The Golden Locket (Unbreakable Trilogy, Book 2) (21 page)

I slide along the wall towards the wide arched corridor and into our bedroom, collapse onto the bed face down.

Gustav sits beside me, winds the silver chain round my wrists and very carefully ties the end of it to the curved pole of the bedhead.

‘Maybe I still need a little time.’ He tests the silver chain unnecessarily. ‘Maybe I’m not as cool as I thought with this setting-free idea. Maybe I think your head will puff up with all this success, and you’ll fly away. Like Weinmeyer’s pigeon,’ he murmurs, stroking my hair back from my hot face. ‘Hey, don’t go to sleep,
signorina
. We’re meeting Pierre tonight, when he’s finished at the theatre.

‘That’s not till nearly midnight. Can’t I just have a little nap?’ I moan and shake my head. ‘Pierre Levi is the last person on earth I want to see!’

‘You don’t expect me to cancel our rendezvous, do you? Every time I see him we become closer to one another again – back to the good old days when nothing could break the Levi brothers apart. I’d forgotten how much I really missed him. There are already moments when it feels like the weekends when we used to drive out of London on our motorbikes. We had these helmet-mikes so we could talk as we drove. Sometimes we’d be on the motorway, heading to Brighton maybe, and we’d just decide on the spur of the moment to go to France or Holland, and divert to Dover!’ Gustav stops stroking my hair and laughs softly. ‘No women ordering us about then! But tonight he wants to see you, too.’

‘And what Pierre wants, Pierre gets. Prince Pierre.’

‘You are an essential part of this process, Serena. You kept your head when all around were losing theirs on New Year’s Eve. This reconciliation would have fallen apart without you.’ Gustav’s hands pause on my hair. He starts to tug at it so that I have to lift my head. ‘I have another way to wake you up. My punishment. You came close to having someone else inside you today, but since I can’t let that happen for the moment, I’m going to introduce you to an acceptable alternative.’

‘You may as well be speaking Greek, Gustav. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. And I don’t want to go out tonight.’

‘Tough. Because after you have taken what’s coming to you, you will freshen up, look beautiful again and attend this rendezvous. Partly because it concerns you. Mostly because I want you by my side.’

I turn my face sideways. I can see two people sitting there, sliding apart and merging. In my drunkenness I think it’s Pierre on the bed, stroking my hair, now bending down and fiddling with something on the floor. It’s Pierre’s black eyes glaring at me from beneath glowering brows, so like Gustav’s, the sweep of the forehead, the creases beside the eyes when they smile. Instead of Gustav’s glossy hair falling over his eyes, though, I think I can see Pierre’s stiff black hair standing up in spikes, his thick neck with that snaky scar bulging over his collar. His mouth tilting into a smile that I can’t decipher. The blue vein in his temple going.

He looks so like Gustav. And he respects me. Polly said so. Which feels good, coming from someone as contrary and difficult as him. It’s flattering. It’s making me feel things I shouldn’t. Making me see Pierre when he isn’t here. I’m just pissed. But Polly said I’m the only one he’ll listen to. She asked me to help her get him back. I need to speak to him.

‘Pierre,’ I murmur.

‘That’s right. We’re seeing him at the Library Bar tonight.’

I squeeze my eyes shut, twist away and bury my head under the pillow.

Gustav shakes me, and the chill of sobriety nags me, because what my lover has produced from under the bed is a big, thick leather phallus, exaggerated in size but exact in anatomical detail, and curved slightly like a scimitar. This is a weapon, not a toy. He holds it up in the air between us like some kind of talisman, turns it so we can see it from every angle, then brings out a tiny jar of amber liquid.

‘What are you doing?’ I croak. I strain against the silver chain. ‘That looks like honey.’

‘Lubrication,’ Gustav mutters in a deep, guttural voice, dipping his fingers into the pot and running the honey over the leather. ‘To anoint my little sinner.’

I whimper and wriggle as he runs the tip of the now dripping dildo under my nose, pushes it across my upper lip, between my teeth so that I’m forced to suck it like a lollipop, then he hitches up my velvet dress and draws the thing slowly and deliberately up and down my spine, over my bottom, painting me with a languid trail of amber that is already turning from warm liquid to prickling stickiness as it dries on my skin.

