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  Minnie, calm and regal as ever in a simple black crepe shift and pearls, sat rigid-backed beside the door. Contrary to all outward appearances, her stomach was churning. There had been a time when she believed that no behavior of her husband’s could surprise or hurt her anymore. But tonight, for the first time in many years, she did not know what to expect or how she was supposed to behave. She was in uncharted territory, and Pete’s palpable rage was doing as little as Laurie’s hysteria to calm her own fraught nerves. What in heaven’s name had she ever done to deserve this? She just wanted this evening over with.

  All four of them jumped when the doorbell rang.

  “Why is he ringing the bell?” snapped Pete. “He has a key, doesn’t he?”

  Anxious to diffuse her son’s anger, Minnie took charge at once, standing to receive her guests with a serene smile glued to her face. “Antoine, would you get the door, please?”

  The butler glided forward. “Of course, madam.”

  The heavy black door swung slowly open. Duke was nowhere to be seen.

  “How do you do?” The accent was cut-glass English. “I’m Caroline Berkeley. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to take my coat?”

  The young woman before her was about as far removed from Minnie’s preconceptions as it was possible for her to be. She was beautiful, but certainly not tarty. Her hair, which was either naturally blond or very expensively dyed, was worn up in a neat chignon and contrasted dramatically with her flowing, feminine rainbow-effect Pucci dress (in fact, wasn’t that the dress Minnie had so admired in last month’s Vogue? It was, she was sure of it). Elegant strappy Yves Saint Laurent sandals revealed perfectly pedicured and subtly painted toes. Her makeup was minimal, intended only to heighten her almost neon-blue eyes and surprisingly delicate English complexion. This was no dime-a-dozen playgirl from Venice Beach. Caroline looked, disconcertingly, like a lady.

  She was also unusually self-assured. Ignoring the butler, she handed her coat to a bewildered-looking Claire before turning to Minnie.

  “So you must be Mrs. M.?” She smiled smugly. “How adorable you look in that dress! My mother has one just like it.”

  Minnie failed to suppress a scowl.

  “Dukey’s told me so much about you.” She winked at Minnie conspiratorially. “He’s just fetching my luggage, by the way, he should be here in a moment. Anyway, I’m sure we’ll have simply tons to talk about, swapping secrets and all that, but first of all I’m afraid I must use your loo. Or perhaps it’s my loo now?” Caroline laughed, pleased at her own wit, and strode off down the corridor. She evidently knew her way around the house.

  Pete exploded. “Fucking arrogant bitch! And why the hell did you take her coat?” He shot an accusatory glance at the terrified Claire, who looked down at the cream Chanel wool in her hands in panic, as though it were about to self-destruct.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled meekly, “it just happened so quickly, I didn’t really have time to . . . I mean . . .”

  “Oh, never mind. My God, that little slut has some nerve, treating my wife like a fucking maid. And the way she spoke to you, Mother. Who the hell does she think she is?”

  Before Minnie could respond, Duke came sauntering triumphantly into the hallway, weighed down by two enormous Louis Vuitton suitcases. Taking in his wife’s look of shock, Pete’s undisguised fury, and Laurie and Claire’s subdued misery, he laughed out loud. “So, I guess you met Caroline, huh? Isn’t she great? Quite a looker, wouldn’t you say, Peter?” he added spitefully to his son.

  “Sure.” Pete’s tone was utterly dead. “If you like cheap whores.”

  Duke laughed again. Nothing was going to put him out of his good humor tonight, least of all his pussy of a son. “I’ll tell you something, kiddo, she may be a whore but she certainly isn’t cheap,” he said. “I paid five hundred dollars for that dress.”

  Minnie felt a small, irrational stab of pain. Even in the early, happy days of their marriage, Duke had never spent anything close to that on her.

  “Ask your mother.” Duke looked at Minnie, his eyes flashing with the excited cruelty of a cat playing with a cornered mouse. “She knows all about class, don’t you, my darling? Wouldn’t you say Caroline is elegant? She comes from one of the oldest, most aristocratic families in England. I mean, we’re not talking Greenwich here. Caroline’s from the real upper classes.”

