walk from the car, but, as far as she could recall, Reynauld hadn’t looked even slightly damp.
Maybe he’d taken the only umbrella. Not much of a gentleman, then.
Amanda showed her into a room that took her breath away. Not a room: a suite, she thought, spying a second chamber opening from the first through connecting doors. They must be totally loaded. There were flowers everywhere again, and ugly expensive furniture upholstered in red-and-cream stripes. The cover of the huge bed was crimson and mounded with tasselled cushions and bolsters.
‘Warm yourself up with a nice hot shower,’ Amanda suggested. ‘I’ll wait for my bag.’
There were even flowers in the bathroom: white lilies that gave off a sweet narcotic scent. Huge fluffy towels too, and gilt taps. Rose, alone at last, shook her head and giggled, bemused by everything from the bidet to the matched range of expensive-looking toiletries on the marble sink. Guests didn’t even have to bring their own hairbrushes – there were two laid out already. There wasn’t a lock on the inside of the bathroom door though. Ugh, how French, she thought. But the chance to indulge was too tempting to resist.
Oh, it was so good to shed her damp and frowsty clothes and step into a piping-hot shower. She was especially delighted to discover the many nozzles that sprayed her with water from multiple angles and she spent time playing with them until she got them to hit her just right – on the upper slopes of her breasts and right over her pubic mound. The naughtiness made her giggle, and the teasing insistent pressure made her wish Kyle were there, soaping her up with that expensive body-crème and running his fingers through the suds.
Soon, she promised herself, sighing and shivering with pleasure. I’m nearly there.
It was a bit of a shock to find, when she stepped out, that all her clothes had vanished off the bathroom floor. In their stead, a pale violet-grey slip and a pair of stockings had been draped over the dressing-table chair. Rose frowned. She hadn’t noticed anyone entering the bathroom; she hadn’t heard a thing. It was like a fairy tale, where things appeared by magic.
She wondered whether to march out in her towel and demand her clothes back, but decided to try the new ones on first.
The result was disconcerting. She stood before the mirror and stared at herself, in that slip that barely skimmed her thighs and the hold-ups in their matching hue. Her skin was cream-pale and the tiny gold cross Kyle had given her gleamed upon her breastbone. The lingerie made her look older; not in a bad way, but more sophisticated. Like a model, she thought. The silk clung to her breasts and hips to emphasise her slender figure. She wondered if she ought to have a matching pair of panties with those same embroidered white flowers on, or whether it was just gross to wear someone else’s knickers. Am I supposed to go down to dinner with a bare pussy then?
She was combing out her wet hair when Amanda walked in.
‘There,’ she said, coming up behind Rose in the mirror. ‘That colour suits you better than it does me. I just look so washed out these days.’ Without asking permission, she adjusted the straps at Rose’s shoulders and smoothed the slip over her waist and hips. Rose was both flattered and irritated. She thought she looked better than Amanda too. Of course I do – I’m much younger for a start. And why was the woman resting her hands on her shoulders, like she owned Rose? After that hot shower, Amanda’s fingers felt chilly.
‘You and Reynauld,’ she said, pouting her lips and looking with satisfaction at her reflection. ‘Is he your boyfriend then?’
‘My employer. And yes. We are lovers.’
Ugh. She’s got to be at least forty. What does he see in her? And what a snotty way she has of talking, like she thinks she’s the Queen or something. ‘Aren’t you, like, a bit old for him?’
Amanda didn’t answer for a moment and Rose, looking at her narrowed eyes, had time to wonder if maybe she’d been a bit rude, before the other woman said softly, ‘He’s older than he looks.’
‘Is he French?’ Rose decided not to dwell on her possible faux pas. ‘He looks French.’
‘He’s from Baghdad originally, I believe.’
‘What, he’s an Arab sheikh?’ Rose was tickled and a bit alarmed by the prospect of such exoticism and wealth.
‘Persian, not Arab. And not a sheikh.’
‘What does he do, then?’
Amanda blinked and dropped her gaze. ‘He used to work in the City. We’re … currently relocating.’
Banker, said Rose to herself: Boring. ‘Are we going to eat, then?’
‘Yes. We’re going to eat. Come on through.’
Amanda held the door and Rose preceded her into the bedroom. Half a dozen steps in, the girl realised that Reynauld was there, sitting on the bed with his hands at his sides, waiting for them. Rose stopped dead, shock rippling across her skin. Against the crimson bedspread he looked as dark as a clot of congealed blood. His black shirt was open so she could see his bare chest, and there was a look of patient anticipation on his face.
As Amanda’s hands descended on her shoulders once more, cold and implacable, Rose felt all the air leave her lungs and her brain solidify into a solid useless mass. She couldn’t stop looking at Reynauld’s torso. He had black hair etched across his chest and his flat hard stomach – not at all like Kyle, whose lithe body was smooth like polished wood, or like a girl’s. There was nothing remotely feminine about this man, and Rose found herself appalled.
‘Come here,’ he said. His voice was soft and deep, like the voice of darkness itself. But not cool like Amanda’s: warm with pleasure instead. His black eyes drank her in, as if he were sucking the light from her. Rose felt the hands at her shoulders push her forward. Her heart was rocketing with dread and with realisation: that this was what it had all been about, that this was what they had been planning since they stopped to give her a lift in Calais. And though she felt sick with fear and raw with betrayal, at exactly the same time there was a flush of wet and terrible heat between her legs, as if this was what she had been waiting for too.
‘What do you think?’ asked Amanda.
‘Very nice,’ he answered, and then dashed any thought that his approval might have been aimed at Rose herself by adding, ‘Show me her breasts.’
Deftly Amanda swept the thin straps off Rose’s shoulders and reached round to heft her breasts from the fallen silk. Rose’s nipples swelled to hard puckers of protest under the brush of her chill fingertips, and her thighs squirmed, trying to staunch the moisture welling there.
‘Please,’ she said breathlessly, lifting her hands.
Amanda batted them away and cupped her breasts, pressing into her from behind with her own body. She was surprisingly strong. Rose found herself pushed forward almost into Reynauld’s reach.
‘Small tits,’ said Amanda apologetically.
‘Beautiful,’ answered Reynauld. Lust was like a thick black tide brimming in his eyes and his voice. Rose could feel it sucking at her, and she knew that if he touched her she’d be pulled under and drowned. ‘Rose,’ he murmured, ‘thank you for this.’
In addressing her, it was as if he gave her
