Secret Surrender Read online

  ‘Alice.’ He breathed the word. She held out her cheeks for a formal kiss hello and when his lips touched her cheek, she felt a slight wetness of his mouth, and did he scrape that stubble along her cheek deliberately? He knew that the most sensitive part of her body was the skin around her mouth – he would not have been able to resist.

  ‘Hello, Jacques.’

  He broke into a smile, that same smile which had been such a rare treat when they were together. The teeth were still so white, the tongue still so pink and the lips had lost none of their fleshy, sensuous attractiveness in the last eight years. Alice had a sudden, vivid image of where that mouth had been, remembered the eyes that were meeting her own now gazing up at her from between her legs while his nose nuzzled her clitoris, his tongue probed her cunt, and his thumb slid in and out of her arsehole. She did not realise her mouth had fallen open until Jacques leaned over and used his thumb and forefinger to close her parted lips. She saw that he had a drop of chocolate, presumably from her lips, on his finger. Slowly, deliberately, he slid his finger in and out of his mouth.

  ‘Stop it, Jacques,’ admonished Alice. ‘You can’t behave like that around me. It’s not appropriate. I’m married.’

  ‘Oh, I know that you’re married. I’ve been following your progress. You’ve done very well for yourself since you were begging to suck my cock in an attic flat, haven’t you, darling?’ The bitterness in his voice broke her heart. Jacques looked over his shoulder and mouthed an order to the waiter. An awkward few seconds passed. ‘Of course, I was co-starring the first time you were ever committed to film, wasn’t I?’

  She thought back to that last night when she had fled Cannes with nothing but a tiny suitcase and a shredded black videotape. The film that she had destroyed before anyone had a chance to view it.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you do understand why I had to do it, don’t you? I had to think of myself, and my future. I hoped you would understand and think of me the way I think of you, fondly. I was drowning in you, Jacques. Your games were getting darker, you were like an addiction, and the only way to really break an addiction is to go cold turkey, so that’s what I did.’ She was babbling now, but she couldn’t stop. ‘And I had to take the film. I don’t regret what we did; I had a great night. I had a great summer, but I was ambitious, Jacques. I couldn’t have a tape around that could surface in years to come and ruin my career.’

  Jacques stared into his coffee. ‘You could have trusted me.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  Jacques opened his mouth.

  He seemed as if he was about to say something but then thought better of it and changed tack.

  ‘What’s it like?’ he asked. Alice knew exactly what he was referring to, but feigned innocence.

  ‘What’s what like?’ she said.

  ‘With Pierre,’ he said simply. ‘Sex with Pierre. I can imagine you, my lithe little Alice, suffocating under his weight, tolerating his cock, making all the right noises and then thinking of me when you come.’

  This was so devastatingly near to the truth that Alice felt tears prick her eyes but she regained her composure in time to retort, ‘I’m not your little Alice.’

  ‘Have you ever felt as alive as you did that last night? I bet you haven’t lost control of yourself since then, have you, Alice?’

  She was close to losing control now. Despite all her efforts at steeling herself against Jacques’ presence, she was beginning to melt, her body beginning to thrum and pulse and her pussy to swell and dampen. She felt Jacques’ knee between hers. She withdrew her legs and clamped her knees shut.

  ‘I’m going to go now, Jacques,’ said Alice. But she stayed where she was, ignoring the voice in her head that told her to get up and walk away now. Alice Daumier the actress did not behave like this. She was calm and cool and did not let men like Jacques play games with her and feel her up in grubby little cafés. From her bag she fished out a ten euro note, placed it on the table and made to leave.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Jacques.

  ‘I can’t do this, Jacques,’ Alice replied, standing up and wrapping her trenchcoat around her like armour. ‘You can’t make me.’

  Alice turned on her heel and prepared to leave the café. Jacques’ next words were spoken in such a low voice as to be barely audible but their meaning froze her in her tracks. ‘I’ve still got a copy of the film.’