  He was hitting Minnie where it hurt and they both knew it.

  Right on cue, Caroline sashayed back along the corridor, stilettos clacking painfully loudly on the polished marble, and wrapped herself possessively around Duke. “Darling,” she stage-whispered into his ear, “you know, we could always skip supper and just go straight to bed?”

  Bitch, bitch, bitch, thought Pete. She’s enjoying this.

  “Skip dinner?” Duke smiled at her proudly. “I don’t think so. My wife here has gone to a lot of trouble, sweetheart. And we wouldn’t want to be rude, now would we?”

  At dinner, the pair of them were insufferable. Duke was deliberately, revoltingly affectionate toward his young mistress, constantly running his roughly wrinkled hand across her cheek or feeding her morsels of monkfish from his fork like a lovesick teenager.

  Caroline was also in rare form, and no one was immune from her witheringly bitchy put-downs.

  “Gosh, Laurie,” she exclaimed, wide-eyed, “you are brave. I always think gold is such a difficult color to pull off with a fuller figure.”

  “Mrs. McMahon”—she seemed to delight in addressing Minnie pseudo-respectfully—“this food really is delicious. Heavens, if I had a cook as good as Conchita, I don’t expect I’d worry about my figure, either. Dukey, do you think she’ll be able to rustle me up something low-fat for breakfast tomorrow?”

  Minnie’s self-control in the face of such provocation was quite astounding. Pete, on the other hand, rose like a starving, credulous fish to every piece of bait Caroline threw him.

  “Now, Claire”—Caroline leaned forward across the table, giving both Pete and his wife a flash of her small but perfectly rounded porcelain-white breasts—“I do hope that you and I can become friends. It will be so nice to have a girl my own age to play with.”

  “Really?” said Pete, stabbing viciously at his syllabub with a teaspoon. “And here we were all thinking you preferred playing with men old enough to be your grandfather.”

  Claire looked miserably from Pete to Minnie. She had dressed particularly conservatively this evening, in a long taupe skirt and sweater, perhaps in a subconscious effort to fade into the background. Although undeniably a beautiful woman, with her shoulder-length mane of honey-blond hair and luminous creamy complexion, her shy looks paled into nothing when set beside Caroline’s glamour and electric sexual confidence. Not that it bothered her. Pete’s young wife didn’t have a vain bone in her body. She just wished that this awful woman who was so upsetting her husband would go away and leave them all alone.

  “Peter, that’s enough,” said Duke, a razor-sharp edge biting into his famously deep, resonant voice. “Like it or not, Caroline is a member of this family from now on. I will not have her spoken to in that tone by anyone.”

  Father and son glared at each other, their faces eerily illuminated by the candlelight, but Pete dropped his gaze first.

  “Least of all you,” added Duke, folding his napkin with a measured finality to indicate that the conversation was now closed.

  Laurie, who was suddenly feeling uncomfortable and awkward in what had been her favorite dress, was too choked with self-pity to rally to her brother’s support. Poor Claire kept her eyes glued firmly to her plate throughout the whole excruciating ordeal.

  Buoyed by Duke’s support, and fueled by more than a few glasses of the vintage champagne Minnie had been told to lay on for the occasion, Caroline allowed her arrogance full rein, rudely snapping her fingers at the staff and generally behaving as though she were the established lady of the house. She had been dreading this evening, the inevitable showdown with the old man�
��s ghastly wife, but now that it had all gone so well, she felt deliriously happy.

  All this wealth and privilege were hers for the taking, and she intended to grab them with both hands. How ridiculous to think that she had feared Minnie McMahon so much! The poor old stick was clearly no match for her. Caroline found it almost impossible to imagine the black-clad statue across the table from her, with her drawn features and tight-lipped reserve, as ever having been of sexual interest to Duke. She looked like a relic from another era, one of the many older women for whom the swinging sixties had swung right on by, and who woke up in the seventies to find the world they grew up in had disappeared forever.