‘Don’t resist, Serena. I saw your eyes watering with desire when those strippers played with their dildos in the club earlier. So I asked them if I could have one for my girl to take home. I actually wanted one of the white ones they’d used, but they said this one was brand new and we could have it as a gift.’ He laughs so boyishly just then that it infects me, too. ‘They were all for coming home with us to demonstrate how best to use it, but I said no, I wanted you to myself. But I took their number. For future reference!’

I giggle helplessly and feel my body going all soft and willing as he bends to his gentle task and runs the blunt end down between the cheeks of my bottom and burrows underneath me, pushing open my resisting body, nosing towards the centre. Those strippers oiled up their phalluses with something good enough to lick and then buckled on special belts and aimed them at each other, suggestively at first and then thrusting their pelvises like men, pushing in and penetrating each other, long and slow.

A little scream bunches in my throat as my legs come up to squeeze it away, but it’s like a missile, what do they call it, heat-seeking, because the dildo pushes blindly against this different part of me, against the tightness, burrows in forcefully and pushes until there’s a little pop.

The resistance gives way to melting acceptance, and I revel in the fact that this is Gustav, my lover, who asked those scary strippers if he could have their dildo to take home and is wielding this thing and invading my most private part with it. I don’t want anyone else to do this to me, not even some domineering woman I might play with in the future. I have a vision of Mrs Weinmeyer locking those fur handcuffs and using a white dildo on her chunky husband, and it’s that awful, naughty thought that makes my legs stop kicking against the soft white duvet, my wrist ensnared with the silver chain go limp.

‘Trust me. I’m your teacher. Although this is a first for me, I have to admit. We’re experimenting together, remember? So think of this not as punishment but as another pleasurable lesson. For both of us.’

I have managed to push away Pierre’s presence at last, but I can’t look at Gustav while this is happening. Now his other hand is lifting me, to get a better angle, I suppose. His long warm fingers are wandering over my bottom, following the path of the dildo, and the combination of sensations is emptying my mind of all thought, filling my body with a riot of responses. His fingers find another way in. How dirty can this get?

He seems detached from me, perhaps torturing himself with thoughts of me dancing in front of those grinning men. He’d be more tortured if he knew I’d just imagined his brother sitting on my bed, but I can’t focus on that now, all I know is that several fingers and a dildo are working in tandem, tips inside me now, pushing on and up. My heart starts to beat thickly and fast. I’m not afraid, but I feel vulnerable, cracked open like a shell, my tender insides exposed to a new, brutal battering.

‘I’m here, Serena,’ Gustav grunts, reading my mind as always. ‘I’ll always be here. You’re perfectly safe. Give in to it. Go on. See how good it can feel.’

I grapple for the remnants of my senses and he gives a low, throaty laugh, pushing the dildo harder so that I squeal and jump, but my body is letting it right in now, and the combination of the two, the leather phallus and the strong, gorgeous man holding it, the bulky weight of his body behind each thrust, the knowledge that I deserve this, is beginning to have its effect. If this is a new lesson, then I’m learning fast.

‘You’re so wet now, Folkes, you little slut,’ Gustav mutters as I start to buck against the leather dildo, squeeze my thighs round it, round his hand and arm, to keep it there. He matches the buck of my body with an answering thrust. He runs his free fingers up me, out again, over me, making me wetter still, everything tight and sore and throbbing now, gripping what’s inside me, keeping it there, my body scraping back and forth over the bed as Gustav watches and manipulates.

Above my head the sun sinks rapidly over the Hudson River. Around us the city hums and sings.

The brute hardness of the dildo is almost visual, sparks coming off it, off me. I don’t care that it’s false. It’s big and hard, warmed by my body, and with a sudden rush the phallus speeds up inside me, making me arch upwards in shock.

And then it’s him, of course it’s him, Gustav is inside me now, his fingers fanning under me as he pulls out the weapon of punishment and enters me to show me that in the end it’s always him.

‘I feel like a cowboy. I can barely walk after that, ah, initiation.’

‘No more than you deserve,
cara
. I was only doing what we both wanted to try out in the safety of our own home, but I never dreamed a well-endowed dildo like that would fit so snugly into your dainty little ass. And if you can’t walk then it means you have to stay close to me, yes?’

