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‘It’s been a year.’
‘Has it?’
His indifference stung. ‘Yeah, well, London didn’t work out.’
That was the understatement of the century. It was hard to believe she was back at Lustell Cove, her childhood home: scene of angst-ridden school years at Taverick Manor, endless lazy Saturdays paddling the water and stolen kisses after dark with Theo Randall from the tennis club, who had always smelled faintly of Aertex. At twenty-two Olivia had graduated from a local art course, London had seemed like the next logical step and so she’d headed to the city to Become A Painter (how ridiculous that sounded!), envisaging days spent floating about museums discussing abstract expressionism and sipping free wine. Instead she’d spent the next year trading an Aix-en-Provence atelier for an Archway bedsit, and camping with a tortured writer who never bought loo roll and who was in possession of so much body hair it was like showering after a gorilla. Wading ankle-deep through unsold drawings had soon become depressing and, following a series of short-lived bar jobs, the last of which had culminated in Olivia telling an aggressively sexist customer to fuck off, her bank account had finally run dry and she’d been forced to admit defeat.
‘No kidding,’ he droned.
She smiled brightly. ‘So did I miss much?’
‘Nah.’ Addy yawned, stretching so his chest opened before her like a casket of treasure. ‘The cove’s dead. Nothing exciting ever happens round here.’
‘It will now I’m back. I can’t spend the entire summer sitting under my mother’s caravan roof, you know.’ If it could be called that: parts of Florence Lark’s ancient Pemberton Static were tacked down with masking tape.
‘Guess you’ll be looking for a job?’
‘It’s why I’m here.’ She consulted the noticeboard. ‘Anything good come up?’
‘Dunno—haven’t checked it in ages.’
Every opening at the cove advertised at the Blue Paradise and the display was thick with flyers requesting bar staff, shop help, grape pickers at the Quillets Vineyard or muck shovellers at the Barley Nook stables … The list went on. Olivia had taken most as holiday earners when she was still in training bras.
‘Suppose I should,’ Addy commented boredly. ‘New horizons and all that.’
Her head snapped up. ‘You’re leaving?’
‘Maybe. I’m antsy. You know how I get. I need more out of life than sitting round here chatting up girls … It’s samey after a while, you know?’
She forced a smile. Was Addy aware of how she felt? Maybe. But then he could have the pick of any girl he wanted, and she was just his friend. She could make him laugh. She could surf with him in the rain. She could help him with his English homework because he had a fear of any book that was longer than fifty pages. What she couldn’t be was a six-foot blonde with legs that went on for miles.
Even though Olivia had known him since the beginning of time, the Addy fire burst before her now just as brilliant and dangerous as the first day she’d seen it. She’d been six and he’d been nine, and Addy’s little sister a regular at Tiffany’s tea parties. Olivia would spy him outside with his friends playing Gun Tower Home! and would long to flee the dinky dining room and china pots filled with nothing, and tear through the brambles till her dress ripped. Of course the boys had tried everything to shrug her off: locking her in the Creepy Shed, vowing that she had to be slave, racing on their bikes so she couldn’t keep up, setting up dares they never thought she’d meet … But Olivia was determined, and once she had accepted the ultimate challenge of sprinting across the field owned by Farmer Nancarrow, a shadowy, mysterious, darkly enticing character who had become in the children’s eyes more myth than man—he would shoot anyone who trespassed on his land and then cook them for supper!—they had finally accepted her as marginally all right for a girl.
It was a lifetime ago, and yet still only yesterday.
Olivia had hoped that seeing Addy again might have prompted an epiphany, a realisation that all these years he had tricked her into seeing what wasn’t there, believing what wasn’t true. But with Addy, just with Addy, always with Addy, it returned to the same. Olivia wasn’t stupid, but he made her crazy. She was solid; he turned her to mush. She was level-headed; with him she went wonky. Her love for him could be traced back to twelve, eleven, ten, maybe before, when they had made hideouts in the ferns and she’d started noticing his eyes were blue, not grey, and her mum would pack them fish-finger sandwiches, and each time Olivia gave him a sketch, of him, of her, of the swinging tyre they had rigged above his parents’ lake, folded tight and slipped into his pocket, it had felt like losing a tiny piece of her heart.
