To Love, Honour & Betray

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything to you at the time—not until I’d told Ma—but Ry and I … it could be more than just a few weeks I’ll be spending in America.’ She paused, allowing her words to sink in, but Garth wasn’t in need of any extra time to assimilate what she was telling him. He had known … guessed … sensed already, his guesswork keeping pace with her carefully delivered words.

As his hand gripped the telephone receiver, he could feel his palm starting to sweat. At the same time, a cold shock of nausea was gripping his stomach. Now he knew why Claudia had been trying to get in touch with him.

‘Daddy, are you still there?’ he heard Tara demanding uncertainly.

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ he told her, praying that his voice sounded far calmer than he felt.

‘Can you talk to Ma for me?’ Tara was asking him. ‘I know she’s upset and the last thing I want to do is to hurt her, but I love Ry so much…. I just wish there was some way we could all be together, but it’s a bit like it was when you and Ma told me that you were going to divorce, isn’t it? Sometimes you just can’t have all the people you love with you.

‘Ryland’s family, his work, are in Boston. He’s always known that it’s expected that he’ll go back to take his place in the family firm and it’s what he wants to do. You and Ma will be able to come over for holidays. I’ve already told Ma that … and we’ll be able to come over here, and besides, nothing is settled yet. I’ve still got to go through the grilling process,’ Tara went on mock-humorously. ‘And according to Ry, a full investigation by the FBI is nothing to what his aunt is going to put me through. She’s going to want to see family trees, proof of a clean bill of health and a total lack of any inherited disruptive genes before she’ll even call me by my first name, never mind accept that Ry wants to marry me, according to him. Not that Ry cares whether or not she does approve, but he says that won’t matter to her. Once she realises how we feel about one another, she’ll set the full investigative process into motion whether we agree to it or not.

‘She’s the main shareholder in the family business—her late husband, Ry’s father’s brother, was the elder son. When Ry’s uncle died, naturally his controlling share of the business passed on to her. Ry’s father has some shares and like Ry he works for the business. From what Ry has told me about her, she’s terribly starchy. Apparently she’s going to want to know all about my own family background. Not that I’m worried, really. It will be easy peasy. Gramps and Nan go way back and the Brig knows the name and address and how many fillings every single member of the clan has ever had. Daddy, are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Garth confirmed quietly.

‘You will speak to Ma for me, won’t you?’ Tara coaxed. ‘I know that secretly she was hoping I’d marry a nice local boy and settle down within pram walking distance of Ivy House and I’d have liked that, too, but … I really do love Ry.’

‘Have you applied for your visa yet?’ Tara heard her father asking her sombrely.

‘I’ve filled in the forms, but Ry says there won’t be any problems putting down that this is a holiday and we can sort the rest out over there. That’s funny. Ma asked me exactly the same question.’

After he had finished speaking with Tara, Garth tried Claudia’s number again even though it was almost midnight.

Once more there was no reply. Where was she? Tara had told him she was going out. Out where and with whom? The man in the newspaper, Luke Palliser, whose expression and body language had made it so plain that he wanted far more than a mere business relationship? Was she even now in his arms … in his bed? Stop it, Garth warned himself as he paced the floor. What the hell was happening to him? Surely he knew Claudia better than that. The last thing that would be on her mind right now would be sex, as he ought to know. The only thing, the only person, on her mind right now would be Tara. Even when Tara was a baby, he had once half-jokingly told Claudia he felt she loved her more than she had ever loved him or could ever love him.

‘Yes, I think I do,’ Claudia had agreed seriously, ‘but it’s a very different kind of love. The love that perhaps only a woman who has already lost one child can know. It doesn’t take away from my love for you, Garth. It’s simply different … very different.’

After the taxi had dropped her off outside her apartment block, Estelle made sure it was well out of sight before punching a number into her mobile phone. Perhaps she was being overcautious but she had made it a rule never to mix her private and public personae, and Blade was very much part of the intensely private side of her life.

‘But that’s close to incest,’ a friend had gasped in shock when as a young teenager Estelle had boasted in lavish detail about just what kind of relationship she actually enjoyed with her stepbrother. The other girl had been shocked, but Estelle enjoyed knowing that what she and Blade did together would have been forbidden by their parents. It was all the more exciting and exhilarating knowing what secrecy and deceit they had to employ.

