His brush with death seemed to have made Todd even hornier than usual. Aware of Milly’s full, pert breasts pushing up against his chest, he felt his cock start to harden.
Milly felt it too, and for a second she pulled away, frightened.
She’d pictured losing her virginity a thousand times. In her fantasies it was always Bobby’s face above hers, bursting with a longing and desire as passionate and all-consuming as her own. She’d imagined the tenderness with which he would make love to her, wary at first, then more assured as he felt her need, pulling him body and soul ever deeper inside her. . . .
But these were childish dreams. Hazy images, hijacked from romantic novels and the cheesy daytime soaps she’d watched as a child.
Before her now was the adult reality: Todd, a grown man, his dick pressing like iron against her thigh, his breath heavy with a lust that was anything but tender.
Dim memories of a poem—or was it a prayer she’d learned at school?—floated back to her. Something about “putting away childish things.”
Tonight she’d told Bobby that she wasn’t a child. Now was the time to prove it.
Reaching down, she tentatively began stroking the outline of his erection through his cotton pants. He groaned, then leaned forward, kissing her greedily on the mouth as his hands groped for the zipper at her neck. Finding it, he undid her dress so fast, she barely had time to blink. Underneath she wore no bra, just a simple pair of white cotton panties with cute yellow daisies all over them.
“Sorry.” She blushed. “Not very sexy, are they?”
“Au contraire,” said Todd, slipping his hot hand under the fabric and running his fingers through the silky pubic hair beneath. “I love the little girl look.”
He hadn’t planned to seduce her tonight. He’d imagined it would take weeks to win her trust, maybe longer. He had Bobby to thank for propelling her into his arms and, he fervently hoped, onto his dick so soon.
Milly heard herself gasp and felt a rush of pleasure engulf her as he began gently rubbing her clitoris with his left hand, simultaneously easing himself out of his pants with his right. Glancing down, she caught the briefest of glimpses of his dick, so big and hot and alive it looked like a separate creature, rather than a part of his body.
“Don’t worry.” Todd grinned, seeing her eyes widen. “I won’t hurt you.”
This turned out to be a lie. With one sharp, violent thrust he pushed himself inside her, making her cry out with pain. It felt like someone trying to drive an express train into a hose.
“Shhhh, shhhh, it’s okay,” he murmured into her hair as she bit down hard on his shoulder.
“You said it wouldn’t hurt!” Her face was so indignant, he couldn’t help but laugh. Relieved that the worst was over, Milly soon found she was laughing too.
“It won’t anymore,” he said. “I promise. See?”
Slowly he began to move, rocking back and forth inside her, and she closed her eyes, losing herself in all the new, delicious sensations consuming her from the inside out. After a few minutes, she could feel her climax building. Instinctively, she tightened her grip around the back of his neck. Her legs began flailing wildly, seemingly beyond her control. It was like drowning, except . . . wonderful. She wanted to drown him with her.
With one deep, full-throated groan he pulled out of her, shooting hot, white liquid over her stomach as he did so. Mesmerized, like she’d just seen a magic trick for the first time, Milly reached down and touched it while Todd got to his feet and started pulling his pants back up.
“Tomorrow,” he announced firmly, “you’re going on the pill. And I don’t want any arguments. I almost didn’t make that.”
Milly wasn’t about to argue. She merely nodded vaguely.
Tomorrow.
What did she care about tomorrow?
All she could think about was today. The day she became a woman. The day that everything changed.
Tomorrow could take care of itself.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Easy now. Easy.”
Milly stroked Demon’s neck gently as they waited at the starting gate, and wished he would stop shivering. He wasn’t well, poor baby.
It was July, and they were at Santa Rosa, one of the premier quarter horse tracks in California, about to take part in a trial for next month’s big stakes race. Sean, never her biggest fan at the best of times, had torn a strip off her this morning for going ahead with it. “I’m telling you, that horse isn’t right,” he insisted angrily as, with the help of two grooms, she’d loaded Demon into the trailer. “He should be resting.”
