Glittering Fortunes

‘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.