proper, comfortable place for us to relax, nice clothes, good food, some certainty that we have a future together.’
‘Which I have told you we will have!’ Tepe, his voice still a whisper, snapped. ‘I’m working on it. I think about it every day. Eventually—’
‘Eventually, if you don’t do something soon, I may leave you to the timid caresses of your frigid wife and—’
‘Go and attempt to seduce Mehmet Süleyman again?’ He looked at her with both desire and disgust. Somehow the lingering obsession she still retained for her ex-lover Süleyman excited him. It always had. From the start he’d envied Süleyman, but the thought that he now had what the far more cultured and aristocratic officer no longer had made him feel superior. Ayşe Farsakoǧlu was both a beautiful woman and an uninhibited lover – Süleyman had to miss her. After all, what did he have now? A sharp-tongued old hag of a wife, monstrously fat in her pregnancy. Orhan smiled. Ayşe, however, did not.
‘The only time I think about Mehmet Süleyman,’ she said icily, ‘is when I consider all the smart places he could have taken me. Places you and I must go to, unless of course you want Aysel to find out.’
With the speed of a viper, he snatched her wrist across the table. ‘Don’t even think about blackmailing me!’
‘I’m not blackmailing you, I’m promising you I will do this!’ she replied, her face set hard and determined against the pain inflicted by his hands. ‘I want better than this, Orhan. I’m nearly thirty. I want us to have things. I want you! I want to be your wife. I’ll do anything I have to to make that happen!’
For a moment they sat like that, their hands joined as if arm-wrestling across the table. And although afraid of what he knew she could do and say, Orhan Tepe was also excited by how Ayşe was at this moment. When she was like this, determined and manipulative, she was also very sexy. In his mind he replayed old scenes of her kneeling on the floor in front of him, taking him into her mouth as he pushed and raked at her head with his fingernails. He felt his penis stiffen.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said thickly.
She pulled her wrist out of his slackening grasp and stood up.
Orhan took her to the apartment his brother used on the rare occasions he visited from Ankara. There he first re-enacted the scene he had imagined earlier and then, later, he laid her down on his brother’s bed and entered her hard in the way his wife, Aysel, hated. Almost as soon as he had come inside her, he wanted her again. He couldn’t get enough. Only afterwards did he give thought to how he was going to continue this. Yes, he did want to give her all the things, the good times, that she wanted. If he did that he knew she would become even more accommodating, more open to sexual experimentation. But he couldn’t do that right now and it made him angry. A woman like Ayşe needed more than just vague promises to keep her interested and out of the way of his wife. If only he didn’t have to spend all his money on his family. The thought of it threw a temporary cloud across his features – until, that is, she mounted him again, making all thought disappear. Orhan Tepe gladly embraced the oblivion.
They hadn’t planned a stopover in Amsterdam, but when Hikmet heard that the connection to İstanbul was delayed by at least three hours, he decided that both he and Kaycee needed a break. And since money was no object, he first changed their flights and then booked them into the exclusive floating Boatel. There they made love, drank several bottles of champagne and watched the sun set over the city. It was idyllic and they were both very content until Kaycee, who was completely relaxed, fell asleep, leaving her husband alone to frown at and then turn away from his reflection in the mirror on the wall. That his wife didn’t have a clue why they were really going back to the place of his birth didn’t please him. With
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