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‘Do you think they were still in here when the lava came?’ I am leaning against him, now. The etchings are so delicate, yet so businesslike. The theme of giving pleasure for money smoothly reproduced, but going back centuries. ‘Were they petrified exactly as it found them, you know, in flagrante?’
‘Some of them would have been, yes. But what a way to go.’ Now both his hands are resting on my hips. He’s stepped over the first of a series of lines today. An intricate game of hopscotch. But his fingers have been inside me now. He’s taken hold of me. I still ache down there, and I’m aching for much, much more.
I am too turned on by the pictures, by everything that has happened, to stop him. He runs his hands over my hips, down my legs, tugs the soft jersey dress.
‘Imagine coming to your favourite whore, paying your usual, getting her to service you every which way on the bed, hot, tangled, no clue what is erupting outside on the mountain, just what is erupting inside these walls, the client lost inside his whore, pumping his life away.’
He runs his fingers up under my dress and sinks them into the soft flesh of my butt cheeks above the stockings, stroking where he stroked me before. I push against him as the shivering starts and yes, there it is, the hardness straining into my back. Gustav Levi wants me.
‘They wouldn’t have stopped, would they, even if their hearts were clattering with fear?’ I dare to bring my hands onto his hips to keep him there as my nipples go rigid inside my dress. ‘They would have gone on and on, don’t stop until I come, whatever it is can’t touch us in here—’
‘That’s right. Safe inside the lupanare.’ His voice is a groan as my hand runs over the definite bulge. I fold my fingers lightly round the shape of him. ‘Everyone at it like there’s no tomorrow.’
‘But you and I have tomorrow.’ I close my eyes, swallow, squeeze very lightly. I feel the jump and swell of his response. ‘And tomorrow you can tell me what you think of my portfolio, Mr Levi.’
‘You make that sound so dirty. I’ve managed to corrupt you in a few short hours. Oh, God, this is like taking a hot meal from a starving prisoner, but not now, Serena.’ He pushes me gently away, my dress draping unhappily back into place. ‘Not now.’
I turn to look at him and he is standing where I left him, his hands hanging loosely by his sides.
‘You’ll see I’m not as sweet as you’re painting me when you see what’s in my portfolio.’ I smooth my hands down over my legs, fan them out over the throbbing area where he touched me. ‘My work was becoming risqué long before we met! Easily as erotic as these.’
He fiddles his jacket closed as if trying to button up the red-blooded part of him. He takes my arm and leads me down the corridor towards the lift and presses the down button.
‘Yet again you’ve whetted my appetite, Serena. Actually I’ve seen at least one very sensual picture on your camera. The one of the couple kissing in the rain? Where is that?’
‘Pont Neuf in Paris. Not a very original location.’
‘But exquisitely romantic nevertheless. His hand right on her backside, pushing her against that lamp post on the bridge? Shocking? No. Sexy? Extremely.’
‘Wait until you see my Venice series.’
His eyes flash black fire as he steps towards me. ‘Tell me more, you little minx.’
‘They are classified until we both sign. Yes? Then my portfolio will be your portfolio.’
I rip open the envelope, take out the one-page contract, skim the contents until I get to the figures 50:50. He stands there as if his stuffing has been knocked out. I laugh softly and reach into his jacket. What a way to pitch my work. I may as well have thrown a dart directly onto the bull’s eye.
I let my hand brush against the smooth Egyptian cotton of his shirt, feel the thumping of Gustav’s heart inside his chest, and as he looks down in surprise I reach into his inside pocket and draw out the heavy silver fountain pen he used earlier.
‘How did you know?’
‘You’re not the only one who watches people like a hawk.’
I can’t believe my own cheek. He laughs as I rest the paper on the wall and sign on the dotted line.
There’s another pause between us. These pauses get longer, and more intense, yet they’re easy pauses. I’m happy in Gustav Levi’s silences. The relief of making a decision is like the lifting of a weight. The frisson of anxiety that I might have signed my life away, done something disastrous, is like the flicker of a distant torch about to run out of battery. And easy to dismiss.
It’s only till Christmas.
‘Your work is marvellous, Miss Folkes, and you are going to make millions. I can’t believe how lucky we are to have discovered you!’
As the lift doors start to close him off from my view, I realise that he’s said exactly what I was praying someone would say to me. He truly is the answer to my prayers.
A satisfied smile, shining with possibility, spreads across his face and behind him an aeroplane cuts a swathe through the velvety evening sky as it starts its descent to Heathrow.