Privately, Milly knew he was right. Though Sean was always having a pop at her for something or other (he’d somehow gotten it into his head that she’d betrayed Bobby by riding for Jimmy—a nice line in hypocrisy, given that he himself was the man’s head vet!—and by “shacking up,” as he put it, with Todd), this time he had every right to be angry. For almost two weeks Demon had been struggling with his breathing in the punishing summer heat. Only yesterday he’d started spontaneously bleeding at the nose after she took him out for a breezing—a long ride through the open Palos Verdes countryside—and she had to bring him back to the stables early to cool down and rest.
But having run a whole battery of tests last night and come up with nothing, Jimmy was adamant he was race fit and should go to Santa Rosa as planned. There was really very little that Milly, as the jockey, could do about it.
“He’s fine,” she told Sean defensively. “The tests were clear.” But though she wouldn’t let him know it, she was worried. After Easy’s death, she’d vowed never to get close to a horse again. But over the past two months, the horse Jimmy had bought from Todd specifically for Milly’s training had won her over completely with his dopey eyes, incurable competitiveness, and the cute barrel-chested waddle that made him look more like a cart horse than a racehorse. She loved him madly and would rather die than see him hurt.
Sometimes it was hard to believe she’d been riding for Jimmy for only ten weeks. It felt more like ten years, so completely had her life changed.
Her learning curve at Palos Verdes had been not so much a curve as a perpendicular cliff face. Gill Sanders, Jimmy’s quarter horse trainer, turned out to be a tougher taskmistress even than Bobby, which was quite an accolade. After one intensive week of grueling workouts in the indoor school, she’d started Milly and Demon on practice three-hundred-yard sprints. Soon she had them entering trials at all the big-name California tracks—Ferndale, Alameda, Fairplex Park, Los Alamitos—for serious stakes races like the Gold Rush Derby and the Miss Princess Handicap. As the weeks rolled by and they got to know each other better, their form improved consistently, with Milly winning trial after trial, often with increasingly impressive margins over much more experienced riders.
It was all a very long way from the Ballard Rodeo. Thanks to Gill, she gained more race experience in her first five weeks at Palos Verdes than she had at Highwood in six whole months. She and Demon became inseparable.
But there was a downside.
Not everyone involved in quarter horse racing, it appeared, was as laid-back and gentlemanly about the sport as the cowboys from Santa Ynez. The camaraderie Milly had been so struck by at Ballard simply didn’t exist in LA, or anywhere else where jockeys, trainers, and owners were competing against one another for big bucks. Sexism was also rife in the sport.
“We haven’t had a decent female jockey in quarter horse riding since Tami Purcell retired in 2000,” Jimmy reminded her at one of the trials, after a competing rider had elbowed her dangerously hard in the ribs, and the offense had gone unpunished. “There’s still a lot of resistance to the idea. But you have to try to look beyond all that.”
Milly nodded earnestly, rubbing her bruised side.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Jimmy went on. “Tami was a great rider: fifty-five stakes wins, including the All American, and you can’t argue with that. But she didn’t have what you have: the looks, the youth,
the accent, the image. She was never branded correctly.”
“Correct branding,” Milly was beginning to learn, meant a round of PR commitments every bit as grueling and time-consuming as her training and racing schedules. But despite a chronic lack of free time and being in an almost permanent state of exhaustion, deep down she felt happier than at any time since her father’s death. After all those months yearning hopelessly after Bobby, coming to LA was like a rebirth. Even more important, she felt she was at long last making progress in her career—progress toward getting Rachel out of Newells before she destroyed the stud and her father’s legacy completely.
Stroking Demon gently between the ears, she tightened her reins and readjusted her position in the saddle as they came under starters orders. Thankfully, it was a slightly cooler day today, and his earlier shivers seemed to be dying down.
