Refracted Crystal: Diamonds and Desire Read online

  She scowled playfully at him. “Very well,” she corrected herself. “Perhaps I ate too much, that’s all.” As she rubbed her abdomen, she pinched the flesh tenderly in her fingers. There was a little too much flab for her own liking. Damn it! How could Daniel eat like a horse and stay so slim? She sighed once more, knowing the answer to that: at heart she was far too lazy a person to endure the physical regime that he imposed upon himself.

  Daniel had picked up a shirt and was pulling it over his solid arms and back when he heard her sigh. Turning again, he looked at her somewhat sharply. “What is it?” he asked.

  She shook her head, but he refused to accept this, reading her face rather than any other overt signs. Continuing to button up his shirt, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her with a stern kindness. “What is it? You’re not still thinking of what that asshole, Felix, said, are you?”

  Again she shook her head and then relented. “No. Perhaps. A little.” She paused but refused to look at him, staring instead at her hand which was pinching and rubbing her belly, somewhat more roughly now as though to punish it. “You don’t think I’m too fat, do you?”

  At this, he laughed and threw up his hands in a show of mock exasperation. “Women!” he breathed. “No, I don’t think you’re fat.”

  Her expression showed that she did not believe him and so he bent down and began to kiss her belly. Her skin was warm and silky against his face, and in this position he could smell the faint perfume of her sex still in its natural heat. She sighed once more, but this was a gentler, comforted sound this time, and her fingers reached down to his hair, softly stroking his locks as his mouth continued to move over her.

  “That’s nice,” she murmured.

  He lifted his lips a fraction of an inch above her flesh, letting his breath warm her. The navel was a lozenge dipped in the rise of her abdomen, and this close he could see the very faint fur of her skin, almost microscopic and the sweetest down to his sight. Her legs parted slightly, and her scent became almost imperceptibly stronger. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

  She continued to stroke his hair very slowly. Had he lifted his eyes at that moment, he would have seen her face raised slightly on the pillow, gazing down at him with a lulling intensity. Instead, he brought his mouth once more into contact with her, kissing her, letting his tongue touch her skin, nuzzling her trimmed pubic hair with his nose. His tongue flickered out again, tasted a salty sweetness.

  Kris moaned.

  “That’s very nice.”

  He did it again, feeling the mound of her outer labia parting, the utterly smooth inner labia beginning to extend, tickling the furl of her clitoris with the very tip of his tongue. Honey coated her as he entered her again. Despite himself, he was beginning to grow hard once more.

  “I thought you said you’d be late,” she said. Though her words implied that he should stop, her fingers, with his hair wrapped around them, told him that she didn’t care.

  “Then I’ll be late,” he replied, lifting his head and looking at her with a grin. “I have something to attend to here first.”

  “In that case,” she said, pushing her body up slightly and trying to grope past his shoulders with her hands, “I should attend to you.”

  He, however, pushed her gently but firmly back down onto the bed. “Did I say you could move?” he asked with mock authority. “You lie back and open your legs.”

  “Yes, sir!” she replied, equally mockingly but full of delight as she stretched her thighs apart. “But you can’t go to your meeting with that!”

  Daniel looked down. “Why not? Maximilian Roth may be richer than me, but I don’t think he should forget for a moment who has the bigger cock.”

  After Daniel had left, Kris lay for a little while on the bed, still naked, her fingers slowly stroking between her legs. His mouth had been a source of joy, and she no longer sought another orgasm but instead let her hand caress her sex, feeling the memory of his head between her thighs. Wet, she let her juices stain the tips of her fingers before raising them to her mouth, imagining that it was his tongue tasting her.

  While part of her wished to remain in bed all day, however, another part was annoyed at the thought of missing any experiences in New York. They would only be here a few days before Daniel had promised to take her to San Francisco so she would have to make the most of it.

  Rising somewhat sluggishly, it was only the shower’s hot burst that finally sparked her body into wakefulness. She knew that Frank, the driver, was available to take her wherever she desired, and she also knew that Daniel would have preferred that. Kris, however, was still newly arrived enough among the super rich to want the experience of walking around the city. The day looked as though it would be warm and so she chose a modest but light dress, decorated with a floral pattern. Daniel had thought it looked old fashioned, but Kris had rather fancied its slightly retro, fifties chic. With a pair of elegant but comfortable sandals, she completed her dress and left the hotel.

  She knew there was a metro not far away but she wanted to walk through Central Park first of all. As she crossed the road that lay between the hotel and the entrance to the park, she remembered when she had seen this place covered in snow just before Christmas. The memory of what had followed made her grimace for a moment, but she shook that recollection away: yes, she had fucked up there, but it was past now.

  Nonetheless, she suddenly realised that until now she had avoided returning too often with Daniel on his various trips to New York. In truth, he was always a little sullen before he went and upon his return, and he had not pushed her to accompany him. She knew that the man he was meant to meet today, Maximilian Roth, lay behind some of his discomfiture. From what she could gather things had not been going so well for Daniel as previously, which also lay behind some of his problems with Felix. Not that he talked about it as much as she would have liked: indeed, more of her information came from carefully searching for reports and information on Stone Enterprises.