  Alice spun around as though an invisible pair of hands had been placed on her shoulders and turned her body 180 degrees. Hadn’t she destroyed the tape with her own hands?

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ she managed to say, although she knew that bluffing wasn’t Jacques’ style. Jacques never said anything unless he meant it.

  ‘Darling Alice,’ he said, the smile on his pink lips genuine now that he could see he had her attention and indeed the upper hand in his little game. ‘You really were very naive back then, weren’t you? I might have only been starting out as a filmmaker, but I knew the basics. You never shoot a film using just one camera, you have at least two different cameras so you can capture the action from every angle. Sure, the tape you took would have had the best shot of your beautiful body and it was up close with you and Julie. But I had a secondary camera in place on the other side of the room. I have half an hour of footage that will show the entire world exactly the kind of person Alice Daumier really is.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

  Jacques opened his jacket and from the inside pocket produced a loose sheaf of photographic papers. With a quick glance around the café to make sure they were out of anyone’s eyesight, he spread them on the table before her. Alice’s stomach churned as she took in the grainy pictures, obviously stills taken from a film. The images of the four bodies entwined brought back the memories of that night more vividly than ever and despite her fear and stress, she found herself becoming incredibly aroused. With shaking hands, she picked up the photograph of herself and Julie, Alice, the slim blonde teenager, kneeling before Julie’s statuesque beauty. Julie’s beautiful head was thrown back, her bee-stung lips parted in ecstasy and her long red hair curled down her back like a nest of snakes. How well Alice could remember the feel and taste of Julie’s bulbous breast in her mouth, the way she got greedier and greedier and couldn’t get enough of it. How fascinated Alice had been by the contrast between the soft, plentiful flesh of the breast and the tiny but rock-hard nipples. She could smell Julie’s perfume and recall the smattering of freckles across her breasts.

  Alice placed the photo face down on the counter, unable to look at it any more, but Jacques had other ideas. The next photo he showed her was of the two of them, doing what they did best. He was sucking her as she lay back on the bed with her head thrown over the side of it, hair hanging down, his arms pinning her arms to the bed. At once she remembered how helpless she had felt with her body trapped under his like that, and realised that nothing before or since had ever compared to the moments when she had utterly surrendered herself to the overwhelming force of Jacques’ desire. She was getting wetter by the second: her panties were saturated, and her inner thighs became damp and sticky. Alice shifted uncomfortably, allowing her knees to part again as she did so. Quick as a flash, Jacques placed his knee between her thighs and forced them open. She could feel her clit swell and rise. He was so close … All he had to do was touch her; no one would ever know …

  She forced herself to speak. ‘Why come to me now?’ she asked. ‘You’ve had this eight years. You’ve obviously known where I am for quite some time. Why wait until now, when I’ve got so much to lose?’

  ‘I thought I could live without you. I thought that the memory of you, and the film of you, would be enough to sustain me for the rest of my life. I can still get hard just by conjuring up the image of you naked. After all these years. I saw you on television, in magazines, and thought that I could bear to see you with Pierre. But over the years, it got worse, not better. I simply realised that I had to have you again, in the flesh
.’ He toyed with his frayed cuffs as he spoke and suddenly it seemed obvious.

  ‘Do you need money?’ Alice asked. She could see she had genuinely offended him. He looked absolutely brokenhearted and she realised at once that money was not Jacques’ object.

  ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘It’s you I want. And I know how concerned you are about your public image, that you would never jeopardise your career by returning to me, so I figured the only way to get what I want from you is blackmail. You won’t like it at first, you’ll feel guilty, but I’ll get you back. I’m sorry it has to be this way, but you’ll thank me for it in time, I promise you.’

  He paused, and showed her the final photograph in his series. It was all four of the bodies entwined, and although it was hard to distinguish whose limb was whose, there was no mistaking Alice’s face, the face that was seen on the cover of a hundred magazines but never like this, blurred, her face smudged not just from the poor picture quality but also by the ecstasy that she was quite clearly feeling. How she longed to feel like that again.

