Legal Action - Box Set (44 page)

              “You’re a lucky man, Alex,” Billy said, “for a lot of reasons, but mostly because you have people who really care about you. Charlotte’s husband told her not to put herself in any danger, but when she saw you tied up, that was it, there was no stopping her. Maddie, wow, she is a prize and you couldn’t find a nicer woman. We might not have found you so quickly without her help. Man, she’s in love with you and it shows, she doesn’t want anything else but to make you happy. I’ve been meaning to say thank you for inviting me to your wedding. I mean, I know I have to be there for work, but to seat me with your family, it means a lot.”

              They walked along silently for a while after that, then Bly let the dogs off the leashes and he ran with them down the beach. He had begun a routine of running with the dogs every day. He ran to keep his body strong and because the dogs loved it. Mostly he ran to outrun the thought of Charlotte. To try and forget the look of pleasure on her face, and the way she smelled and tasted, and the feel of her body when she moaned and climaxed beneath him.

*

              Amanda and JP came to dinner at the mansion to meet Maddie’s mother, and Amanda said she had tons of exciting news.

              “I’ll start by telling you that we’ve found the most incredible venue for your wedding,” she told Maddie, after she’d hugged her soon-to-be sister in law and met her mother.

              “I’m Dorian Newland, so glad to meet you, and congratulations on your marriage,” Maddie’s mother told JP and Amanda, and like Maddie she was blonde, and bright eyed, and sincere.

              “Where is this marvelous place, Amanda?” Maddie asked, leading the group into the dining room where they sat as wine glasses were filled. “We’re getting nervous, the invitations need to be engraved and sent out soon.”

              “Pass Christian, Mississippi, the historic McCall house. It’s the most enchanting estate right on the Gulf of Mexico. The house is opening at the end of May as a bed and breakfast and your wedding could be the very first grand event. I can’t tell you how magical it is, Alex, the house is a massive, white columned affair with all these oak-paneled rooms, and it sits on several acres covered with ancient trees. JP and I stayed there with Finn and Charlotte earlier this month, Charlotte said you’re welcome to use it, and there are plenty of bedrooms for the entire wedding party. Did I say that Charlotte inherited the estate? There was some long ago mix up, and her father, you know, Charles Tremont? Of course he knew that her mother was a debutante back in the day, so he looked into things, and it turns out the estate stays in the McCall family. It’s Charlotte’s now, then it will go to her children someday.”

              “It sounds perfect, doesn’t it Maddie?” Dorian Newland asked her daughter, and Maddie agreed that it did, and asked Bly if they could fly out and have a look as soon as possible.

              Bly said of course, they could go right away, and asked what other news Amanda was so eager to tell.

              “Well, it’s all too so exciting and really, I can’t believe how it’s worked out, JP, do you want to tell it, or should I?” Amanda asked, sipping from her glass of wine as the food was served by a uniformed maid.

              It was all so normal to Amanda, JP thought. She was comfortable with the mansion and the opulence and the servants that came and went, and she didn’t even seem to notice they were there. Amanda was used to getting what she wanted, and being spoiled, and giving orders, traits she’d learned from her mother. At first it pissed him off, her habit of ordering him around, then he began to like it.

After sex she would lie on the bed and stretch like a contented kitten, and tell him to bring her a soft cloth. When he did, she would spread her legs and say he’d made an awful mess, and she expected him to clean it up. As he moved the cloth over her greedy little pussy, she would squirm and push the cloth aside and move his fingers wherever she wanted them. The first few times she did it, he made her sit up and suck his cock to teach her a lesson. She moaned and licked and sucked with such pleasure, he soon became addicted to her erotic bossiness. 

Maddie on the other hand, still looked ill at ease with her surroundings, she was sexy and very beautiful, and Bly seemed to be in love.
Seemed to be
, that was what bothered JP. Bly listened intently when Maddie spoke and his eyes crinkled at the edges with genuine happiness, but when Charlotte was mentioned, he was like a deer caught in headlights. Bly was just fucked up over Charlotte, what would it take for him to ever let go of her completely? JP knew how it was between Charlotte and Finn, and the world would have to end or turn upside down, for anything to ever come between them.

