“He won’t, Liam. You don’t know him. He just won’t.”
But Liam was already dialling the emergency services on his mobile, determined that, just for once, he would forget the fear and do the right thing. Besides, it would make him feel slightly better about things going tits up with Mimi.
“Stop it, Liam, stop it. He’s done nothing wrong.” Anna tried to wrestle the phone away, but Liam was resolute. Instead she took to her heels and made a break through the buzzing early-evening bar.
“You’re taking your time tonight. Where are you?”
“Just walking up your street. There was a bomb scare at King’s Cross station. Had to take a bus instead.”
“Come in through the garden doors. Anna’s gone out. Meet me in the guest suite on the second floor.”
Mimi pushed open the French doors and walked past Luana, who was mopping up spilt tea, thinking, Anna’s gone out? Where? With whom?
But the curiosity was too mild in comparison with the growing sense of dread in her heart—and tension between her thighs. It was going to happen. It had to happen. John meant to possess her, and she was all out of excuses.
Throughout the journey home, little sparks of need had shot around her body, as if someone was playing an erotic pinball game with her. It didn’t take a genius to work out that this must be John, toying with her through the psychic link, sending stimuli to her pleasure centre, preparing her thoroughly for the moment when he would have his wicked way. She had shifted irritably in her seat on the bus, burying her head in her magazine, hoping nobody worked out that her nipples were hard and her sex was beginning to waft its animal scent up into the close, sweaty air around it. She would cry, if crying was something she ever did. Instead she shut her eyes and concentrated on keeping still. He didn’t have her beaten yet. She still had it in her to resist him—she was a long way from the clinging shadow he had made of Anna. She was stronger than that, and he respected her for it.
“I’m thinking of you, Miranda.” His voice entered her head so thoroughly that, for a moment, she thought he was beside her on the plastic seat. She spun her head around to face an elderly woman in a turban, piles of carrier bags filling her ample lap.
“Sorry,” she muttered, though the woman had said nothing.
Inside her mind, John laughed.
“Don’t panic. They’re nice thoughts. Very nice. Your body laid bare for me, quivering and eager. Your perfect hair all mussed, your makeup smudged, legs spread good and wide so I can see everything that’s coming to me. Everything I mean to take and use and own.”
Mimi didn’t realise she was shushing aloud until the woman moved to a seat across the gangway.
“I’ll take it, I’ll fill it, I’ll give you a ride to remember. You’re going to wake the dead in Highgate Cemetery with your screaming tonight. You’ll limp into work tomorrow and everyone will wonder who’s been giving you what for. At any rate, they’ll know it isn’t Liam!”
The name woke Mimi from her sensual reverie. She sat up straight and looked around her, sure that she must have attracted attention from her fellow passengers, but nobody looked up from their iPods and Evening Standards. Of course, she reflected, you would have to start lobbing grenades about to raise an eyebrow in central London.
“Please…” she silently begged, and he seemed to hear her plea, leaving her alone to read about a new production of A Doll’s House until the bus reached Belsize Park.
At the top of the stairs, Mimi paused, running her hand over and over the polished knob at the end of the banister.
She tried not to let the thought crystallise into words that Stone could interpret, but too late, it was in her head.
“There must be a way to break the link. If I get rid of my mobile…”
“Get in here! Now!” came the instantaneous response, and Mimi let her shoulders droop and her head hang low, traipsing towards the cream door beyond which she would be altered, turned into Stone’s creature in some sick mating ceremony.
He was sitting, languidly cross-legged, in a plush bedroom armchair, his strong, compact physique draped in a robe of heavy burgundy damask, tied at the waist with a gold sash. The open bottle of cognac and pair of brandy balloons on the walnut side table turned him into some cartoon representation of loucheness, every element present from the embroidered slippers to the rapacious gleam of his eyes.
“I thought you might like a drink before we proceed,” he said, pouring rich gold into one of the glasses. “Take the edge off any…performance anxiety. Well, don’t just stand there, Miranda. Come here.”
He slapped a thigh, making it clear that he expected Mimi to join him on the armchair. She hesitated.
“Take those trousers off first though. You never wear trousers—why did you put them on today?”
He knew fine well, Mimi thought crossly, that she had chosen the neglected linen crops precisely because it would make Stone’s planned seduction less easy. Again, she baulked at his command, feeling she ought to put up more of a fight.
“I’d prefer to keep them on.”
“No you wouldn’t. Take them off, or I’ll take them off for you.”
The low-level aphrodisiac in the air around them magnified, suddenly and intensely, precipitating a flood of wetness to Mimi’s crotch. The linen would stain if she didn’t get them off. She hurried out of the ill-fated pants and kicked off her ballet flats into the bargain, left standing in a short-sleeved silk blouse and her biggest, least see-through pair of knickers.
“Did you wear knickers like that at school?” John taunted. “Gym knickers? Did you think they would put me off? On the contrary, I look forward to pulling them down. Now get over here.”