Vision of Love (6 page)

For just an instant my heart sank, but Lucas was right and why should I deny it? The Spence’s were different and I was glad that we were. Lucas annoyed me, though. I hated to be thought of as a rich heiress, hunted down because I was both attractive and the recipient of a small fortune. My heart had been in my mouth waiting for David’s reply.

“Good Lord, it’s not about the money.” David had paused. “And, it’s most definitely not about the sex. I find her lovely, stunning and charming and quite, how do they say, fey and whimsical?”

Once, he had pushed me into the corner next to the piano in Laura Godsey’s parlour. “Kiss me, Emma, I want to see.”

“See what?” I’d attempted to force him away. “What do you want to see? If I’m capable of kissing you, or if like a vampire I’ll suck your blood? Have you been having bets on me? Is that it David?” I‘d been fuming when I had pushed him back with my hand. “What do you say in secret to Lucas, that you want to fuck me and see if I’m a virgin?”

I think he liked my flaring personality and the anger that rose so easily to the surface, but on this occasion I had been easily quenched. He’d pushed me back, his expression one of being wounded. “Oh no,” he had said. “None of that. They speculate about you, everyone does, but I don’t care a jot. You’re extraordinary and I love you, Emma.” He’d been soft and persuasive as his hand cradled my breast. “Don’t be defensive and nasty. You’re just so ethereal and pure looking I want to see if you’re really like that. I don’t believe in all that airy fairy stuff I truly don’t, but when I kiss you a part of me feels compelled to believe it. I want to see if you’re enchanted like they say you are and if you’ll enchant me…if these lips”—he touched them gently with his finger—“feel as soft on me as I think they will.”

“Don’t be silly.” I turned my face away.

Undeniably David was good-looking. He had a pleasant round Nordic face with wavy blond hair and blue eyes. I think I was fond of him because he wasn’t a dynamic sex threat like most men and he wasn’t the type to put his hand on your breast or cunt. No, he was the kind of man who’d respond well to a domineering woman and something about that excited me. Especially when I imagined him naked and hands bound, crouching at my bed post whilst I whipped him. My escapism into fantasy was one of my small indulgences and I allowed myself it, because it gave me pleasure and pleasure was hard to come by. Anyway, if the whispers were true, I was insane so what was the harm? I was hardly going to actually gratify these daydreams was I?

Sitting naked in front of my dressing table, I leant forward, peering at myself critically stroking a little rouge over my cheeks and attempting to drag my thoughts back to the present. “Well, dear, this will never do,” I muttered, tracing my thumb under my eye. I’d become increasingly pale recently and I doubted that any amount of powder or rouge would hide the dark shadows. I’d always been very pale, and as Granny used to say ‘a true English Rose’, but now my pallor had translated into an ethereal and haunting kind of beauty—the beauty coming from being touched by the finger of darkness, and that rendered me a mortal walking in two worlds.

Bem was there in the corner, his smouldering dark gaze whispering over my skin.

“Why, are you doing this, why do you insist on this plan?” he said in his melodious, seductive lilt. “Is this the way you try to punish me, Emma, or are you trying to rehabilitate your soul before it’s too late?” He stepped forward his angular features cast into relief by the glow from the lamp. “You were so casual about the mortal you, so ready to release it, and now you seem to try and cling to it in desperation, like it’s a life raft or something.”

“You have such a lovely way with words,” I replied, pouting at the mirror and unscrewing my lipstick to dot the colour on my lips. “And perhaps you’re right because I feel that the tether holding me to mortal is exceptionally fragile indeed.” I stroked my mother’s double strand of black pearls, holding them up to my neck and tossing back my blonde hair.

I was finding it distressing having to think about David, but it was impossible to turn down his invitation, especially on my birthday. I had to attend the odd dinner party or shopping trip, but it was becoming increasingly harder every time. I sprayed my body in light rose eau de cologne—under my arms, behind my ears and inside my cunt as if I anticipated a man was going to thrust his nose or mouth inside me. I could tell that it annoyed Bem, whose eyebrows knitted together in a frown.

“You were made to be a mortal whore,” he observed a little nastily, stepping into the lamp’s full glare, his dark eyes flashing. “Do you want me to put your pearls on for you angel?”

