Rupe chuckled glutinously. “I want you to talk dirty to me,” he said. Oh, it was one of those calls. “Where were we?”
Eve’s brow furrowed minutely as she leaned back in her Aeron: “Let’s see, I’m working my jaw and licking my lips as I kneel in front of you, Master. My! Aren’t you hard!” (Rupe, she knew, was a marshmallow in the absence of chemical assistance.) “I can feel your pulse through your trousers as I unbutton your fly…”
“Yes, but what are you wearing?”
Eve closed her eyes. “My olive-green Armani suit, sheer black hold-ups, the black Jimmy Choos, and my black Rigby & Peller corset.” (Which was not what she was wearing right now, Jimmy Choos excepted, but that was the whole point.) “And the stainless steel number-three butt plug.”
“No panties?”
“I waxed yesterday, thinking about you, Master. I don’t want to wear panties, they’d only get soaked when I run my tongue down the underside of your throbbing man-tool…”
Rupe’s demand for telephone sex was tiresome but predictable, and he engaged in it like a dog marking its territory by pissing: You belong to me, he was reminding her, even though I’m three thousand kilometers away. He probably did it just to remind himself that, for all her deadly efficiency, he was still the boss of her.
Rupert de Montfort Bigge was a creature of hierarchy and privilege. He’d have been perfectly at home in the House of Commons, wagging his willy at the Leader of the Opposition during Prime Minister’s Question Time; but his political career came to a sticky end almost before it got started. If only those unfortunate photos from the secret university dining society hadn’t come out just as he was up for approval by the candidate selection committee! The photos of his throbbing man-tool getting along splendidly with a roast hog’s face, in a roast hog’s face, with applesauce spurting out of the hog’s eye sockets in viscous gouts as he pumped away with verve and enthusiasm, had certainly captured Party HQ’s attention.
It was, in all, a bit of a career-killing move, even for a high-flyer like Rupert who was born and bred to inherit a safe Conservative seat. Because the question the committee had to consider was, if all this is coming out now, what’s going to come out later?
(If only they’d known…)
After his political career crashed and burned at the end of the runway, Rupert threw himself single-mindedly into a life of dissolution and vice. His reputation became such that pedigreed parents warned their debutante daughters away from him despite his near-billionaire status. (Marrying for money was all very well, but not if it meant marrying an overdose flying in loose formation with several strains of sexually transmitted diseases hitherto unknown to science.) So extreme was his drug use that the injections of cocaine threatened to rot the arteries in his cock, and his personal bodyguard required special training in administering opiate antidotes. But Rupert came to his senses just short of a mid-thirties heart attack and turned his voracious appetites away from sex and drugs, towards a single-minded pursuit of money and power. With enough money it became possible to pursue political power by proxy, and with enough political power all enemies could be vanquished. So Rupert upped his game and focussed obsessively on the business of money and power. He used his own legitimate trading activities as cover for darker transactions, which he carefully delegated to his minions so that his own hands remained clean. Meanwhile, he amused himself with acts of petty sadism—the less consensual the better. Buying up and asset-stripping nursing home chains, looting employee pension funds, drowning kittens, and hunting giant pandas: it was all balm to his soul. Best of all, as a captain of industry he didn’t even have to hide his vices from the voting public.
It amused Rupert to demand telephone sex from Eve, whose outer shell of puritanical frigidity he found vexing. In his clubbable old-boys world view women were wives, whores, or servants. Eve certainly didn’t have the pedigree to be a society wife, although her effectiveness as a business subordinate (never dare to say partner) was unquestionable; so he alternated between door two and door three, never realizing that there was a fourth door behind which was chained a man-eating tiger, held in check only by a fraying rope of ruthlessly deferred gratification.
The phone sex had a secondary purpose of course. It bored the crap out of the intelligence officers who were undoubtedly listening in on his mobile phone conversations: for Rupert was a Person of Interest to numerous stock exchanges, futures markets, and financial fraud investigative agencies. Crypto might be hacked (Rupe didn’t trust scramblers: what one boffin could make, another could break), but a bored officer who’d stopped listening after wanking himself silly was liable to miss the significance of the post-coital pillow talk.
“I’ll be home tomorrow night, my dear, and I was thinking I’d like you to obtain a book for me. It’s a little something for the weekend I heard about on my travels: everyone’s talking about it in Nicosia. I’d like to read it with you when I get back. Do you think you could find it for me?”
“A book, Master?” Eve sat up and uncapped the fountain pen she’d been twirling idly for creative inspiration, notepad at the ready.
“A banned book, Eve, a very naughty, wicked book indeed! Positively filthy, I should say.” He chuckled lasciviously. “Absolutely one of a kind, and we’ll have so much fun with it!”
“Does it have pictures?” she asked, staying in character.
“It’s not that kind of book, I’m afraid, but yes, it does have pictures. It’s a concordance of a lost manuscript, mentioned in the secret annex to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the Vatican index of books deemed heretical or contrary to morality. It was never printed, and the original was held under lock and key in the vaults of the Sacred Congregation of the Index until it disappeared in 1871, probably stolen.
