The Perfect Sinner

‘’Fraid no can do, old chap,’ Max had told him, giving him his crocodile smile. ‘We’re pretty fully booked right now.’

Revenge indeed.

Max couldn’t really remember when he had first discovered this power he had within himself to hurt others. What he could remember, though, was the sickening sense of anger and fear he had felt when he had once overheard his father and his uncle David talking about him.

He had been about ten at the time and already feeling the effects of Louise and Katie’s arrival on his relationship with his parents. Max had never been the kind of child who liked being held or touched. Even before he could walk he had wriggled out of the reach of adults who would have picked him up and fussed over him, resenting, too, his cousin Olivia’s challenging presence in the arena of his life. Olivia, who was always cuddling up to his mother. Olivia, whom his mother seemed to like more than she liked him.

‘You’ve got a fine boy there,’ he could remember hearing his uncle David say enviously to his father. ‘The old man thinks I’m letting the side down by not giving him a grandson. Mind you, I’ve got to say, Jon, that you and Jenny don’t seem to realize just how lucky you are.

‘If Max was mine … Perhaps he should have been mine,’ David had said very softly. ‘Dad certainly seems to think so. He says that Max is far more like me than you. You know, Jon, sometimes it seems to me that you and Jenny don’t like your son very much.’

The two men had moved out of earshot before Max could hear any more. What had his uncle David meant? Why didn’t his parents like him?

Deliberately Max had begun to test them, anxious to discover if what his uncle David had said was the truth.

He asked for a new bicycle and he was told he couldn’t have one, but the twins were given new tricycles for their birthday.

Max had ‘borrowed’ one of them, and when it had ‘accidentally’ been pushed under the wheels of a delivery van and smashed, he had told his stern, grave-eyed father that he hadn’t meant to push the bike, he had just let go of it at the wrong time.

The other tricycle had mysteriously disappeared, and when questioned about it Max had stubbornly refused to say a word.

His sharp eyes began to notice how much more time his mother spent with the twins than she did with him, how much more fuss she made of Olivia.

He told her that he didn’t want her to take him to school any more and that he was going to ask his grandfather to tell uncle David to take him. This was despite the fact that more often than not it was Jenny who took Olivia to school, David being far too self-engrossed to consider doing anything so mundane as the school run.

Max began to listen keenly to the way his grandfather compared his two sons, praising David and speaking contemptuously of Max’s own father, Jon. His father, Max had discovered, was a man to be despised and ignored. His grandfather and his uncle David became the pivotal male role models in his life. To cloak his childish fear of his parents’ rejection of him, he began to cultivate a protective wall of indifference to any kind of adult emotion, and at the same time he started to learn how to manipulate it to gain his own ends.

In much the same way as he had learned to distrust his parents—his father might speak of chastising him out of love for him, but Max knew better: his father did not love him, his father did not like him. Max had heard his uncle David saying so—so Max also learned to distrust and alienate his peers. Better to protect himself by cultivating and inciting their antagonism than to risk the pain of being rejected by them.

Now, twenty odd years down the line, if anyone had suggested to Max that it was out of the seeds of his extreme emotional sensitivity and vulnerability as a child that his adult persona had grown, he would have laughed at them in cynical mockery.

He was as he was; he liked being as he was, and for those who didn’t like it or him—then too bad!

It irritated him that Justine had put him off instead of inviting him to go straight round, as he had expected her to do.

He had been looking forward to the release he knew that having sex with her would have brought him; not just for his sexual desire but also from the anger and sense of ill-usage that being with his family always caused him.

Madeleine, with her pathetic humility and eternal self-sacrificing; his parents with their well-mannered ‘niceness’; his cousin Olivia with her smug self-satisfaction; Luke with his arrogant superiority; and Saul, the perfect father and husband. God, but they all irritated the hell out of him. He knew how much they disapproved of him … disliked him…. How sorry they felt for ‘poor Maddy,’ how they talked about him behind his back, but he was the one whose name was beginning to appear with flattering regularity in the society columns; he was the one whose income was running very satisfactorily into six figures; he was the one who never lacked a willing sexual partner—a variety of willing sexual partners. Well, at least not normally!

