Secret Surrender Read online

  ‘I know, I’m being silly,’ she said to Delphine, squeezing a lemon over her plate. ‘Ignore me.’

  But Alice couldn’t ignore the feeling. Of course, she was used to people staring at her wherever she went. That wasn’t what she meant. The usual kind of staring was bold and unabashed. If you’re in the public eye people think that they can stare at you in a rude, bold way. And that you won’t mind. And that you won’t even notice! No, Alice felt that she was being watched in a very different way but it was nothing she could explain. If she had believed in having a sixth sense then that’s how she would have described it. She often felt that there was a pair of eyes on her in the strangest places, when she was buying her groceries, jogging along the Left Bank, having her hair done, walking with Pierre. Sometimes, even standing at the window of her own apartment she felt hidden eyes were devouring her. There was something sexual about it, she was certain of that. This voyeur, this stalker, whoever he was, was reawakening feelings that had lain dormant in Alice for nearly a decade.

  She was half-expecting to feel the invisible eyes burning her back on her walk home, but she sensed no one apart from one paparazzo whom she knew and was on friendly terms with. She let him take her picture outside her apartment, told him which designer she was wearing, and closed the door behind her. Alice took the stairs, two at a time – she never took the lift and it showed in the tightness of her butt and the shapeliness of her calves.

  She let herself in through the front door, called out Pierre’s name and got no reply. Good – she had the apartment to herself. The clickety-clack of Alice’s high heels on the marble floor of the entrance hall picked out a little rhythm that echoed off the high ceilings. She walked through the living room trailing her hand along the bookshelf of dusty paperbacks, wondering which to read this afternoon as she curled up in her favourite window seat. It was one of Alice’s chief pleasures in life to sit in her window seat with a good cup of coffee, reading classic French literature and occasionally glancing up at the life happening on the street down below. Alice’s finger settled on La Chamade by Françoise Sagan, a book she had first read at school. It reminded her of lost innocence: hers, not the heroine’s. Yes, she decided. She would bathe, then wrap herself in her favourite silk robe, and settle in for an afternoon’s reading. If she read at four o’clock she would get the full beam of the afternoon sun pleasantly warming her skin and illuminating the pages of the book.

  But first, a bath. Alice’s baths were legendary among her family and friends. In his wedding speech Pierre had joked that he had begged Alice not to take a bath on the morning of the ceremony for fear that she would become so engrossed in her steamy sanctum that she would quite forget that she had somewhere else important to be. To Alice, bathing was a sensual pleasure that came third only to food and sex. Or should that be sex, then food? She opened her bathroom cabinet, wondering which of the expensive potions to pour into the water that gushed from the spotted gold tap. The old-fashioned tub was mounted in the middle of the bathroom, and the ancient plumbing made a deafening clanking sound. She often masturbated in here with the tap running, fingers flicking hard and fast over her clit, skilfully bringing herself off in less than the time it took to run the bath and safe in the knowledge that the rushing water and noisy plumbing would drown out her moans of pleasure. Sometimes, when she was really horny, she would lie down in the bath, her legs hooked over the side, pussy spread directly underneath the tap so that the jets of water cascaded on to her clit, washed over her pussy and arsehole and massaged her to orgasm.

  But not today. Today Alice just wanted to soak her aching muscles and ease the feet that had negotiated Paris’s unforgiving cobbled streets in three-inch stilettos. She sank into the scalding water, letting it turn her creamy white skin a vivid pink. A white mist filled the tiny bathroom. Clouds of lavender-scented steam obscured everything, the mirrors, the fixtures and fittings, so that Alice could barely see her hand in front of her face. She lay in the bath until the water was lukewarm and her fingers and toes were pruned and wrinkled. When she could finally bring herself to rise, she massaged an expensive body lotion into every inch of her skin: it was made from crushed pearls and cost hundreds of euros for a small glass jar. She enjoyed the feeling of her own fingers pummelling her flesh, smoothing her skin until it felt like silk.

