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  He knew blindingly in that moment that nothing, nothing would make him give up Rothwell. He had to have it, no matter what the cost… and if that meant marriage to Geraldine Frances then a marriage there would be. But, as he vowed to have the earldom and all that went with it, he also vowed to make his cousin pay for standing in his way, for forcing him to marry her. Oh, yes, he would make her pay…

  His mother was saying something about him having to be nicer to Geraldine Frances… He suppressed an acid, jeering comment. Did she really not know that he knew exactly what had to be done? He looked at her with distaste and dislike. Over the years she had changed her attitude towards him and had somehow managed to convince herself that she had always adored and cherished him; that he was the ‘precious child’ she had so often referred to, and, even more unbelievably, she seemed to have convinced herself that he felt the same way about her. A sudden thought struck him and he said casually, ‘Ma, I’ll eventually be leaving school… when I do…’

  ‘You’ll go on to Oxford, of course. I—–’

  ‘No,’ he told her curtly. ‘No… I think it would be a better idea if I did something to convince Uncle James that, as his only male heir, I ought to be taught something about his business affairs.’

  His mother looked at him.

  ‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘But we’ll have to wait until James is in a better frame of mind. And I don’t know if he—–’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to him,’ Charles told her smoothly. ‘Persuade him to fix something up for me. Something which will enable me to keep in close contact with Rothwell and Geraldine Frances…’

  Again his mother stared.

  ‘Yes, I should have thought of that… you’re going to have to make sure someone else doesn’t steal her away from you, Charles. Without her…’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘It’s a pity she didn’t die with her damned mother… Then there’d be nothing to stand in between me and Rothwell.’ And Margaret, who had once felt very much the same thing about her young brother, could say nothing.

  Charles had raised a very salient point, though. It was essential that he remain in close contact with Rothwell and his cousin, and if James could be persuaded to take Charles into his confidence about his financial affairs, to teach him all that he was so unnecessarily teaching Geraldine Frances…

  ‘I think your cousin will have to go away to school in a few years,’ Margaret announced thoughtfully… And Charles, who knew quite well the lines on which his mother’s mind ran, agreed softly.

  ‘An excellent idea. Divide and conquer, unite and rule… We must make sure that the only person my dear cousin unites herself with is me… so that through her I can make sure that I’m the one to rule Rothwell.’

  By the time he left school Charles had established a strong network of drug users to whom he supplied a variety of drugs, no longer obtained merely from his original source of supply.

  Once he was free of school, the network spread, and as always Charles was careful only to supply to those he knew could afford to buy.

  His sexual experimentation while at school had led him to the discovery that there was a certain type of woman he enjoyed sex with best.

  Physically she had to be attractive, and, equally as important, physically desired by other males. She had to be a woman who was in some way a challenge, but not so much of a challenge that she might ultimately refuse or reject him, and, most of all, she had to be the kind of woman who, once she had accepted him sexually, would let him establish over her an ascendancy which would allow him to dominate and direct their relationship.

  He quickly found out that the easiest place for him to find this woman was among the ranks of young models attached to the fringes of the groups in which he mixed. Physically beautiful, they were almost always also insecure enough to be gratified by the attention he paid them, by the title he waved under their nose with just the right amount of modesty, by the names he dropped so carefully and nonchalantly. And then, when he had had enough of them, there was no problem in getting rid of them.

  Tearful threats of suicide, protestations of loving him… Charles ignored them all. He was, as they soon discovered, impossible to blackmail emotionally.

  With his uncle, knowing the control James ultimately had over his future, Charles was very careful to preserve an outward image of probity and seriousness, but, while James was never unpleasant to him, Charles knew that his uncle did not like him.

  Another fault he laid at Geraldine Frances’s door. Another crime for which she would ultimately pay.

  Sometimes, lying in bed with his latest lover, sated and relaxed, he would study the body of the woman lying next to him, comparing her lissom lines with those of his grotesquely overweight cousin… comparing her sexual experience and skill with Geraldine Frances’s total lack of it. It made him shudder to think of Geraldine Frances in the same state of wild abandonment reached by his lovers when he skilfully encouraged them to take just the right amount of drug to ensure that they gave him the maximum amount of pleasure.

  Later, when the drug began to matter more to them than sex, he was quite happy to supply them so long as they could afford it. Once they could not afford it… well, that was their hard luck.

  James’s name and wealth admitted him to privileged circles which would otherwise have been completely closed to him, and he was beginning to find that there was a market for his drugs which far outstripped anything he had previously known.

  Wealthy young socialites with their parents’ money behind them, secure in their positions of privilege, soon learned what he was able to supply.

  He began to receive invitations to the kind of parties where drugs were openly passed round… where there was no risk of anyone betraying a friend’s habit… where people could afford to pay virtually whatever Charles chose to ask.

  He had only one problem. Demand was beginning to outstrip what he could supply.