“No thank you.” He reached out his hand and I moved away. I knew that a finger on my skin would be enough to weave the spell, enough to melt me. Instead, I fastened the pearls myself, and when I moved the chair back, the sight of my naked body in the mirror with just the black pearl necklace was enough to arouse even me.

I raised my foot on the bed and smoothed my thighs with my fingers, aware he was staring at the tuft of my sex. He licked his lips and crept forward with the stealth of a panther, his eyes half closed in lascivious contemplation of that place. He’d come and do it now if I wanted him to, and the thought of it gave me a strange feeling of power. He would kneel there in front of me, and holding my buttocks, bring me to melting orgasm with his demon tongue. I shivered, rolling my stockings up my legs then clipping them in place—his smouldering gaze following my every movement.

“I thought you’d dispensed with all that gaudy finery, the stockings and the garters, the things that imprison your womanhood. You could at least have let me dress you. I would have felt better knowing my hands had been there before his. Then tonight when he touches you, you’d feel me consuming you, evaporating that mortal contact. You will let him caress you, won’t you, you’re bound to? How can you not let him? I curse him and I’ll keep cursing him until he melts away.” Bem was pacing, his handsome head bowed, his long raven black hair flopping forward. “You’ll let him put that morbid mortal taint on you again, won’t you? So, when you get back, I’ll have to carry you to the bath and bathe you all over, inside and out just to rid us both of it.” He made a face. “Ugh, it’s rank, that taste of mortal man, worse than curdled milk. It makes me sick to think of it.”

I could have dignified this with a response. Instead, I stared a reprimand at him in the mirror. He was making me shiver, his strong psychic powers trying to connect with me as they danced through the air like ripples across a celestial pond. The light scintillating off his thick hair, he sprawled sexily in the chair by the fireplace, staring at me with his chin on his fist and his legs apart. “We’ll sort it out later though, darling. I won’t upset you before you go. I don’t want to spoil your birthday, and of course, if you feel you want to prove something to yourself you must do it. You must come to me without a shadow of a doubt, without fearing mental bondage or any such ridiculous thing.”

“It’s not a case of having to prove anything.” Walking over to the bed, I shook out my gown, the glorious ivory silk catching the light and spinning rainbows. “I’m simply clinging to human since I’m still alive, still flesh and blood. But, you can see, can’t you, that it’s becoming harder to cling to the familiar things? Even simple things like eating and brushing my hair have become difficult. The purpose of tonight is”—I paused—“to see if I can still participate in life, because if I can’t you know what will happen, don’t you? Some fool like Mrs Fassbender or even Marylyn—since now even Marylyn shuns me—will send for a doctor at that insane institute and they’ll have me locked up. They’re like vultures, Bem. I’m sure they want to take Langhousa off me.” I nervously rolled the pearls between my fingers.

His mouth twisted in a cruel smile. “I don’t see how they can do anything. That’s why you go to see Mr Panjari in Delhi, isn’t it? He’s tied up your will and fastened any loopholes with his considerable legal skill.”

“Tonight’s about principles. Don’t you see?” My face folded into what I imagined was a sorrowful mask and I could feel tears pushing at the backs of my eyes. “I’m confused and I never thought I’d say it, but I think I want your dirty dark world. The trouble is though, Bem, I’m tethered to this life and there are some things I still like about mortality. Books, for instance, and the feel of life and yes, those silly banal female things like shopping and coffee and, well…” I tugged a comb through my thick hair before twisting it up and digging the pins in with sharp angry jabs. “Just being human, being in flesh. You said so yourself that you adored flesh. That even in the guise of a demon you thrilled at the feel of a corporeal overcoat in which to flaunt your alien beauty, an overcoat, I may add, I so kindly furnished you with.”

He steepled his fingers under his chin, and his gaze was as deep and fathomless as a pool. “God, you’re so fast in an argument, so cutting in a riposte. I’d never let those vultures take Langhousa off you, you know that, don’t you?”

“You’d have no choice if the doctor said I was crazy and talking to demons and they bundled me in that van. So, you see why I must do these things?”

