The marriage had been Eve’s idea. Everything was always Eve’s idea.
She was berating Max over one of their weekly lunches. “You need an heir. Someone to take over the business and undo all of your mistakes. Someone who can make Kruger-Brent great again.”
“I’m trying, Mother,” Max said weakly.
“You’re failing. Get married.”
Max knew he was a poor chairman. He knew that Kruger-Brent’s once bright light was fading, spluttering out slowly like a dying star. It didn’t help having his mother second-guessing his every decision, bullying him into taking one direction then blaming him when the hoped-for profits failed to materialize.
It was Eve who had insisted that they sell their holdings in the Ukraine: “If there was oil in those fields, they’d have found it by now. Alternative energy, that’s the future. Are you completely stupid?”
Max dutifully sold Kruger-Brent’s five thousand acres to Exxon, investing the money from the sale in a wind farm in Israel. Six months later, Exxon struck oil. A year after that, the wind farm filed for bankruptcy. Eve blamed Max.
“You never drilled that land properly. What do you expect if you do a half-assed job? This is business Max, not some childish game. God help me, you’re your father’s son.”
Eve brought up Keith’s name more and more often these days. It was almost as if she’d transferred the hatred and rage she once felt for her husband onto her son. Max had destroyed Keith Webster, but the monster Keith had created lived on in Eve. Max had done everything his mother wanted. Killed Keith. Betrayed Lexi. Won back Kruger-Brent. But every trophy he brought her was like gasoline poured on the flames of Eve’s hatred. He could feed the fire. But he could never put it out.
Meanwhile, Lexi’s star continued its inexorable rise. No one remembered the sex scandal that had driven her out of Kruger-Brent. When people saw Lexi Templeton today, they thought of glamour, of resilience, of success. No one at Kruger-Brent said it to Max’s face. But the whispers behind his back were deafening:
We made a mistake. We should never have gotten rid of her. Lexi’s the winner in the family, not Max. We backed the wrong horse.
By the time he met Annabel, Max was drinking heavily. He was thirty-five but looked ten years older. His looks were fading. Like everything else about me. Annabel Savary was fifteen years Max’s junior, beautiful and everything he was not: sensible, happy, healthy and uncomplicated. The product of a blissfully happy marriage-her father was an English lord, her mother an American socialite-Annabel was in New York doing an internship at Christie’s when Max met her at an auction. He was outbid on the Constable he was after. But he left the auction room that day with a far more valuable prize.
Annabel Savary loved Max Webster in the same way that she had once loved her pony, Trigger. Everybody told Annabel that Trigger was too old and bad-tempered to be broken in. But the nine-year-old refused to give up. Trigger was a beautiful pony, intelligent, strong, fast as a bullet. With patience, and after suffering numerous bites, kicks and other signs of Trigger’s displeasure, Annabel transformed him into a sweet-natured, loving animal. By the time he died, when Annabel was eighteen, Trigger had won a boatload of “first” rosettes and was famed across Derbyshire for his devotion to his young mistress.
Annabel was as certain that Max could change as Max was certain that he could not. He knew he should let her go. She has no idea how fucked up I am. But Eve wouldn’t hear of it. She thoroughly approved of Annabel, believing her to be too young and naive to pose any threat to her influence.
“Marry her quickly, before she changes her mind. Get her pregnant.”
Max did as he was told. The wedding was a blur. When he looked at the photographs later, he could barely remember having been there. All he could think about on the way to the church was whether Lexi would show up-she didn’t-and whether his mother’s pleasure with him would last this time.
Max knew how badly Eve wanted a grandchild. For different reasons, Annabel was also eager to give him a son. Max found the performance pressure unbearable. With Lexi, he’d allowed his sexuality free rein. Somehow, in his mind, Lexi and Eve had merged into one being, the mother-lover, the fulfillment of all his deepest, darkest fantasies. Lexi had allowed him to pour his rage and frustration into her body. She knew the wildness in him, the twisted savage inside, and she wanted it. Sodomy, violence, bondage, nothing had been forbidden. With Lexi, Max had gorged his inner beast. But Annabel must never know that monster. She was pure and lovely. Max must not defile her, the one piece of goodness in his life.
Only Annabel’s stubborn, superhuman patience saved the marriage. After six miserable, sexless months, she took matters into her own hands, literally. Ignoring Max’s protests, she reached over in bed one night and began stroking his limp penis. Nothing happened.
“I’m your wife, Max. I’m a woman. Put it inside me.”
“Stop it!” Max loathed hearing her talk this way.
“No, I won’t stop it. Enough is enough.”
“Christ, Annabel. I can’t get it up on command, okay?”
She took him in her mouth. In spite of himself, Max started to get hard. Images, hateful, degrading images of his mother and Lexi, poured into his mind like sewage. “Please stop.” But Annabel didn’t stop. Straddling him, she inserted his penis between her legs, bucking and squeezing until at last, with a sob, Max came. Afterward he cried in her arms for hours.
That was the night Annabel realized he was sick. It was also the night she conceived their twin sons.