  As for Pete and Laurie, they were even more wet and useless than Duke had hinted. Caroline wondered what possessed him to keep the pair of them under his roof. He had said something about it once—some nostalgic Catholic rubbish about family—but Caroline had been focusing on the divine Cartier necklace they’d been choosing on Rodeo at the time, and hadn’t really caught his gist.

  What had not escaped her notice, however, was that Duke was being extraordinarily tactile this evening. As his hand softly caressed the back of her neck, she wondered if this meant he would be excessively demanding in bed later, and suppressed a sigh. Humiliating his pathetic wife was obviously turning him on, judging by the size of the erection Caroline had been fondling discreetly for the last hour. You could say a lot of things about Duke, but he certainly still had a very healthy libido.

  Her suspicions proved justified that night in bed. Exhilarated by his own demonstration of power and control over Minnie, Duke’s eyes were alive with excitement at the prospect of screwing Caroline. Availing himself of her exquisitely ripe, young body would be the perfect end to what had been a thoroughly enjoyable and arousing evening.

  He and Minnie had kept separate bedrooms for the last twenty-odd years, and his dark-wood-paneled room no longer bore any traces of his wife. Duke had had the exquisite parquet flooring smothered in the ankle-deep cream carpet he so loved, and all the antique furniture replaced with so much chrome and glass that the original walls looked embarrassed and out of place. He loved the modernity of the furniture, and not just because Minnie hated it. It made him feel young somehow. And the thick carpet beneath his bare feet felt wonderfully luxurious to the boy who had grown up running barefoot on the cold, rough wooden floors of a Brooklyn tenement building.

  Duke reclined on the enormous, laminated plastic bed, draped in rich purple velvet covers and purple silk pillows fit for a debauched Roman emperor. He felt his cock turn to iron as he watched Caroline start to strip for him.

  With one graceful movement she released the clasp at her neck, and five hundred dollars’ worth of Pucci silk slithered to the floor. Staring at her full, high breasts, the pale pink nipples flushing a deeper red with lust, her slender, almost breakable legs looking even longer in those black stilettos, Duke knew he had never wanted a woman more. She gazed wantonly back at him, the dampness from her pussy beginning to show through her minuscule sheer pink panties, and bent down to remove her shoes.

  “No. Leave them on.” His voice was rough and brutal with longing, all of the faux affection from the dinner table gone. “Come here.”

  Hanging her head submissively, she approached the bed and, climbing up onto it, knelt in front of Duke, awaiting instructions. She was like a doll, he thought joyously; he could do anything he wanted to her, anything. He knew she was only interested in his money, of course. But what did that matter? This was fifty times better than picking up a hooker down on Sunset.

  Caroline might be a gold digger, but she still had social class, something that had always eluded Duke, for all his money and power. That cut-glass English accent and her grand titled friends made her infinitely more exciting in his eyes. He loved to watch her playing the part, acting like the little lady of the manor, and knowing that whenever he snapped his fingers he could have her, naked, compliant, ready to cater to his every whim. His money enabled him to control her, to own her. Mikey was wrong. You could own a woman. And Caroline was all his.

  “Suck my cock,” he commanded, lying back against the pillows as the small blond head bobbed up and down in his lap. He had wanted to fuck her tonight, but it had been a long, long day, and the moment he felt her expert tongue rolling itself around his erection, flickering teasingly just beneath its head, he knew he had to come now.

  Gripping her skull with his left hand, he forced her head down farther until his dick was touching the back of her throat. Instinctively, she struggled, retching and fighting for breath, legs flailing grotesquely, still in her tight black shoes. The sight was too much for Duke, who cried out as he came, clamping her head to his cock so that every drop of his semen poured straight down her throat before he released her.

  Caroline pushed her tangled hair back from her face, gasping for air, and wiped the sweat and saliva from her face. She knew she must look like a first-class whore, and the thought aroused her. Duke was old enough to be her father, if not her grandfather, and she’d be lying if she said that physical attraction was her prime motivation for being in his bed. Even so, she had to admit there was something about him, about the two of them together, that worked. He never, ever gave a thought to her pleasure. But in a perverse way, that pleased her.