Gustav kisses my hair as we step out of the lift into the cute rooftop bar of the Library Hotel on Madison Avenue. It’s so intimate in here that it’s impossible to miss Pierre. He’s sitting out on the glass-roofed terrace with a bottle chilling in an ice bucket.

He stands and spreads his arms as soon as he sees us. I feel Gustav stiffen slightly. He takes my arm as if it’s he who needs support. I totter beside him towards his brother. The high red heels I stupidly decided to wear to show Pierre I was not to be messed with were a bad choice. The unnatural gait makes my calves cramp, and the tendons at the tops of my legs, where they were wrenched open by my lover and his brutal toy, are twanging like a Spanish guitar.

The men stop in front of each other, study each other’s faces for a drawn-out moment. It must be strange, I think, standing aside, to see another’s visage so like your own. With a pang that nearly doubles me over with its acuity I realise how important it is that these brothers forgive each other.

I will never look into the face of someone who shares my blood, and the thought of two brothers turning their backs on one another breaks my heart.

They finally make an awkward, back-slapping embrace, and just before they separate I catch Pierre’s eye over Gustav’s shoulder. The eyes are black and innocent, the mouth curled in a half smile of – what? Approval? Admiration? Thanks?

Instantly I realise what, or rather who, is absent. I sidestep round Pierre before he gets a chance to greet or kiss me, and sit down on the chair opposite him. I guess he’s given up even going through the motions of treating my cousin like a girlfriend.

‘Polly not joining us?’ asks Gustav, glancing round, raising one eyebrow at me.

‘Er, no. She’s out of town tonight, some big casting she really couldn’t miss. Didn’t she tell you, Serena? Up Boston way.’

She told me no such thing. The poor girl doesn’t even have an assignment at the moment. She’s right here in New York, waiting for me to call her after tonight’s meeting. She’s either hunched in her flat or down at the gym riding an exercise bike furiously to burn off all her frustration and her few remaining ounces of weight. This is not going to be the moment to tackle Pierre about Polly, though. I promised her I’d try, but it doesn’t look as if I’m going to get the chance, especially if I make sure I’m never alone with him. I’m beginning to doubt whether I
can
help her.

I keep my face averted from Gustav, try to alert Pierre to the fact that I know he’s only pretending to care about Polly. But when he lifts his glass and we chink cheers he returns my look so easily, an attentive, waiting smile transforming his face with such open, boyish enthusiasm that I falter. There’s little doubt that he is, or has been, cheating on her. But this handsome, groomed young man doesn’t look anything like the deranged bully Polly described to me. Or the sexy, threatening face that hovered in my drunken imagination earlier.

I feel like a traitor, but I can’t help being warmed by his smile. He has shaved closely. Even his hair looks calmer, the thick black tufts parted to one side like a schoolboy’s and brushed close to his head. He looks totally sorted. Totally together. In comparison it’s my poor cousin who is sliding downhill. If Pierre Levi has broken her heart I have to tell him what I think of him. It’s a terrible way to treat her. But for the sake of the peace these brothers are after, tonight is not the time.

Dare I say it, Pierre looks even smarter than Gustav tonight. Fair enough, we’re all off-duty, but Pierre has really made an effort in a blue and white checked shirt and navy-blue blazer with the correctly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket, even crisp well-tailored trousers. Gustav on the other hand is taking more and more of his dress code from his role as my pretend Hispanic assistant.

I glance at my lover, though, as I always do for strength, and my stomach gives a sleepy kick. He looks gorgeous, like a bandit. Silky hair half falling over his brow, evening bristles hollowing his cheeks, an eager sparkle in his black eyes as he rests his hands between his knees.

‘Yes. Of course she told me,’ I lie sweetly. But the fear that I’m letting Polly down tastes sour. ‘I’ve been so busy I forgot to mention it.’

Pierre pours out the wine. The body language of the two brothers would be funny if it wasn’t so tense. They are leaning towards each other like two condemned buildings that if not shored up will be demolished.

‘Busy at Club Crème today, I gather. The Robinson stag do. A really prestigious commission.’

Gustav and I exchange glances. Gustav pauses as he’s about to sip his wine, keeps the glass in front of his mouth as if to hide what he really wants to say.

‘And one we thought was highly confidential.’