Pearl (The Pearl Series) (10 page)

Her name was Hélène.

Sophie had been in the game since we left home when she was seventeen. But she was picky. She started out as just as an escort, refusing for a full two years to have penetrative sex. Wouldn’t even blow the guys. No, she was educated, she maintained—she had more to offer. She could hold an intelligent conversation and she looked like a top model. She was ambitious, too. It wasn’t long before she was the darling of several politicians and men in extremely high places. Sex was not her thing. She hooked them in a different way.

She was a Dominatrix.

They’d get off on being whipped and scolded. She’d set the scene, sometimes playing mommy, nanny or a wicked stepmother, sending them to bed with no supper or dripping hot wax onto their chests. They loved it. Some wanted golden showers. One, she even dressed up in giant diapers and spanked when he cried. It was all pretty sick but she was making a fortune. The more insane it got, the richer she became. There was one, though, who became obsessed with her. Set us up in a luxurious apartment in the Champs-Elysées, and wouldn’t share Sophie with anyone. He paid handsomely for exclusivity. She became his official mistress. We were still both going under false names. She had read
The Three Musketeers
and liked the name of the author. So she chose Dumas. I was fascinated with chivalry and jousting knights so I chose Chevalier—Knight when translated into English.

We were the
Two
Musketeers, fighting to survive.

She then got bored of having to cow-tow to the politician, but before she left him, she managed to extract enough money from his coffers to set herself up in business. She became a Madame. He was furious, but her
Little Black Book
with all the names and phone numbers of some of the most powerful men in Europe spelled Doom for anyone foolish enough to mess with her. She was above the law because, guess what? She had them in her pocket: politicians, government aids, heads of police, big business men married with children, with too much at stake to lose face. Sophie was practically running Paris, not to mention her British and German contacts. She had it all sewn up very nicely.

What I later told Pearl about our stepfather helping us set up HookedUp with his piddly 15,000 euros? Bullshit. It was
Sophie
who funded HookedUp. She needed to launder money, needed to put all that cash somewhere legitimate. That’s where I came in.

But back to my fourteenth birthday, several years before…

Hélène knew that I was obsessed with her. She wore black stockings, held up with garters, and a gray schoolgirl uniform. She also had a lot of powerful clients and they loved that dirty-sweet look. She was thirty but looked a lot younger. Slim, but with a curvy ass. I could smell her every time she walked by me. Vanilla, or something that smelled like candy. All I thought about was burying my cock inside her. I could hardly sleep nights I was so infatuated.

On my birthday, she knocked on my bedroom door at five in the morning. She was laughing, had been up all night and was tipsy.

She leaned back against the wall and splayed her legs apart, her high heels digging into the wooden parquet floor, her skimpy, silk panties flashing a scarlet red. “Come on then, big boy. Come and show me what you’ve got. I saw that huge great cock of yours bulging in your pants the other day. I have a feeling that big boy has a crush on me, doesn’t it?”

I was mortified. My face was burning like a scalding iron but what she was saying was giving me a hard-on.

“You see? I just look at you and you get a stiffy.” She burst out laughing again and then got down on her knees and pulled down my pajama bottoms.

When I told Pearl, “That was maybe the best blowjob I ever had,” the
maybe
bit was a clue to the truth. Because Hélène’s blowjob was iconic. Unforgettable.

It was my
first
. And being a green fourteen-year-old, you can imagine what it felt like.

The fuck that followed was even more incredible for me, but disastrous for Hélène. I clawed and panted and came instantly. How could I stop myself? That’s when she decided I needed ‘training.’ I became her ‘valet,’ her sort of Action Man doll. She trained me, all right. She taught me almost everything I know.

After about six months, I began to get the hang of it. She wouldn’t let me fuck her until she was soaking wet first. I learned to
earn
my fuck and enjoy foreplay as much as the act itself. Lubricant was banned. That was a curse word. “Any man who uses that shit isn’t worth the time of day, and certainly isn’t worth the time of night,” she sneered. She taught me that it wasn’t a race. And woe betide if I ever came before she did. Not. Allowed. Ever. If I did that, she wouldn’t let me fuck her for a week.

Word got out that I had a big dick so her friends got curious and she began to share me. I was insatiable, wanting it several times a day, so I sure as hell wasn’t complaining.

There were several in the game who were inorgasmic. They put on a great act, though—could have fooled anyone. And did. Fooled me, till I was shown how to read the signs: the fake screams and eye-rolls. Hélène explained that all women were natural born actresses in the bedroom, and not to be taken in by the Big Lie. They taught me how to understand women’s bodies. Really know them.
Feel
them. One was even into Tantric sex, so we did it without hardly even moving. I learned to detect the tiniest twitch in her pussy and make her come by not even fucking her. Teasing her with my stillness. Making her beg for the smallest movement, which could send her over the edge. That’s when I learned about the power of the brain, and that sexual organs were no more than the brain’s tools.

“Don’t get cocky about having a big penis,” Hélène warned. “It’s useless unless you know how to use it properly. God gave you a big dick for one reason only: to give us women pleasure. Don’t abuse that gift. One day you’ll find someone special, want to get married and have a family. The rule will still apply; you’ll want to make your wife happy. If she’s happy, you’ll be happy. Trust me on this.”

Just one woman? Marry? The idea seemed inconceivable to me at the time. I wanted every pretty woman I laid my eyes on, and that’s the way it continued for many years.

But Hélène’s words had an impact on me and have lived with me ever since.

Naught to sixty and I was still cruising.

I invited Pearl to dinner that very same day. To celebrate her Big O, if you like. Not that I made a big deal of it to her. I wanted her to know how special she was to me. When a woman lets a man enter her, she feels an extraordinary vulnerability afterwards, partly because so many guys start acting like assholes once they’ve got what they wanted. They see women as vessels for their own pleasure. That’s not the way I operate. I want a woman to feel ecstatic after I have been with her, not deflated.

