above her and let the remainder dribble onto her. He could see the snail trail of its rivulet reflected in the sourceless light. She lowered her hand, and he heard the whisper of the glass falling on the carpet. In the next moment her champagne-cooled hand found its way between his legs. His stomach tightened reflexively.
“Victor,” she said, and she turned a little to him, her breast pulling out of his hand, and ran her tongue up the side of his rib cage. Again his gaze went to the partitions of glass walls, through light and water and light and water.
She suddenly sat up, her face right in the center of his line of sight. She wore no makeup-they had been at this a while, in and out of the pool, and at it again-so her face was only an apparition, though he could make out her wonderful mouth and her eyes that tilted upward on the outer edges.
“If you could have anything in the world,” she said, “what would it be?”
“All of Colin’s money,” he said without hesitation.
Rayner’s lips rose at the edges in a smile, and she was close enough for him to feel the little burst of breath as she gave a single voiceless laugh. Her hand toyed between his legs.
“All of his money,” she said, leaning over him, the weight of her pendulous breasts resting on his chest “And to that end, how are you progressing?”
“I’m not quite sure,” he said, and he wasn’t quite sure what in the hell she meant by the question, either. He turned his head, drank the rest of his own champagne and set the glass on the jade green marble of the small table beside the bed. He reached down to her breasts and kissed her forehead. “Not sure about the money,” he repeated, “but I’m having a dee-vil of a time with his wife.”
There were a few minutes of aggressive fondling and kissing which almost led to more heated action, but Last was able to avoid that without letting her know that he thought it was time to move on to precisely the issue he had just raised.
“Bloody champagne,” he said, giving one last tongue-flick to a peachy aureole before rolling over and sitting up on the side of the bed. “I’ve got to get some coffee or something. I won’t even be able to steer the bloody car.”
“Why don’t you spend the night?” she suggested, leaning on one elbow, facing his back.
“No, can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head and running his fingers through his hair. “We’ll get shot in bed one of these nights. A very bad end to a very good thing.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he waited with his head in his hands, his eyes cut to the side, as if he were a hunter listening with held breath for the single thwick of a broken twig to betray the approaching prey.
“I want to go ahead and divorce him,” she said. “This is driving me nuts.”
“That’d be crazy, love,” Last said. “It’s not time yet. He’d know. He’d have me shot.”
“He doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t even suspect anything.” She put a hand on his back, two fingers straddling the ripple of his spine, kneading and massaging it “It’s been years since he’s noticed anything about me except whether or not I’m absent or present.”
“The man’s in the information business, Rayner. He knows. As a matter of fact, I’ve been half-thinking we’ve already pushed our luck too far. Something hasn’t seemed right in the last couple of weeks.”
Her hand stopped on his back. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know… exactly,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Something’s going on with him. I can feel it.”
Her hand dropped, and she sat up in bed. “Turn around,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
Last turned around and sat with his back resting against the headboard. Rayner arranged herself beside him and facing him, her legs crossed yoga style, her hands straight down on either side of her for support as she leaned back slightly. This provided him a wonderful view of her bosom, which he loved to look at and which she loved to have him to look at. Her strawberry blond hair was tousled.
“You know once you asked me why I never seemed hurt or sad or bitter because of the way Colin treats me?”
“Yes.”
“I gave you some fluffy answer.”
He nodded.
“The truth is that by the time you and I met in Veracruz, I had already been through that ‘hurt’ stage of our so-called marriage. It was past, well past. I should have listened to his first wife. She actually came to see me once, before I married him. A nice woman. I liked her, which should have been warning enough.” She paused and looked at Last. “That makes sense,” she said, “but I’m not sure you’d understand it. Anyway, when everything she had warned me about began proving true, I saw the handwriting on the wall.”
She paused and raked the fingers of one hand through her hair. “I’m not a total bitch,” she said, “but I’m not a patsy, either. We’d been married a couple of years, this house was new, and his business had just undergone a giant growth leap. Boom. Suddenly the business was huge. That was because Brod Strasser and another guy had bought into it.”
“Who was the other guy?”
“A Greek-a weird man if you ask me-named Panos Kalatis.”
“Colin told you all this?”
“God, no.” But she didn’t say how she knew. “Actually, these men own controlling interest now, or Strasser does, through one of his holding companies. Poor Colin’s just an employee for all practical purposes. A highly paid errand boy, no longer his own man. The man’s smart, Colin is. I’m not saying he’s not smart. It’s just that… I didn’t have much respect for the choice he made.
“Once he’d sold out, figuratively and literally, I thought to myself: okay, where am I, exactly? I’m married to a man who’s indifferent to me, treats me like an outdated appliance. I could live with that, I guess, for a while, if the benefits were good. I mean extraordinarily good.”
“But they weren’t.”
“No, not in the long term, I didn’t think. Colin makes this fabulous salary, but he doesn’t have a piece of the action. Fabulous salaries are great as long as you’re employed. But people get fired. I mean, the 1980s are littered with surprised executives. They thought it would never end too. But it always does. People like Strasser and Kalatis own the action. They don’t get fired. And when Colin’s no longer any use to them they’ll throw him away like something they’ve wiped their behinds on. He’s only a breath away from losing everything… whenever it suits them. And then where would that leave me?”
She reached out and took one of the tea rose pillows and held it in her lap, her arms wrapped around it. She looked at him a moment before she continued.
“So I made up my mind to get something out of this… relationship. I thought, well, if they can buy information I can too. I hired a first-rate private investigator. He documented on film and tape Colin’s affair with his secretary. In flagrante, as they say. It was rather erotic footage, if you could forget who they were. When I had had enough of it, when my sick curiosity had been indulged ad nauseam, I told the guy thanks and paid him off. Then I contacted the secretary and had her come over here one afternoon when Colin was out of town.
“We sat in the living room over there,” she said, looking through the walls of glass, “and I showed the videos to her. She was stunned and frightened. Ashamed. I kept playing them until she simply ducked her head and wouldn’t watch them anymore. It was cruel of me and, frankly, I surprised myself. By this time I didn’t think I had any emotional investment left in the man, but I found that I was getting some kind of unseemly satisfaction out of this perverse humiliation of her. But finally I stopped.
“I really didn’t blame her, after all. The woman’s intelligent, a superb executive secretary. She knew sleeping with the boss was going nowhere but, on the other hand, it wasn’t hurting her at all at bonus time, and he was continually giving her all these gifts. I know what executive secretaries do. I used to be one. I know what it’s like. A good one practically runs the company, but she never gets any credit for it and compared to some of the men executive officers-who do a hell of a lot less than she does-her salary’s paltry. She thinks, what the hell, she deserves the perks she gets from sleeping with the bastard. She knows all about the boss’s personal life-this woman knew Colin and I hadn’t had sex in two years. She knows all about the business. Where it’s strong, where it’s weak. Where all the corporate skeletons are buried. Who’s got clout, who hasn’t. But most important: she has access.”
Rayner stopped and looked at her hands. She was doing something with her fingers, more precisely her