Tomorrow he would have to punish Justine a little for tonight, to point out to her that he had virtually walked out on a family gathering just to be able to spend the night with her—it didn’t matter that he would have left, anyway; she wasn’t going to know that. Yes, just a small cooling off on his part; a discreet hint of withdrawal should be more than enough to make her come running, eager to appease him.

He had a meeting in chambers to attend in the afternoon, which would give him an excuse to cut short the time he spent with her, further reinforcing and underlining the stance he intended to take with her. It was their final chambers meeting before they closed down the office for the Christmas and New Year period.

Apart from Justine’s proposed divorce, Max had no other major work currently in progress, but that did not concern him too much. Early spring was always a good time for new briefs; the forced conviviality and intimacy of the winter months en famille often proved to be the breaking point for a marriage under strain. Also, Justine had already dropped several hints about inviting him to join her when she went skiing. Max had no particular love of either the sport or the cold, but he had to admit that the thought of Aspen and its social life, its socialites, was extremely tempting.

He would tell Maddy that it was business, of course. Getting off the bed, he started to strip off his clothes before heading for the shower.

Like virtually all other male members of his family, Max was a stunningly sexy man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a naturally well-muscled torso, he shared his male cousins’ dark-haired and very masculine good looks. However, in Max they possessed a certain almost magnetic intensity that one of his smitten victims had once described as making her completely spellbound, like standing in the path of a ten-ton lorry, knowing it had the potential to destroy you and yet being so hyped up on the mixture of adrenaline-induced excitement and fear that knowledge produced that you simply couldn’t move out of its way.

‘It’s that look of cold ruthlessness in his eyes,’ she had continued, shivering sensually. ‘You just know, the moment you look at him, that he doesn’t give a damn about you or your emotions, but somehow you just can’t help yourself.’

There was a sharp ache in Max’s body, which he knew from experience could only be alleviated by sex. He smiled grimly to himself as he turned on the shower. He should, after all, have taken Maddy to bed before he left Haslewich. Although he would never have told her so, despite her lack of self-esteem and her plainness, there was about Maddy a very rich vein of sexual warmth and generosity, a femininity, a womanliness that Max knew perfectly well most men would have found extremely alluring, all the more so because her own unawareness of it meant that it would be a secret that only a lover would have access to, just as only one lover would have access to her body.

Maddy had been a virgin when he had first taken her to bed, inexperienced and unknowing, untutored, but her body had surrounded him with a softness, a warmth as instinctive and natural as her protective mother love for her children.

She didn’t receive him with that same innocent generosity and warmth any more, of course. On the rare occasions when they did have sex, he could feel how much she resented his ability to arouse her and how hard she strived to resist her physical desire for him. It amused Max to let her. He knew he could make love to her more often and easily turn her resistance into molten liquid acceptance and desire, but what was the point? The last thing he wanted was for Maddy to be sexually demanding or sexually possessive.

He showered himself briskly, then stepped out of the cubicle, smoothing his dark, wet hair back sleekly off his face as he reached for a towel.

If he was going to go to Aspen he would need to buy himself some suitable clothes. He had read that a lot of the Hollywood set went there for the season. He started to smile as he rubbed his body dry and then padded naked across to his bed.

Max was going through some paperwork when he heard the front doorbell ring. On his way to answer it he quickly checked his appearance in the hallway mirror. He was wearing the expensive after-shave that Justine had given him and the Turnbull and Asser shirt, which had been another present from her. The gold cuff links had been a gift from another grateful client. He glanced at his watch, a Rolex that Maddy had given him as a wedding present. Justine was earlier than he’d expected her. Well, she was still going to have to make due reparation for last night and wait a little for her sex. Yes, and plead with him for it, too!

Max opened the door.

‘Crighton, may I come in?’

Without waiting for Max’s assent, Justine’s husband stepped determinedly into the hallway.