  As she left the bathroom, something underneath the front door caught her eye: a small, pale blue, square envelope. Alice was intrigued. The letter must have been delivered by hand. Occasionally fans found out where she lived and thrust notes into the hands of her long-suffering neighbours, but it was not the custom to bring the letter to her front door; usually, they would simply save it and slip it in with the next post.

  She picked the envelope up and turned it over, and almost screamed. There was just one word, ‘Alice’, written on the envelope but the handwriting told her that this was no letter from a crazed fan. It was far more thrilling and dangerous than that. She had not seen her name written in this hand – an elegant, flamboyant looped script that she would have recognised anywhere – for eight years. Her hand shook as memories came flooding back. The towel wrapped around her body fell to the floor. Alice leaned against the wall, grateful for the cool plaster against her skin. She felt sick and dizzy, as though she would actually fall over or faint without the wall’s support.

  Thank God Pierre was out. Alice needed to be alone to read this letter. She looked at the envelope as though she were afraid it might attack her physically. She savoured this moment, knowing that whatever the letter said it was going to change her life. She looked around the pristine apartment as though it were about to vanish, and said to herself, enjoy the last few moments of calm; you might be about to lose all this. Alice went to the fridge where she poured herself a glass of cool crisp white wine with hands that fluttered uncontrollably, like a pair of birds in a cage. Only after a glass and a half did she feel ready to read the letter. She tore it open.

  Darling Alice,

  Of course I’ve been watching. Did you think that I wouldn’t come after you? I have watched your star rise for the last eight years. Sometimes I see you on screen. Sometimes I see you in a magazine. Sometimes I have been so close that if you had turned around you would have looked into my eyes. I have never touched you, although I could have done. I know that you have felt my presence.

  I’m getting closer. It’s nearly time for us to meet again. And when we do, this perfect life you have made for yourself – a life without me in it – will change for ever.

  There was no signature, of course. There didn’t need to be. Alice let her eyes fall closed. A series of vivid scenes came back to her in a sequence of highly arousing flashbacks. Bodies which came together time after time after time, a mouth on her breast, her tongue on his balls, hands on backs, fingers tearing at hair and legs entwined and a hard dick which had filled her up inside. And then there were other memories, more bodies, new mouths, a confusing tangle of flesh and a feeling of finally knowing what it was like to be alive, really alive … It was like watching the edited highlights, a montage of scenes from films she had starred in. But this was no film. This was real life. Another life. A long time ago. But still, Alice’s life.

  She had always known that Jacques would catch up with her one day. Now that she saw the letter she realised she had been, on some level, waiting to hear from him all this time. Alice folded up the letter into a tiny square and put it in her lingerie drawer.

  Pierre came home an hour later and from somewhere Alice found the strength to behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She managed to make small talk with him over their supper, but all the while her mind was racing and a pulse was hammering between her legs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALICE WAS EIGHTEEN when she met him. A baby, really. Fresh faced, and as innocent on the inside as she looked on the outside. She inherited her peaches-and-cream complexion and fair hair from her father, the London banker James Hill, but her mother, a glamoro
us Parisian called Veronique, had made sure that she had all the poise and grace of a French woman. Veronique had been a model in her own teens and was determined that Alice should follow her into the world of fashion. But Alice didn’t care about modelling. All her life she had wanted to act, and while the other girls in her class were experimenting with boys and sex and drugs and nightclubs, Alice was attending drama workshops, reading the great playwrights and working as an usherette in the evenings, just to be near to the stage and to theatre people.

  She had had one or two casual boyfriends and had been on a string of dates but had never gone further than a few not-very-passionate kisses goodnight. Alice had enjoyed the kisses, although not as much as her male companions, whose erections – mysterious hard flesh that she didn’t understand – would press into her thigh. But she had never felt any compulsion to take them further, or to give into her admirers’ pleas for something more.