  Duke looked at her smeared, disheveled face with satisfaction. He was an old man now and he knew it. Sure, he was in good shape, he took care of himself. But so many of his old buddies were already gone—heart attacks, lung cancer, God only knew what else. He reached over to the bedside table for a Lucky Strike and lit it.

  Death did not preoccupy him unduly, although he missed his youth, the adrenaline rush of mass adulation that had fueled him through his twenties and thirties, already a movie legend.

  What an incredible, fantastic life it had been.

  With the exception of a few terrible incidents in Japan during the war, and the painful breakdown of his marriage, it had been a life crammed with enjoyment, excitement, and excess. Duke had lived it greedily, relishing every second, and he intended to see out the last days of his life with the same energy, the same pursuit of his own pleasure, that he always had.

  He had learned long ago to block out the pain of losing Minnie’s love. Without her, he had abandoned all hope of becoming a “better” man and ruthlessly stamped down any finer feelings of selflessness, honor, or decency whenever they threatened to limit his rampant, hedonistic lifestyle.

  He looked at Caroline again and felt a wave of satisfaction. How many men in their sixties had mind-blowing sex on tap from a girl as utterly desirable as this? Gazing down at her, inhaling deeply on his cigarette, he felt like a fucking king.

  Without taking her eyes from his, she bent her head once again and began slowly licking his balls.

  “Good girl,” he purred, stroking her hair more tenderly now. “That’s a good girl.” She wrapped her arms around his thighs, laying her head comfortably between them while her tongue got to work.

  “Welcome to the family.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  In snagging Duke McMahon, Caroline Berkeley felt she had finally achieved her destiny.

  The fourth child and only daughter of Sebastian and Elizabeth Berkeley of Amhurst Manor, Oxfordshire, she had been born into a world of postwar optimism in 1946. Her privileged parents were still wealthy at that time, although a lot of money had been lost by the previous generation of Berkeleys, grandparents and great-aunts whom Caroline never knew, through alcoholism and heavy gambling debts. After her mother died in Caroline’s infancy—Elizabeth had never recovered from the death of her eldest son, Lionel, on the Normandy beaches—the family’s financial decline had gone from bad to worse.

  Unsurprisingly, Caroline’s dissolute grandfather Alexander had done nothing to prepare her father in the fine arts of investment or estate management. Sebastian’s resulting financial ineptitude, combined with his debilitating grief over the loss of both his wife and son, were to prove fata
l to the great old estate.

  By the time Caroline turned fifteen, Sebastian had lost Amhurst, along with the bulk of his children’s inheritance. This sudden reversal of the family fortunes was the single most formative event in her childhood.

  She could remember the day her father had driven to school to break the terrible news to her, could see his ashen face as though it were yesterday. As soon as they sat down on an old stone bench, in the rose garden at Massingham Hall, she had known something was very wrong.

  “For heaven’s sake, Pa, what is it?” She heard the panic rising in her voice. She had never seen her beloved father in such a state. “Is it George or William? Are they all right?”

  Actually, her older brothers were the last thing Caroline was concerned about, but she couldn’t think of anything else that would make Sebastian look so terrible. If he were ill himself, she was sure, he would tend to make light of it rather than turn up at school with a face like a wet weekend.

  When he turned to face her, tears were pouring down his cheeks. “Caro, I’m so sorry, so very, very sorry. I’ve had to sell Amhurst.”

  She felt the world spin and was grateful she was sitting down. She doubted her legs would have supported her if she’d tried to stand up at that moment. Sell Amhurst? What on earth was he talking about?

  “Please, darling.” Sebastian had looked at her beseechingly. “Say something.”

  What was there to say? His shame and distress were so obvious, and so acute, that she hadn’t the heart to reproach him or the energy to throw some sort of tantrum. She had opened her mouth, just to ask him why, how could this have happened, but closed it again before the words had even formed on her lips. What was the point of tormenting herself, or him, with such questions? Amhurst meant the whole world to Sebastian, just as it did to her. If he had sold it, then she knew he must have had absolutely no choice.