Chapter 1
Nan Mikell shook out the full length of her glowing auburn hair until the tips, hanging far out over the sparkling blue pool, dipped lightly in the water. Her brown, firm-fleshed arm lazily went over the edge of the pool and followed it; she watched the prismatic effect of the water bend her arm, immersed up to the forearm, at an acute angle. She saw the scarlet-tipped fingers of her hand waving gently at her under the water.
Nan rolled over on the cushion. The water of the pool was icy cold; the air was warm and humid. The effect of the two temperatures on her skin was sensual in the extreme. And the Florida sun beat down body, leaving a fine film of silvery sweat over her aroused body.
For she was aroused, after all. No use trying to hide that from herself. She had been lying here in the sun on the deck of the big Bal Harbour house for an hour now, and her reverie had passed from her body-slim and brown in its fashionably Palm Beach string bikini, too daring for wear among any but the most intimate of friends-to the mornings calls, to the appointment book (with its dreary succession of charities and obligatory appearances), back to her body again.
And a fine body it is, too, she thought-the Hard masculine practicality of her thoroughly divided mind asserting itself again. Thinking of it, she closed her eyes and, lying back on the cushion, she ran the fingers of one soft brown hand down the silky skin of her flank, naked all the way down except for the soft string that held the shamelessly tiny piece of cloth over her crotch. Little goose bumps broke out along the length of her nude thigh as the fingers touched, caressed, stirred the tiny sub-bleached golden hairs on her leg. Still, not wanting to rush her little game to its conclusion, she kept up the soft caresses, barely touching herself. It was a game, after all-a game she played with herself.
A game she played with herself daily now, whenever the schedule showed a break, whenever she had an hour or so alone to herself in the big house, with its decked pool cantilevered out over the carport and the lush garden below. These early afternoons had come to be almost the only thing she liked about the echoing emptiness of the house: the warm air and the delicious feeling of aloneness...and the accompanying fantasy-rich and opulent and exotically un-Florida, un-stodgy Bal Harbour-that accompanied it all.
The fantasy had already begun in her mind. It varied, daily, with the different impressions that she had absorbed in the morning. Always there was the same delicately handsome young body, tanned and muscled, the same masculine, but ever so gentle, hands on her eagerly receptive skin, the same soft lips covering her with hot, insistent kisses, building her excitement up ever so slowly to a frenzy of passion, again, again...and then bringing her back down slowly from the heights, slowly and carefully, wary of breaking the magic spell that lay upon her as she lay back and absorbed it all with a delicious passivity that required nothing of her but that she respond.
The face...the face changed daily. It was now the face of a fresh, unspoiled beach boy she'd spotted coming out of the surf, some yards down from the limits of her private beach. Another time it might be a bronzed young faun she'd run into, coming out of a Miami Beach bar a week before. It was always a face that had made an impression of...what? Innocent, puckish sensuality? The abandon of adolescence half-corrupted? It didn't matter. It was the impression made that mattered. No. The face could fade. It was the strong and smooth young body, the thing that did not change, that mattered. It was the gently insistent hands. Most of all, it was the questing, soft, infinitely tender lips, touching her here and there....
She shivered and arched her back to let one of her own brown hands reach behind her back and slip the string of her tiny bra loose. As she did, a stray wisp of cool breeze broke through the dampness of the Florida air, slipped inside her bra, caressed the unseen dark nipples of her little breasts so that they sprang to a delicious stiffness, still under the barely-confining cloth.
Her eyes remained closed. That was part of the game. The lover would remain an imagined lover. The caresses, the kisses would fall in silence upon her, unseen. And soon the reality of her own two hands, miming his, would be joined by a kissing mouth, touching here and there on her body, coming hotly to rest at last in a wild crescendo of excitement: that part was where her dreams, her fantasies, took over. And the ecstatic uplift of it all-the "high," as her daughter Monica had called it once-was enough. It was enough to blot out the dreariness of her world. The loneliness of it. The emptiness.
Nan Mikell hadn't had a man in nearly a year now.
What matter? she thought, driving the last shred of self-doubt out of her mind now, letting the fantasy have free rein....
