was hard to imagine how he couldn’t love it – how anyone couldn’t. But Angela intended to spend the next week making the house as perfect and homely and welcoming as was humanly possible.
If Brett’s happy, we’ll all be happy.
We’ll settle down here. Put down roots.
Angela Cranley closed her eyes and willed it to be so.
Brett Cranley closed his eyes and willed himself to come. Normally he had no trouble in that department, but the stress of opening up new offices in London combined with family pressures and physical exhaustion had taken their toll. Either that, or the girl just wasn’t hot enough.
‘Oh, that’s good! That’s so good.’
The secretary moaned, arching her back and giving her new boss a better view of the eagle tattoo across the top of her buttocks. Brett was not an admirer of tattoos, on men or women. He found himself becoming irritated – why had the stupid girl gone and done such a thing? – which was not helping him to orgasm. He closed his eyes again. Focus, for fuck’s sake.
Reaching around, he grabbed hold of the girl’s breasts which were large and heavy, like two water balloons. Her nipples were small and erect, twin pink diamonds between his thumb and forefinger. Better. She was pretty, sexy in a slightly chubby, accessible sort of way, with short hair – a pixie cut, he believed it was called. Tricia had had glorious long hair, black as tar and silken. Thinking about it now, Brett felt his erection strengthen and his excitement start to build at last.
‘Oh Brett! Brett!’
Thrusting harder and faster, he wanted to say her name but realized he’d forgotten it. Michelle, was it? Or Mary? Something with an ‘M’. He’d only hired her a week ago as the receptionist for Cranley Estates’ new London office. He couldn’t be expected to remember everything.
Reaching behind her, the girl cupped a hand underneath his balls and began to stroke them. That was it. ‘Oh … Jesus.’ He came, finally, collapsing on top of her, sweat pouring from his brow.
‘That was nice.’ The girl smiled cheerfully, wriggling out from under him.
‘Wasn’t it?’ Brett sighed, rolling onto his back. The carpet felt rough and scratchy underneath him, but he was too tired to move. Bending over him, the girl expertly removed his condom, carried it over to the waste bin in the corner of the office and dropped it inside. Then, still stark naked, she grabbed a few sheets of printer paper, balled them up and dropped them on top, concealing the evidence.
Brett grinned. She’s thorough. I like that in a secretary. A self-starter, too.
He wondered how things were going down in Sussex. Whether Ange and the children had reached the house yet. He must call them in a minute, once what’s-her-name had gone.
He glanced at the clock on the wall: 4.30 p.m. The secretary was already almost fully dressed, doing up the top buttons on her silk blouse and straightening her hair as if she’d just got back from the gym. Clearly she had no expectation of post-coital affection from him: another huge plus. Tricia had been painfully demanding in this regard. In every regard, come to think of it. Brett missed his mistress’s lithe, gymnast’s body, but nothing more. Tricia had broken the sacred code of the other woman and made a nuisance of herself with Angela, calling the house, showing up at events where she knew his wife would be present. She’d become a threat to his marriage, to his family. Brett Cranley couldn’t tolerate that. His own parents had divorced when he was young, and Brett saw himself decidedly as a family man. Sure he played around. Who didn’t? But he loved his wife and it would be a cold day in hell before he left her for another woman.
But this girl – Michelle. It’s definitely Michelle – she seemed to have a much clearer idea of the boundaries. She also seemed nice, sunny natured, a good sort of chick to have around. Perhaps he could overlook the tattoo and the hair?
Brett Cranley had not grown up poor. His father had run a successful dry-cleaning business and his mother, Lucille, was a hairdresser. What Brett had done was grown up quickly. Both his parents were dead by the time he turned fourteen, his father from a car accident on Christmas Eve, hit head-on by a drunk driver, and his mother from breast cancer. It was Lucille’s death that had affected him the most. An only child, Brett had always adored his mother. And while the loss of his father was shocking and sudden, Lucille Cranley’s protracted illness, her pain and fear, her desperate, dashed hopes of remission, had profoundly changed Brett’s psyche. The teenage boy lost his faith, not only in God and modern medicine, but in other people altogether.
There was no point in loving people, because the people you loved would eventually be taken away from you.
There was no point relying on people, because they would let you down.
There was only one life: this life. And in this life, you were on your own.
These were the lessons Brett Cranley learned from his parents’ deaths.
In some ways they changed him for the better. Having always been a rather lazy pupil, with no fixed goals or plans for his future, Brett suddenly threw himself into his studies. Living with his aunt Jackie and her two children, who were jealous of his good looks, intelligence and modest inheritance, and made sure he knew he was tolerated rather than loved within the family, Brett spent hour after after locked in his room, cramming for exams. When he won a place at a prestigious boarding school on a mathematics scholarship, his aunt didn’t want him to go.
‘It’s six hundred miles away, Brett. You won’t know a soul. Won’t you be lonely?’
‘No.’
‘Your mum wanted you to live here, with us. She thought that’d be best for you.’
‘She was wrong.’
Aunt Jackie looked pained. ‘It was what she wanted. I promised her …’
‘It doesn’t matter what she wanted,’ Brett said angrily. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Brett!’
‘I’m alive and I know what’s best for me. I’m going to St Edmund’s.’
In the end Brett had had to apply to the executors of his father’s will to release funds for his education and had petitioned the family courts to be allowed to go away to school. He never returned to his aunt’s house, or to Burnside, the Adelaide suburb where he’d spent his childhood. It was the first of many battles that he would win in his determined pursuit of wealth and worldly success, the only ‘security’ that meant a damn in Brett’s book. By his sixteenth birthday he was fully legally independent, the top performing scholar at the top school in Sydney, and the youngest-ever applicant to be awarded a place at ANU, the Australian National University in Canberra, for applied mathematics.
ANU was to change Brett Cranley’s life. Not because he graduated with first-class honors and went on to Melbourne Business School to begin an MBA he would eventually be too successful to have time to finish. But because it was at ANU that he met the two women who transformed him from a boy into a man.
The first was a professor’s wife by the name of Madeleine Jensen. Maddie spotted the dark, angry-looking boy on campus in his first week in Canberra.
‘Who is that?’ she asked her husband. Professor Jamie Jensen was the head of the math faculty at ANU, a quiet, scholarly man considerably more interested in Fermat’s Last Theorem than he was in his wife’s sexual needs. Or any other needs, for that matter.
‘That’s Brett Cranley. The prodigy, or so they say. Ridiculous to send a child of that age away to college in my view, but there we are.’
‘I wouldn’t call him a child,’ said Maddie, catching Brett’s eye and the wild hunger beneath his brooding exterior. ‘He’s very good looking.’
‘If you say so, my dear,’ Professor Jensen muttered absently.
Maddie did say so. Not just to her