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.”
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 fatal 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.
For a few fleeting moments, she allowed her mind to fly back there, to linger on each image, on every remembered smell and sound and touch of her home. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear the rooks cawing in the treetops of the Great Park, and smell the dampness of the early-morning mist, intertwined with the sour smoke of the previous night’s bonfire. She could feel the smooth, polished wood of the banisters under her hand and see the vast, faded tapestries of hunting scenes that hung, so exquisite and yet almost unnoticed, against the cool stone walls.
She pictured her old Nanny Chapman chasing her out of the cavernous larder, remembered the “slap, slap” sound of her bare feet as she ran across the cold flagstone floor of the scullery and out into the kitchen garden, with a slice of cook’s apple pie still clenched tightly in her sticky fist.
Her father had sold Amhurst. It was gone.
Silently, lovingly, Caroline folded away each of her precious memories. If she were going to survive this, she knew she could never, ever look back. She also knew, somewhere very deep inside herself, that her childhood had come to an end in that instant.
Getting up slowly, she put her arms around her father’s neck and held him while he wept. The rose garden, always such a peaceful place, was racked by the sound of Sebastian’s sobbing. Caroline felt she would never be able to set foot there again.
“Don’t cry, Daddy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Really it is. We’ll get through it together. We’ll find somewhere else to live, maybe a lovely cottage like Granny’s or something? It’ll be gorgeous and cozy, and I can bring you your pipe and slippers by the fire every night, just like a really old man.”
That, she realized, was exactly what he looked like, slumped and shivering beside her on the cold stone bench. Overnight, her strong, invincible father had become a broken old man.
Sebastian stared at his daughter in wonder, deeply touched by her desire to comfort him, overwhelmed with gratitude for her forgiveness. “I’m afraid it isn’t just the house, you know,” he forced himself to continue. “I’m . . . the thing is, you see . . . well, there are some debts. A lot of debts, in fact.” Her heart felt wrenched with love and pity for him as he stared abjectly down at his shoes, all glistening and wet from the dewy grass. “I can pay them, of course. There’s no question of anything not being honored, of shirking anything.”
“Of course there isn’t, Pa,” she assured him. “I know that.”
“It’s just that after everybody’s been paid off, well, I’m afraid there’s really very little left. A couple of the paintings I should be able to hang on to, and your great-grandfather’s Egton chest. But everything else . . . Oh, Caroline, darling.” He was crying again now. “Your inheritance, and the boys’. It’s all gone. All of it. I am so terribly, terribly sorry.”
Caroline was surprised to find herself feeling angry. Not at her father—heaven knew how he had gotten himself into such a mess, but he had obviously tried his best. He must have been struggling for years, she realized, not wanting to worry any of them with his troubles, hoping against hope that this dreadful day of reckoning would never come.
No, she was angry with fate, angry at whoever it was who had dealt them this card, who had dared to take their beloved Amhurst.
A powerful sense of resolve and strength surged through her. From now on it would be up to her to make her own way in life. And by God, she was going to do it. Her father was too old and too filled with guilt and shame to do what needed to be done. But Caroline Berkeley was not about to become a common pauper. She would have to find her own fortune, make her own way as her Berkeley ancestors had done so long before her. And she already had a pretty shrewd idea of just how she might do it.
After an horrific, miserable Christmas with her family, Caroline had returned to Massingham and begun, belatedly, to apply herself to her studies.
A private education was, she realized, essential if she were to mix in the sort of monied circles that might help to restore her fortunes, and she astounded her family by winning a much-coveted scholarship that would enable her to stay on at school. (The headmaster had generously agreed to give a devastated Sebastian a term’s grace in which to make “alternative arrangements” for his daughter’s education. But clearly there was no way he could continue to afford her fees.)
Growing up at Amhurst as the only girl in an otherwise all-male family, Caroline had become exceptionally skilled in the art of manipulating men. This skill, she decided, would be her fastest and surest route back to the lifestyle that she had not only become accustomed to but considered her God-given right.
She would marry money.
She’d thought it all through quite logically. Building a successful career involved a high degree of uncertainty; plus she had no real idea what she wanted to do. Besides, working her way back to wealth would take years and Caroline was not prepared to wait that long. Far better to find herself a rich old man she could wrap around her little finger, just as she had always done with her father. With her golden, shoulder-length hair, perfect peaches-and-cream complexion, and a body already in full, glorious bloom, at fifteen she was well accustomed to the gratifyingly dramatic effect her looks seemed to have on the opposite sex.
She started to approach her social life like a military campaign, angling for invitations to St. Tropez or Sardinia, only ever befriending girls whose parents were rich enough to look indulgently on such blatant freeloading.
Her natural intelligence rapidly helped her to develop finely tuned social antennae. She learned to judge exactly when she was in danger of outstaying her welcome with any particular group, and needed to move on to newer, more fertile pastures. She adroitly avoided paying for herself at dinner or on holiday without ever drawing her companions’ attention to the fact. And she perfected using the combination of her aristocratic family name, youth, and striking good looks to manipulate potential sugar daddies.