Bem jumped to his feet, placing his hands on my shoulders. “Yes, Emma, regrettably I do. Let me attend to this, let me zip it up.” He took the dress off me, his hand sliding onto my butt and separating the crack so he could place his finger there while I stepped inside the sumptuous fabric. He inched the dress up and fastened the tiny buttons his fingers burning like liquid fire on my spine, before kissing my neck with definite, firm kisses like punctuation marks, he gazed over my shoulder at me in the glass.

I gave him a look of mute appeal.

“Do you remember how we used to do this? I washed and dressed you and sprayed your eau de cologne and dusted talc between your legs. I could have done it tonight. I could have knelt at your feet and been your slave.” Bem moaned.

“Whose slave is whose? I don’t wish to feel your ownership tonight.” I shimmied, and the tiny glass beads attached to sleeve and hem like trapped teardrops, shone in the light.

“Ownership—that sour point.” He was stroking his chin.

“Oh please.” I turned around. “Don’t be like this. You know I have to prove to myself that my world exists. You’ve found your paradise.” Sitting down I picked up my slippers and slid one on. He was there immediately, taking them off me and stroking my stockings.

“No, let me do that. Do you recollect how I did this once before, on that day I saved you, Emma? You’d gone to the market to buy saffron and that man chased you up the alley. You broke your heel and I had to come and save you.” His smile broadened. “You were confused, because even then I was painting you with my world. Yes, even then I had your lover in my hand and he was turning to me and it was Bem Hazari—demon lord—and not Shankar—feeble mortal—who held the strings of your destiny. How could it be otherwise when I’d mesmerised his human soul? And you knew it the moment you laid eyes on him, you felt that fatal attraction and you wanted it. You always did. Is it any wonder he was charmed by a creature like you, something uniquely appetising to mortal and demon, a creature that since her mortal birth had been morphing into something glorious?” He peered up at me, his eyes full of silent entreaty. “On that day you were a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, flexing its womanly and otherworld power and glowing with promise. If it’s possible for a woman to become more beautiful day by day you were she.”

I turned away from his piercing gaze, gripping the arms of the chair. I could recall that day so well. A man had followed me up a side street. He’d appeared from nowhere, a fleet panther. He’d pushed up against me, a white man, someone I took to be a businessman. Pinning me between the wall and his body and brutally pushing aside my underwear, he’d stuck his finger so roughly up inside my sex that it had brought tears to my eyes. I’d raised my knee and kicked him in the groin the way Granny had taught me, before I’d fled sobbing up a dirty side street where the gutters had been overflowed with filth and stray dogs had sniffed at my feet. I’d tucked myself into the dark shadows of a doorway, heart hammering. At first I’d thought he’d followed me because, when I had looked up, I had seen a man in a rather crumpled white linen suit staring down at me with molten eyes of such inexpressible emotion my head had swum and I had had to steady myself. It was Shankar—the man I’d come to love with all my heart.

Men followed me everywhere. It was part of the curse of being a Spence woman that I couldn’t shake off. I wasn’t a whore and I was sure I did nothing to invite it, but as Granny Rowena used to say, ‘A Spence woman is a Spence woman and she has a sex magic about her that attracts men like bees around a honeypot’.

“Men can be such beasts and I’m a man, of course. You trust me don’t you?” He’d grinned at me. “I’m a doctor so let me see that foot. You went down hard and I think you twisted it.”

Yes,
I’d thought with a moan of consternation, glancing down, and seeing I’d broken the heel on my shoe. My foot really did hurt.

Crouching down, he’d unfastened the strap inspecting the broken heel of the shoe carefully, then, holding my foot and putting it on his knee, he had spent a great deal of time manipulating it. For the first time in my life I’d yielded to one orgasm after another, precipitated solely by the touch of his fingers.

“It’s only bruised. Lean on me and I’ll take you back to the hotel.”

We’d crossed the market square. No one had seemed to notice I was walking in my stockinged feet, the doctor holding my shoes in one hand and my arm in the other, his hand on my flesh burning every place he’d touched. In the hotel foyer he’d done something unthinkable for an Indian gentleman. Before I had time to complain, he’d scooped me up and carried me to my room. Once there, he’d unlocked the door, ferried me to the bed and, unclipping my suspender belt and rolling my stockings down my leg, he had begun bending my ankle this way and that to test for an injury. I’d wanted him to kiss it and yes, then he had been kissing it all over as strange shivers pulsed through me and his eyes teased me.