CHAPTER SIX
It’s the tall dark mansion on the corner of the square, somewhere in Mayfair. The one the witches swerved past on Halloween night because they were too scared to bang on the knocker to trick or treat. The one he started to walk towards that night then changed course to walk me to that cocktail bar. The one that is now being battered by gusts of wind as a storm revs up and tips buckets of rain over me as I struggle up the hill.
I should have known that’s where Gustav Levi lives.
What I didn’t expect when he invited me to his house tonight to celebrate our long and happy association was that no-one would answer the door. I ring the bell and bash at the knocker for a few minutes, getting wetter and wetter, before the door swings open apparently of its own accord. I hesitate. It doesn’t creak on its hinges, but it’s pretty Hammer Horror nonetheless.
I follow a trail of bright lights set into the edges of the floor, the treads of the stairs curving up into the shadows upstairs, enticing me from the darkened, red-lacquer-painted hallway down another flight of stairs into the basement, and the second thing I didn’t expect was that I’d find the man of the house in a vast, quartz kitchen wearing chef’s whites and breaking eggs into a huge glass bowl.
‘Ah, you found us.’ He looks up at me with a boyish grin and starts whisking so energetically that he has to follow the bowl across the counter. ‘And so we come back to the square where it all began.’
‘Us?’
‘My household. My underlings.’ He waves the whisk vaguely. ‘Usually you’ll find all sorts of people coming and going here. But tonight it’s skeleton staff, you might say. I’ve even let Dickson off tonight.’
‘Dickson?’ I look around.
‘My chauffeur and pilot. Doubles up as my chef, too. But a man’s got to find a way of relaxing when he comes home from running his empire and sealing deals with startling new talents he’s picked up in the street. So I’m cooking tonight.’
To cover the sudden chill of awkwardness I walk around the kitchen making a show of examining everything. It really is state of the art, with several ovens of various sizes and at least six gas rings the size of hub caps on the oversized central hob. What did I think Gustav was going to be cooking? Toe of frog and eye of newt?
‘So you didn’t pick me at all. You live right here in the square. You were just taking a constitutional that night and happened to bump into me.’
He shakes his head calmly. I see what’s different about him tonight. He’s had his hair cut. It’s sweaty with his culinary efforts, but it makes him look tidier, more formal, but somehow safer. And it means I can see his eyes clearly, and tonight they are very bright. ‘Believe what you like, Serena. I picked you, as soon as I saw you.’
‘You thought I was a boy.’
‘Touché.’ He grabs at the escaping bowl and we both start to smile. ‘But very soon you’ll see that we’re a perfect match. In fact, I can’t wait to get started.’
‘On the exhibition? Or on me?’
He allows himself a brief chuckle. ‘Both. Although the exhibition I believe is nearly ready for lift off. It’s the other part of the contract which is beginning to feel a little like the blind leading the blind.’
‘The sex part, do you mean?’
‘I love that you’re so direct, Serena. Was I really that explicit?’
‘You didn’t have to be. You started off by touching me, remember? Very intimately. I took that as, I don’t know, an introduction to what you have in mind?’
He puts down the egg whisk and rubs at his hair. Now that it’s shorter it stands up in black spikes and makes his face look more open. ‘I confess you caught me on the hop. Once I’d met you and seen the work stored on the camera, I wanted to do something to keep you here. Otherwise I feared that you would simply vanish into thin air. Or someone else would snap you up. So I thought of doing it this way. Making it personal as well as professional. Having said all that, I’m not sure I thought it through.’ He neatly rips a huge paper bag and releases a cloud of flour. ‘I think it’s a case of suck it and see.’
I turn my back on him before he sees me blushing, and walk as calmly as I can to the end of the kitchen. The scraping of my feet sounds intrusive on the underheated floor. Through the big doors I can see, in the long thin moonlit paved garden, small trees and rose bushes in pots being bent and buffeted by the rain and rising wind. I lean my forehead on the glass.
I’m well and truly trapped in his web now. Gustav’s designers and printers are working all hours. The pictures have already been selected for enlargement and framing, and the railings leading along the street towards the front door of the Levi Building have been cleared to display the publicity poster we’ve chosen for my exhibition. It will show the crocodile of mini witches caught by my camera on their way to the party, lit by the streetlamps and halted in their tracks by the little one falling over. In the next day or so that image will be developed, enlarged, elongated and fixed to the railings, the witches waiting in their various impatient attitudes under the melancholy statue for the little one to right herself.
‘No going back now, Serena.’ Gustav rubs the foil from a pat of butter round a couple of ramekins. ‘We’re on the slippery slope.’
‘I like you barefoot,’ I remark as he dances from what the chefs would call the mise en scène over to the fridge and back again. ‘And I like those dark jeans. You were wearing ones like those the night we met.’
