Glittering Fortunes. Victoria Fox

      ‘Maybe. I’m antsy. You know how I get. I need more out of life than sitting round here chatting up girls … It’s samey after a while, you know?’

      She forced a smile. Was Addy aware of how she felt? Maybe. But then he could have the pick of any girl he wanted, and she was just his friend. She could make him laugh. She could surf with him in the rain. She could help him with his English homework because he had a fear of any book that was longer than fifty pages. What she couldn’t be was a six-foot blonde with legs that went on for miles.

      Even though Olivia had known him since the beginning of time, the Addy fire burst before her now just as brilliant and dangerous as the first day she’d seen it. She’d been six and he’d been nine, and Addy’s little sister a regular at Tiffany’s tea parties. Olivia would spy him outside with his friends playing Gun Tower Home! and would long to flee the dinky dining room and china pots filled with nothing, and tear through the brambles till her dress ripped. Of course the boys had tried everything to shrug her off: locking her in the Creepy Shed, vowing that she had to be slave, racing on their bikes so she couldn’t keep up, setting up dares they never thought she’d meet … But Olivia was determined, and once she had accepted the ultimate challenge of sprinting across the field owned by Farmer Nancarrow, a shadowy, mysterious, darkly enticing character who had become in the children’s eyes more myth than man—he would shoot anyone who trespassed on his land and then cook them for supper!—they had finally accepted her as marginally all right for a girl.

      It was a lifetime ago, and yet still only yesterday.

      Olivia had hoped that seeing Addy again might have prompted an epiphany, a realisation that all these years he had tricked her into seeing what wasn’t there, believing what wasn’t true. But with Addy, just with Addy, always with Addy, it returned to the same. Olivia wasn’t stupid, but he made her crazy. She was solid; he turned her to mush. She was level-headed; with him she went wonky. Her love for him could be traced back to twelve, eleven, ten, maybe before, when they had made hideouts in the ferns and she’d started noticing his eyes were blue, not grey, and her mum would pack them fish-finger sandwiches, and each time Olivia gave him a sketch, of him, of her, of the swinging tyre they had rigged above his parents’ lake, folded tight and slipped into his pocket, it had felt like losing a tiny piece of her heart.

      ‘There’s tons of stuff on here,’ she said, without conviction.

      ‘No offence, Oli, but I’m aiming higher than the cove. I haven’t bothered with that waster pinboard.’ Addy scratched his chin. ‘I’m thinking big.’

      Olivia almost didn’t see it.

      A leaf of paper obscured by a yachting brochure, but where its edges escaped it bore the unmistakeable crest she remembered from her youth:

       Usherwood Estate seeks able & enthusiastic gardener Summer hours at competitive rates— please enquire

      She frowned. As the stately residence of the former Lord and Lady Lomax, grand old Usherwood was a fairytale castle of turrets and wings, towers and acreage, a majestic relic of a forgotten time. The Lomax couple had perished in a plane crash thirteen years ago, and their sons, at that time only teenagers, had inherited. Cato, the eldest, was notorious, a Hollywood A-lister who had bolted after the tragedy, never to return. The youngest had stayed at the ancestral home, and was by all accounts a recluse.

      ‘Hey, Humpty, check this out!’

      The voice was so upper class it sounded like there was a bag of marbles rolling around in its mouth. Olivia turned. A strut of city boys had located a window mannequin in a state of undress and one of them was making an obscene gesture at her nether regions. Lustell Cove attracted the Made in Chelsea set. With its lush, wild panoramas matched by higgledy-piggledy streets dotted with quaint Cornish cottages and tea shops, it was far enough from the capital to feel exclusive to the seriously wealthy, while its hot beach culture ensured it was anything but a stuffy hideaway.

      ‘Too funny, Ruffers, too funny.’ Humpty was sporting a pair of Hawaiian-print boardshorts despite Olivia’s suspicion he had never done anything in the water save a breaststroke—and that only if it promised not to get his hair wet.

      ‘D’you surf?’ asked Addy, not especially interested. Olivia saw his eyes scan the gathering for a hot blonde with a trust fund—she knew him too well.

      ‘My dad’s got a Maxus,’ Humpty replied, tossing his coiffed arrangement in the direction of the marina, which was bobbing with sleek white speedboats. His entourage of Hooray Henrys guffawed their approval. ‘Who needs a plank of wood?’

      ‘Can I help you, then?’ said Addy. ‘You know, with anything surf-related?’

      One of them asked: ‘Dude, do you know the Lomaxes?’

      Addy returned his attention to his phone. ‘Not if you mean Cato,’ he bristled. ‘Far as I know he hasn’t been back here in, like, for ever.’

      ‘The house is pretty creepy, huh,’ said Humpty.

      ‘Is it true it’s, like, the biggest house in England?’ enquired Ruffers.

      ‘I heard they’ve got champagne fountains in the gardens,’ said another.

      ‘And Cato keeps a monkey in the cellar,’ put in Humpty, ‘to bring him things. I read about it. Someone saw it swinging about in a gold waistcoat.’

      There followed an inventory of increasingly extravagant fictions. Everyone was so busy talking that they didn’t notice when Olivia unpinned the Usherwood flyer and fed it discreetly into the back pocket of her jeans. She slipped outside.

      The sun had vanished, casting the bay in shade. Olivia folded her arms against the rash of goosebumps prickling across her skin. High on the hill loomed the vast silhouette of the Usherwood Estate, staining the horizon like a great inkblot.

      She stepped on to the beach. The sand was cool and silky between her toes and she padded across the inlet, away from Usherwood and back into sunshine.

CHAPTER TWO

      ‘OH, BABY, YES! Keep going, stud—you are truly the best in the world!’

      With each brutal thrust Susanna Denver’s back was scraping painfully against the knobs on her lover’s gold-plated washroom cabinet, but then space was always going to be at a premium at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic.

      ‘Keep it dirty,’ Cato growled, his breath ragged in her ear. ‘You know I love it when you talk filth, you scandalous harpy.’

      Susanna clamped her thighs around his waist and reached down to clasp the most famous backside in America (recently initiated into the Hollywood Hall of Fame after an Award-nominated nude scene). Sharp crimson nails dug into his flesh.

      ‘Harder!’ she squealed, bucking a touch too fervently so that behind her a decorative tap flicked on and she found her ass being sprayed with water. ‘Faster!’

      ‘Not wet enough already?’ Cato snarled in that impossibly attractive English accent, which made Susanna think of black-and-white World War II movies where everyone went about smoking pipes and talking about submarines.

      ‘Always for you, baby,’ she gasped, ‘always for you!’

      Cato slipped a hand between her legs, dousing her in the liquid heat.

      ‘Say my name,’ he croaked, ‘say it!’

      ‘Ca-to!’ she managed, the word severed in two as he thrust into her, his black shock of hair abrasive against her chest and his face buried in her tits.

      ‘Say my full name—my full name, goddamnit!’

      ‘Lord Cato! Fuck me, Lord Cato, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!’

      Lord Cato did as he was told, seconds later coming so fiercely that