Chapter 1
There are those who maintain that a blind man's aural and tactual senses are intensified by way of compensation for his loss of sight. It would have been a highly diverting and unusual test for such a man if he could have been present at this moment on a warm September evening in Room 4-A of Comstock Hall, an old-fashioned but still quite comfortable dormitory for unaffiliated freshmen and sophomore girls just two blocks off the campus of Marwell College. Because then he might be able to test the accuracy of that theory as to whether Eleanor Landers was taking off panties made of silk or of satin or possibly even of velvet.
She was five feet six inches in height, and her figure was breathtakingly voluptuous, as the full-length mirror on the front of her bathroom door assured her. Most of it was visible and completely unveiled as her slim creamy fingers took hold of the waistband of those snug fitting yellow panties preparatory to fucking them down over lush, rounded, resilient hips, because she had already removed a matching bra and stood in charcoal-brown nylons and high-heeled brown leather pumps. Under the cling of those molding panties, the outline of a narrow white satin-elastic garter belt could be seen, and its even narrower and tautly stretched tabs pressed very tightly along the outsides of ripely curved, firm thighs whose richly feminine contours a sculptor would have gratefully admired. The fine cleanly rounded shape of her calves was further enhanced by the gauzy embellishment of the nylon hose, whose caressing delineation also revealed the fact that her knees were suavely rounded and delightfully dimpled. In a sense, that is the final test of a woman's beauty, for too often the knees of even a Miss America suggest an angularity; Eleanor Landers' definitely did not.
She leaned forward a little to study herself in the mirror. It was still faithful to her almost exotic beauty, though it could not hide the selfish lines of the somewhat small, sensually ripe-lipped mouth nor the unbridled insolence of the delicately aquiline nose with its thin, sensuously flaring wings.
She frowned now, and her cat green eyes narrowed with exactly the suspicious look of a crafty feline; her lids were heavy and her lashes exaggeratedly thick and curly. That was artifice, as the TV commercials will tell you, and they made her look properly glamorous and sexy, which was precisely the image Eleanor Landers wished to create. Her coppery-red hair was, tonight, primly combed back from the top of her forehead and pinned into a tight oval bun at the back of her neck. It had a kind of unconvincing austerity to it, completely at variance with the breathtakingly sensual body and the creamy skin with its overtones of rosy flecks, so typical of a true redhead. A moment later, as she tugged down her panties-their rustling, slithering sound over the rich curves of her buttocks and thighs proved they were made of silk, because satin has a kind of hissing sound, and velvet a dull kind of scratchy friction as it moves over naked skin-there was still more natural evidence that she was a genuine redhead.
She opened the bathroom door and went in, then dropped the panties into the washbowl, where the bra was already soaking in a foamy detergent lather, and took down, from a wire hanger on the back of the door, a green satin bathrobe with narrow black cloth belt. She knotted the belt at the front, buttoned the lower buttons, so that the rather wide lapels of the robe gaped and exposed the glossy satin cream of throat and chest and the enticing valley between her firm breasts. A cool, calculating little smile had begun to creep over her lips, and now she opened the medicine cabinet, took out a perfume atomizer and sprayed it against the pulse hollow of her throat and the top of the cleft at her bosom.
"I think that should do it," she remarked aloud, as if wanting to reassure herself, and replaced the atomizer in the cabinet, closed the door. Then she walked back into the wide, comfortably furnished room, scanning it quickly as if appraising it for the first time.
Of all the eighty-odd girls who inhabited the three floors of Comstock Hall, Eleanor Landers was the only one to boast possession of a room and bath all to herself. Money was the answer. That and simpering flattery to old Martha Dowdale, the 62-year-old widow of a former Marwell professor who had had the job of managing the hall for the past 30 years, the then president of the college having tended it to her as a sort of consolation for her husband's tragic death. James Dowdale had been a chemistry professor and had, alas, an unfortunate tendency to imbibing martinis. And one evening, on one of his benders, he had wandered into the laboratory and concocted a sulphuric dosage of something or other with an unpronounceable name, then forgotten to empty the beaker into the sink. So, the next morning, still suffering from the hangover, he had commenced a new experiment and the combined results had been explosive; so much so that there was hardly enough of him left to bury. The college had generously overlooked his fatal penchant and given his widow the sinecure of managing this dormitory for girls who didn't belong to Greek-letter sororities.