‘I’m flattered you remember.’ He stops buttering and whisking and looks down at himself. Holds the white apron out comically like Little Bo Peep. ‘You like it rough, Serena?’
I bite my lip. He does too, biting down the shocked smile we share at the naughtiness of his remark. Yes, I like it rough, I think to myself. Or I will when I try it.
‘The suit distances you, that’s all. Makes you unreachable. Maybe first impressions are the ones that stay with us?’
He frowns as he ponders the question. Ponders me. ‘I think I like you every which way, Serena. Though I’m glad the tomboy is beating a retreat.’
‘I can be all things to all men. But yes. It’s kind of fun, and kind of pervy, dressing as my cousin.’
He laughs lightly and turns to a tray on the counter. I nearly tell him I also prefer him with his arms showing, because I love his strong hands and what I know they can do, and his strong forearms with the ropes of muscle. But I say nothing.
‘Have a drink,’ he says. ‘Shaken, or stirred?’
I pick up a glass of vodka martini from a tray on the counter and once again relish the slow burn of it down my throat. I hold the glass up and watch how his movements sparkle and undulate through the clear liquid.
‘Dip these nachos into the tzatziki. I’m willing to bet you haven’t eaten anything today.’
I hitch myself onto a stool and drain the entire glass. Take another one. ‘You’d be right. The cupboard is bare at Polly’s flat. I had a sandwich at the gallery today. So what’s this going to be? Pavlova? Mousse? Meringue?’
He moves the bowl along the counter to sieve the flour into the eggs. ‘Double baked cheese soufflé, if you must know.’
I watch the way the muscles in his arms flex as he whisks.
He catches me looking. Stops whisking and holds the bowl over his head to check the whites are done. ‘And if you’re lucky, maybe a taste of my famous Coquilles Saint Jacques.’
‘And for afters?’
‘What my grandmother used to call wait and see pudding.’ He dances back to the huge American fridge and brings out a bright berry coulis and some clotted cream. ‘Where’s my piping bag?’
I snigger like a schoolgirl. He looks at the limp, wrinkled bag in his hands, looking exactly like an oversized condom, and chuckles with me. His face is flushed from the heat of the kitchen. He’s unshaven again. Yes. I like him rough. It makes his face shadowy and manly, makes his eyes bright.
He grabs a hunk of mature cheddar and starts grating.
‘What’s that cheese ever done to you?’ I laugh.
‘Just getting it prepped for the second bake. Timing is crucial. Hey, look at you,’ he says suddenly, reducing the hunk of cheese to a few crumbs. ‘You’re soaked. What was I thinking? I should have got Dickson to collect you from the flat, but now you need to get dry. If you go up the stairs, as far up as you can go, you’ll find a shower room and something to put on. It’s the old attic. The previous owners claim it’s haunted.’
I let out a nervous tinkle of laughter. ‘I’m too tired for jokes, Gustav. You asked me to be at your beck and call, but you don’t have to scare me half to death as well.’
‘I didn’t mean to. Some people find that an added attraction. But I’m hoping you will consider this your home.’ He waves his grater in the direction of the stairs. ‘And when you come down I have a little gift for you.’
I wander obediently through the big house. There’s no-one else here. The skeleton staff consists of this mysterious man cutting and chopping and baking in his kitchen. And me.
The night gets wilder, pressing black and insistent against the windows as I climb the stairs, past closed doors, past low lights and pillar candles, soft music piped presumably from a central system Gustav is controlling from the kitchen. For the first time it occurs to me that all this melancholy magnificence, bought with the spoils of success, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if he has no-one to share it with.
The room at the top really is under the eaves, but the beams have been painted white as has all the old, distressed French-style furniture. White muslin curtains stir slightly against the glass doors leading out onto a little balcony. On a large four-poster, like something Scarlett O’Hara might sleep in, someone has laid out a white silk negligee. Why does everyone think I should dress as a vestal virgin? Don’t two years of active, adolescent sex with Jake count?
But I shiver suddenly as the rain slaps against the long thin window.
As I step into the warm spray of water in the little shower room attached, Polly’s voice in my ear has changed to: suck it and see. What’s not to like?
I am so ravenous and the jazz music playing in the background is so mellow that it feels perfectly casual and natural half an hour later to be perching barefoot against the quartz island in the kitchen devouring soufflé, warm bread, and cherry mousse. None of this strikes me as at all odd. That I’m eating supper in a strange house, wearing nothing but a white negligee given to me by a man I only met a few days ago. What else would I be doing?
Now softer music is playing throughout the house and Gustav has gone upstairs ahead of me and lit soft lamps everywhere. He has also taken off his whites and is wearing a soft blue and white striped shirt unbuttoned at the neck.
