Wicked Pleasures (39 page)

‘Baby, I promise to sit with you. Come on.’

They went down, ran across to the waiting line of the carriages. ‘The longest ride you do,’ said Angie to the driver, clambering in.

The carriage set off towards the park; Baby sat there, half terrified he would suddenly see someone he knew, half overwhelmed by pleasure. Angie looked at him and grinned.

‘I know what you’re thinking. Don’t. Whoever do you think would recognize you in one of these things? Give me your hand.’

Baby gave her his hand; she kissed it tenderly and drew it beneath the rug the driver had tucked around them.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘a little reunion, I think.’

He felt, with a stab that was almost fear, her thighs, smooth, warm, silky soft; she was wearing stockings, not tights, and she pulled his hand very very slowly, gently upwards, into the heat of her, pausing every now and again, and then suddenly, it was there, his hand, where it wanted to be, placed on her bush. Baby froze, stilled with desire and delight; she had no panties on, she was naked beneath her black jersey dress. Angie, having guided his hand to its destination, moved her own, under the blanket, seeking out his fly; he felt her moving towards it, stroking his own thighs with infinite gentleness, and then slowly, slowly undoing the fly, reaching, tenderly tentative, inside for his penis. He felt her fingers on it, moving, feathering up and down, lingering on the tip; he moaned, and she giggled and leant over and covered his mouth with her own. As her tongue sought out his, her hard, thrusting, greedy tongue, Baby felt as if he had been given food after a long long period of hunger, had come into shelter from burning sunlight; he lay back, and began to explore her with his hand, feeling into the soft moistness, remembering vividly, joyfully, her infinitely greedy tumultuous depths; she moaned herself then, and turned her back to him, suddenly, carelessly, lifting herself onto him; Baby felt her, wet hot, felt his penis suddenly inside her, felt her closing round him, pushing, pulling at him. He put his hands around her waist, pushed his fingers down over her stomach, into her bush, seeking out her clitoris, finding it, hot, hard; she was panting, moaning herself now, clenching and unclenching her vagina, and he felt in a great torrential primeval urge his orgasm rising, rising in him, into her, and as he came, as his pleasure exploded, broke, she thrust harder, harder against him, drawing it into her own; and then it was over, and they lay there beneath the blanket, staring up at the stars, eased of hunger, oddly at peace, as the carriage proceeded in a more respectable and orderly way around Central Park.

After that it was simply a matter of logistics. There was no way he was going to let her leave his life again.

‘I love you,’ he said as they lay in bed in her hotel, after a second, more leisurely piece of lovemaking. ‘I was mad to let you go.’

‘Yes you were,’ said Angie. She reached across him for her champagne. ‘I read somewhere that if you dip a cock in champagne, it tastes absolutely delicious.’

‘The cock or the champagne?’

‘Not sure. Let’s try.’

‘My cock wouldn’t fit into that champagne glass,’ said Baby.

‘Bighead.’

‘No, just the cock.’

‘I bet it will.’

‘OK.’

It didn’t, to his considerable complacency; so she poured the champagne over it, and then wriggled down and started lapping it off. Baby smiled at her golden head, stroked it, felt his penis rising again.

‘Baby Praeger, you certainly haven’t lost any of your potency in these ten years,’ said Angie.

‘Oh but I have,’ he said, his eyes momentarily heavy. ‘It’s only you working your magic.’

‘Really?’ She was clearly charmed by this thought. ‘You mean you sometimes can’t? With … ?’

‘I sometimes can’t. With anyone.’

‘Baby! Does that mean other ladies? Apart from Mary Rose.’

‘I’m afraid it does,’ he said, his eyes heavy with love as he looked at her, ‘but I have to tell you that I have never been to bed with anyone, in this whole long ten years, without thinking of you.’

Angie sat up suddenly and looked at him. Her eyes were oddly bright; she brushed at them impatiently.

‘Shit,’ she said, her voice slightly shaky. ‘Shit, Baby, you mustn’t say things like that.’

He asked her about her own life; she told him there had been a couple of relationships, neither of them long-lasting, a couple of briefer ones. ‘I really haven’t been very into sex,’ she said, suddenly efficient. ‘I’ve been too busy being a tycoon.’