Max had met him on only one previous occasion at a dinner party given by a friend of Justine’s to which he had been invited.

Although not as tall as Max and certainly a good twenty years older, Robert Burton nevertheless possessed that aura of power and forcefulness common to most entrepreneurially successful men. He might not walk with a deliberate swagger nor verbally boast of his achievements or his wealth, but he most definitely had about him that air that warned other males that he considered himself to be their superior, and as he eyeballed Max with cool aggression as he marched past him, Max was immediately and acutely aware of a relentless dislike he could feel emanating from him.

To give Max his due, though, apart from a small betraying distortion of his pupils and a reactive tensing of his muscles, he gave no other sign that his visitor was not the person he had expected to see, even managing a passably plausible, polished wave of his hand in the direction of his sitting room as he invited, ‘Robert. Good to see you, old man. What can I do for you …?’

On the verge of walking into the sitting room, Robert Burton turned round and thoroughly scrutinized Max.

‘I’ll say this for you, Crighton, you’ve got nerve,’ he commented tersely. ‘I’m a very busy man and I don’t have time to play verbal games. Justine has told me what’s been going on and …’

‘Ah. Good.’ Max cut in on him smoothly. ‘I did counsel her to tell you that she wanted a divorce. These things are always better when the two parties concerned discuss them as adults, and—’

‘Better for the bank balances of their lawyers, yes,’ Robert Burton cut him off acidly, ‘but let’s not get side-tracked. It isn’t your professional relationship with my wife I’m here to discuss.’ He paused meaningfully. ‘I do know, like I said, what’s been going on. A friend tipped me off. Apparently you’ve got quite a reputation for bedding your female clients….’

Max gave a small shrug. ‘When a marriage is breaking down, people become emotionally—’

‘Vulnerable,’ Robert Burton supplied darkly before Max could finish. ‘But it’s hardly professional behaviour to use that vulnerability against them, is it, and I should have thought that a man in your position would have to be very careful about guarding his professional reputation. After all, that’s really what a barrister has to sell, isn’t it? His reputation is his product. Unless, of course, you’ve decided that it’s more financially profitable for you to trade on your reputation in the bedroom rather than in the courtroom. Rumour does have it, of course, that it wasn’t so much your legal skills or qualifications that got you into your chambers in the first place. Does your wife know that you regularly bed your female clients?’

‘It’s a very pleasant bonus to my work,’ Max acknowledged with a taunting smile and a small shrug, ‘and I can’t deny that it is a perk that I do find very enjoyable … after all, what normal heterosexual man would not?’

It was one of Max’s greatest assets that he possessed a remarkable gift for turning the tables on his opponents and sending back the arrows they fired at him with devastating speed and accuracy, and he could see from the betraying narrowing of Robert Burton’s eyes and the hard edge of colour seeping up under his skin that he had succeeded in getting him off guard.

‘In your shoes, I’d be rather careful about what I admit to,’ he warned Max. ‘I doubt very much you’d enjoy being on the other side of a lawsuit….’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Max agreed, and added urbanely, ‘but then I doubt that very many men would like to stand up in court and admit that their wives preferred me as a lover. Which reminds me, since I am acting for your wife in the subject of her divorce, I really should advise you that it is quite unethical for you to approach me….’

‘There isn’t going to be a divorce.’

Max stared at him in disbelief.

‘Justine and I have had a little talk,’ Robert Burton told him with heavy irony, ‘and we’ve decided that we’re going to give our marriage a second chance. I think that what Justine really needs is to be a mother. A woman needs a child, children, and they do say, don’t they, that the conception and birth of a child cement a couple more closely together than anything else. You’ve got children, haven’t you?’

He gave Max a challenging look.

‘Divorce can be an extremely expensive and messy business, and as Justine now agrees, it makes sense for the two of us to stay together. Oh, and by the way, there’s no point in you trying to get in touch with her. She flew out to New York on Concorde this morning.