  So far he had dealt discreetly and cautiously with other suppliers, wary of allowing himself to get dragged into water he might later find too deep. Once he was married to Geraldine Frances—once he had control of her wealth, of Rothwell—there would be no necessity for him to earn an income by drug dealing.

  But now there was, and once he realised the extent of the money he could make supplying his wealthy, aristocratic peers he lost a little of his caution and decided that it was time to find a new and better source of supply.

  Discreet questioning of all his existing sources gave him the same answer. The supply of drugs in London was controlled from one source. If he wanted a larger supply, they could give him a name… If he tried to bring in supplies from a source outside the city, those who controlled it would react in swift and dangerous retaliation.

  For a month Charles hesitated, but in the end his greed won. He was invited to a coming out ball, held in the private home of one of the country’s wealthiest peers. The ball was being held to celebrate the man’s niece’s eighteenth birthday. It was the most prestigious event Charles had so far attended, and he had been invited, he knew, purely because he had happened to drop James’s name in the right ears.

  This was no marquee-erected-on-the-lawn affair, but a glittering extravaganza held in a ballroom which almost rivalled that at Versailles.

  The supper provided was as parsimonious as only the very, very wealthy could get away with, but the drink flowed generously, and Charles had the dubious privilege of being approached by the giggling and tipsy girl who was the focus of the whole affair, who had been ‘dared’ by her chums to invite Charles to help her celebrate achieving her majority by making love to her.

  Charles cautiously refused. He had no wish to find himself the victim of a paternity suit, and certainly not for the dubious pleasure of having a rather plain and certainly dull young girl, who he knew quite well was unlikely to inherit anything more than a hundred thousand pounds.

  Besides, he had other, far more important business to attend to.

  He
had been approached over and over again throughout the evening for drugs, and the greed that was so much part of his inheritance from his mother finally urged him to push caution aside and to make contact with the name he had been given.

  The ball was well attended by representatives of the more up-market gossip Press. Charles dutifully posed for photographs with half a dozen carefully selected young men and women, all of whom in their own way were physically outstanding.

  The photographer was a woman, bone-thin, dark-haired, sharp-featured, and Charles had to look at her twice before he recognised the pale blue eyes and realised who it was—she had slimmed down dramatically since their first unconventional meeting.

  She raised her eyebrows mockingly when he approached her and said softly, ‘Well, well, fancy meeting you here.’

  She was not the kind of woman Charles would ever be drawn to, but he had never forgotten his initiation ceremony, the excitement she had engendered within him, the power he had sensed emanating from her.

  ‘You still enjoy watching others play, I see,’ he responded.

  If she recognised the subtle threat of his words, the recognition he had that for her pleasure would always come from being in control… from being apart from rather than involved in… from being an observer rather than a participant, she didn’t betray it.

  ‘It’s a job,’ she told him, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Speaking of which, here comes my boss…’

  The man approaching them was tall and dark, very vigorous-looking despite the fact that he was well into his forties.

  ‘Come along, Helen, my love,’ he demanded. ‘Stop making a play for the belle of the ball, and remember that you’re here to work, not play…’

  Homosexual, Charles recognised immediately, equally immediately making it subtly clear that he was anything but.

  Homosexuals were outsiders… aliens… their particular pleasure had to be kept a secret if they wanted any kind of public life. The man who inherited Rothwell could never be gay.

  Charles was no longer living with his mother, but rented a flat from a friend of a friend.

  When he returned to it in the early hours of the morning, he discovered that his newly discarded lover had somehow or other managed to obtain a key and had destroyed everything capable of being destroyed in the place.

  His mouth hardened. He would make her pay for that particular piece of folly, but in the meantime… the flat wasn’t his and would have to be restored to what it had originally been… That would take money… Before he could change his mind he found the note he had made of the name he had been given and the telephone number, and punched the numbers into his phone.

  The interview he had later with the anonymous man, who he was quite sure was not the one he had spoken to on the phone, was mutually beneficial. The interviewer was plainly impressed by his contacts, by the promise of the business he could bring in, by the amount of drugs he was prepared to take, and the business he could virtually guarantee already, and Charles in turn was impressed by the discretion and wariness evidenced by the fact that whomever he had spoken to was keeping his own real identity a secret and using a go-between.

  Charles was particularly insistent about the precautions to be taken over the delivery of the drugs to him and his payment for them. In the end it was agreed that Charles would employ a cleaner, whose name he would be given, who would act as his contact with his supplier.

  He found a new lover to replace the one he had abandoned, quickly discovered just how much money he could make from his drug dealing and for the first time in his life experienced something approaching contentment.

  And then his mother died, and the realisation that he might after all find that his uncle might manage to alienate Geraldine Frances from him, and thus destroy his chances of ever possessing Rothwell, was brought sourly home to him.