‘There’s tons of stuff on here,’ she said, without conviction.
‘No offence, Oli, but I’m aiming higher than the cove. I haven’t bothered with that waster pinboard.’ Addy scratched his chin. ‘I’m thinking big.’
Olivia almost didn’t see it.
A leaf of paper obscured by a yachting brochure, but where its edges escaped it bore the unmistakeable crest she remembered from her youth:
Usherwood Estate seeks able & enthusiastic gardener Summer hours at competitive rates— please enquire
She frowned. As the stately residence of the former Lord and Lady Lomax, grand old Usherwood was a fairytale castle of turrets and wings, towers and acreage, a majestic relic of a forgotten time. The Lomax couple had perished in a plane crash thirteen years ago, and their sons, at that time only teenagers, had inherited. Cato, the eldest, was notorious, a Hollywood A-lister who had bolted after the tragedy, never to return. The youngest had stayed at the ancestral home, and was by all accounts a recluse.
‘Hey, Humpty, check this out!’
The voice was so upper class it sounded like there was a bag of marbles rolling around in its mouth. Olivia turned. A strut of city boys had located a window mannequin in a state of undress and one of them was making an obscene gesture at her nether regions. Lustell Cove attracted the Made in Chelsea set. With its lush, wild panoramas matched by higgledy-piggledy streets dotted with quaint Cornish cottages and tea shops, it was far enough from the capital to feel exclusive to the seriously wealthy, while its hot beach culture ensured it was anything but a stuffy hideaway.
‘Too funny, Ruffers, too funny.’ Humpty was sporting a pair of Hawaiian-print boardshorts despite Olivia’s suspicion he had never done anything in the water save a breaststroke—and that only if it promised not to get his hair wet.
‘D’you surf?’ asked Addy, not especially interested. Olivia saw his eyes scan the gathering for a hot blonde with a trust fund—she knew him too well.
‘My dad’s got a Maxus,’ Humpty replied, tossing his coiffed arrangement in the direction of the marina, which was bobbing with sleek white speedboats. His entourage of Hooray Henrys guffawed their approval. ‘Who needs a plank of wood?’
‘Can I help you, then?’ said Addy. ‘You know, with anything surf-related?’
One of them asked: ‘Dude, do you know the Lomaxes?’
Addy returned his attention to his phone. ‘Not if you mean Cato,’ he bristled. ‘Far as I know he hasn’t been back here in, like, for ever.’
‘The house is pretty creepy, huh,’ said Humpty.
‘Is it true it’s, like, the biggest house in England?’ enquired Ruffers.
‘I heard they’ve got champagne fountains in the gardens,’ said another.
‘And Cato keeps a monkey in the cellar,’ put in Humpty, ‘to bring him things. I read about it. Someone saw it swinging about in a gold waistcoat.’
There followed an inventory of increasingly extravagant fictions. Everyone was so busy talking that they didn’t notice when Olivia unpinned the Usherwood flyer and fed it discreetly into the back pocket of her jeans. She slipped outside.
The sun had vanished, casting the bay in shade. Olivia folded her arms against the rash of goosebumps prickling across her skin. High on the hill loomed the vast silhouette of the Usherwood Estate, staining the horizon like a great inkblot.
She stepped on to the beach. The sand was cool and silky between her toes and she padded across the inlet, away from Usherwood and back into sunshine.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b00ffe7c-936b-53cb-b7fc-9c36742c11a6)
‘OH, BABY, YES! Keep going, stud—you are truly the best in the world!’
With each brutal thrust Susanna Denver’s back was scraping painfully against the knobs on her lover’s gold-plated washroom cabinet, but then space was always going to be at a premium at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic.
‘Keep it dirty,’ Cato growled, his breath ragged in her ear. ‘You know I love it when you talk filth, you scandalous harpy.’
