Killer Diamonds Read online

  A while later, she had a better idea of what he’d meant. His arms were wrapped around her legs, strong muscles wedging them inexorably apart despite her struggles to break free; his face was buried between her thighs, his mouth working her to orgasm after orgasm. She needed, desperately, to stop, at least to have a break; her senses were completely overwhelmed, her clitoris so over-stimulated that it felt like a huge exposed nerve. She would have thought he would come up for air at some stage, but it must have been a quarter of an hour and he hadn’t stopped. She had screamed so hard that her throat was hoarse. Shooting tomorrow would be murder; she would have to drink honey and lemon nonstop. He was absolutely relentless. Kicking and squirming was having no effect; he just tightened his grip and made her come yet again.

  There was nothing for it. He had begged her to keep on the satin gloves, and now she reached down and buried her fingers in his hair. The fabric was slippery, but his curls were so springy that she managed to get a good grip on them even in the gloves, enough to drag his head away from her by force. He tried to shake her off, but she held on for dear life, her knuckles digging into his scalp, shrieking:

  ‘Stop, stop! I can’t take any more!’

  His eyes were such a dazzling blue with triumph that they looked like the summer sky lit up by the noonday sun.

  ‘I like to hear you scream,’ he said complacently, finally loosing his clamp on her thighs and wiping his mouth on his forearm. Her muscles were aching, her hips sore from being held open for so long.

  ‘You’re a bastard,’ she said as he climbed up the bed and pulled her into his arms. ‘There isn’t a part of me that doesn’t hurt. My throat’s wrecked and I must be bruised all over. And my pussy feels like you’ve burned it with a red-hot poker.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said into her hair. ‘So we’ll have a bit of a sleep and do it all over again tomorrow morning, bright and early.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Vivienne said. ‘I have major internal bruising. That cock of yours isn’t coming anywhere near me for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Oh, come on, at least give me a dawn blow job?’ Randon said, sliding his thumb into her mouth. ‘God knows you owe it to me after what I just did to you.’

  She sucked his stubby thumb, running her tongue around the flat nail, tracing its outline, then clamping her lips down, exerting enough pressure to hear his breath catch.

  ‘Yes, like that,’ he said, his voice less than usually steady as he pulled his thumb out again. ‘I have to admit, you fuck really well for an actress. They usually just lie there and think you should do all the work.’

  ‘I fuck well for an actress! That’s so sweet of you to say! You’re such a gentleman,’ she added with a considerable amount of irony, which, unsurprisingly, he completely ignored, exclaiming instead:

  ‘Oh! Just remembered something.’

  He let go of her, rolled over the wide bed, jumped to his feet and strode naked across the room to the pile of clothes they had literally torn off each other several hours ago. His penis bounced jauntily on its thick bed of curly dark hair; detumescent, it wasn’t particularly large. He was definitely a grower, not a shower.

  ‘Your jeans!’ she said, suddenly remembering. ‘I’m not having you walk out of here tomorrow looking like you came in your trousers. That would be mortifying.’

  ‘I’ll have a production assistant swing by my hotel and pick me up another pair,’ he said casually. ‘Actually, I’ll have them pick up all my stuff and bring it here.’

  Vivienne sat up, putting her hands on her bare hips.

  ‘How dare you take me for granted?’ she said indignantly.

  ‘God knows how you won an Oscar,’ Randon said, grimacing. ‘That was the worst acting I’ve seen in a long time.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Vivienne grabbed one of the pillows and threw it at him.

  ‘You could do with some new dialogue, too,’ he said, catching the pillow with one hand; his other was rummaging in his jacket pocket. ‘You’re starting to repeat yourself. Here, I’ll feed you the line. It’s “thank you”. Catch.’

  He extracted a velvet-covered jewellery box and threw it onto the bed. It landed in a tangled knot of sweaty sheets. Vivienne leaned over to fish it out.

  ‘Could you throw another pillow first?’ he suggested hopefully. ‘I liked the way your boobs wobbled when you did that.’

