Under His Influence

“Sleeping in her room. She’s exhausted. The stress of thinking she had lost me has told on her. I need to check on her.”

“Right. You do that. I’ll fix us some supper. You must be hung

ry.”

“I don’t really get hungry,” John noted. “But I certainly didn’t eat any of the muck that passed for food in that hospital. So yes. Supper is good. We’ll sketch out a plan of attack for tomorrow’s meeting with Merchant. Then I need to work on the machine. I’m so close, Miranda. So very close. I just need a couple of things…a couple of Merchant’s millions and I’m there.”

“Good. Right. I’ll see what I can find in the kitchen.”

The night was long and the night was hot.

Liam lay on his scratchy brown sofa inside his airless sleeping bag, staring up at the ceiling, listening to indie guitar bands on his headphones. The trouble with these indie guitar bands was that every second song was about a special girl, a frustrated love, a yearning. In the end, he tore them off and tried to read a lad mag instead. “How to Get Yourself Into Her Head (And Get Her Into Your Bed).” Right. He threw it aside. Was there any self-help guide in the world for the man who wanted another man’s pregnant, lovelorn wife? Perhaps he should try and write his own.

Anna, wide awake in Liam’s rumpled sheets, held her hands over her still-flat stomach, trying to think of a future for herself and her child. What would they do? Where would they live? How would they live? John had the money, but who would give them the love? Where did that love go, that huge, sincere, overwhelming love John had poured all over her? How could it just disappear? It made no sense. And then she was going over it again, and over and over until the questions whirled and merged and her head ached.

Mimi, cocooned in silks in the eighth guest room, breathed in scented air and heat. Her back arched up off the sweat-pooled sheets, and she rubbed compulsively at her clit for the third time that night. When would this ache of lust just stop? When would her need for him dissolve? What would it take?

She climaxed again, hips trembling, patches of fabric clinging to her.

“John,” she panted, “Take me, John.”

John, in the basement, flicked a switch, watched a light flash, smiled.

“Whenever you’re ready, Mimi,” he murmured, then he got to work on the circuitry.

“Why you want her so bad?” Luana, yawning in the corner in a bundle of blankets, watched her son at work. “She only Earth girl. Not B’delia princess.”

“The B’delia princesses are all dead, Mother. You saw them die. We want strong blood and strong flesh. She has those.”

“What we are come to,” lamented the woman, laying her head down to sleep. “We are the last ones. Everything is in your hands, son. Everything.”

Mimi had been to the Fleet Street Ball once before, as the guest of an exalted political correspondent. Lowly creatures from the Features Desk weren’t usually invited to the glitzy charity extravaganza, so she had cultivated a relationship with the hoary old political warhorse with the specific agenda of angling herself an invitation.

She had enjoyed the ball, and the man hadn’t been a bad shag either, so it was win-win. All the rumours about spectacular alcohol consumption and concomitantly scandalous behaviour had been quite true. She was still dining out on the anecdotes a year later.

This year, pure hedonism was not her aim. This year, she had to work.

Poured into a strapless spangly gown copied from one J-Lo had worn earlier in the year, she tried not to be too pink-cheeked and girlishly excited by the effect her curves had on John when she climbed into the waiting limousine.

“Who’s this movie star?” he purred.

“Oh, you know all the lines. Do they do corny chat-ups on your planet too, then?”

“We are taught to charm. Charm is an underrated weapon.”

“That’s what it’s for, in your eyes? A weapon?”

John, sleek and groomed in his bespoke Savile Row suit, simply stretched his lips in a feline smile and flicked one of Mimi’s diamond drop earrings.

“It works.”

“Not on me it doesn’t.”

“Oh, of course not.” His glib smile lingered about his lips just long enough for Mimi to get hot under her diamond choker. “Anyway, it isn’t you it has to work on. It’s Merchant. I need you to flirt with him, Miranda. I might even offer you to him as a sweetener.”

“You will not!” yelped Mimi, jerking herself back from John’s steadily advancing clutches.

“Joke,” he said. But he wasn’t smiling.