And Eleanor Landers had taken the time to learn something about brooding old Martha Dowdale and to discover that she liked growing flowers in a box and minor English poets, and so when she had come to be interviewed as an applicant to live in the hall, she had talked so knowingly about peonies and nasturtiums and about the Restoration poets that the enchanted widow had seen to it that this appreciative and intelligent young woman simply must be given a room all to herself.
It was just another of the many tiny little triumphs the green-eyed redhead had managed to accumulate in the short span of her twenty years. A few minutes hence, she thought amusedly, the smile deepening on her sulky, sensual mouth, there would be a vastly more important one to chalk up on her ledger. Tom Jenkins was going to pay her a visit against every written and unwritten campus rule.
Tom Jenkins was one of the most eligible senior males on campus. To have got him away from Elly Douglas, the bespectacled, angel-faced, sensitive Phi Beta Kappa senior who wore his pin-and even for a single evening-was in itself a feat that would spread Eleanor Lander's fame all over the college. A single night's work would do the trick, and after tomorrow, everybody would be talking about what a daring, unconventional and exciting creature she was.
That was precisely what the redhead wanted. To attract attention to herself so that she might occupy a pedestal of importance all during the next three years. Because this was only her second week at Mar-well, and she was starting her sophomore year. It wasn't much better than being a freshman, and if you weren't pledged by an outfit like Delta Gamma Theta, you might as well curl up into a hole with a good book and die, just like the greasy grinds and teachers' pets who burned the midnight oil and never got anywhere on campus.
Having money wasn't the only answer, either. Marwell's tuition fees were slightly higher than the schools in the Chicago area where she had come from, but, after all, there were lots of girls who came from families as wealthy as hers. Samuel Landers had made his fortune manipulating stock in a brokerage firm, and earned enough from a single killing on the bear market to move her and Mom to Briarwood Terrace, Chicago's swankiest residential area. She owned her own Ford Thunderbird, a white gleaming streamlined car of which she was inordinately proud, but in the private parking lot back of the DGT house, she had already seen a Jaguar, an Imperial and an air-conditioned blue Cadillac with a stereo tape player and FM set.
At twenty, Eleanor knew that she was a bit old to be a sophomore. But then, she'd lost that one year when Dad and Mom had decided to take her along to Europe with them to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. And in Paris, where they'd spent two months, she'd fallen in love with a suave black-haired young man who was 26 and known as the Comte Henri de Rochembeau. Mom had been thrilled at the possibility of Eleanor's marrying into the nobility, and had done all she could to keep Eleanor's secret meetings with Henri an even deeper secret from Samuel Landers. Unfortunately, everything had gone wrong; Henri de Rochembeau had turned out to be a third cousin of the real count whereas he himself was a salaried doorman at a imagine department store on the other side of Paris and had taken sick leave from his job after meeting Eleanor in the hope that she would turn out to be a rich American girl he could marry in order to improve his own negligible fortune. And she herself had been so smitten with his savoir-faire and good looks that she had let him enjoy more liberties than she ought to have done, and for a dreadful time she had thought she was going to bear a child.
Mom-whom Eleanor preferred to call Laura in keeping with the sophisticated trend of treating your parents like equals, or, better still, like menials-hadn't been able to keep that secret from Dad, and so Eleanor had been lectured, given proper hell, and instead of being left in Paris at the Sorbonne as Dad had originally intended, he had taken her back to Chicago at the conclusion of the long European trip and enrolled her at Marwell. That way, she would be away from Chicago and out of mischief, so far as he was concerned. Marwell was eighty miles northward of the Windy City.