  But she was flipping open the lid of the case and staring at its contents, mouth open.

  ‘Still waiting for the thank you,’ Randon said, jumping onto the bed again and sitting there cross-legged, watching her. He was solid and muscular, black hair dappling his forearms and shins, which he had refused to let them shave for Nefertiti.

  It was decades before the fashion for men being visibly ripped and cut, or for being waxed; male actors’ bodies were much more real. Neither Robert Mitchum, who had been a boxer, nor Burt Lancaster, an acrobat who had worked as a trapeze catcher in a circus, had six-packs or chiselled pectorals; their bodies had been honed through physical effort, not targeted gym work and the consumption of protein shakes. Randon would have roared with laughter at the idea that he should do sit-ups or cut down on his drinking during production of a film to tone up his physique; he had been reluctant enough to agree to let the make-up team darken his skin with brown-tinted oil every day saying that if they’d wanted someone who looked like an Egyptian, they should have avoided casting the son of Irish-origin Liverpudlians.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Vivienne eventually managed. ‘Randon –’

  She tore her eyes eventually, reluctantly, from the contents of the box. It was no secret that Vivienne adored fine jewellery, collected it as men did vintage cars or rare vinyl. Film producers knew to greet her, on her first day on set, with a present waiting in her dressing room, both a tribute to her diva status and an investment in her future good behaviour on set. There was no question that having been a film star for almost her entire life had made her spoilt and demanding, and the best way to handle her was to parcel out treats to her much as if she were still the child star she had once been.

  A producer had once commented about Vivienne that he’d been told in rehab that addicts got stuck at the age they were when they had first become addicted; a thirty-five-year-old who had become addicted to heroin or booze at eighteen would never grow emotionally beyond the latter age unless they got clean and worked hard on themselves. As long as they stayed on the drug or the drink, they would only possess the impulse control and immaturity of an eighteen-year-old.

  The producer had said drily that one could see, dealing with Vivienne, that some actors also seemed to remain at the same stage of emotional development as when they had hit the big time. For Vivienne, that was in her early teens, and she could certainly be as capricious and impulse-driven as a teenager whose brain had not yet fully developed. Her love for pretty, shiny things was certainly childish; as she stared in wonder at the diamond and emerald earrings glittering up at her from the blue velvet bed on which they lay, her magnificent eyes were as wide and enchanted as a little girl who had been given exactly what she wanted for Christmas.

  ‘They’re incredible,’ she breathed, stroking one of the earrings with as much devout worship as if she had been a Catholic allowed to touch a holy relic. ‘Oh my God, they must have cost an absolute fortune!’

  ‘They bloody did!’ Randon said cheerfully. ‘Put them on, then – let me see what my money’s bought me.’

  The earrings were so big and heavy they needed a clip fastening, rather than being set for pierced ears. They looked like pendant drops taken from a chandelier, costume jewellery made for a theatre production. Each consisted of just three stones: from two cushion-cut three-carat collet-set diamonds, set above each other, depended drop-set six-carat diamonds. They were as big as pebbles and their weight, as Vivienne affixed them to her lobes, was equally heavy, but she did not flinch as the clips snapped tightly shut. Instead she lifted her chin for balance, looking positively regal.
/>   ‘You look like a queen,’ Randon said, his normal joking tone quite absent as he took in the spectacle of Vivienne, naked but for her gloves and earrings, sitting in the centre of the canopied Empire bed, her posture superb. She studied herself in the huge, gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall, the earrings so large that they were clearly visible even across the room.

  ‘The bottom stones come from an Indian Maharajah’s turban,’ he said. ‘They were set on either side of the Timur Ruby.’

  Vivienne turned to look at him with a smile as dazzling as the diamonds themselves.

  ‘Maybe you’ll buy me that next,’ she said, her eyes alight with pleasure.

  ‘If the Queen ever puts it up for sale, I’ll be first in line!’ he said, grinning.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew so much about fine gems,’ she said, looking back at herself in the mirror again, hypnotized by the sight of herself in all her splendour. She raised her arms to lift her thick black hair up and back, coiling it on top of her head with her gloved hands, the movement lifting her breasts in a way that she knew was extremely flattering.