...He wouldn't speak. She would hear nothing of him, there in the darkness behind her closed eyelids, except that infinitely expressive language of breath that he spoke so well. Soft breath on her cheeks, her eyelids, her ears, as one by one he kissed them reverently, like a sultan counting his jewels. Warm, deep breath as he bent deeply over her, kissing her neck, drawing a little line of soft-lipped kisses down her body from there to...yes, now he was pulling the soft cloth away from her breasts, baring them to the sun, to the gentle, strangely cool breeze, and his kisses went....
Ahhhh! There was a morning's growth of boy-beard on his face: as he kissed the tip of one nipple the soft-hard bristles touched her sensitive areola delicately; the goose bumps rose on the erectile flesh of the dark ring. Her nipple grew long and painfully sensitive; as attuned to her arousal as if the flesh kissed had been his own, he began now, softly at first, then with a growing abandon, to suck on it She gasped-just once-as he took the hardened, fingertip-sized end of it into his mouth, rolling his rough tongue around the sides of it, gently nipping with sharp, white, boy's teeth all over. She groaned with pleasure.
And now his lips left the nipple, dove hungrily on the other. And as he repeated the delicious formula on the second breast, she felt, to her intense satisfaction, his hands start in on the first: tweaking it, nipping with sharp little fingernails, tracing the line around her areolas, rolling the aroused nipple between her fingers...It was so good!
Now, feeling the first twinges of a passion long smothered by her loneliness and inhibitions, Nan Mikell, her own brown fingers rubbing her breasts, spread her legs to the sun, curling her red-tipped toes in abandon. And, surreptitiously, one eager hand stole gently down her side, touching nude and suddenly alive flesh every inch of the way, to toy with, and eventually loose, the simple bow tie that held the bottom of her bikini to her body. And, pulling softly, liberated the rest of her eagerly straining body to sun, soft ocean air, and the imagined kisses of her fantasy lover.
As if in response to her wish, a wisp of cool breeze swept across her suddenly naked skin. A spasm of shivering swept over her; she bit her Up and arched her long and slender neck in a delicious motion, giving herself up to it all---
There in her self-imposed darkness, she went deliriously limp as the brown hands lifted her legs to the sky, caressing them all the way from the delicately painted toes and the soft, unscarred soles, down the slim ankles and swelling calves, to the unmarred tenderness of the insides of her brown and satiny thighs, opening her wide, wide....
And that was the curious part When, if ever, she came to think about these golden moments afterward, as the reverie took over, the strangeness of it always struck her. She invariably imagined him naked and shamelessly male during all this, and as aroused as she was. She knew if she opened her eyes-that wasn't part of the game, but she could imagine it-she would see between his own hard thighs the thick and engorged emblem of his manhood: a stout and straining, uncircumcised, red-tipped penis of heroic dimensions, surmounting heavy balls pulled tight by his arousal against his body, the whole coming fiercely up at her out of a jet-black forest of wildly curling hair-an exciting, arousing, breathless-making sight But....
But he'd make no move to put it inside her. It wasn't his arousal that mattered. It was hers. And hers could only be dealt with satisfactorily by what happened next And what happened next was a beautiful and secret thing that no man had ever done to her, that she'd never had the nerve to ask a man to do to her. And although, as she lay back to enjoy it all, she might think of the big and straining penis, its trembling head aquiver with passion, its sweetly delicate eye pulsing forth with a single silvery drop of delicious-looking dew as it all but visibly yearned for her. She might even long-shamelessly!-to touch and caress it, even (she shuddered now, thinking of it, shaken by the thought) kiss it tenderly and lick the tiny drop of sperm from the end of it; but this had no part in the fantasy. She might think about it-fleetingly-but no more. More important was to give herself up, completely, to the secret ritual they shared. More important was to spread her thighs wide, straining to hold herself open for him, as his lips invaded the secret places of her body. His lips; his fingers; his questing, darting tongue....
Ahhhhh! she groaned in something near pain, as the brown mouth dived hungrily into her auburn-haired crotch, the lips and teeth burying themselves in the soft, wet inner lips of her vulva, his tongue going like mad on the infinitely sensitive flesh of the insides of her. She was wet! So wet! It was his task to lick her dry, dry as a bone!.