‘And I’m really proud of you. I think you’re wonderful. Do you live alone?’

‘Yes, in a house in St John’s Wood. It’s really pretty, I can’t wait to show it to you.’

‘A whole house to yourself ?’

‘Well, most of it. I have my grandmother in the basement.’

‘You do? Well that’s wonderful.’

‘I felt I owed her one. As they say. And she’s fun, even if she is seventy-something. Oh my goodness, Baby, that reminds me, I haven’t got around to cancelling that standing order to the rest home in Bournemouth. I’m so sorry. It’s only been two or three months, I’ll do it right away.’

‘All right, darling, no rush. Talking of rushing, I really do have to go.’

‘Where are you supposed to be?’ she said, stroking his shoulder with her finger.

‘Oh, at one of my schmoozing sessions. I have a whole host of new activities, Angie, you’d be amazed. I’ve gone into showbiz banking. My father hates it.’

‘But your father doesn’t have any say any more?’

‘He has a great deal of say,’ said Baby, laughing, ‘but that’s where it ends. Thank God.’

‘Tell me about your showbiz activities.’

‘Another time. How long are you here for? I didn’t dare ask you before.’

‘Oh,’ said Angie, ‘another week. Maybe two. I have some clients looking for property over here.’

Baby was very impressed.

Praegers, it was generally agreed, had changed more than a little since Baby Praeger’s ascension to power. There were those who thought the changes were for the better, and those who thought quite the reverse; but nobody could deny their existence. Baby had gone in for glitz: had sponsored causes and charities, donated generously to the arts, established high-profile sporting events. The Praeger Vets Baseball Team took on all comers (almost invariably losing to them) in a blaze of media attention, and attendance at Baby’s annual Celebrity Golf Game in Palm Springs was mandatory for anyone who was anyone (or indeed wanted to be).

Fred III hated the whole thing and said so; he was suspicious of it, he said, and particularly of Baby’s own high-profile role.

Baby, warmly confident in his own abilities and the clement climate of Wall Street altogether at the time, told him he didn’t understand, that it was the age of the personality, that Fred should take a look at Bruce Wasserstein, Peter Cohen, Dennis Levine. ‘You hear those names and you think smart and you think dynamic, the clients rush in.’ Fred retorted that it was dangerous, that the guys pulled in the clients all right, and then left with them; what was right was the system at Goldmans where you had to be ten years just to get to be a partner.

‘Times have changed, Dad,’ said Baby.

Baby was actually just a little concerned about the partner situation at Praegers. The senior guys were just fine: Pete Hoffman, Chris Hill, Mike Stevens, and the other seven, all rocks: experienced, strong, able, backing him to the hilt. But he was uncomfortably aware he had put in some just slightly less rock-like, less able people as junior partners over the past year: notably Chuck Drew, charming, golden friend of Jeremy Foster, brought in from the considerably lower echelons of Chase and placed on the board more to please Jeremy than to promote the greater good of Praegers, and Henry Keers, sharp, funny, ambitious, and showing promise but no more in the fast-developing M & A (Mergers and Acquisitions) department. Henry was a prime mover at the MidWeek Meeting, and he had an eye for his own superstar status; he was exactly the kind of man Fred worried about. What was really dangerous about these promotions, Baby knew, was that it weakened his defence amongst the board against men he didn’t want in. Pete Hoffman was rooting for his own son, Gabe, now a senior vice president, brilliant, hard-working and ferociously ambitious. But Baby didn’t worry overmuch about any of it; life was too much fun.

The development of the relationship with Angie proved complex. Her business was in London, and that was where she had to be. She was not playing at it, she explained to him, it was worth a lot of money, and she had to take care of it. He could see that.

After the first fortnight, while she looked (unsuccessfully for the most part, she said) for properties for her client, she went back to London. Baby missed her almost beyond endurance. It was as painful, if not more so, than the parting ten years earlier. Then he had been resolute, putting her out of his mind, determinedly ignoring the pain; now newly in love he could hardly stand it.