  ‘I don’t,’ Randon said, shrugging. ‘But I wanted to get you something really special to celebrate our first time. That’s where I was last weekend – in London, going round jewellers.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know what to say,’ she murmured, as he crawled across the bed towards her and wrapped his arms around her from behind, propping his head on her shoulder and staring at the mirror with an intensity equal to hers; two actors both as famous for their extreme good looks as for their acting skills, both at the height of their beauty, unashamedly relishing how good they looked together.

  ‘I’m going to photograph you like this,’ Randon said. ‘That pose, with your hands on your head. I did an interview earlier this year where I talked about how much I love taking photos – God knows why, I must have been on the lash – and Kodak sent me its latest camera. It’s amazing. I’m going to take a lot of nude shots of you so I can have plenty of wank material when you’re not around.’

  ‘God, you’re so romantic! You want to do porn shots of me with my tits out?’ Vivienne said, laughing, but secretly relishing the idea that Randon would be masturbating to her image.

  ‘Of course! They’ll never look better!’ he pointed out. ‘Don’t you want to have them immortalized for posterity? That way, when you’re old and droopy, you’ll be able to look at my photos of you and say to yourself, “Okay, I’m a sad old bag now, but by God, I used to have the best tits in the world.”’

  ‘I am never going to be a sad old bag,’ Vivienne said with hauteur.

  ‘Still, these won’t always be this firm,’ Randon said, reaching around to cup one of her breasts, his chunky, spatulate fingers closing round it with great appreciation. ‘Don’t get many of these to the pound.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re vulgar,’ she observed even as her body responded to his touch, her nipples hardening.

  ‘You love every second,’ he said, bending over to kiss her shoulder. ‘No one’s ever talked to you like this before, have they? It’s bloody good for you, woman. You need it. You need to be shagged and insulted on a regular basis. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. Marry me. I’m brave enough to take it on.’

  Vivienne’s jaw dropped, her mouth sagging open. Seeing how unflattering this looked in the mirror, she snapped it shut again, turning to look at Randon directly; for something this important, simply talking to each other’s reflections wasn’t enough.

  ‘I do not believe you just asked me to marry you after one fuck. You’re a drunken madman,’ she said with absolute conviction.

  ‘Always have been,’ he said, his eyes bright. ‘Always will be. But by God, I don’t lack for courage.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and saw his eyes widen, his perpetual cocky attitude momentarily dropped.

  ‘All right what?’ he asked, and her full lips curved with delight at having successfully caught him off guard.

  ‘All right, I’ll marry you!’ she said with superbly feigned nonchalance. ‘If you’re fool enough to offer, you might as well take your punishment. I’ll make your life a living hell. Oh,’ she added. ‘And I expect an engagement ring that makes these –’ she flicked the earrings – ‘look like cheap trinkets.’

  ‘Hold on!’

  Randon unwrapped his arms from her, jumped from the bed and dashed from the room, his stocky body moving with the speed of a sprinter, his round buttocks rising and falling hypnotically. Five minutes later he returned, just as fast, with a bottle of champagne in one hand and two flutes in the other. Taking a running leap, he landed squarely in the middle of the bed, making the ancient frame rattle with the impact, chucking the champagne bottle at Vivienne.

  ‘Who needs to sleep!’ he said. ‘Let’s drink until we pass out, wake up and fuck our brains out to celebrate getting engaged!’

  And that was precisely what they did.

  Chapter Two

  Seville, 1970

  ‘Not like that! Jesus, woman, anyone would think you’d never fired a gun before!’

  Randon Cliffe grabbed the derringer from his wife.

  ‘Oh my God, you’re such a bully!’

  Vivienne Winter put her hands on her hips and glared at him. She was a little drunk, but only someone who knew her well would have realized it; her speech was barely slurred, her movements only fractionally impaired, and if the glint in her eyes was partly a result of the bottle of champagne she had drunk over dinner, it merely added to the sheer magnificence of her physical presence.