Susanna clamped her thighs around his waist and reached down to clasp the most famous backside in America (recently initiated into the Hollywood Hall of Fame after an Award-nominated nude scene). Sharp crimson nails dug into his flesh.
‘Harder!’ she squealed, bucking a touch too fervently so that behind her a decorative tap flicked on and she found her ass being sprayed with water. ‘Faster!’
‘Not wet enough already?’ Cato snarled in that impossibly attractive English accent, which made Susanna think of black-and-white World War II movies where everyone went about smoking pipes and talking about submarines.
‘Always for you, baby,’ she gasped, ‘always for you!’
Cato slipped a hand between her legs, dousing her in the liquid heat.
‘Say my name,’ he croaked, ‘say it!’
‘Ca-to!’ she managed, the word severed in two as he thrust into her, his black shock of hair abrasive against her chest and his face buried in her tits.
‘Say my full name—my full name, goddamnit!’
‘Lord Cato! Fuck me, Lord Cato, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!’
Lord Cato did as he was told, seconds later coming so fiercely that Susanna’s ass was slamming in and out of the porcelain bowl and Cato had water coursing down his legs and into the nest of suit pants pooled at his ankles.
‘You’re a rampant little nympho, aren’t you?’ he choked afterwards, fighting to catch his breath. ‘Be a good girl and run along, I could murder a gin on the rocks.’
Back in her seat on the Lomax private jet, Susanna patted her hair and checked her reflection in a crystal compact. Her lipstick was smudged—Cato preferred there to be a prime blowjob on the menu; it was one of his foibles—she fixed it and smiled with satisfaction. Looking back at her wasn’t just the face of Susanna Denver, romcom queen who commanded ten million a movie—oh, no, it was the face of a future Lady of the Manor! She couldn’t suppress the mewl of excitement that escaped when she thought of it. Surely it was only a matter of time before Cato proposed, and what would she say? She would say Yes, yes, yes! as fiercely as she had five minutes before with his cock driving through her like a steel truncheon.
It was several minutes before Cato joined her (he always needed the bathroom after sex: another eccentricity). He picked up his Tanqueray and balanced the tumbler in the palm of his hand. The dark hair on his knuckles was a stark contrast to the clean, ice-cracked liquid, and on his pinkie he wore a fat gold signet.
‘Everything all right, darling?’ Susanna asked, giving him her most winning smile. She had considered that he might have asked her to marry him on the jet—after all, he spent most of his life on the darned thing—but obviously he had something far more romantic planned for when they got to Cornwall. She couldn’t wait to see the mansion: it looked like Charles Dickens lived there, as if they’d have a chimney sweep, and a maid who wore a doily on her head! It was too sweet for words.
‘Fine,’ Cato barked. She went to rub his shoulders but he batted her off. ‘If you must know, I’d rather turn this filly around and be touching down in LA in an hour’s time, not bloody Heathrow.’ He swigged the gin in one.
‘Oh, darling,’ she comforted, ‘it’ll be gorgeous when we get there …’
‘Will it? It’s England, Mole; it rains all the time.’
How Susanna wished he wouldn’t call her that. It was an endearment—she had a freckle birthmark on the small of her back—but all the same it made her sound like a soggy, twitchy little thing emerging blindly from the ground. Cato had taken to introducing her as Mole in new company, which she absolutely had to put a stop to.
‘I don’t mind a bit of rain,’ said Susanna, flipping open her magazine.
‘You’re not cut out for it,’ Cato retorted.
‘I can be. I will be.’ She wanted to add when we’re married, but didn’t.
A muscle twitched at his temple. ‘If Charles did the right thing and moved on I’d be a damn sight happier. Usherwood is mine, after all. I’m the eldest; it’s my inheritance. Still,’ Cato swirled the glass, ‘I can’t apologise for being a trans-Atlantic man. Career calls—not that my brother would know the first thing about that.’