When she had told Blade what she had boasted to a friend, they had had an argument during which he had hit her once very hard across the mouth before forcing her to go down on him thirstily with her mouth as he swore at her and not stopping until he had finally come, his semen spilling from her mouth and running down over her naked body.

Estelle had found it one of the most thrilling, erotic things they had ever done and had her own orgasms without his even touching her, long before he had come himself. She had been thirteen then and Blade had been eighteen. They had continued their sexual relationship all through Blade’s years at university as well as her own—frantic, heated, obsessively driven sado-masochistic sex sessions interspersed with long time periods when they neither spoke nor even saw one another.

Estelle could remember one particular occasion when they hadn’t seen one another from the time Blade had returned to university at the end of the summer until his arrival at home just before Christmas. She had been out with friends when he arrived—a deliberate ploy—knowing how infuriated he would be when she wasn’t there waiting for him. But the party she had gone to had turned out to be rather wilder than she had expected. The school friend who was giving it had an older brother who had turned up with his friends.

Estelle hadn’t had sex with them; she had grown wary and wiser since the days when she had enjoyed confiding all her secrets to her friends. The outside world knew and saw one Estelle; she and Blade knew quite another. But she had enjoyed some pretty heavy snogging sessions and when she arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, very much on a sexually driven high, fuelled in reality far more by the knowledge of what potentially lay ahead of her with Blade than what had already happened, the thrill that had shot through her body as Blade unlocked the front door to her was almost orgasmic in itself.

He didn’t speak; neither of them did. Instead, he simply stood at the bottom of the stairs watching her while she walked up. By the time she reached the top, her nipples ached as though they were already raw, she felt wetter than she had ever felt in her whole life and her clitoris felt so swollen she could hardly walk.

Her bedroom with its own en suite bathroom was at the opposite end of the house from that of her mother and father. Her mother was fond of saying that she believed that teenage girls needed their privacy, but what Estelle knew she meant in reality was that she simply didn’t want to be bothered with her.

Estelle had learned long ago that her mother neither liked nor loved her—and she certainly hadn’t wanted her. It was no secret to Estelle that her conception had been an accident since her mother had never wanted children.

‘I’ll kill myself,’ Estelle had once threatened dramatically as a girl. ‘You just want to get rid of me!’

As she turned away from her, Estelle had heard her mother saying grimly, ‘Isn’t that the truth!’ But it had been another few years before Lorraine had bluntly told her that she had tried to abort Estelle in the early days of her pregnancy.

‘I believe a girl Estelle’s age is old enough to be trusted to make her own rules,’ Lorraine responded with a dismissive toss of her head when people commented on the amount of freedom she allowed Estelle. As if one difficult child weren’t enough, Ethian Morton, her second husband and Blade’s father, had been less than pleased when his first wife’s partner had declared that Blade was beyond their control thanks to the poor quality of the fathering he had received during his parents’ marriage and that they were passing the responsibility for the boy back to his natural father.

Despite being expelled from three boarding schools for inappropriate behaviour, much to Ethian’s relief Blade had managed to scrape through enough A levels to get into an admittedly second-rate university. Both parents were also relieved when neither of their offspring had wanted to join them on the skiing holiday they were due to take, starting just as soon after the Christmas festivities had ended as they had decently been able to arrange it, which meant, in fact, that they were flying out to Colorado on Boxing Day.

‘You’re leaving Blade and Estelle at home on their own?’ one neighbour had asked, unable to conceal her feelings.

‘Blade’s an adult,’ Lorraine had reminded her, affronted, ‘and he and Estelle get on wonderfully well together. In point of fact, they’re closer in many ways than if they were actually brother and sister. He’s very protective of her. It’s quite sweet, really.

‘Nosy cow,’ she had said angrily to Ethian later. ‘Just because she runs around those noisy brats of hers all day long and enjoys playing earth mother and martyr.’