Besides, I couldn’t get enough of Pearl.

I spent the whole afternoon preparing for her visit. I went food shopping and got gourmet treats delivered to my apartment: sea bream, hot peppers from the Pays Basque in France, black truffles, razor clams from Galicia in Spain, Cornish cream from England. I wanted to impress Pearl as much in the cuisine as I had in the sack. They say the way to a man’s heart is through the stomach. Believe me, it works the other way, too. Prepare a woman a home-cooked meal and you score major brownie points.

I had conquered the business world. People needed HookedUp
,
or at least thought they did. It dawned on me that I liked feeling needed. Perhaps that’s what came of coming from a dysfunctional family; a desire to feel accepted, needed, wanted. My mother fled when she should have stayed. She left me when I was only seven years old. So I knew all about rejection and being abandoned.

Something I still secretly feared. Yes, I wanted women—in general—to need me.

And as for Pearl? I wanted her to feel she
really
needed me.

I called Elodie, my niece, to come and help me prepare the feast. Elodie was eighteen and your typical surly teenager. However, she was bright and had an aptitude for numbers and figures so I had her working for me at the offices of HookedUp for the summer. She’d dropped out of college and was floating about, luxuriating in the fact that she was only eighteen and had all the time in the world to screw-up her life.

We stood in the kitchen, drinking cold beers, listening to Elvis Presley sing
Can’t
Help Falling In Love.
I had Elodie reluctantly chopping vegetables, pouting and rolling her eyes every time I asked something of her.

I raised my brows and said, “You think eighteen’s young, don’t you?”

She shrugged. Her dark brown hair flopped over her beautiful, heart-shaped face that was so delicate and adorable, you felt it could break.

I went on, “First kitchen rule, Elodie: hair up. Go to the bathroom and tie that horse’s mane into a nice, neat ponytail or bun. I don’t want strands of hair in the food.”

She made a face at me. “Who is this chick that’s got you into, like, Mr. Perfection mode and listening to corny love songs?”

“When you make a gourmet meal you have to pull out all the stops—get thee to the bathroom, young lady. Now!” Of course, all this conversation was in French. Elodie’s English was still, at that point, floundering. I’d enrolled her in intensive classes—she needed them.

“And after this can I go to my room?” she asked, spearing a tomato.

“What? And hide behind video games, wasting your life online? No, you cannot go to your room. You stay here with me while I show you how to cook properly. Then, an hour before my guest is due to arrive, go take a shower and make yourself look pretty and presentable. Take off that dark coal around your eyes, those silly fuck-me heels that you go tottering about in, and make yourself look like a lady. There is a lady somewhere deep down inside there, isn’t there? Just dying to get out?” I teased.

She jokingly wielded a large stainless-steel knife at me. “I’ll go back to Paris if you keep bossing me about like this.”

“What? And get driven crazy by your mother? What will you live on?”

Elodie pouted air, puckering up her lips like a model on a fashion shoot. Sophie wasn’t giving her a dime. I, at least, had her on my payroll. She was learning how HookedUp operated in New York. Learning a trade. “Bathroom,” I ordered. “Hair out of face. Hair out of food.”

She sloped off.

“And shoulders back. Stop looking like an angry teenager and get your shit together.”

I was being tough on Elodie but it was the only way to bring her out of her shell. The more I treated her with kid gloves, the more she withdrew. So I was playing dad, although she did have a real father, Sophie’s husband. Sophie was Elodie’s stepmother, but she had still taken her on as her own. Elodie’s mom died when she was six, or so. But right now, things weren’t going well between Elodie and Sophie. Elodie had clammed up and Sophie was hurting with the rejection. The usual mother/daughter stuff. I didn’t ask too many questions.

Elodie thought I didn’t know about her secret but I had a pretty good idea. Something bad had happened to her. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pretty. It didn’t seem as if it was the usual, teenage heartbreak trouble. As far as I knew, Elodie had never even had a boyfriend. No. Some shit had gone down that had broken her. Changed her from a giggly, bubbly girl into a very angry person. She looked as if she had been deceived. Destroyed. I wanted to help. I loved Elodie as my own and I felt protective towards her. To me, she felt like my flesh-and-blood daughter. I’d tried, various times, to get her to open up to me. Not easy.

Elodie clicked back into the kitchen, her hair up in a messy, ragamuffin bun. I gave her a C for effort.

“You’d be more comfortable taking off those heels,” I remarked.

“I know.”

“Well then?”

“I like to feel tall. Makes me feel stronger. If anyone fucks with me I can take one off and stab him in the eye.”

“Ah, a weapon,” I observed with a wry smile. “Interesting.”

Elodie was petite. Tiny. She had wrists that looked as if you could crack them in two. Her skin was translucent, as if she had been living in a dark cave all her life. She used to be bronzed and healthy-looking, spending summers diving in and out of my pool in Provence, but now she shied away from sunlight like a vampire.

“Have you had any lunch today?” I asked her.

“An apple.”

“Right. I’m going to prepare you a
steak au poivre
and French fries
.
”

“I’m not eating meat anymore.”

“No, of course not,” I said, my eyes taking in the bloodless pallor of her thin skin, as I gathered some ingredients out of the fridge. “A nice, big, hearty bowl of pasta, then, with
a lot
of Parmesan on top? You need some protein, my girl.”

“Whatever,” she said listlessly. Then she muttered, “Who is this Pearl Robinson, anyway?”

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. “How do you know her name?”

“Maman mentioned her. She’s getting her checked out.”

I sucked in a lungful of air. “Of course she is,” —and I exhaled with a long, exasperated groan— “of course she fucking is.”