Susanna flushed with pleasure. She loved it when Cato talked about claiming the estate full-time. Things were going impossibly well for him in LA right now, but come next year he would be ready to divide his time between the two—and she would be right there alongside him as the next Lady Lomax. She couldn’t wait.
‘Another,’ Cato commanded one of his staff, holding aloft the empty glass. ‘Why he insists on being such a miserable bastard is well and truly beyond me.’
Susanna craned to see. ‘Go easy on him, baby, he hasn’t been with us long …’
Cato shot her one of his your-stupidity-never-ceases-to-amaze-me looks. ‘I’m not talking about that cretin,’ he snipped. ‘I’m referring to Charles. Naturally.’
The gin landed, accompanied by a miniature offering of salted nuts.
‘Just because Mummy and Daddy got lost in the fucking Bermuda Triangle’—Cato said ‘fucking’ like ‘fahking’—’I mean, let’s get over it, shall we?’ He chucked the nuts into his mouth like a shot of Tequila and appeared to swallow without chewing. Susanna found him urgently sexy. With his splintering eyes and jet-black mane, so brutish and carnivorous, he possessed the kind of unreconstructed maleness that had women worldwide longing to experience the Lomax magic. Once she was his wife, Susanna Denver alone would achieve that privilege.
‘These are stale,’ Cato complained of the nuts, but continued to pulverise them nonetheless.
‘Try and relax, sweetheart …’
Cato loosened his tie. ‘I am relaxed. Just don’t talk to me about my brother.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You brought him up. And now look! I’m in a terrible mood thanks to you.’
Susanna had learned early on in their acquaintance that Cato was not a man with whom to be argued. She knew better than to raise the issue of Charles (like the prince!), but privately thought their relationship was bound to be strained what with the family history being so raw. Cato rarely talked about the accident, only in garbled bursts when he was blind drunk on Courvoisier. Thirteen years ago, Richmond and Beatrice Lomax had taken a single-engine plane for a day flight over the Bahamas—at nine a.m. they had departed; by twelve they had abandoned radio signal. Their plane was lost, the bodies never found. To this day their deaths remained unclassified.
‘Put him from your mind,’ she calmed him. ‘Shall I rub your shoulders?’
Cato scowled.
Susanna couldn’t help but suspect there was more to the brotherly rivalry than met the eye. Reading between the lines it seemed that Charles, the youngest, had always been the favoured son—and Cato resented him for it. Funny how such petty jealousies could wind their way into adulthood. Perhaps Susanna could be the peacemaker, encourage the men to see what was really important. Once she and Cato moved into Usherwood on a permanent basis she saw no reason why Charles should have to be evicted. Where would the poor mite go?
On cue Cato pronounced: ‘Charles is in for a terrific surprise when I tell him I’m taking over. He never could handle the place; it’s falling apart around his bloody ears. What Usherwood needs is a real man to take care of it.’ Buoyed by the thought, he turned to Susanna and awarded her an indulgent smile. ‘A bit like you, Mole.’
Susanna took his hand. ‘Indeed,’ she purred demurely, in the way English ladies surely did when they were soon-to-be-heirs to great stateliness and fortune.
Cato downed the drink, exhaling heavily through his nostrils like a bull with a ring through its nose. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, ‘I think I’ll have your mouth wrapped around my cock one more time before we land,’ as though he were considering which route they would take into the southwest once they hit the roads tomorrow (Susanna suffered from jetlag and preferred a night at Claridge’s before entertaining an onward journey). She had selected a vintage burgundy Bentley for the trip and might even don a floral headscarf, if the weather was clement.
England’s fields appeared like patchwork in the window, a quilt of greens and yellows stitched together by thorn and thistle: Land of Hope and Glory.
Susanna sighed the sigh of the devoted. She couldn’t wait to be introduced to her new home. And once Cato proposed, everything would be just perfect.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_cbd97b41-ef39-57bb-a3ed-2cda8f446569)
CHARLIE LOMAX STOPPED at the stream to let his dogs drink. He wiped his dark brow, the material of his T-shirt damp with sweat and sticking across his shoulders. It was a scorching day, thick with heat, the only sounds the steady babble and the hounds’ lapping tongues as they attacked the water in loud, contented gulps.