  Alice’s dedication had paid off – she won a scholarship to study drama at the University of Paris. Veronique was pleased because she was bound to be ‘discovered’ there, her father insisting that she would be able to transfer to complete a degree in a ‘proper’ subject when her year-long course was over.

  There was a gap of two months to fill between finishing school in northern France and taking up her post in Paris. Both her parents decided that Alice should travel to the south of France and spend the summer waitressing. They were keen that their daughter should gain some experience of life outside the family home as well as building up some savings for when she went to university. Veronique suggested Cannes for its heady mix of cosmopolitan nightlife.

  ‘If you make it as an actress, you will end up there anyway for the film festival,’ she informed Alice. ‘And it won’t do you any harm to be surrounded by rich people giving generous tips. I’m sure you’ll infiltrate the smart set in no time. You will write to me with news of parties on yachts, I am sure of it.’ Alice sometimes wondered if Veronique was not trying to live vicariously through her. She could only agree that it would be good for her to experience life away from home. After all, an actress needs to have as broad a range of experiences as possible if she is to be a success.

  The reality had not quite measured up to Veronique’s fantasy or Alice’s expectations. Instead of a glitzy job serving cocktails to millionaire playboys on the seafront hotel, Alice’s employment agency had found her a waitressing job in a rundown café in one of the less glamorous districts, miles from the sea. She was surrounded not by money, power and beauty but by local workers, the odd travelling student who never tipped, and old men and women whose ability to make one beer or coffee last for three and a half hours never failed to amaze Alice. Her accommodation was a dingy basement flat with a shared bathroom that was so dirty it was impossible to believe you could ever get clean in it. When the windows were closed the heat was oppressive and Alice felt that she couldn’t breathe. When the windows were open the smell of stale fried onions and garlic drifted in from the neighbouring restaurant and permeated her hair, her clothes and her skin. On her first evening in Cannes, she decided to knock on the neighbours’ doors to introduce herself. The room opposite her own had been opened by a fat little man in a stained vest with an angry face who had sworn violently at her before slamming the door in her face. After that, Alice had decided that she was better off not getting to know her neighbours. Better to be friendless than surrounded by such awful, ugly people.

  Alice had spent three miserable weeks in Cannes, and was about to call her mother to say that it had all been a terrible mistake and could she come home when the man who was to change her life walked into the café. Dressed in a tattered white shirt and holey jeans, with a string of wooden beads around his neck and dark, thick, wavy hair that had not seen a barber for months, Alice immediately categorised him as a poor student. Without making eye contact, he took a seat at a wonky table and ordered a beer.

  ‘I’ll make it icy cold for you,’ she said with a smile. ‘You look so hot.’ She expected him to smile back at her, but when his eyes met hers their gaze was intense and deadly serious. His eyes were cornflower blue, dramatic in his deeply tanned face, and his lips were pink and soft. Something about him made Alice blush. She had been shy around boys before, but never quite like this; within a few seconds her body began to change in a way that was entirely new to her. The pulse that began to hammer in her throat and travelled down her body like a streak of lightning before focusing itself between her legs was unprecedented and terrified her. Alice poured the beer with shaking hands, noticing as she tilted the glass under the tap that her nipples were as erect and pointed as though it had been a winter’s day and not 40 degrees in the shade. She turned her back to him and smoothed her hands over her breasts, both wanting and not wanting him to see what was happening to her.

  She had a sudden, unbelievably vivid, mental picture of the two of them naked, his full red mouth wrapped entirely around one of her small white breasts, sucking it greedily, teasing her nipple until it was swollen and harder than it had ever been before. The sudden flow of warm wetness that seeped into her panties took her by complete surprise. Alice had never done any of the things that she was picturing with a man before. She had never even been naked with a man. Until she had met this stranger, she had had no desire to be. Now, it was all she could think about.