  ‘Men and guns!’ she continued, as Randon checked the safety on the derringer. ‘It’s just all penises with you, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all penises with you,’ Randon said, looking up and winking at her. Vivienne refused to be distracted.

  ‘Give me back my gun!’ she insisted. ‘I need to practise! This is such a crucial scene – it opens the play—’

  ‘Don’t hold it like it’s a separate thing,’ Randon said, handing it back to her. ‘Feel as if it’s an extension of your own body.’

  ‘But she hasn’t used it before,’ Vivienne said. ‘I wanted to show that.’

  ‘How do you know? She might have been taking pot-shots at mongooses in Malaya for years!’

  Randon paused, his blue eyes opening owlishly wide as a thought hit him; he had been nipping at Spanish brandy all day even before cocktails and wine with dinner, and although his tolerance was by now legendary through the length and breadth of the film and theatre worlds, that meant that he was rarely – if ever – completely sober.

  ‘Is it mongooses?’ he mused, momentarily derailed, his previous thundering tone dropped as he moved effortlessly into his best university professor impression. ‘Or mongeese? Surely the laws of grammar should suggest the latter? What would the collective noun for them be, I wonder? A killing of mongeese? A bite of mongeese?’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Vivienne said. ‘You’re drunk. And you’re making no sense. No one would want to take a shot at one! People like mongooses, because they kill snakes.’

  Although she was making a good point, her voice had wavered, just faintly, over the word ‘mongooses’, and Randon pounced on it.

  ‘You don’t know either!’ he said triumphantly. ‘It should be mongeese, don’t you think? Logically, it definitely makes the most sense!’

  Vivienne turned on her heel, tossing her hair to make it clear that she was ignoring him completely, and swept from the room. Randon threw himself onto the sofa behind him and waited. They were staying in a rented mansion in Seville for the duration of their latest film shoot, a romance set during the Napoleonic Wars: Vivienne was playing a Spanish peasant girl called Conchita who fell in love with Randon, a British rifleman seconded to the guerrillas trying to harry Napoleon out of their country.

  However, immediately after In Love and War wrapped, she was headed to New York and a tight rehearsal schedule for her Broadway debut as the anti-heroine of Somerset Maugham
’s play The Letter. Set in Malaya in the 1920s, it opened with a very dramatic scene: as the curtain rises on the veranda of a colonial house on a rubber plantation in the jungle, a gunshot rings out. A wounded man staggers out of the house onto the veranda, followed by a woman with a revolver in her hand. As he tries to escape, she fires again and again, advancing mercilessly; he collapses to the ground and she stands over him, emptying the gun into his body.

  It had to capture the audience’s attention from the first moment. They had, absolutely, to believe that they were watching a murder.

  The click of a gun signalled that Vivienne had started the scene. She timed it perfectly, allowing her invisible target to react and stumble into the room, clutching his stomach, before she appeared. Although she was wearing jeans and a silk blouse, her thick black hair loose and tumbling around her shoulders, she walked now as if she were wearing a 1920s evening dress, tightly fitted in the fashion of the period, forcing her steps to be short and clipped. She held the derringer in both hands, much less tightly now, with a flexibility to her wrists, and Randon nodded in approval; that was what he had meant by telling her to think of it as part of her body.

  She fired again, twice, and her eyes narrowed as she watched the invisible man fall to the ground, close to her feet. She made a gesture, as if sweeping something away from her legs, and then she raised both hands again, holding the gun, and fired down, three more times, a pause between each one, her expression icy, making it crystal clear that her intent was to kill him. And then slowly, a look of horror filled her eyes, as she realized the full impact of what she had just done.

  Randon left several beats before rewarding her performance with loud and enthusiastic applause. She threw back her hair, flashing a smile, Vivienne again.

  ‘Much better, wasn’t it?’ she demanded. ‘I gave myself the shivers!’

  ‘Apart from that thingywhatsit you did with your hand,’ Randon said, imitating the gesture. ‘What the fuck was that about?’