And so Eleanor had made up her mind to attract attention here on campus, to be queen bee in this little rustic town, just as if Chicago and Paris had never existed. The way to do that was to do something startling. She wouldn't make the same mistake twice; Tom Jenkins, personable and handsome though he was, wasn't going to get anywhere at all with her, even if he was coming up to her room this very night. In fact, in a few minutes, if her alarm clock was right. She'd worked it all out, and she giggled now, thinking what a neat little stunt it was.
Just last Friday Suzy Mersh, a year older than herself and a ripe curved silver-haired blonde who had had boy trouble and was being forced to repeat her sophomore year, had pointed Tom Jenkins out to her. Eleanor had been attracted by his sturdy yet athletically lean figure, his dark blue eyes and crew-cut dark brown hair and the strong jaw and firm mouth that were characteristics of determination and energy. She'd seen Elly Douglas clinging to his arm and sneered at the doting look the bespectacled brunette turned on him.
And Suzy Mersh had told her that Elly practically had a stranglehold on Tom, who was the star right halfback on the Marwell team and might even make the Little All-America team this next fall.
"They've been going steady since high school, take it from me, Eleanor. You haven't got a chance," Suzy had said. And that had been an irresistible challenge. Besides, it rather amused Eleanor Landers to think that she was competing with a girl who had the same first name as she did-though nobody ever called Eleanor Elly. That was much too plebian and vulgar. But she knew one thing: Elly Douglas was a sweet innocent who didn't know the first thing about catching a man's roaming and roving eye; and if Tom was stuck on Elly, then it must be only because he'd never met a really predatory female who could teach him more in half an hour about the opposite sex than pallid little Elly could in a lifetime.
So she had bided her time and on Saturday, at the Sweet Shoppe, where all the crowd went for scrumptious sodas and sundaes and malts and huge banana splits (bigger and cheaper than back home in Chicago, she had to admit), she'd walked in and there was Tom Jenkins cracking a book and all alone by himself in a booth. Very boldly, she'd walked over, slid into the seat opposite him, and sweetly purred, "Do you mind, Mr. Jenkins?" He'd looked up and shoved his book away and grinned, then shook his head. And that was how it had started.
Tonight was Wednesday. She'd already had one clandestine date with him under the bleachers in Crowe Field-though all she'd let him do was steal a few kisses and feel her breasts through her tight sweater. But she'd intimated that if he was really man enough to win her favors, she might let him do much more. She'd bragged of her family background, inventing an important post in the diplomatic service for Dad and a tremendously vital society role for Mom (though the best Mom could do, even with Dad's money, was be a guest at the Briarwood Country Club and an invited fourth for bridge). She'd told him about her many trips to Europe and her knowledge of exotic customs and strange ways, and she'd found out-just as she'd suspected after Suzy Mersh's comments-that Tom Jenkins was a novice in the ways of love and something of a bumpkin, a real country boy who was going to marry the first sticky, silly female who made googoo eyes at him out of the mistaken notion that a high school sweetheart was your true and only love.
"I live at Comstock Hall, Tom honey," she'd whispered as she deftly disengaged herself from his embrace. She knew she had left him panting and flushed for wanting her, and she was willing to bet her next month's allowance that he'd never ever necked with Elly Douglas. "Why don't you come up Wednesday night and we'll have fun?" And he'd gasped, shaken his head, flushed still more and blurted, "Oh, gosh, Eleanor, I couldn't. No man's ever allowed there, you know that yourself."
That was when she'd told him there was an ivy-covered drainpipe right outside her room and that she would leave her door open at ten-thirty, for fifteen minutes only. "If you're man enough to shinny up there-and it ought to be easy for a football hero, Tom sweetie," she'd cooed as her fingers brushed his cheeks, "I'll let you do all the things you've ever wanted to do to a girl." And he'd kissed her and gasped, "You mean it? I will, then!"
Only what Tom Jenkins didn't know was that all Eleanor Landers wanted from him was the gossip that she was so exciting that a star football player and leading senior would risk his reputation and chance of graduation by breaking the strictest rules on campus. Because once he got into her room, he wasn't going to get to first base with her at all.