  Then Jacques’ hands were under the table and when he slid his hand between her legs, using his right hand to hook her panties to one side, she let him. He placed his left thumb directly on to her clitoris. There was no need for him to move the digit. She was aroused enough for simply the feel of his flesh on her pussy after all these years to bring her to an orgasm that sent wave after wave of pleasure through her body. She bit down on her lip, letting pleasure and shame and relief engulf her.

  She was still feeling the after-shock convulsions of her orgasm when Jacques swiftly gathered up the pictures and stood up to leave. He held the pictures over his cock to disguise the hard-on she knew must be there. It must have taken all his reserves of self-control to walk away from her, when he knew what she could do with him.

  ‘Now,’ said Jacques, ‘I think we let the game begin. These are the rules. If you want me to keep your little secret and preserve your career then you have to do exactly what I say. I have many pleasures in mind for you. I would say that the pleasure will be all mine, but I think you’ll be getting plenty of pleasure out of the scenarios yourself. If you let yourself. I’ll be in touch.’ And he walked away, leaving Alice flushed and confused, alone in the café. And the big question buzzed round and around her head. Did blackmailing somebody count when the thing they were forcing you to do was the thing you most desired in the world?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ALICE COULD NOT sleep. Pierre snored lightly beside her, his arm flung out across the bed, reaching for his wife. He seemed huge, his arms like great hams and his legs like giant logs. But as Alice tossed and turned, her own arms and legs tangled in the Egyptian cotton bedclothes, she could only picture Jacques’ wiry frame and felt guilty as she wished Pierre could somehow become Jacques and put out the fire that burned inside her.

  Alice was wild with life and lust, and all of her senses seemed sharper than usual. Even her eyesight seemed to have improved in the last few days. In the blue light of night, she could see every detail of her sleeping husband’s face. She could smell the day’s perfume that lingered around her neck and wrists, taste salty sweat on her lips, and every millimetre of her skin was supersensitive to each touch and caress of the bedclothes. And then what was that noise? A thud and a scratching sound … Alice was used to street noises drifting up to her fifth-floor window, but this sounded like it was coming from the end of the corridor, within the building. Could a cat have somehow got inside the apartment? God forbid, a rat? Thoughts of Jacques were replaced by fear that a rodent could be scurrying around in her kitchen. She decided to investigate.

  Naked, Alice walked through the double doors that divided her bedroom from the rest of the apartment. Her bare feet made almost no sound on the cold stone floor and she stopped dead in the corridor; there was that sound again. A rustling, or scraping as though a small animal was in the house. It was definitely a rat. She shivered. She would have to wake Pierre; there was no way she could cope with this on her own.

  But then she heard a footfall heavier than any animal’s. She noticed Jacques’ unmistakable smell a fraction of a second before a dark figure stepped out of the bathroom doorway. His hand reached out and grabbed her by the mouth, wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her into the bathroom. All Alice was aware of was the smell and the feel of him, the buttery softness of his leather jacket, the rough denim of his jeans as he spun her round, and then the lock of his hair as he bent down so that his eyes were level with hers. Alice was aware of her nakedness and how vulnerable and terrified she should be feeling. But she was excited: from nowhere, pressure and tension began to gather between her legs and she felt herself getting wet. She sucked the flesh of his fingers, wanting to taste him. He gently drew his hand away from her mouth and placed it on her collarbone.

  ‘How did you break into my apartment? How dare you? How do you know I won’t scream the house down?’ Despite her desire, she had to say something to Jacques, otherwise she knew she would hand over control to him completely.

  ‘I know you won’t. I know you.’ Alice’s knees began to quiver. Desire, panic and excitement made her weak.

  ‘Please.’ Alice did not want to beg Jacques but she knew that she would have to. ‘Does it have to be like this? With my husband asleep in the next room? My career, my marriage … If what we had meant anything to you, you wouldn’t be doing this to me.’