  The sun was bright and it was still early enough for the city air not to have become too humid yet. She enjoyed the breeze that blew among the trees in the park, various people around her walking, sitting or jogging, some alone, some in couples or groups.

  From the park she had intended to follow the streets into Manhattan, browse through the expensive boutiques and buy a new outfit—or two, or three—for her wedding. She still couldn’t quite get over the fact that the event was so close... and she had so little to do. Initially, she had big plans for the event, fantasies that, the more she thought about them, appeared too silly. In reaction to this, particularly when they realised that there really was no-one in the way of family that either of them would need, they had almost married on the spur of the moment, a registry affair in London. That had seemed too casual to Daniel, too negligent, and he had suggested that they jet off to some exotic location and tie the knot there. Jokingly, Kris had offered Las Vegas as a location when Daniel had fixed upon a suitable compromise in San Francisco.

  She was glad that inviting Anne and Andrew had been his suggestion, and that he had apparently already contacted his office to arrange the details of their travel. But the realisation of how few people would be present to see the two of them commit to each other suddenly made Kris feel a little melancholy.

  Were there really so few people in her life? She struggled to discover more names that meant anything to her. Each one was struck off the list in turn. What few members of her family remained were far too distant now, and Kris would have worried more that they would have tried more to extract some material advantage from her relationship with Daniel. Ditto most of her university friends, while peers from school had long since dropped off the radar. Her brief flirtation with sites such as Facebook had revealed just how uninterested she really was in all these people, and Daniel of course had no time or inclination for such fripperies. Beyond Anne and Andrew, she really couldn’t think of anyone she would be prepared to spend any amount of time with.


  Which left the two of them. In part, Kris was perfectly content with this. She had always thought of herself as a typically gregarious, outgoing young woman in her late twenties, but in truth as soon as the opportunity to disassociate from everyone else presented itself she had grasped it with both hands. She didn’t really need anyone else but Daniel, and in so many ways she felt that he wanted only her.

  So why this melancholy?

  She knew the answer. It was clear to her—it always had been, it was just that she was scared to think about it too much.

  Daniel was devoted to her; she had no doubts about that whatsoever. Yet while he exposed his vulnerable self to her only, yet the world of Stone Enterprises demanded his attention too much. She had noticed it even more recently; the look of tiredness, exhaustion even, when he came to her, a slight sullenness even that she knew had nothing to do with her.

  If Kris was jealous now, it was not of any other woman. For all that Daniel could be witty, charming, urbane, attractive, and desirable, his heart was as much a stone as his name to most people. No, her jealousy had a different source: she was jealous of his work.

  Yet even jealousy was not quite the right word. It was eating him, devouring him from within. It was not just jealousy, but also over-protectiveness towards her lover, the man who would be her husband. While he worked and worked and worked, she filled her life with stuff and more stuff.

  It had never struck her as clearly before. Her own work, her painting and art, had been sufficient to fill the empty spaces and she was truly grateful to Daniel for that, but it was not enough. Here she was, in New York on a summer day, buying things that she didn’t need when what she really wanted was to be with him.

  But there was also something else she needed to know she now realised.

  When Daniel returned to the hotel, he found Kris seated at a laptop in the living area of their suite, staring intently at the screen. Beside her was a pad on which she had obviously been writing, but as she heard the door close she quickly closed the screen.

  He greeted her, coming behind her as she tucked the pad away in a drawer and kissed her on the back of her head. She smiled, a little tersely, and he asked: “What were you looking at?”

  “Nothing important,” she replied. “How was your day? How did the meetings with Roth go?”

  He shrugged at this. “Roth didn’t particularly have much time for me after the first round. I hadn’t given him... the answers that he wanted to hear.”

  Kris frowned at this. “And what did he want to hear?” Daniel, however, shook his head. “No, let’s not talk about that. I’m tired. Let’s go and eat—something simple and quiet.”

  She accepted his suggestion and within the hour Frank had taken them to a small Italian restaurant some half hour away from the hotel. Daniel admitted that this was one of his regular haunts, a much more modest affair than he usually treated her to and for which fact Kris was grateful this evening.

  The restaurant was a family-run establishment and the service was friendly and efficient without being ostentatious, while the food was a delight. Daniel himself was quiet, saying little at first and, for the initial half hour or so, Kris was content to let him eat and simply relax. Before long, however, the pressure inside her became too much.

  “So, this Maximilian Roth,” she asked innocently, attempting to make conversation. “Is he Jewish?”

  Daniel shook his head, his mouth full of pasta. Swallowing it down and taking a sip of water, he explained: “A common mistake. His family was originally German—Lutheran or something like that. Sorry, I never really paid attention to all that stuff, it never seemed particularly important before.”

  “Until you ended up with a good old Catholic girl, eh?”

  He snorted at this, but said nothing. Nonetheless, she could see that his attitude had begun to relax. “Maximilian and I were close for a while,” he remarked, “but that was a long time ago.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  He nodded. “He gave me some useful advice when I started out, but... things haven’t turned out so well since.”