He waits for me solemnly as I come up from the kitchen to the ground floor and puts his hand in the small of my back to usher me into a little art deco cocktail bar off the hallway. The walls in here are of dark purple velvet. The chairs and stools are the same. It’s like walking into the cushion of a giant jewellery box. Even the bottles crammed onto every available glass shelf behind the mirrored bar are filled with liquors gleaming in jewel-bright colours.
‘Nightcap?’ He holds out a champagne bottle. His face looks almost bearded in the flickering candlelight, and the wolfish air has returned. His black eyes are asking questions again. But despite our signed agreement, despite eating together tonight, even though he touched me, pushed his fingers into me so intimately to pin me down, to make his point, to stake his claim, I still don’t know the answer.
‘Just one, thanks. And the food was great. Who knew?’ I walk a little shakily across the polished wooden floor, over the creamy rug, aware of the silk negligee clinging to my legs. Still sore from his fondling. Aware of his dark eyes trying to read me again. ‘But then I ought to get going. It’s quite a long way back to Gabriel’s Wharf.’
‘You’re going nowhere dressed like that, signorina!’He twists the cork out with a pop. I was right. He is staring straight up my legs, directly at the place where he touched me. I perch quickly on the arm of the sofa and cross one thigh over the other. He chuckles. ‘But I would love to see it. You, running through the driving rain in nothing but a petticoat. Hailing a cab on Piccadilly in the middle of a thunderstorm. Eyes huge. Hair streaming down like a waterfall. You’d look like a Hitchcock damsel in distress.’
I look down at my body. My arms and legs are bare, my feet are bare, like his, and the lovely garment shimmers, the spaghetti straps slipping down my arms, delicate silk catching the light from the sconces and candles and picking out the tremor of the fabric as I move and breathe, lingering on my curves. And oh God, the low light lingers now on the stiffening of my nipples. I am wearing nothing underneath after the shower, because I had nothing dry to wear.
I’m learning the different ways he looks at me. The businesslike stare, deadpan but flashing with interest and enthusiasm. The concentrated one of this evening as he shuts out the rest of the world and whips egg whites and cheese into an ambrosial fluff. There’s another look, too. This one. The magician’s sleight of hand, which changes him from a formal, polite, reasonably easy colleague or friend to a man harbouring deeper, darker intentions.
That’s the one I glimpsed in the gallery, when he marked me, hooked me with his fingers. And that’s the one who seems to be here now, standing behind the bar. The penetrating gaze that sends shivers of doubt, fear, anticipation, and excitement down my spine.
He hasn’t laid a finger on me this evening. Hasn’t so much as mentioned the pictures which have been framed today, especially the controversial Venetian ones which are bound to cause a stir when the show opens. He hasn’t mentioned what else he requires me to do to fulfil the personal part of our agreement. Maybe he’s lulling me into a false security, lulling me into forgetting that this is all a lot more complex than just being colleagues, with his soufflé and his easy chat, and now the champagne. Maybe soon he’s going to demand the next instalment. And maybe I’m going to shock him by being totally ready, willing and able.
But for now I play his game, assuming nonchalance. I fold my arms. ‘How am I supposed to get home, then?’
‘If our Dickson was here, he’d take you home, semi-naked or not. He knows not to touch my property, however tempting. But as he’s not, and I’ve had too much drink to drive you myself, you’re staying here, Serena.’ Gustav hands me a flute brimming with palest gold and reaches out to run a finger down my jaw. My eyes flutter at the touch. Surely he can see how I react to him even with the slightest contact? Surely he can see what he’s awoken?
‘But—’
‘No more questions,’ he insists softly, pressing his finger on my mouth in his familiar gesture. His eyes spark as my tongue flicks out to lick his finger. I know he’s feeling the same clench of desire inside him that I am.
I reach up to take his hand, lace our fingers together. They are longer than mine, and stronger, and warmer, but somehow they fit so well. ‘Gustav,’ I whisper. ‘When?’
His eyes blaze back at me as he swallows hard. He lifts our joined hands towards his mouth, brushes them over his warm lips. I try not to squeal with impatience.
Then he gently extricates his fingers.
‘First we drink to celebrate! That first glass down in one go. And then another, I think, to quench any nerves.’
‘I’m not nervous.’ I keep my voice low. Hope it’s seductive.
He clears his throat. ‘Tomorrow we prepare for your private view, and we still have a lot to do. Tonight, I will try to answer your question, Serena. Starting with this.’
I do what he says. Drink the flute of champagne in one go, and it feels as if I could float off the floor. Then he hands me a little blue box tied with a scarlet ribbon.
