The Perfect Sinner. Penny Jordan

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      Max began to listen keenly to the way his grandfather compared his two sons, praising David and speaking contemptuously of Max’s own father, Jon. His father, Max had discovered, was a man to be despised and ignored. His grandfather and his uncle David became the pivotal male role models in his life. To cloak his childish fear of his parents’ rejection of him, he began to cultivate a protective wall of indifference to any kind of adult emotion, and at the same time he started to learn how to manipulate it to gain his own ends.

      In much the same way as he had learned to distrust his parents—his father might speak of chastising him out of love for him, but Max knew better: his father did not love him, his father did not like him. Max had heard his uncle David saying so—so Max also learned to distrust and alienate his peers. Better to protect himself by cultivating and inciting their antagonism than to risk the pain of being rejected by them.

      Now, twenty odd years down the line, if anyone had suggested to Max that it was out of the seeds of his extreme emotional sensitivity and vulnerability as a child that his adult persona had grown, he would have laughed at them in cynical mockery.

      He was as he was; he liked being as he was, and for those who didn’t like it or him—then too bad!

      It irritated him that Justine had put him off instead of inviting him to go straight round, as he had expected her to do.

      He had been looking forward to the release he knew that having sex with her would have brought him; not just for his sexual desire but also from the anger and sense of ill-usage that being with his family always caused him.

      Madeleine, with her pathetic humility and eternal self-sacrificing; his parents with their well-mannered ‘niceness’; his cousin Olivia with her smug self-satisfaction; Luke with his arrogant superiority; and Saul, the perfect father and husband. God, but they all irritated the hell out of him. He knew how much they disapproved of him … disliked him…. How sorry they felt for ‘poor Maddy,’ how they talked about him behind his back, but he was the one whose name was beginning to appear with flattering regularity in the society columns; he was the one whose income was running very satisfactorily into six figures; he was the one who never lacked a willing sexual partner—a variety of willing sexual partners. Well, at least not normally!

      Tomorrow he would have to punish Justine a little for tonight, to point out to her that he had virtually walked out on a family gathering just to be able to spend the night with her—it didn’t matter that he would have left, anyway; she wasn’t going to know that. Yes, just a small cooling off on his part; a discreet hint of withdrawal should be more than enough to make her come running, eager to appease him.

      He had a meeting in chambers to attend in the afternoon, which would give him an excuse to cut short the time he spent with her, further reinforcing and underlining the stance he intended to take with her. It was their final chambers meeting before they closed down the office for the Christmas and New Year period.

      Apart from Justine’s proposed divorce, Max had no other major work currently in progress, but that did not concern him too much. Early spring was always a good time for new briefs; the forced conviviality and intimacy of the winter months en famille often proved to be the breaking point for a marriage under strain. Also, Justine had already dropped several hints about inviting him to join her when she went skiing. Max had no particular love of either the sport or the cold, but he had to admit that the thought of Aspen and its social life, its socialites, was extremely tempting.

      He would tell Maddy that it was business, of course. Getting off the bed, he started to strip off his clothes before heading for the shower.

      Like virtually all other male members of his family, Max was a stunningly sexy man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a naturally well-muscled torso, he shared his male cousins’ dark-haired and very masculine good looks. However, in Max they possessed a certain almost magnetic intensity that one of his smitten victims had once described as making her completely spellbound, like standing in the path of a ten-ton lorry, knowing it had the potential to destroy you and yet being so hyped up on the mixture of adrenaline-induced excitement and fear that knowledge produced that you simply couldn’t move out of its way.

      ‘It’s that look of cold ruthlessness in his eyes,’ she had continued, shivering sensually. ‘You just know, the moment you look at him, that he doesn’t give a damn about you or your emotions, but somehow you just can’t help yourself.’

      There was a sharp ache in Max’s body, which he knew from experience could only be alleviated by sex. He smiled grimly to himself as he turned on the shower. He should, after all, have taken Maddy to bed before he left Haslewich. Although he would never have told her so, despite her lack of self-esteem and her plainness, there was about Maddy a very rich vein of sexual warmth and generosity, a femininity, a womanliness that Max knew perfectly well most men would have found extremely alluring, all the more so because her own unawareness of it meant that it would be a secret that only a lover would have access to, just as only one lover would have access to her body.

      Maddy had been a virgin when he had first taken her to bed, inexperienced and unknowing, untutored, but her body had surrounded him with a softness, a warmth as instinctive and natural as her protective mother love for her children.

      She didn’t receive him with that same innocent generosity and warmth any more, of course. On the rare occasions when they did have sex, he could feel how much she resented his ability to arouse her and how hard she strived to resist her physical desire for him. It amused Max to let her. He knew he could make love to her more often and easily turn her resistance into molten liquid acceptance and desire, but what was the point? The last thing he wanted was for Maddy to be sexually demanding or sexually possessive.

      He showered himself briskly, then stepped out of the cubicle, smoothing his dark, wet hair back sleekly off his face as he reached for a towel.

      If he was going to go to Aspen he would need to buy himself some suitable clothes. He had read that a lot of the Hollywood set went there for the season. He started to smile as he rubbed his body dry and then padded naked across to his bed.

      Max was going through some paperwork when he heard the front doorbell ring. On his way to answer it he quickly checked his appearance in the hallway mirror. He was wearing the expensive after-shave that Justine had given him and the Turnbull and Asser shirt, which had been another present from her. The gold cuff links had been a gift from another grateful client. He glanced at his watch, a Rolex that Maddy had given him as a wedding present. Justine was earlier than he’d expected her. Well, she was still going to have to make due reparation for last night and wait a little for her sex. Yes, and plead with him for it, too!

      Max opened the door.

      ‘Crighton, may I come in?’

      Without waiting for Max’s assent, Justine’s husband stepped determinedly into the hallway.

      Max had met him on only one previous occasion at a dinner party given by a friend of Justine’s to which he had been invited.

      Although not as tall as Max and certainly a good twenty years older, Robert Burton nevertheless possessed that aura of power and forcefulness common to most entrepreneurially successful men. He might not walk with a deliberate swagger nor verbally boast of his achievements or his wealth, but he most definitely had about him that air that warned other males that he considered himself to be their superior, and as he eyeballed Max with cool aggression as he marched past him, Max was immediately and acutely aware of a relentless dislike he could feel emanating from him.

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