‘I hope I’ve made myself understood,’ he told Max as he turned round and opened the door, ‘but then, I know you’ll have got my drift, won’t you, Crighton.’

As Max automatically followed him to the front door, the older man continued with obvious enjoyment, ‘Oh, and by the way, perhaps I’d better warn you, I’ve had a word with the senior partner in your chambers, alerting him to certain facts I felt he ought to know. After all, a chambers like yours trades on its reputation, and anything that might damage that reputation has to be very swiftly and mercilessly dealt with, doesn’t it … rather like anything that might threaten a man’s marriage or his financial status.

‘It’s the mark of an intelligent man, I believe, to act quickly and decisively to protect what he values.’

Max said nothing. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what Robert Burton was saying to him. He had somehow or other persuaded Justine not to go ahead with her divorce because he had no intention of allowing her to profit financially from her marriage to him. Simpler and far more financially expeditious to remain married to her. But it was his remark about his own professional status that had alarmed Max the most, especially that comment he had made about speaking with the head of his chambers.

Although technically Max was his own boss and none of the other members had any kind of jurisdiction over his actions or his morals—in practice … Well, he would soon find out, since no doubt the subject would be raised at this afternoon’s meeting, if it was going to be raised.

‘Hell and damnation,’ he muttered grimly as he consigned Justine to the past and the long list of his ex-lovers an hour later as he left his mews house en route to the old-fashioned set of chambers in the Inns of Court where the high status of their address more than compensated for the cramped office that Max occupied.

The senior partner’s office was, quite naturally, the most luxurious: large, elegantly furnished, reeking of that unmistakable indefinable aura of old money, class and power, and Max could never walk into it without coveting it and everything that went with it. Already he had promised himself that one day it would be his.

3

‘Ah, Max, there you are….’

As Harold Cavendish, the senior partner, gave him his benign smile and waved him into a chair, Max stiffened warily when he realized that he was the last to join the meeting.

As the meeting followed its normal and predictable course, Max allowed himself to relax a little and mentally began to run over in his mind who would make the most suitable replacement in his bed.

When the meeting was over, Max got up to leave, then froze as the senior partner placed a restraining hand on his arm and told him quietly, ‘Er, no, Max. I’d like you to stay. There’s something we need to discuss.’

Harold Cavendish waited until the others had gone before beginning to speak. Max might not be very popular in chambers and Madeleine’s father might have had to put pressure on them to take Max on, but there was no doubt whatsoever about the effect he, and his brand of dark, smooth good looks, had on their female clientele. It wasn’t just his own business that Max had increased while he had been with them, as Harold himself was keenly aware.

Max always reminded him of a particular breed of German dog, all sleek good looks and power on the outside, but inwardly possessed of an unreliably vicious streak that, when provoked, could be extremely dangerous. His wife had once told him wryly that it was the thought of harnessing and controlling all the sexual power and uncertainty that was Max that made women behave so foolishly over him.

‘It’s the knowledge that they’re never quite totally in control of him that is so alluring,’ she had told him. ‘Max represents the dark and dangerously exciting side of sexual attraction.’

‘Chap’s a bounder,’ he had objected gruffly. ‘Look at the way he treats poor Madeleine.’

‘Yes, I know,’ his wife had agreed ruefully, ‘and I’m afraid that that just makes him all the more potently alluring.’

Harold had shaken his head, not really understanding what she meant, and he was no closer to understanding now just why so many pretty women were foolish enough to get involved with Max.

Harold waited until Max had closed the door before telling him uncomfortably, ‘Had a chat with Robert Burton. He, er … seemed to think there could be something unprofessional going on between you and his wife….’

Max said nothing.

‘He’s a very powerful man and we handle a lot of his friends’ and contacts’ work.’

Max still said nothing, and Harold found himself fighting against a sense of irritation with him that he wasn’t doing the decent thing and making things easier for him.