He made a trip to London, a forty-eight-hour stop-over; he booked in at the Savoy, and there they stayed for the entire time, never leaving the room, and hardly the bed. Once or twice he told the switchboard to say he was out, just to create the impression, to his office and to Mary Rose, should she phone more than once or twice, that he was indeed engaged on business and not confined to his suite. But the only expeditions he really made were into Angie’s apparently insatiable small person; and one brief one in her company to Harrods, to buy presents for the children. When he left she cried, and said she would come to New York when she could, but not for at least a month, she was very busy with several transactions, and there was no one else to handle them.

‘Can’t you get an assistant?’ said Baby gloomily, downing a treble brandy in the VIP departure lounge at Heathrow, and no, she said, no she certainly couldn’t, she would find herself ripped off totally, and would he consider leaving Praegers in the hands of Pete Hoffman and Chris Hill for more than a few days? Baby said he certainly would, and frequently did, when he went on business trips or vacations; and in any case he hardly thought the comparison was valid. Angie had a one-woman property business, not a billion-pound investment bank.

‘I daresay,’ said Angie, looking at him with a dangerous light in her green eyes, ‘I and my company are worth proportionately more than you and your company.’

‘Maybe,’ said Baby hastily. He realized he had absolutely no idea how to deal with professional and powerful women.

The compromise they reached would have seemed highly unsatisfactory if it hadn’t made him so happy. Once a month at least Angie flew to New York; once a month at least he went to London (or occasionally to Paris or Zurich, to allay Mary Rose’s suspicion). They were greatly aided in this by Concorde, which cut four hours off the flying time; Angie particularly enjoyed the phenomenon of leaving Heathrow at eight and arriving at JFK at exactly the same time or even a little earlier. One day just for the hell of it she flew over for lunch with Baby and back again; she had some news she wanted to share with him (a purchase of an entire row of very pretty Georgian cottages in Camberwell she had beaten two of the big boys to, by the simple process of getting the residents on her side and offering to pay their removal expenses) and lunching at the Lutèce seemed, she said, a particularly good way of celebrating. She wouldn’t even go to bed with him that day, she said it made the journey seem more extravagant if its purpose was simply lunch; Baby’s frustration was very largely alleviated by the charm of her gesture. After a while, when Angie was in New York she lived in her old apartment in the Village, which Baby had always found himself emotionally unable to sell; an agent had leased it out for him, on short-term
lets, and he reclaimed it easily. It was an exceptionally nice apartment, with big light lofty rooms, just off Vincent Square, and Angie after an initial protest agreed that it was more sensible than running up huge hotel bills. In any case, as Baby pointed out, they were a lot less likely to be recognized by anyone in the Village than in the environs of the Pierre Hotel.

As a cover for early morning visits to Angie, Baby took up running. He bought track suits and trainers, got up early every day, and set off at an extremely brisk pace in the direction of Central Park. Once out of sight of the apartment he would saunter on for a while, picking up a coffee at one of the early morning delis, and if the day was nice enough, actually go into the park and sit on a bench and admire the landscape and any passing female joggers or dog walkers. This routine only varied when Angie was in town, when he hailed a cab, drove down to the Village, removed the track suit and climbed into her bed. Mary Rose, who always left the apartment by seven thirty to go to her exercise class, consequently never saw him return (to remove a clean, unsweaty track suit and to climb, quite unnecessarily, in the bathtub), but she approved very much of his new regime, having urged him for years to take some exercise. It added considerably to Baby’s pleasure, as he lay entwined in Angie’s arms, to contemplate the rather different nature of the exercise he was actually taking from what Mary Rose complacently imagined.

He was charmed and delighted by the new Angie; he had never forgotten the pleasure of her, of her beauty, her just slightly sharp charm, her sense of fun, her innate sexiness, and those qualities, rich as ever, had been heightened, sharpened by absence, by not having her. But there was something else now, something totally unexpected and every bit as important, as valuable, and that was that she was in some strange way an equal, a business partner, someone with whom he could talk problems through. She had always listened, made observations, talked sense; but now she could look at a situation from every angle, proffer suggestions, examine arguments. The hours they spent talking money, tactics, successes, dangers, came to mean as much to Baby as the hours that preceded them making love; and in some strange way he found them as exciting. Talking a deal through with Angie, describing its conception, its progress, its traumas, its conclusion, was an oddly intense pleasure.

What he did not discuss with her – until it was far far too late – was what he came to think of as the Chuck Drew affair.