  Too well he understood what his uncle was trying to do, but he wasn’t going to allow James to succeed… Geraldine Frances would marry him. No matter what he had to do to make sure of it, he would have Rothwell.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHRISTMAS this year had been the happiest one she could ever remember, Geraldine Frances reflected blissfully, looking back on the short, ecstatic time she had spent with Charles, learned of his love and received her father’s permission for Charles and herself to be unofficially engaged.

  She frowned suddenly. Her father’s enthusiasm for her future with Charles did not match hers, she knew, but he had not proffered any explanation for that lack of enthusiasm, and for some reason she was reluctant to press him for any. It was far easier and far, far more pleasurable for her to concentrate on the fact that she and Charles still had two whole precious days together before he had to return to London, rather than to worry about her father’s lacklustre response to the announcement of their love for one another.

  Tomorrow her father would be joining other members of the Belvoir hunt, and Charles would be going with him, while she remained here at Rothwell. While she loved the pageantry of the hunt, she hated its end result, and had long ago opted out of sharing her father’s pleasure in that particular sport.

  If she could change just one thing about this wonderful Christmas, it would have been its venue, she decided, staring out of the window across the frosted park of Rothwell. She would have preferred to spend Christmas in Ireland at Castle Kilrayne.

  Charles had mocked her when she had told him as much. ‘Gerry, you may love that monstrous heap of rocks, but I’m afraid I don’t share your feelings. Rothwell, now…’ His voice had softened betrayingly and she had recognised with almost a chill shrewdness, for the first time in her life, that it was possible for a human being to love an inanimate object or a place almost to the point of an obsession. But since it was an awareness she didn’t want to have, since it showed her idol to have faults and flaws, and since she was still young enough to want Charles and her love for him to be totally without flaw or fault, she had dismissed the vague feeling of distaste that the look in his eyes had given her, turning away from him so that she didn’t have to see it. She loved Rothwell herself, was proud of its history, its beauty, but it was, after all, only a house. A house filled with art treasures beyond price… a house which had belonged to her family for many generations… but still only a house, and the avid, hungry look in Charles’s eyes when he spoke about it had frightened her.

  The two of them had been alone in the huge book-filled room. It was over twenty feet high, with an arched ceiling covered in ornate plasterwork squares, each one depicting various hereditary arms appertaining to the family. Painted and gilded, the ceiling echoed the richness of the mahogany bookshelves, which ran the full height of the walls. A gallery encircled the room, reached by a curling wrought-iron staircase.

  The original Aubusson carpet, now faded and slightly worn, still covered the polished floor. It had been woven to the special order of the eighth Earl.

  Her father had been with the estate manager. Once, houses like Rothwell were supported by the income from the lands on which they stood, but no longer.

  Geraldine Frances had looked at Charles… She could still not believe they were virtually engaged. He had been frowning, staring down into the fire, and a tiny frisson of disquiet had touched her skin, running coldly down her spine. She had wondered anxiously what his thoughts were and why he looked so distant, and she had ached for the confidence and the experience to go up to him… to touch that beautiful sculptured face… to see his mouth soften and smile, and to know that his smile, his attention, his love were for her and her alone.

  Remembering those feelings now, she shivered a little. It was stupid of her to harbour these kind of insecurities, to worry that…

  That what? That Charles’s love for her was not as intense, as fierce, as all consuming as hers was for him? He was a man, she reminded herself, and men did not always show their feelings as easily as women. He had told her he loved her, hadn’t he? Had said that he wanted her to be his wife? So why was she sufferi
ng this ridiculous mood of self-doubt… why did she wish she could keep Charles permanently at her side, when she knew that just wasn’t possible?

  The sound of the door to the sitting-room opening made her swing round, her worried expression changing to one of brilliant pleasure as Charles came in. He checked in the doorway, almost as though he hadn’t expected her to be there. Almost as though he hadn’t wanted her to be there… but even as the disquieting thought struck her, he was coming towards her, smiling his golden, caressing smile, holding out his hands to her as he exclaimed, ‘Gerry… here you are! I thought you were cooped up with your father and Harding.’

  John Harding was her father’s estate manager, and traditionally whenever they were at Rothwell her father spent his mornings in the library going over estate matters with him.

  ‘It’s a pity your father doesn’t do a bit more entertaining here at Rothwell,’ Charles commented, releasing her quickly, after kissing her lightly on her forehead.

  Quelling her disappointment at the brevity of his caress, guilty about her rebellious flesh’s longing for something more intimate… more… intense, Geraldine Frances felt the sting of the lightly said words and looked at him miserably.

  Charles led a very sociable life in London, she knew, and it was probably only natural that he should miss it when he was here. He was naturally gregarious where she was not, and as always when she suffered his displeasure she hunted round despairingly in her mind for something to placate him with.

  ‘There’s the hunt tomorrow,’ she reminded him. ‘You always enjoy that…’

  His eyebrows rose, a look of cynicism hardening his face; someone older and more experienced than Geraldine Frances would have recognised his pleasure in tormenting and hurting her, but she was too young, too much in love to see below the dazzling, magnificent surface of his physical good looks.