              “Fine, I’ll tell them,” Amanda said, exasperated with JP for only a second before she slipped her hand into his lap under the table, “Finn is going to be partners with JP in the new law firm, so they’re moving back to San Diego! Of course the building the “threesome” used to live in is going to be the law offices of Thomas and Hale. I know, crazy isn’t it? This is what they always planned to do, and Finn is taking his real last name back. He says if there are still crazy fuckers out to get him, so be it. Oh, excuse me Mrs. Newland! Anyway, they’ve been searching the internet for houses and I think there may be one that Charlotte really likes,
and
she’s going back to work at Sheppard and Sheridan.”

              In bed that night Bly turned away from Maddie and she ran her hands over the tensed muscles of his shoulders and back, and down to his ass. She pressed her breasts against him and reached around him to grasp his achingly hard cock. He groaned as she stroked his heavy balls and he turned onto his back and let her mount him. His hands held her hips and a determined look was in her eye as she leaned back and her fingers circled her clit as he watched. She moved to her own rhythm, using his body and his miraculous cock for her own pleasure, and it excited him to watch her. She was going to make him her own, no matter what, and she wasn’t the least bit afraid of the ghost that haunted him.

*

              Bly left Billy Kipling with Maddie and her mother at the McCall House, as the bed and breakfast was called. They were in love with it, the imposing Greek Revival house, and the manicured lawn, thick with live oaks that led right to the sand at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. The couple who were running the bed and breakfast had given them the grand tour, pointing out what good fortune it was that so many of the centuries-old trees had survived devastating hurricanes along the coast. The house was as it always had been, ever since the first McCall built it for his French bride, Charlotte Lesairre, who came to join him in the years after the Battle of 1814. The last resident had been Mrs. Charlotte Rose McCall, known to everyone in the county and in New Orleans as the fiery tempered, “Miss Rose.”

Bly drove to the Pass Christian cemetery and stood in front of the crypt where Sally McCall was laid to rest. When Charlotte still loved him, and lay curled against him in the night, she’d told him about the day she sat in the limo and watched as the crypt was sealed. She said she listened to Eddie Vedder with the volume turned as loud as it would go, and still it couldn’t drown out her grandmother’s vicious words. She called Charlotte the bastard of a bastard, and said that Tremont was a married bastard who had let himself be seduced by Sally, her little whore daughter. Then her grandmother died in the night and she was turned out of the grand house. He realized that through some bizarre twist of fate, Charlotte now owned the house of her dreams, and her nightmares.

              He returned to pick up Maddie and Dorian, and he said he wanted to walk on the beach with Maddie alone. They walked silently, hand in hand and finally they sat on the sand with their feet at the edge of the waves. He handed her a small narrow box that she hadn’t noticed before, as she talked on and on about how perfect the McCall House was for their wedding.

              She looked into his eyes as she opened the box, they were the exact color of the Gulf, blue-green and bottomless and heartbreaking. She lifted the gold charm-bracelet out of the box and tears filled her eyes as she studied it, then she looked up into his face and he was smiling shyly.

              “It’s just a small gift,” he said, fastening it onto her wrist. “The charms are like symbols, memories of what we’ve shared so far. This little building is supposed to be the hospital where I opened my eyes and saw you. The snowflake is for our first date in Prague, and the palm tree is for the island where we began to fall in love. The other ones you can figure out for yourself, except for the heart, that’s mine and I’m giving it to you and you can add…”

              “Shut up,” she said, kissing him through her tears. She heard her mother, and Billy Kipling, and the bed and breakfast couple whisper as they passed by them on the beach, and Maddie lay back and pulled him on top of her. “Just hush, you’ve said it all. I love you and I know you love me, and it’s real and it’s
us
and its forever.” 

              They didn’t make love on the beach, but only because they wanted to get married at the McCall House, and they were afraid they would be thrown off the property. They didn’t want to give Maddie’s mother a heart attack, either. So they were good, and behaved themselves until Dorian stepped off the jet in Florida. Then the jet took off again, headed home to San Diego, and Kipling joined the pilots and closed the cockpit door. They had privacy then, and on a smooth leather sofa at the back of the jet, they made love all the way across the country.