In any case, there was nothing she could do now but focus on the race ahead. Luckily, Demon seemed to feel the same way. The instant the gates came up he rocketed forward, looking for all the world like a horse in peak condition. Within a few short seconds, they’d pulled to the front of the pack.
“Good lad,” Milly yelled encouragingly into the wind. “Just a little longer, Deems, and it’ll all be over. You can do it.”
The crowd wasn’t huge, a couple of hundred at best, but it was enough to bring out the natural showman in Demon. Under the weather or not, he was more competitive than any other horse Milly had ever ridden, Thoroughbred or quarter, and reveled quite unashamedly in the attention and applause. The moment they crossed the finish line—first place, again, for the second time that week—he tossed back his head and started showing off, kicking excitedly with his hind quarters in what was becoming his trademark victory dance, to the delight of the spectators.
Looking up, Milly saw Gill dashing over toward them. She looked uncharacteristically upbeat in a bright-yellow-plaid golf sweater and striped pants. Normally she eschewed any color that didn’t fall comfortably between the ranges of charcoal and swamp, so she was obviously in celebratory mood.
“That was fine,” she said, panting as she pulled up alongside them. “Good job.”
“Really?” Milly grinned. A “fine” from Gill roughly translated to a “fucking fantastic” from anybody else. “Good job” was almost unheard-of.
“Definitely. You made very good time,” she said, patting Demon on the neck. “I can’t see how you won’t get through with that.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Milly nervously. “There are still two trials to go though.” Dismounting, she looked around, scanning the sea of congratulatory faces swarming around them. “Is Todd here, d’you know?” she asked as casually as she could manage.
“No idea,” said Gill, who was already totally focused on Demon, covering him with a blanket and beckoning one of Jimmy’s junior vets to come check on his temperature. “Haven’t seen him.”
Milly bit her lip and fought back a ridiculous urge to cry. Goddamn it. He promised he’d be here. Now she’d have to ask Amy for a lift home—again.
Since the night she lost her virginity to him back in April, Todd had become the center of Milly’s world. The change was gradual at first and began in practical ways. Living in his house meant she had to fit in with his timetable and habits from the start. As a nondriver in LA, she was even more beholden to him than she might otherwise have been—or at least to Miguel, his relentlessly chipper Mexican driver, who took her back and forth to Palos Verdes every day for training.
Milly soon discovered that Bel Air, though glamorous, was incredibly isolated. There were no shops, no coffeehouses, no neighborhood at all. Everybody hid behind their big electric gates, peering at one another with binoculars and trying to figure out how much everybody else’s real estate was worth. It was the kind of area where you could live on a street for thirty years and never meet your next-door neighbor, as Todd had told her proudly, without a hint of irony.
Even if there had been anywhere to go, the streets were so wholly designed around the car that there weren’t even sidewalks, so she’d still have been trapped. At least at Highwood she’d been able to walk or ride into Solvang and get a newspaper and a coffee when the mood took her. Now she needed Todd’s help just to leave the property.
The whole thing was such a rigmarole, she ended up spending more and more time at home. Cut off from her family and friends in England, and now estranged from Bobby too, there was a huge hole in her life, and no one but Todd to fill it. It wasn’t long before the relationship had swallowed her whole.
With Bobby, it was like everything had happened in slow motion. Or, rather, nothing had happened but over a very long time, allowing her frustration to build to a boiling point. Being with Todd was like taking the lid off a pressure cooker. It was not so much a release as an explosion.
She’d never imagined herself being with an older man before. But now that she was, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Under Todd’s practiced tutelage, she took to sex like a duck to water, basking in the confidence that his desire gave her. She was no longer little Milly, Cecil Lockwood Groves’s horse-mad kid, or Bobby Cameron’s charity case. She was a strong, sexual woman, with a rich, handsome older lover. Instead of any of the tall, sophisticated LA models he could have had, Todd had picked her. For Milly, that was the biggest aphrodisiac of all.
Soon she not only accepted his control but delighted in it. Having lost her father and her home in a few short months, and seen her world turned completely upside down, it was lovely to be with someone who made all the decisions. It made her feel safe.
