‘Breakfast … Oh, Max … I don’t … I can’t …’
She sounded more alert now, and Max could picture her sitting up in bed in her Belgravia house, her tawny hair down round her shoulders, her skin honey gold from her recent holiday in Mauritius. He had flown out to join her there for five days.
‘Some client conference,’ the solicitor who had originally instructed him had commented enviously when he had handed Max Justine’s fax.
‘When you’re playing for millions, the cost of flying your barrister out for an urgent conference is pretty small beer,’ Max told him carelessly.
Justine was the wife of a millionaire, soon-to-be billionaire corporate raider. The first thing she had done when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her ‘friends’ was to instruct her solicitor that she wanted him to hire Max as her barrister, the second was to arm herself with as much evidence as she could of her husband’s business affairs, including his complex and often adventurously artistic interpretation of the tax laws.
Max had decided appreciatively that she had enough on him to make it a piece of cake for them to get her the kind of divorce settlement that would make her virtually as comfortably wealthy as his ex as she had been as his wife, and to get him the kind of publicity that would ensure that he maintained his position as the country’s foremost divorce barrister.
‘Divorce isn’t really the kind of thing we like to specialize in here in chambers,’ the most senior member, a QC and one of the country’s foremost tax law specialists, had advised Max stiffly when he had originally joined them. ‘It’s not really quite us, if you know what I mean.’
Max had known exactly what he meant, but he had also been acutely aware of the fact that it was only his father-in-law’s name that had got him a place in the chambers at all. He also knew that the only reputation he had then to gain him the clients who would bring him the kind of high profile and even higher income he craved so desperately was one of being unwanted and rejected by his previous ‘set,’ where he had been allowed to work only as a tenant and on the cases that no one else wanted to deal with.
His new chambers attracted a clientele who wanted and expected only the best barristers whose names and reputations they already knew, and so Max had seen a niche for himself in the one field where the chambers didn’t already have a specialist—matrimonial law.
That had been several years ago, and now Max’s reputation had grown and his name on a case was likely to strike dread in a wealthy husband about to enter the divorce arena.
The extremely high fees Max charged for his services weren’t the only benefit he earned from his work. Max had quickly and cynically discovered that newly divorced and about-to-be-divorced women very often had an appetite for sex and the male attention that went with it, which ensured him a constant turnover of willing bed mates.
One of the main advantages of these relationships, from Max’s point of view, was that they were always relatively brief. While his female clients were going through their divorces, he provided a comforting male shoulder to lean on, someone with whom they could share their problems as well as their beds. But once everything had been finalized, he was always able to very quickly and firmly detach himself.
If any of his lovers showed a tendency to cling and become possessive, he suddenly became far too busy with ‘work’ to be able to take their calls—they soon got the message. A new client, a new lover—it was time for Max to move on.
The affair with Justine, because of the extremely complex nature of her husband’s financial affairs and the huge amount of money potentially involved, had lasted considerably longer than usual, and as yet Justine’s husband had not been served with any divorce papers.
‘I’ve got at least two friends who got damn all out of their ex’s,’ Justine had told Max, showing him her expensive dental work in a very sharp, foxy smile.
‘I have no intention of allowing that to happen to me. Here is a list of the assets I intend to make a claim on,’ she had told Max, handing him an impressively long typed schedule.
They had been lovers for more than two months, and Max had to admit that he was impressed. He doubted that Justine had a single ounce of emotional vulnerability in her entire make-up. She was one of the most sexually demanding women he had ever had, abandoning herself completely and totally to the sexual act and not allowing him to stop until she was completely and utterly satisfied. But once she was, she was immediately and instantly back in control; her mind, her brain, were as sharp and dangerous as an alligator’s teeth.
Her husband would be lucky to escape with even half of his fortune intact, Max had decided as he listened to her plans for using her knowledge of his tax affairs to blackmail him into settling and giving her what she wanted.
‘I don’t intend to file for divorce until after this new deal he’s working on has gone through,’ she had told Max candidly. ‘It’s worth almost five hundred million, and I want to make sure I get my share of it.’
‘Look. I … I can’t talk now,’ he heard her saying quickly to him now. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’ll come round to your place….’
She had rung off before Max could object, leaving him angrily aware of his sexual frustration and even more importantly, with a sharp sense of unease.
It was going on for two o’clock in the morning, but he felt too restless for sleep. Max’s instinct for survival was very acute and very finely tuned. It had had to be. As his grandfather’s favourite he had spent his growing years fighting off any potential claims on his position from his siblings and cousins, and as a young adult he had had to strive to maintain that position.
Now that he was married to Madeleine, his grandfather’s favour didn’t matter in quite the same way. Madeleine’s trust funds were worth considerably in excess of his grandfather’s assets, but it wasn’t just the desire for wealth that drove Max. He had another need that in its way was just as intense, and that need was to stand apart from his peers, to set himself above them, to be envied by them. Friendship, affection, love, none of these interested Max nor mattered to him.
Supremacy, that was what Max craved. Supremacy and the security that came with it. The supremacy of being the best divorce barrister, the best QC, the best head of chambers in the best set of chambers. In Max’s opinion, there were two ways to gain those goals. The first was through merit and skill, the second—sometimes the more subtle—was an underhanded method of gaining power, which made its acquisition all the sweeter. To emerge as top dog was important when others had openly derided one’s fitness for such a role.
It had amused him recently to bump into Roderick Hamilton, the barrister who had beaten him on a vacancy they had both applied for in his last set of chambers and who had none too subtly crowed his victory over him.
Max had invited Roderick to join him for a drink and over it had encouraged him to talk about himself. He had learned that Roderick had married somebody from the county set, the lower echelons of the upper classes of whose acquaintanceship he had once boasted to Max.
His wife, to judge from the photograph he had shown Max, was the plain horsy type, and no, they had no children as yet … but they were trying…. His dream, it turned out, was to buy himself a small country house.
‘But they’re so damned expensive, old chap, and Lucinda’s wretched horses cost the earth to keep.’
Max had smiled and casually mentioned his own two children. Maddy’s grandparents’ family seat was also dropped into the conversation along with references to its history and its decor; not too much, just enough to ensure that Roderick realized that he, Max, was living the life-style that the other man so desperately wanted, that he had fathered the children that Roderick so far had not.
And sweetest of all had been when he had given him a lift home in his new Bentley, to coolly refuse the invitation extended for him and Maddy to join Roderick and his wife ‘for supper one evening.’
‘’Fraid