Estelle’s bathroom was mirrored all along one wall. Blade’s suggestion and her fifteenth-birthday present from her parents. When she walked into it, she didn’t bother closing the door. She tugged off the skimpy dress she had been wearing, let it fall to the floor and then stood in front of the mirror staring at her reflection. Her mouth was swollen, the bright red lipstick she favoured smeared. She was tall and slim, her breasts firm and high enough for her not to need to bother wearing a bra, and besides, she liked the feel of her nipples rubbing against the fabric of her clothes and she liked even more the looks she got from men when they saw their taut outline.

Eyes half-closed, she licked the swollen flesh of her mouth, sliding her hand inside her knickers so that she could feel her own wetness. A familiar clutching sensation seized her lower belly. Closing her eyes, she wriggled out of her knickers.

She heard the bathroom door close and slowly opened her eyes, one hand still on her body, teasing the quivering piece of flesh her clitoris had become, the other still holding her wet knickers, her gaze locking with Blade’s as she returned his silently intense scrutiny.

‘What have you been doing?’ he demanded expressionlessly as he came towards her, the question almost a mild, uncritical whisper, but Estelle knew better. Her heart started to pound as she felt the onset of a familiar feverish excitement and fear.

‘Smell,’ she taunted, holding out her knickers to him. As she knew he would, he took them, smoothing them out very gently before inhaling the scent of her sex from them. Her sex and no one else’s.

‘Come here,’ he ordered, still using the same soft, gentle voice, but Estelle wasn’t deceived. Trembling from head to foot with the sensation that to her was almost more pleasurable than the release from it that lay ahead, she did as he instructed.

As she approached him, Blade unzipped his jeans, and as she had expected, he wasn’t wearing anything underneath them. His penis was stiff and rigidly erect, rising from its bed of thick, coarse, tangled dark hair. In the early days of their intimacy, his sexual organ had fascinated her and as a punishment for her ‘transgressions’ he had ordered her to wash his penis for him, sometimes by lapping it with her tongue, sometimes with soap and water.

Walking past her now, he lay down on the floor and commanded, ‘Come here.’ Estelle’s whole body convulsed, quivering with sexual urgency. ‘Sit on it,’ he demanded, drawing her towards his erect penis.

Willingly she complied, straddling him and lowering herself eagerly onto him. As she did so, he started to thrust upwards so forcefully that the sensation of him inside her was almost more pain than pleasure and at the same time he reached down between her legs and used his fingers on her clitoris.

It was too much for her self-control. Within seconds she had started to climax.

They spent what was left of the night in her bathroom and after he had finally spent himself and had his orgasm, Estelle knew that she was going to be sore, but she didn’t care. She had loved every moment with Blade, every moment.

The memory of that high still had the power to make her smile and to make her wet, very, very wet indeed. She was smiling now, her hand automatically reaching between her legs, her body turned into the protection of Blade’s doorway as she heard him answer her phone call.

‘Blade, it’s me, Estelle,’ she told him softly. ‘Are you in?’ That question was their private code and meant ‘I want sex.’

She could almost feel the dark, triumphant smile slicing his face as he told her softly, ‘No, I’m afraid I’m not. It’s all right, darling,’ she heard him saying as he half covered the receiver. ‘It’s only my sister.’ Then his voice dropped to a whiplash sting of mocking sound as he told her, ‘If you’re really desperate for it, Estelle, I could always talk you through it. You’ve always enjoyed that, haven’t you? Or, of course, you could come round and watch … even join in.’

Furious, Estelle cut the connection. She was more than well aware of Blade’s predilection for voyeurism and three in a bed, but right now she wasn’t in the mood for playing games or sharing. Right now she wanted him to herself. All to herself.

Angrily, she turned on her heel and started to walk towards her own apartment building. There was a man standing on the pavement several feet away from her, waiting to cross the road.

Hungrily, Estelle studied him, her eyes gleaming with predatory sexual urgency. He wasn’t her type, though, thin and pallid-looking, his body stance limp and docile, and no doubt his sex was the same.

Glaring at him in disgust, Estelle mentally cursed Blade, knowing how much he would be enjoying having the woman who was with him right now, all the more so because he knew Estelle was going hungry … wanting him, needing him.

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