What I Did for Love

I am lying on a narrow bed, a soft white robe tied loosely at my waist. The room is shadowed; there is another bed, a deep sofa, wooden furniture, a large, strange curved shape like a saddle covered in velvet sitting on the floor. The door opens and he comes in quickly, silently, pulling his own robe open, and he drops to the great pillow cushions on the floor at the side of my bed. With a flick of his hand, my robe is half open, my left breast exposed, the nipple hard. He caresses it, and then bends and takes my breast in his mouth, giving me little bites and tongue-flicks. I am hot for this man, his effect on my body a drowning of the senses, pleasure, and the nip followed by the kiss and passage of his lips over and over along my breast. “I am going to leave your breasts very sore,” he murmurs, a cool voice thick with desire. I do not care.

He said he would use me. This man, who just days ago I thought I could love and desire forever, now hated me and had bought my body in exchange for money, though not in the usual way these things are done. I was not an escort or prostitute – though I may now qualify for these names. He wanted to punish me for rejecting him, and did not know what pain that rejection had cost me, the greater pain I would have had if I had not rejected him.

All these thoughts were flashes of color in a muddle of sexual arousal, his hands moving over my belly, and downward, exploring and finding my quick, working me and then stopping, so that I was ready to faint into unconsciousness of anything but lust, desire, and the pounding of my heart that I could feel tremoring my whole body.

“I am not going to care for your pleasure,” he had said coldly and with a cruel smile. “I intend to have every pleasure from you, though. I’ve never been with a whore, so you’re my first.” The words were intended as blows, but my moral sense was off somewhere else. By giving myself to this man, I could rescue my brother, his investments, his financial career, and most importantly, I could assure his emotional
survival. My brother would not take my money. I was rich enough, but he was determined to protect my fortune, even if it meant the loss of his own.

So I lay here with the man who had purchased me, crazed with arousal. I heard him mutter, “I can’t wait, even though I wanted to do all sorts of things to you.” He rose abruptly from the pillows, pushing aside the rest of my robe, and bending swiftly to suck and give darting licks to the firebox between my legs. “Spread them wide apart,” he ordered, his open hands pushing my legs outward from the inside of my thighs. He came over me, his erection quickly glimpsed, and he was pressing into me, I gasping a little, wet enough, the chemistry of us powerful, and his quick thrusts, four or five or six, then stopping and rearranging me, scooping my buttocks, grabbing my hips and moving me upward on the bed, then entering me again.

“I want this to last a long time,” he said in a stern whisper. “I want you to be sore everywhere when this night is over.”

As if I cared. But it was so strange how all this had happened, that what had started as such sweet love, had come to this.

I never had an argument with my brother until that fated day that I also met Grenville Rand. That day our three lives became entangled in love and hate, in ways no one could have predicted.

My name is Dray Cooper. Bredon is my older brother and, until this past spring, my legal guardian. He continues to be my self-appointed surrogate father, indulgent, loving, giving me almost everything I want. But our hearts are burdened by sadness, for what he and I want most, only heaven can give. Our parents had been killed three years before on a flight from Paris to New York, their plane exploding from a terrorist’s bomb. I was fifteen when they perished, and Bredon was thirty-five. He had been their “honeymoon baby,” and I was their “change of life surprise.”

Our parents’ estate, bequeathed equally to us, left us very rich. Airline settlements and insurance policies added several more millions to each of our fortunes. Bredon’s goal was to give me a life that I was not even sure I wanted any more after our parents’ violent end. He hired therapists for me, but he was the best help, serving as the anchor for my heart in our now-shaken world. While doctors dealt with my body and psyche under my brother’s watchful eye, he was also shaping my financial security. His goal was to protect my inheritance, maximize my income, limit my risk as much as possible. He was a successful financier involved in many high-risk investments, but only let me invest with him if it was “done before begun,” if the profit was practically jumping to rapid heights as the venture started. That was a rare thing. Mostly, my money remained in extremely conservative accounts and investments. When I turned eighteen during this, my first college year, my money became my own. My parents had not doubted my ability to handle the wealth they left me, nor Bredon’s ability to invest it wisely for me. Bredon had
most of my assets hidden behind bland, untraceable corporate names and made sure that all taxes on all my profits were promptly paid. He was not one of the many fools who thought they could evade the IRS forever. He had established two additional trusts that would come to me at twenty-one, “just in case,” he had teased me. Just in case I went wild with spending. I never did. My interests were art, science, nerdy things, organizations that protected animals and the environment.