So when Todd bought her a fabulous new wardrobe but insisted on personally picking out every single item in it, she didn’t complain. Nor did she object when he devised a strict diet plan for her—Jimmy had decreed she must lose a few pounds to give her more competitive edge in the saddle—and then hired a full-time eating counselor to follow her around and make sure she stuck to it.
The downside, of course, was that she’d effectively handed him all the cards in the relationship from day one. And he didn’t hesitate to play them, making sure he kept her in a permanent state of insecurity as to his motives and affections. He was always flirting with other girls, and made no effort to hide it. Often he would return home in the small hours from some party or other, without even bothering to concoct an excuse. Milly would fly into a tearful rage—but he could always placate her by taking her to bed.
Todd had been delighted to discover that Milly’s latent sexuality, once unleashed, was a far stronger, more animal thing than he’d expected. Her lack of sexual inhibition was almost total, an openness that also extended to her emotions. Playing hard to get was evidently not in Milly’s repertoire.
“Hey.” Amy, car keys in hand, floated over, dressed in a huge, shapeless pink shirt and matching pants. She looked like a cross between the Pillsbury dough girl and a giant raspberry, but Milly couldn’t have been more pleased to see her. “What’s wrong? Oh, don’t tell me.” She frowned. “He didn’t show up, did he?”
Milly shook her head and tried not to look as miserable as she felt. “He probably had a crisis at work.”
“Yeah,” said Amy sarcastically. “Sure.”
The two girls had become firm friends ever since Milly started riding for Jimmy. Milly was a valuable ally for Amy, sticking up for her whenever Candy’s bullying got too much. In return, Amy provided Milly with unconditional adoration and a permanent shoulder to cry on, patiently listening for hours while she ranted on about Rachel Delaney, getting Newells back, her awful brother and mother back in England, and her rift with Bobby Cameron.
The only bone of contention between the two of them was Todd. Amy couldn’t stand him and couldn’t understand how someone as gorgeous and talented as Milly could allow herself to be controlled by such a womanizing jerk.
“I can give you a lift home if you like,” she said, deciding to drop the subject of Todd’s no-show. Milly looked miserable enough without her ru
bbing it in.
“To Bel Air?” said Milly. “But it’s miles out of your way.”
Amy shrugged. “I’m hardly in a rush to get home. Candy’s got two of her girlfriends over tonight. The longer I can spare myself the bitches of Eastwick, the better.”
Milly giggled. No matter how annoying Todd was being, Amy never failed to make her see the funny side of things.
She smiled naughtily. “I was so pissed at her this morning for dumping the boys on me again, I took the Porsche.” Candy’s pink Porsche—the Barbie-mobile as it was known to all the grooms and staff at Palos Verdes—was her pride and joy. She’d hit the roof when she found out Amy had swiped it. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna pass up a ride in that?”
“Give me two minutes to change and I’ll be right there,” said Milly, trying to push images of Todd in bed with some nameless bimbo out of her mind.
“Forget it. Just come like that,” said Amy. “I’ll be Barbie, and you can be Ken.”
Milly laughed, linking arms with her friend. “All right then,” she said. “After you.”
Six thousand miles away, Jasper wiped his clammy palms on his trouser leg for the second time in five minutes and wished his hands would stop sweating.
He was sitting alone at the virtually empty bar upstairs at the Electric in Notting Hill, waiting for Ali Dhaktoub to come back from the gents and wondering what on earth had possessed him to agree to this meeting in the first place.
It had all started innocently enough a few weeks ago. (Innocence was a relative concept, after all, and what Rachel didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Or, more importantly, him.) Amelia Kelton, the pretty daughter of a local trainer who he’d been screwing on and off for the past three weeks, had offered to introduce him to a friend of hers, a racehorse owner and the son of a billionaire Arab oil magnate. Ali, she thought, could be a potential employer for Jasper. And God knew those were thin enough on the ground at the moment.