  Something about his tone warned her not to pursue this topic, so for a while they made small talk. The pressure inside Kris, however, refused to go away, and eventually she began to address what was really on her mind.

  “When you came home today,” she said at last, “I was looking something up.”

  “Yes?” he said, looking up from his dessert. “What was it?”

  She nodded. “I was... I was looking for information on Victor’s.”

  Daniel’s face darkened at this and he placed his spoon down on the table. For a moment, Kris chewed her lip nervously and stared at him. Her anxiety was caused more by the fact that he was obviously under some stress that he didn’t want to share than by fear of offending him: for her, this was important, and she also knew that the longer she left it the more difficult it would become to clear the air.

  “I wish Felix had kept his goddamn mouth shut,” Daniel said tetchily.

  She nodded. “Me too. But he didn’t.”

  “Can we leave this?” he asked. “Some other time, perhaps. When I’m less tired.”

  Kris shrugged. “If you want. But... but it won’t go away, you know.”

  At this he sat in absolute silence for a moment, his shoulders hunched up and his eyes looking over her shoulder towards the door, as though in that instant he wished to be a thousand miles away. Then, without warning, he sighed and the tension drained away from him. Shaking his head and looking down towards his napkin, he raised it to his lips and dabbed them before lifting his eyes and looking directly at her. Where she had expected anger she saw instead a kind of resignation.

  “You’re right,” he said at last. “It won’t. I’ll tell you all about bloody Victor’s, but first there are two things you need to understand: first, it has been a long time since I’ve ever been there. Two years before I met you, I think, was the last time. The second thing you should know: I have no sense of my... experiences there as anything other than a mistake.” As he spoke, his eyes never wavered from hers, and the expression on his face was more open and calm than she had anticipated. She had thought this would be a painful process to draw him out of himself, but then a strange thought occurred to her: Daniel may have thought himself immune to the Catholic instincts that had once driven her, but he could still be motivated by a desire for confession.

  As such, she said nothing. She could sit and wait for a very long time, listening patiently for when he was ready to speak. Daniel ordered coffee and then, while it was being brought to them, began to speak, quietly and firmly.

  “It must be nearly a decade since I first went to Victor’s. It’s kind of... exclusive. Invitation only. Basically, I guess you could call it a gentleman’s club, but frankly its services... well, you can guess the kind of services on offer.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to tell you everything. Actually, I’m not sure I can remember everything. I spent a fair bit of time repressing some of those thoughts, and I don’t really have a huge amount of time for that psychobabble crap: a few things really are better left off where well buried.”

  He paused as the waitress placed the coffee on the table, smiling at her and waiting for her to depart before continuing.

  “Anyway, for a while I kind of became addicted to Victor’s. A man can get almost anything he wants there, other than perhaps the things that really matter. I’ve heard rumours you can get anything you want there if your tastes are so inclined, but I was never tempted by that. A bit of cocaine, a lot of sex, beautiful women.” He shrugged. “You don’t really need to know the details. That was a long time ago.”

  Kris nodded her head. Nonetheless, she could not help but observe: “Maria told me you had taken her there.”

  He looked pained by this. “Yes, that’s true. She... she was rather into it all. I think it fulfilled some juvenile fantasy of what she thought living rich and dangerously consisted of. To be honest, ‘juvenile fa
ntasy’ just about sums up Victor’s to me. I was angry, destructive—self-destructive as much as anything. Victor’s served a need, for a while. But then... then it all seemed hollow, pointless.”

  He shrugged. “By the end, it was as much a way of sealing a few business arrangements. You would sign a deal, take a client there, let them... enjoy themselves. Because it was so hard to get in most clients would think you had moved heaven and earth to show you just how much they were appreciated, but to be honest I think pretty much the majority of what was on offer could be found in most high class strip clubs or brothels, and any Wall Street trader can tell you where to find enough coke to enjoy yourself—or something harder if you need it.”

  Kris did not interrupt, but as he seemed to be musing on unwelcome thoughts there was one question that she felt she had to ask as he took a sip of his coffee. “And for the... minority of what was on offer?”

  He placed his cup down on the table and looked at her with a fixed expression, for a moment as closed to her as he had ever been. At last, barely moving his lips and speaking in a low voice: “If you’re rich and it can be bought, well... everything’s for sale.”

  Kris nodded again at this. She frowned a little, pondering the next question that was going through her mind, wondering whether she should ask it. Daniel watched her, then said: “Before you ask, I never asked anyone who was unwilling, and while I’m not proud of what I did, aside from filling my nose full of coke at one point in my life, I never did anything illegal.”

  Suddenly she realised that she had not been breathing and so let the air out of her lungs with a grateful rush. His eyes had never left her face, and he continued: “I have never lied to you, you know. I may not tell you everything, but I don’t lie. Not to you.” He laughed, somewhat humourlessly and for a second his eyes flickered away from her, to hide a sense of pain inside himself. “Damn it, I take stupid pride on never lying to anyone, and a few of those fuckers deserve every damn lie I can think of.” His eyes returned to hers again. “But to you—never.”