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.
‘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
