willing, without thought or consequence.

She excused herself and went into the ladies’ powder room where she had to sit down at the dressing table to compose herself. She looked in the mirror and touched her hand to her cheek. She felt a need to do that to prove to herself that the image in the mirror was real. D’Arcy, for all her looks, had never really got caught up in the fact that she was, like her mother, ravishingly good-looking. That hers was a sensual and vibrant kind of beauty to be admired and loved on a grand scale.

In the mirror of the Connaught ladies’ powder room she
saw that for the first time and understood herself as never before. It took her somewhat aback that it should be a near stranger she was out on a sexual odyssey with who should awaken her to herself in a new and different way.

Chapter 10

In the dining room, D’Arcy sat across the table from Brandon and listened to him order their lunch. ‘We’ll have the terrine of
foie gras
served with a vintage Madeira wine jelly and baby leeks, followed by the roast duckling. I like it prepared with the maize, ginger and lemon syrup. The usual trimmings, the poached white peach, and for vegetables, the purée of celeriac, mange tout, a pancake of rosti potatoes. We’ll choose our puddings later.’

D’Arcy was somewhat amused that when the maître d’ had offered her a menu, Brandon had told him, ‘That won’t be necessary, I will order for us,’ and the menu had been whisked away. She watched him as he ordered the wines. His choice was extravagant and perfect for the meal he had chosen. He had what she thought to be heroic, sensual good looks. Brandon looked every inch the depraved sensualist, and she was mesmerised by him. Sitting across from him she was aware of her lust for him – it was like a fever that had to burn itself out, and if the price was obeying him and his every whim, that he should have complete control over her to the extent that she had not even a choice as to what food she might want to eat, then so be it. As lost as she was in this erotic journey she
was on with him, she was aware that she had not lost herself any more than he had. D’Arcy thought it time to tell Brandon she had a few ground rules of her own.

The waiter gone, champagne cocktails on the table in front of them, he raised his glass and said, ‘You will be brave and will never shy away from the new, the never experienced, on this odyssey of ours.’

D’Arcy, without one second of hesitation, touched the rim of her glass to his and said nothing, just took a sip of the cocktail. ‘Another one of your ground rules?’ she asked.

‘If you like,’ he answered.

There was a smile in his eyes, on his face. Everything he said, everything he did, was sensual and exciting, constantly seductive, thrilling. It was like being on a rollercoaster, dicing with death: the death of her ego, and being born again as nothing more than a sex object who was being nurtured by another sex object. It was a bizarre and dangerous place to be in one’s life, like jumping out of a plane, going into free-fall. Did he know how well matched they were, that he in turn was nothing more to her than a sex object? She thought this might be the right moment to tell him.

She slipped her foot free from her shoe and ran it up and down his leg several times. He felt her stockinged toes high up on his thigh and briefly a caress between his legs. The smile on his face was more broad now. ‘I knew from the moment I set eyes on you that you were a woman who would speak to me with your body.’

‘Would it surprise you to learn that this sexual slave of yours has a few ground rules of her own?’

‘Ah, then you do understand that that is what you are to me?’

‘And the only way you want me? Yes, I’ve known that from the start.’

Waiters arrived and hovered round the table covered in its crisp white damask cloth that safely hid the fondling of Brandon’s genitals by D’Arcy’s stocking-covered toes. After their first course was served, Brandon, who did not look at all surprised, asked, ‘And if I don’t accept them, or that you should even have them?’