CHAPTER EIGHT

              “You’re sentimental side is really rubbing off on me,” Charlotte said, and Finn laughed and continued to load their bags into the car as she lingered in the front garden of Dovecote Cottage. “I’m trying hard not to cry, Finnegan, we’re leaving our little nest, don’t you even care about that? Why aren’t you getting all Nicholas Sparks cheesy-weepy now, you know, the whole ‘moment in time, commit this to memory’ stuff?”

              “Because my love, everything that’s important I’m taking with me,” he said, as he scooped up Atticus, who was struggling to take a few steps on the front path. He put an arm around Charlotte and the three of them looked up at the rose covered cottage.

Jude would be moving into the cottage soon, he’d bought it from Finn and Charlotte, and he was setting up an obstetrics practice in the village. He cherished the experience of Doctors Without Borders, but it was time to come home, and he loved the cottage and the peaceful countryside of Surrey. On a whim, he’d gone to the Harley-Davidson dealership in East-London and bought a Road King right off the show-room floor. It was perfect for riding the back-roads and country lanes, and when he stopped at a pub in a neighboring village, he met Meg.

She was tending bar and she had smiled the most incredible smile and said she was a fool for men with long hair. He gave her a ride home when the pub closed, and after the babysitter left, she took his hand as she walked through her small house, and they peeked through a bedroom door to check on her three sleeping children. They were her treasures, she said, but their daddy was a pretty-boy mistake she’d made when she was a still a teenager. He was long gone, he’d left in the night when she told him the third baby was on the way, but she didn’t really care. She could take care of herself and her kids, and maybe Jude would be a welcome diversion after a hard day’s work. She had bad luck with love, she fell for gorgeous men who didn’t do anything good with their lives, and Jude smiled and thought, just maybe her luck, and his, was about to change.

Standing in the lane waving goodbye, Henrietta was sad to see Finn and Charlotte leave. She would especially miss her friend Georgina, and dear little Atticus, but now she had a new neighbor at Dovecote Cottage. Jude had asked her to manage his new office in the village, and just imagining trips to the pub with the young, handsome doctor, sealed up the crack in her heart.

The flight was a long one from London to Los Angeles, they spent one night in Houston and took a cab to Goode Company for mouthwatering ribs and brisket. JP picked them up at LAX and drove them to their new home, which they’d only seen on a computer screen. It was on a lovely old street in La Jolla, a craftsman style cottage, low to the ground, large and rambling. Amanda wasn’t feeling well, JP said, but she would stop by the next morning. Georgina and two of Finn’s sisters spilled into the house and a half dozen of Atticus’s cousins ran up and down the stairs. Atti was in heaven with so many little hands and faces and kids, just his size to play with.

When everyone was gone, including Atticus, who Georgina had insisted on taking home with her for the night, Charlotte began to cry. 

“What is it my love? You’re tired from the trip is all, come on let’s go for a walk or get a bite to eat or crawl onto that lovely mattress on the floor in our bedroom,” he said, pulling her against him.

“Don’t touch me, why did we do this? Why did we leave our happy little life and come back here? Now we have people living all around us, neighbors, and they sound more like me when they talk, and now Atti isn’t going to have your cool accent,” she pushed away from him, and sat on the wide stairway in the front hall.

“If you don’t like the house, my love, we’ll find another, and if you still aren’t happy here in a month, we’ll go back to England. I mean it, I’ll kick my brother’s ass right out of the cottage, and all will be just as it was,” he said, and he sat beside her, then he lay back on the stairs and tried to pull her on top of him.

She pushed his hands away, and told him to leave her the fuck alone, and when his eyes widened in surprise and he laughed, she started up the stairs, but he caught her ankle and she fell to her knees.

He was on top of her then, turning her to face him, unbuttoning her jeans and yanking them down, and she slapped his face and told him to get off of her. They were both panting as he looked into her eyes and let his hands fall away from her.