‘Fact is, old chap, that to put it bluntly, Burton isn’t too happy about the way …’

‘His wife’s solicitor was instructing me with regard to her divorce,’ Max interrupted him coolly. ‘If Robert Burton chooses to misinterpret that … relationship … then …’

‘Well, yes. Yes, of course,’ Harold agreed hurriedly. ‘But one has to think not just of one’s own reputation, you know, but the reputation of chambers as a whole as well, and if it gets around that … well … if Burton should get it into his head to put the word about … The fact is, Max, that we’ve discussed the subject among ourselves and Jeremy tells us that you’ve no major work on at the moment, so we think … that is, we feel … it might be a good idea for you to take some extended leave, say a month or so … just until this unpleasantness blows over, and then …’

Max stared at him in disbelief.

‘You’re barring me from chambers,’ he accused. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘No. No … of course not,’ Harold agreed hurriedly, ‘no such thing … no such thing at all. Fact is, old chap, that all of us need to take a decent break from time to time, and young Maddy would probably appreciate the chance to see a bit more of you….’

Max looked coldly at him. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell him that he didn’t give a damn about what Maddy would appreciate, but he managed to restrain himself.

Robert Burton had certainly managed to put the wind up Harold, he acknowledged bitterly. Pompous old bastard, who was he to tell Max what he could and couldn’t do. Take some extended leave … They couldn’t make him, of course, no, no way could they do that, but they could make life pretty unpleasant for him if he refused, Max admitted angrily. If they chose to do so, they could adopt tactics that ultimately could force him out of chambers, and once that became public knowledge, his chances of continuing to receive not just the fat briefs he had grown accustomed to getting, but also the status and accolades that went hand in hand with being a member of such a prestigious set of chambers, would diminish abruptly. There was no way, after the work he had put in, the sacrifices he had made to get where he was, that Max was ever going to allow himself to be downgraded or side-tracked to somewhere second rate.

As he listened to Harold’s pompous meanderings, he told himself fiercely that when the day came when he took over as head of chambers, he would make everyone involved in this pay for what they were doing to him, especially that creep Jeremy Standish, the clerk-cum-office manager, whom Max knew perfectly well neither liked nor approved of him.

‘So you can see, I’m sure, what I mean—’ Harold was continuing to waffle uncomfortably ‘—and like I said, Maddy, I am sure, will …’

Max had had enough, and giving an impatient shrug, he stood up.

‘A month …’ Max began, but Harold, suddenly becoming courageous and mindful of his fellow members’ urgings and the responsibility he owed them, insisted firmly, ‘Two months, Max. That will give plenty of time for any potential unpleasantness to die down….’

Two months … Max gave him a hard stare, tempted to argue but sharply aware of how it would make him look if he lost.

God, but Justine had truly mucked this up, he fumed half an hour later back in his own small office. And if he had her here right now … he’d … Two months … Just what the hell was he going to do?

As he stared angrily out of his office window, there was a brief rap on the door and Jeremy Standish walked in.

‘Maddy was on the phone while you were with Harold,’ he told Max. ‘She asked me to remind you that it’s Leo’s nativity play tomorrow afternoon and that your grandfather will be going….’

As Jeremy saw the murderous expression darkening Max’s eyes he couldn’t resist adding, mock innocently, ‘I’m sure Maddy will be delighted when she knows that you’re going to have a couple of months off. You must miss her and the children so much with them living in the country and you living in town….’

Leo’s flaming nativity play, that was all he needed, but of course, if he didn’t go, his grandfather was bound to start asking awkward questions. Max still hadn’t repaid the loan he had cadged off him when he and Maddy had got married—and, in fact, he had no intention of repaying it. Max had witnessed his grandfather’s growing involvement with his own son and already sensed that if he wasn’t careful, Leo might begin to usurp his own so-far-unchallenged position as his grandfather’s favourite, and there was no way Max was going to allow that to happen. He was already beginning to think it had been a mistake to allow Maddy to have so much contact with his grandfather and thus easy access to his ear. Not that he had any fear that his grandfather would pay any attention to anything she might choose to say. His grandfather despised women and was an old-fashioned chauvinist.