  She set the beer down in front of him. He didn’t drink it at first but held it to his forehead, which was beaded with sweat. He closed his eyes, allowing Alice to look at him without the fear that he would turn that disquieting stare on her again. She noticed his broad, dark brow, framing eyes with lashes which Alice herself would have been jealous of. The hair at the nape of his neck was damp and curled. The forearms exposed by his rolled-up shirt sleeves were lean but muscular, with veins that ran from his fingers to his elbows, and his tan was not the even bronze of the born Mediterranean but a dappled, ruddy brown. Alice wondered if his skin was the same colour all over.

  Like the old people who eked out a day’s stay in the café over a single espresso, this guy made his beer last for an hour. Alice hovered behind the counter, watching his lips part with every sip. She could not take her eyes off him. From his jacket pocket, he produced a battered old paperback which he proceeded to read, occasionally pausing to look up and stare across the road. Sometimes he would make notes in the margin with a pencil. Once or twice he licked his fingers to help him turn the page. The sight of his long pink tongue and even, ice-white teeth were startling in the middle of that weathered face and triggered a fresh flow of explicit images in Alice’s mind’s eye.

  The mysterious stranger ordered another cold beer, and later a glass of water. Then another glass of water. The nearer Alice got to his table, the faster her pulse raced and the more intense the sensation between her legs became. To her astonishment and something approaching shame, she could actually smell her own pounding, aching wet pussy. And something about him told her that he could too. He was watching her when her back was turned. She felt the strength of his gaze on her bare arms and legs as physically as though it were direct skin-on-skin contact, although she couldn’t explain how she knew he was looking at her.

  At eight o’clock, when the sun began to set and the street was cast in shadow, he lit a cigarette. Alice lifted up her nose and breathed in the smoke as though she were inhaling the very essence of him. At nine o’clock, he raised his left hand and mimed a signature in mid-air. As Alice wrote out the bill, she was at a complete loss as to what to do. If he left he might never come back and perhaps she would never have this wonderful feeling again. Then again, it wasn’t a comfortable feeling. She felt like she was astride a rollercoaster or a runaway train that she could not control. If this is what it’s like to be really turned on, she thought, I don’t know how people cope. I’m a mess. Perhaps I am better off if I don’t ever see him again.

  She brought the bill to him and set it down on a plate on the tablecloth in front of him, all the while her heart pound
ing so loudly she was sure he could hear it. He grabbed hold of Alice’s slender white wrist with a dry, leathery, tanned hand. He might as well have administered an electric shock directly to her skin. Alice felt a surge of sexual arousal stronger than anything else she had ever known. Her breath began to come in short rasps, and she was aware of her erect nipples rising and falling as her breasts heaved.

  ‘A beautiful woman like you and an artistic man like me shouldn’t have to spend their time in a dump like this,’ he said, his blue eyes twinkling. It was the longest sentence he had uttered all day. She allowed herself a shy smile. If Alice had heard that chat-up line from one of the boys in her school, or any of the other customers at the café, or any other man on the planet, she would have laughed and turned on her heel. But there was something about this guy that made even clichés sound resonant, sexy and urgent. What could she possibly say that would make him see how thrilled she was at the touch of his hand on her skin, at his voice and his eyes and the fact that he thought she was beautiful?

  ‘That will be 150 francs, please.’ Alice cringed at her own gauche choice of phrase. But he tightened his grip on her wrist. With his free hand, he reached into his jeans pocket – what’s in there, thought Alice, what lies beneath that faded denim? – and pulled out a tatty brown leather pouch. He tipped a pile of coins on to the tablecloth and began to sort through them with one hand. Alice noticed two things at once; that his fingers were long, brown, strong and healthy but slightly dirty, and that he was at least as poor as she was. Both these things made him seem less intimidating. When he had counted out his change, he made the coins into a little pile. Instead of putting them onto the plate with the bill, he twisted Alice’s arm around so that her palm faced him, and pressed the coins into her hand. One by one, he curled her fingers around the money, making a fist of her hand and covering it with his own. He looked up at her, unblinking and deadly serious.