Mistress-of-the-Game - By Tilly Bagshawe Sidney Sheldon Page 0,27
in trouble again?"
"I have no idea." Mrs. Grainger shut the bedroom door firmly. "If he is, it's nothing for you to worry about. Your brother's big and ugly enough to take care of himself."
Lexi looked furious. "Robbie isn't ugly. He's the handsomest brother in the entire universe in space. Everyone says so."
Mrs. Grainger sighed. She wished Lexi wouldn't take everything quite so literally. She also wished Mr. Templeton would learn to keep his voice down. He had no idea how sensitive his daughter was, or how bright. Lexi was like a tiny satellite receiver, picking up all the tension in the house and translating it into a view of the world that was becoming increasingly skewed.
Today she was chopping the heads off her dollies.
But what about tomorrow?
Pervert!...Preying on innocent children...Sickos like him should be castrated.
Peter Templeton tried to focus on his breathing. He must keep calm. He must not lose his temper with the dreadful woman standing in his drawing room, screaming obscenities at him like a crack whore.
Ludo and I could go to the police, you know.
The woman might sound like a crack whore. In fact, her name was Angelica Dellal, wife of prominent JPMorgan banker Ludo Dellal and mother of sixteen-year-old Dominic Dellal: football star, head boy at Andover and (if Peter had interpreted her potty-mouthed ranting correctly) his son Robert's homosexual lover.
Homo! Freak!
The abuse washed in and out of Peter's consciousness like a toxic tide of effluence spewing from a sewer.
In her early forties, with handsome, aristocratic features and the sort of immaculately blow-dried, highlighted hair that immediately stamped her a rich man's wife, Angelica Dellal must once have been a great beauty. But any sex appeal she might once have possessed had long since been groomed to death, buffed and manicured and Botoxed into oblivion. At this moment she looked positively ugly, mouth stretched wide, face contorted with rage, diamond-encrusted hands flailing wildly.
"So...?"
With a jolt, Peter realized that she had finally exhausted herself.
"I'm sorry. What was the question?"
Angelica Dellal looked as if she might spontaneously combust with indignation.
"The question is what are you going to do to ensure your disgusting, perverted son stays the hell away from my boy?"
"I'll talk to Robert."
"Talk? Is that it? My husband caught them in the back of a car together, okay? Your kid was sucking my kid's dick. Are you hearing this? Am I getting through?"
She jabbed a French-polished talon at Peter. He instinctively stepped back, clutching the couch for support. Had Robbie really? He shuddered. It didn't bear thinking about.
"Perhaps your husband was mistaken."
His voice was a whisper. Peter knew Ludo Dellal had not been mistaken. And yet he couldn't admit it, not even to himself.
Despite years of psychiatric training and decades of practice, Peter Templeton could not accept that his son was gay. How many closet homosexuals had he counseled over the years? Scores, probably. With those poor desperate men, those tortured strangers, compassion had come easily. But with his own son, it was a different matter. He wanted, desperately, to believe that it was this horrible woman's son who had led Robert astray, and not the other way around. That it was his, Peter's, child who was going through a phase. His child who would grow out of it, his child who would go on to be a football star at Harvard and have a wife and kids, and look back at these teenage indiscretions as nothing more than a blip. As sexual teething pains.
He clung to hope like a bare-knuckle climber clutching at a rock face. Robbie wasn't remotely effeminate. Girls hung around him like fleas on a rat, pestering him for dates. Perhaps he was just shy? A late bloomer? It was possible.
Your kid was sucking my kid's dick.
Mrs. Dellal was leaving, sweeping up her fur coat and Chanel quilted purse like Cruella de Vil.
"I mean it. If I see your homo son within ten miles of our house, or Dom's school, I will call the police. And you better pray the cops find your boy before my husband does."
The front door slammed shut.
Silence.
"Daddy?"
Lexi stood in the doorway wearing a white muslin dress with butterflies embroidered on the sleeves and a blue bow in her buttermilk hair.
Peter thought: Look how innocent she is.
"What's a pervert?"
To his great embarrassment, Peter felt himself blushing. "Gee, honey, it's, erm...it's a bad word."