While he guarded the safety of my money, risks were the stuff of Bredon’s wealth. It had made him rich in his own right, as a venture capitalist. After his Ivy League college days, with start-up money from our parents, Bredon launched an investment group whose bold financial moves and successes had impressed even the so-called Wall Street wizards. High-powered, energetic, his special talent lay in creating profitable new companies. He was unafraid to do testing and product offerings that often seemed too risky and over-the-top to other investors. In the face of skeptics, he would create companies that in turn created new “needs,” and dominated brand new markets. Our parents had been surprised, happy, proud that he used his own trust funds and their gifts to continue the tradition of wealth in our family.

I was not ignorant of the ways in which my family had become rich a couple of generations ago, and how it had remained that way. In our private dinner discussions, our parents told us stories of their businesses and investments, and their own parents’ and grandparents’ financial coups. None of this went beyond the family. We had learned early that no family business or financial planning was ever to be discussed in public.

Bredon’s ongoing tutelage gave me a deep understanding of the modern financial world. And after our parents’ deaths he also made sure I knew all the details of his investments and projects. I had full access to his accounts, and he would update me on all their passwords. The world saw me as a young girl, which indeed I was, but age disappeared into necessity and my youth hardly
mattered. I was smart, and if I could learn the advanced sciences of my high school classes, I could learn the art and science of making and keeping money. After all, men had entered Yale at fourteen years old in the early days of our country. The very young have more possibilities than people believe today. They are legal adults at eighteen, but are often still treated as dependent children. It makes them feel helpless, prolonging their dependency, expecting their parents to solve every problem.

My parents had no patience for that. They expected understanding, and got it. They praised resourcefulness and problem solving, and we responded to that praise. They had also impressed upon us the importance of family in investing and holding our wealth, and using our skills to maintain our fortunes. My brother and I were the family that mattered now, for although we had cousins and great-aunts, we were all that directly remained of our parents.

Privacy was an over-arching concern of my family, as it typically was of the long-time wealthy rich. But privacy is difficult in a media-driven world. It was public knowledge, for instance, that Bredon was our parents’ executor and my legal guardian. In the days after the bombing, the media was wild with rumors, reports, commentary, official statements from several governments; the reporters kept stirring up interest with new angles on the story. They sought every detail online and by gossip, about the famous passengers who had died, and the identities of their rich and newly-rich heirs. Our parents were the only American notables on that flight, but several other well-known society “names” from Europe had been on board. Their families too were hounded by their countries’ news media.

Most of our friends sympathized as we avoided reporters and hid from them when necessary. We would look straight ahead, ignoring questions asked or shouted at us when we appeared on the street. Endless newspaper articles, television shows and
digital news feeds, discussed the tragedy. Public and commercial radio and television aired programs with panel after panel, on terrorism, flying safety, legal issues, possible military retaliation. Bredon and I avoided reading, looking, listening. We did not attend nor watch the press conferences held by government officials about the bombing, where they tried to explain why our parents’ plane had been targeted. It was a commercial flight, middle-class families and poorer families also on board, their loved ones suffering and grieving as much as we were.

The evidence was scanty, and pointed to the relentless malice and spite of a small cult of religious extremists, evil men of bitter ignorance, using guns and bombs to defend Almighty God. The blasphemy of such presumption could not penetrate their distorted mental processes. Were it not such a travesty of religious ardor, it would have been the ultimate cosmic joke. All the media talk was really an attempt to deal with fear, to gain reassurance that we were not going to experience another September eleventh. The pictures of various terrorists that appeared in all the visual media made me want to be sick, to empty my body and mind of the images of such murderous, treacherous psychopaths.

Bredon’s friends were very careful to respect our privacy and stoic grief. They avoided asking or saying anything indelicate, except for one, who made an appalling blunder. Head of his own investment group, maybe envious of us as two rich siblings, completely ignoring the gut-deep hurt we still carried, this supposed friend made a too-hearty, sarcastic joke that infuriated my brother. A greedy smirk on his face, he told Bredon that even an heiress’s brother was entitled to legal fees as the administrator of her estate. Bredon went cold, dead silent.

The jokester was too stupid to see the startled looks of warning and retreat on the faces around them, the palpable silence. In other times a tasteless comment might simply have been ignored or shrugged off, but this one had unleashed my
brother’s anger, quiet and lethal. Bredon became distant, dismissive when the man was around, disappearing from his life, no calls returned, no requested meetings agreed to. Even as the truth dawned, he did not really understand his blunder. Everyone in their circle was mystified at his tedious stupidity.