He squinted up at Usherwood House. One hand was raised to counter the glare, and the skin where his sleeve drew back was pale compared with the tan on his forearms. The earthy, musty pocket of his underarm was a hot, secret shadow.
The dogs clambered to their feet for a vigorous shake, their fur releasing a shower of glittering drops. Comet, the setter, pricked his ears in anticipation of his master’s next move: tail bright, eyes alert. Retriever Sigmund panted happily.
Russet sunshine bounced off the stonework, drawing-room windows rippled in the haze. Charlie could picture its quiet interior, shafts of light seeping through dusky glass. A sheet of verdant lawn rolled up to the entrance, studded with flower beds that flaunted summer colour despite their neglect. Mottled figurines hid behind oaks like ghosts, a head or a hand missing, moss-covered and cool in the shade.
It was habit to see everything that was wrong with the place: the dappled paintwork, the peeling façade, and at the porch a stippled, stagnant fountain whose cherubic statuette sang a soundless, fossilised tune. But on days like today, lemon sunbeams bathing the house, the old monkey puzzle rising proud in the orchard and the flat grey sea beyond with its white horses flirting on the waves, it was possible to imagine an inch of its former glory. When Charlie would return for yearned-for ex-eats, the car pulling up alongside his mother’s classic Auburn, gravel crunching under the tyres and the smell of buttered crumpets soaking into the purple evening, those were the times he remembered. That was what Usherwood meant to him.
He climbed the ditch, put his fingers out so a soft, soggy muzzle came in curiosity to his touch, and with it the hot lick of an abrasive tongue.
Through the Usherwood doors the great hall echoed, high windows illuminating a mist of dust particles that drifted into the vaults. Above the sooty inglenook a portrait of Richmond and Beatrice was suspended, its frame a tarnished copper. The dogs skated muddy-pawed through to the library, tails thumping as they waited for Charlie to catch up.
‘Oh, you scamps!’ Barbara Bewlis-Teet, housekeeper since his parents’ day, came in from the kitchen. She shook her head at the dirt the dogs had brought with them. ‘Mr Lomax, you’d let those mutts rule the roost given half the chance!’
Charlie ran a hand through his raven hair. It had grown longish around his ears and he hadn’t shaved in a week, giving him a rugged, piratical appearance. His eyes were panther-black. The bridge of his nose had been split years before in a cricket match, and the residual scar made him look more fearsome than he was.
‘They’re all right.’ He pulled off his boots, thick with caked-on mud.
Affection made Barbara want to reach out and touch him, the boy she had once known—but she couldn’t, because Mr Lomax was untouchable.
How she wanted to rewrite the story whose beginning and end could be found in the landscapes of his face: the concentrated, permanent frown; the dark angle where his jaw met his neck; the fierce brushstrokes of his cheekbones. There was Charlie before the tragedy, a dimly recalled child with a clever smile and a skill for putting things together—cameras, watch mechanisms, telescopes—to see how they worked; and Charlie afterwards, wilted at the Harrow gates, at thirteen so young, too young, for the education that sometimes what was taken apart could never be reassembled. She had driven through the night to collect him in her Morris MINI, doing away with the nonsense of a chauffeured car. Cato had left for the South of France, done with his final year, a hard-boiled show-off whom nothing seemed to touch. Barbara wasn’t sure when Cato had returned to Usherwood, if he even had, to join the mourners and to console the younger brother who had needed him.
‘Tea’s ready,’ she said gently, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Shall I bring it through?’ It was four p.m. sharp and the time-worn set patiently waited, citrus steam rising from the delicate chipped cups Barbara still insisted on using; a splash of milk in a porcelain mug, a silver basin of sugar and a plate of powdery gingerbreads. So long as Mr Lomax cared about Usherwood’s standards, so must she.