By the time she finished school, Caroline Berkeley reigned supreme among the smart young set as the undisputed brightest star in their social firmament. Penniless or not, she was the queen of “Swinging London.”
Her twenty-first-birthday party was a lavish champagne reception in Eaton Square, courtesy of a besotted, fifty-four-year-old Greek shipping magnate whom she had befriended the previous summer.
“Spyros, be an angel and do up my zipper, would you?” she asked him coquettishly, preening in front of the bathroom mirror.
She was looking typically foxy that evening, in a bottom-skimming velour minidress in baby pink, teamed with spiky black PVC boots. She wore her long blond hair in schoolgirl bunches, which she knew both her father and her lover would appreciate, though for very different reasons.
“I’ll fix your zipper if you’ll fix mine.” Spyros’s eyes locked with hers, and they both looked down at his enormous erection, clearly outlined against his tight brown trousers. “I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “That dress is just too much.”
“Darling, I’d love to. Help you, I mean,” said Caroline. “But there really isn’t time.” She finished applying her lipstick. “People will start arriving any minute.”
“So let them arrive.” He pulled her toward him and placed her hand on his fly, trying to banish the thought that he had a daughter almost exactly Caroline’s age. “Maria can show them in. Besides, I promise you, this won’t take long.”
He was right, it didn’t. Less than a minute after Caroline had sunk to her knees on the cold blue-tiled floor and gotten to work on his huge, throbbing dick, he had come gratefully into her mouth. Grimacing slightly, she swallowed, anxious not to smudge her perfect makeup before the party.
Really, she wished Spyros would learn to pick slightly more convenient moments.
Five minutes later, after a brief gargle of mouthwash, she was downstairs greeting her brother George and his wife, Lucy. George was always the first to arrive and the first to leave any party—you could set your watch by him.
“Hello, sweetie, glad you could make it,” she said, and gave him one of her most gracious, hostesslike smiles.
He glared disapprovingly at her dress. “Happy birthday, Caro. You look”—he searched around for an appropriate word—“cold.”
Grumpy bastard. She noticed that his ancient tweed suit was beginning to fray at the cuffs, and wondered why his sour-faced wife never did anything to try and smarten him up. Caroline was not a fan of impoverished gentility.
“Do I?” She forced a smile. “I expect I need a drink to warm me up. Can I get either of you a glass of champagne?”
“Thank you, I’d love one,” said Lucy. “George can’t I’m afraid, he’s driving.”
George shot his wife a look of annoyance. “Just an orange juice for me, please, if you’ve got one,” he said to Caroline, who was glad for an excuse to shimmy off to the bar and leave them.
She badly resented the way both her brothers tried to make her feel guilty all the time. They despised Spyros and made no secret of their disapproval of her lifestyle. Well, screw the pair of them. If they wanted to spend the rest of their lives in drafty old rooms, nursing single whiskeys and crying over Amhurst, that was up to them. Caroline had bigger plans for her life, and no one was going to stand in her way.
At least Pa understood her.
Sebastian, looking frail and elderly, was the guest of honor at the party and spent most of the evening chatting animatedly with Spyros about Greek history. Caroline loved the way he could do that, mingle with everybody, try to see the good in people no matter what their background. He wasn’t a small-minded snob, like George or William.
Later, as her huge pink birthday cake was wheeled into the room, its twenty-one candles flickering merrily, Sebastian cleared his throat ostentatiously and announced that he would like to propose a toast “to the birthday queen.”
“To my darling Caroline.” He raised his glass, his rheumy old eyes scanning the roomful of strangers. He did wish his daughter wouldn’t mix with
quite
such a racy crowd. “You have given me twenty-one years of happiness. Here’s to many, many more happy years!”
“To Caroline!” the room erupted in echo.
Two weeks later, Sebastian was dead.
The meager remnants of the Berkeley estate looked even more pitiful when split three ways. In an uncharacteristic display of generosity, Caroline eschewed her share in favor of her brothers, both of whom had young families to support. Besides, it was 1967. One thousand, three hundred pounds barely amounted to the proverbial drop in the ocean of Caroline’s living expenses. She may as well let them have it.
Not that they were remotely grateful.
“I hope, now that dear old Pa is gone, you’re finally going to start pulling your finger out and get a job,” said William sanctimoniously over lunch at Rules one Sunday.
It was just the sort of restaurant he
would
like, reflected Caroline bitterly, glancing around at the florid-faced, overweight establishment types greedily slurping their port.
“You can’t just keep on sponging off that ghastly Greek fellow, you know,” her brother continued. “People are starting to talk.”
“Oh are they?” she bit back angrily, stabbing at her venison with a fork. “And what have they been saying exactly?”