But now a new sensation entered: the beard she'd felt before. Raking inside of her, hurting her-and then, as quickly, turning the hurt to ecstasy as the soft tongue swept over the places the ungentle bristles had scraped raw. The lips closing in a dozen soft kisses over the aroused flesh, taking mouthfuls of its softness inside himself. The tongue expelling it and licking it, licking it clean, again and again....
Oh my God, she thought. He's licking me. He's eating me. He's sucking my c....But she couldn't say it Not even in her mind, not even in her heart of hearts. She could only enjoy it with a wordless, mindless passion that grew and grew, slowly (she'd always been so slow! It had made Ed so unhappy! But she couldn't help it. Could she? Could she?), building to a climax she could hardly imagine even now.
Once she had sat before a mirror on the massage table. And she'd spread her legs and looked at herself, long and hard, fascinated with what she saw. Her own wide-open c...But she couldn't say the word, even think about it The curling hair growing lush around it; the pink hairless flesh inside; the little red button above it; the brown button of her anus. Was this what the men wanted? she'd thought to herself. And she'd looked at it wondering. It had seemed so strange-looking. And yet...there was a certain beauty about it after all, now. It was all in the way you looked at it
And this young man with her now: he must be looking at it with love, with affection, with a hungry passion. For he was diving noisily into it, his breath coming in great gasps, his busy tongue driving her crazy with eager anticipation of what was to come, any minute now, any minute....
When it came she screamed.
She couldn't help it His whole mouth opened and took the upper third of her vagina into it sucking the upper end of her cleft deep inside him, and, best of all, taking, at last between his soft and voracious lips, the hard, upstanding head of her little button! She kicked wildly; her anus winked open, shut open, shut with an uncontrollable motion of its own; the wetness gushed forth from the soft tissues inside her again; but nothing deterred him. His firm hands holding her spread as wide as she could go. He began, slowly, with a steady rhythm, to suck on the little shaft, taking it in and out of his mouth, in and out, in and out On every fourth, in-and-out motion, his tongue would sweep up the bottom of it in a delicious lick. Then he started varying the rhythm. Every third suck. Then every fifth. Then, once, he went ten sucks without licking her, and she was dying for it when it finally came. She almost fainted when it did....A door slammed.
"Mrs. Mikell, I'm finished I just wanted...."
Nan Mikell, her face red as a beet sprang to her feet. And in the trembling anger that beset her she didn't think to cover herself up at first. Her features, delicately beautiful as a Renaissance Madonna's in repose, were black with rage, contorted like a harpy's. She stood, hands on hips, looking at the intruder, mastering the dark force of hatred in her that contended with her reason as she stared hot-eyed at the playsuit-clad young girl from the University who had come to catalogue Ed's books prior to the official takeover of his library. The girl's face was scarlet with embarrassment; her hand had gone to her mouth and stayed there, and her face held-frozen, as in a stop-motion photograph-a look of horror.
But her eyes, looking at Nan Mikell out of her silent tableau of mortification, strayed once, hotly, to Nan's nude body: to the darkly aroused nipples, to the fiercely tangled bush at the bottom of her belly, to the thin line of hot juice that stained Her bare and goose-pimpled leg.
Then, her eyes clouding over with tears, she came apart. "Oh, Mrs. Mikell, I...I thought you were---"
"Get out!" Nan Mikell said in a deadly voice. And, with an indignant motion, she reached for the robe in the pool-side chair and held it protectively to her body while the young woman, flustered, turned and headed brokenly for the door. Then, still breathing hard, she sat down on a nearby chaise and pulled the robe close about her body.
She'd been seen! Doing it!
By another woman!
And, most strangely of all, she'd liked it!
She'd liked the feel of those strange eyes on Her naked body. She'd felt deliciously, shamelessly nude in front of the girl-and proud of it! And, best of all, she'd enjoyed having the girl see her not only naked, but trembling with passion, with the wetness of her flowing down her thighs!
She'd enjoyed it! Worse-she'd had an almost irresistible impulse to flaunt it! To reach down and grab a handful of hair and bump it up at her! To put both hands down there between her legs, and...and open herself up for the girl! Looking her hard in the eye the whole time!
Shuddering, Nan Mikell pulled the robe even more closely around her. All of a sudden there was a strange chill in the air.