  ‘What we had meant everything to me,’ snarled Jacques in a whisper. ‘But you lost your right to use that against me when you betrayed me by stealing the film.’

  She nodded, fighting back tears.

  ‘OK,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do whatever you want. We’ll meet tomorrow to discuss it. But you need to get out of my house.’

  Jacques released his grip on Alice’s neck. Relief and disappointment competed for first place in her emotions. She wanted him gone, and yet she wanted him to stay and finish what he’d started. He trailed the old familiar hand down her collar-bone and further down her body, tantalisingly slowly, until he was cupping her breast with the palm of his right hand and idly using his thumb to trace circles around her nipple and watching it grow harder. Alice felt a direct link between his thumb on her nipple and the wetness between her legs. Her left breast was also becoming engorged with blood and silently it begged for his attention. As ever, Jacques read her mind through her body and touched her left nipple, holding his hand motionless on her skin. The stillness of his hands on her tits was a stark contrast to the blood that rushed around her body and the pulse that flickered and throbbed on the tip of her clitoris. He took her nipples between his thumb and forefingers and gently pulled at her breasts, stretching the flesh of her tiny tits away from her body before letting them go. They bounced back to their perky state, making tiny slapping noises.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he breezed softly into her ear, his voice a warm zephyr that caressed her as delicately as any feather. ‘Except maybe into your bedroom.’

  She shook her head violently but Jacques grabbed her by the neck and marched towards the bedroom. Terror struck her dumb. Not here, not like this. Pierre was older than Jacques but he was bigger and stronger and probably healthier. He would not know who Jacques was. Thinking him an intruder and a potential rapist, Pierre would probably kill him.

  When they were standing outside the bedroom door, Pierre’s sleeping form just visible through the curtain, Jacques stood behind Alice with his arm slung around her neck. Alice had no idea what was coming next. His free hand was flat against her stomach. He used his palm to massage her belly in soft circular motions, working his way down towards her bush tantalisingly slowly. When he reached her pubic hair and found it neatly groomed, the skin around it smooth as a peach, he made a tiny murmur of approval in Alice’s ear, and then took her ear lobe between his teeth, tugging gently and lightly flicking it with his tongue. Alice bit down hard on her lower lip to stop herself from crying out.

  Jacques stroked her bush for a fe
w moments before sliding his middle finger between her pussy lips and finding her damp, swollen clit. Alice longed for him to stimulate it, but his fingertip travelled swiftly over her excited little knob and found her twitching hole. He plunged his finger inside her before removing it and using Alice’s juices to massage her clitoris. He simply held his index finger against her clit, feeling her flesh respond to the alchemy of his touch, pressing lightly, and a little harder, and harder still, his fingers moving mere millimetres as he explored the intimate topography of her body. Just as she thought she was about to come, Jacques pushed Alice’s head down so that she was bent double. The chink as he undid his belt was almost inaudible but Alice knew what was coming next. She parted her legs and raised herself on to her tiptoes, her gaping pussy inviting Jacques’ prick. And then he was inside her, driving it into her. It was still the perfect fit, and Alice found herself shivering and trembling as he began the smooth, rhythmic strokes that stimulated her G-spot. Alice’s upper body was limp, tits banging against her knees as he pounded her cunt time and again.

  If Pierre had opened his eyes he would have seen the silhouetted figure of his wife bent double, cramming her own fist in her mouth to stifle her groans of ecstasy as another man held her by the hips and plunged a hard cock into her over and over again. He would have seen her freeze for a moment as the orgasm sent her body into a delicious spasm, and he would have seen Jacques’ back arch as he came, too.

  ‘This is what I wanted,’ whispered Jacques as his balls rose up and emptied themselves into Alice. ‘Not money. You. All I’ve ever wanted is you.’ He pulled himself out of her hole and delivered a merciless slap to her tender clitoris before walking away, so light on his feet that the only sound he made was a soft bump as he climbed back the way he had come, through the kitchen window and down the fire escape.