Under His Influence

The waistcoat was wide open now, and Mimi was working on the shirt, relishing the surrender of the crisp cotton as it fell away with each freed button. She had to make sure she paid attention to what she was doing—full attention. She did not need to be thinking of anything other than Liam’s beautiful, slightly stunned face and his taut young body. Intrusive thoughts were batted away with each revelation of firm flesh, smooth and almost hairless, down to the navel that lay in its shallow belly basin, showing off its cheerful downward path of dark fuzz.

“All that working out.” Mimi’s voice was low and appreciative. “It pays dividends. I’d kill for a stomach like that.” She placed a palm against its flatness, pressing down to feel the spring of his abdominal muscles.

“I like you just the way you are,” Liam said with breathless gallantry, only to be soundly hushed with a daggers look. Mimi bent down and kissed a trail from navel to the waistband of Liam’s trousers. Her chin came swiftly into contact with the stretched fabric and its promising lump beneath and she held on to a pleasurable breath, enjoying a moment of anticipation. The best bit was coming next; her favourite bit.

She took the zip between her teeth and began to navigate it, slowly and carefully, over the rumpled terrain thrown into disarray by Liam’s erection.

“Oh Christ,” she thought she heard him say, though the words weren’t particularly coherent. “Oh.”

It was hard work and a couple of times the zip seemed to catch or stick, but she persevered—this had been a favourite party trick of hers at college—and eventually managed to unleash Liam’s cotton-covered cock into the room, watching it bounce up like a cheerful jack-in-the-box while she made efficient work of removing his trousers completely.

“You’ve done that before,” he accused faintly, lifting his bottom in docile complicity when she came back for his boxers.

“And I’ll do it again,” she murmured, gazing raptly at Liam’s naked hips and thighs and, best of all, his proud hard cock, just the right size for her big wet mouth.

“Anytime,” he gasped, sounding shocked by her sudden swoop down, the urgent cupping and caressing of his balls and the slow, sweet descent of her cushiony lips around the hooded tip of his cock.

“Oh! Mimi!” he groaned, and Mimi thought irrelevantly of the Little Red Riding Hood story. What a big mouth you’ve got. All the better to suck you with.

She kept up a sliding suction, gripping the base of his shaft with one greedy hand, letting him scrabble at her dress, trying to get the top half of the shift down over her breasts so he could fumble and squeeze to his heart’s content.

He tasted clean and fleshy and he smelled of the expensive suit he had been wearing. Mimi breathed him in, wanting every sense to be consumed with Liam, to the extent that nothing else existed. She enjoyed his big, groping hands under her dress, letting them spur her on to deeper efforts with her mouth. When he came, he twisted underneath her, almost throwing her to the side before she had had a chance to swallow every drop. She kept her eyes on his face, on the rolled-back eyeballs and the puffing cheeks, the open mouth and the mussed hair. For that moment, he was hers entirely. She had possessed him for that fraction of a minute with a completeness that was rarely achieved. Satisfied, she lay down next to him, stroking his brow.

“That was incredible,” he panted. “I want to make you come now. Your turn.”

“It’s okay. I don’t want to. Just wanted you, in a bad way.”

“I wouldn’t call it bad.” Liam’s face was puzzled. Mimi supposed he had never had his cock sucked without some kind of reciprocal arrangement in place before. Perhaps he thought she was one of those girls who simply loved cock—the kind only spotted in urban legends and the pages of Zoo magazine?

“Maybe later, stud.” She patted his cheek and, standing up, pulled down her shift before returning to her post at the window. The net curtains of the bridal suite were blowing out of a half-open sash, gauzy and bright in the dying sunlight. Mimi thought she caught a distant keening, a sound that could be pain or the crisis of pleasure. She swallowed down an impulse to vomit and turned back to Liam, her face a mask of enthusiasm. “I could murder another of those beers, actually. You?”

“Give me a second,” he said into a pillow. He was half-asleep already, Mimi realised. He was just a man, like any other. Unlike Mr. Stone across the way.

Chapter Seven

John kept late hours and Anna had never been a night owl, so they fell swiftly into a routine after they returned from their Parisian honeymoon.

Anna, having given up her job at the Recorder, would wave John off to the City every morning, and then more often than not spend the day mooching around the fashionable shops and coffee bars of North London in an effort to get away from Luana, John’s slightly sinister housekeeper, who appeared to speak no word of English. Anna had initially presumed that she would be in charge of running the household—a quaint, old-fashioned term that gave her vague notions of lying on a chaise longue in a wrap dispensing languid words of command about the groceries and the cleaning. But it was clear after her first day of domestic married life that Luana held the household reins and she was only going to relinquish them over her dead body. She tore through the cavernous house like an efficient, bleach-scented whirlwind, pausing only to stare with haughty incomprehension whenever Anna attempted to offer a friendly word.

So Anna, with unlimited means at her disposal, would shop, then lunch, then perhaps take in a movie or an afternoon walk on the Heath, arriving home ten minutes after Luana disappeared from view at four.

She insisted on preparing the evening meal. It was the one function that she clung to as proof that she was making a contribution to the home, and her grip on this duty was forlornly tenuous, especially given that she was an inexperienced cook. She pored over Nigella or Jamie or Gordon’s latest recipes, following them to the letter, picking up burns and cuts aplenty in the process.

John usually arrived home to find her elbow-deep in potato peelings or wrestling with the skin of a red pepper. No matter how charred they were, the skin just wouldn’t seem to peel off the way the cookbooks said it would. The same went for blanched tomatoes. Anna would wear an expression of tortured betrayal, one hand gripping her hair. John would take her wrist, pull her into his ar

ms and suggest booking a table somewhere in Hampstead or Highgate. And then she would cry and tell him he’d made a mistake marrying her, and she was sorry she was so useless and she wished she could be better at things, and he would hush her with kisses and take her to bed.

They would stay there for an hour or so, then see if the meal was salvageable and, if not, go out or order takeaway. Then they would go straight back to bed until Anna was exhausted, at which point she would sleep and John would get back up and go downstairs to his basement.

Anna sometimes woke at two, three, four in the morning to find herself marooned and alone in the vast four-post bed. Even with the windows open against the humid summer nights, this was a strangely insulated part of London, into which the endlessly revving engine of the sleepless City never intruded. Anna would feel an immediate constriction of fear at the silence every time, before persuading herself that everything was fine and John was working downstairs again, and it was just as well he seemed able to function on four hours sleep a night.

But how does he do it? It would kill me, she would think, yawning and snuggling back down, feeling the ever-present dull throb in her sex from his constant attentions, finding it comforting, letting it reassure her back to sleep.

“John,” she said, staring with dismay at her breakfast fried eggs, one blazing morning three weeks after the honeymoon, “I’m a little bit concerned.”

“Sweetheart.” John pulled his chair closer, took her chin with a finger, looked deeply and sadly into her eyes. “What could you have to be concerned about? You’re happy, aren’t you?”

“Oh, of course, yes, I’m so happy with you, you must never think I’m not. But…” Anna paused delicately. She had no idea how she was going to phrase this. The rich steam of the coffee, unsettling her stomach beyond tolerance, forced the words out on her behalf. “I can’t bear the smell of coffee at the moment.”