Read Online Old Sins by Penny Vincenzi - Free Book Online Page B

adulterer, seducing quite ruthlessly wherever he chose with a careless skill, and he greatly preferred the company and attentions of married women, not only because of their greater experience in bed but because of the excitement and danger of getting them there. There was more than one marriage in London in the savage winter and glorious spring of 1948 ripped apart as a wife found herself propelled by a force she was quite unable to resist into first the arms and then the bed of Julian Morell.
    There was nothing original about Julian’s approach; but he was simply and pleasurably aware of the fact that women became suddenly and uncomfortably sexually tautened by themost mundane conversation with him, and that by the end of a dinner party at his side or even an encounter at a cocktail party, or a theatre interval, would feel an extraordinarily strong urge to take their husbands home to bed and screw them relentlessly. (Indeed, husbands in the early stages of their wives’ affairs with Julian Morell had rather more reason to be grateful to him than they would ever know.) This made his progression into lunch and from there into long afternoons in bed extraordinarily easy. He knew exactly how to distract and discomfort women, how to throw them into a passion of emotional desire; long before he turned his attention to their physical needs, he would talk to them, and more than talk, listen, laugh at their jokes, look seriously on their concerns, encourage their thinking. He would send flowers with funny, quirky messages, make outrageous phone calls pretending to be someone else should their husbands answer the phone, hand-deliver silly notes, and give small thoughtful presents: a record of some song or piece of music they had heard together, a tiny antique pill box with a love letter folded up tightly inside it, a book of poetry with some particularly poignant piece carefully marked – the kind of things, in fact, that most women eating out their hearts in the sweet agony of an illicit love affair yearn for and which most men entirely fail to give them or even consider.
    He was a brilliant lover in precisely the same way: it was not just his sexual skills, his capacity to arouse, to deepen, to sharpen sexual pleasure, to bring the most tearful, the most reticent women to shatteringly triumphant orgasm; it was his tenderness, his appreciation, his patience that earned him their gratitude, and their love.
    The gratitude and the acquiescence were one thing, the love quite another; in his early days Julian found himself in quite extraordinarily delicate situations as poised cool mistresses suddenly metamorphosed into feverish, would-be wives, ready to confess, to pack, to leave husband, children and home and follow him to whichever end of the earth he might choose to lead them. It took all Julian’s skills to handle these situations; gently, patiently, through long fearful afternoons in slowly darkening bedrooms (it was another factor in Julian’s success that he was at this point in his life partially unemployed) hewould persuade them that they would be losing infinitely more than they would gain, that he was making a sacrifice just as big as their own, and he would leave them feeling just sufficiently warmly towards him to prevent them speaking too harshly of him, and just humiliated enough to be unwilling to reveal the extent of their involvement to any of their friends.
    For his first six months or so in London this was the high wire he walked, permanently exhilarated by his success, his only safety net his own deviousness. After that, he grew not only more cautious but busier, involved in the birth of his business and the development of his talents in rather more conventional and fruitful directions. It was a perfect time for him; the boom he had prophesied had finally arrived, and there was a bullish attitude in the country. Investment was available for sound propositions, ideas were the top-selling commodity.
    Perhaps most