Chapter 1
Arthur Hadley was wishing that he'd taken his vacation by himself this summer. Not that he didn't like the seashore and particularly the scenic beauties of Malibu Beach. But there was a kind of loneliness to it, even though his eighteen-year-old daughter Hester was accompanying him this summer. And perhaps Hester herself was cause for some of his problems which were besetting the handsome young widower.
At least, he liked to think of himself as still being young, although he was forty-three. Still in all, as he glanced down at his still very pale body in the natty bathing trunks he had bought just before coming on this trip, he told himself that he didn't have a paunch or the middle-aged spread typical of office workers who had reached his maturity. He still had most of his brown hair with hardly a touch of gray, and his appetite and general health were quite excellent. Just the same, he reflected, he wished that Sonya could have been along this summer. She had died a year ago this March after a sudden attack of virus which had reached epidemic proportions in the college town of Pomona where they had been living while he was doing a job for his management counselor firm. Perhaps, too, the fact that his job had necessitated several moves to small towns along the Southern California coastal region had hampered him in bringing up Hester the way he and Sonya had planned. But Sonya had always tended to spoil their only child--unfortunately, after Hester's birth, the doctors had told Sonya that it would be dangerous for her to risk another pregnancy--and so Hester had gone her own way, which was almost anti-social.
She was in her room right now reading a book, of all things, when she ought to be out here on the sand, lazing in the sun. Her sallow complexion and a touch of acne certainly would be improved by it, he felt.
Of course, there was no gainsaying the fact that Hester was an extremely brilliant girl in school. Scholastically, she had never given Sonya or him the slightest concern. It was only that, left so much to her own resources, she was often self-centered with company, awkward and ill at ease in the presence of others, and tended to dominate the entire conversation, which she invariably tried to change to the topic of her own making. Sonya and he had often gently remonstrated with her, but to very little avail. Now, on the eve of her first year at college, there was every indication that she was going to be a loner there too just as she was back at home in Pomona.
It was the second week of July, the third day of Arthur Hadley's vacation, which had another two and a half weeks to go, and he had come to Malibu Beach with the express intention of enjoying himself and forgetting if he could gloomy and distraught feelings he had had lately because he was beginning to miss Sonya a great deal more than he had believed would happen. She had been a gentle woman, very lovely in a quiet, rather dreamy way, perhaps Hester had inherited some of her mother's introspective tendencies--and they had been happily married. There had been very few rifts on their horizon, and as for their physical life together, he had really no complaints. Sonya had always been dutiful, though always shy about sex. Still and all, a man couldn't expect his wife to be an accomplished houri. And they had had about eighteen happy years. To be ungrateful would be to defy the wrath of the gods of fate and circumstance.
All the same, as he reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one, looking out towards the ocean where people were frolicking, he wished that there were a companion along to drive away this blue mood of his. He had always been very virile, and with Sonya he had had to quell much of his innate sexual vigor. He had been very gentle with her, understanding and sympathetic, and of course that was what a proper husband should be. But now, more than a year after her death, and still virile and healthy, Arthur Hadley was beginning to feel the pangs of continence.
The thought of remarrying hadn't occurred to him. To begin with, he didn't think that Hester would like the idea. She had been extremely devoted to her mother, and that was understandable too.
He took another puff of his cigarette and looked around him. At that moment, a large beachball bumped against his side. Startled, he looked around, and saw an enchantingly lovely golden-haired young girl running towards him, wearing a blue bathing suit and sandals.
"I'm terribly sorry!" the girl gasped, "I hope we didn't hurt you. Mother and I were playing ball. I guess we shouldn't have, and we just got carried away."
"Quite all right," Arthur Hadley said gallantly as he rose to his feet. "I was beginning to think that maybe a little exercise wouldn't hurt me either. No harm done at all, young lady."
"Gee, thanks," the girl giggled as she retrieved the ball.
At that moment, a stunningly handsome brown-haired woman approached them. She was about five feet seven inches in height, her light brown hair very modishly short-bobbed and hidden under a bathing cap. Her face was oval, somewhat imperious, with large, widely spaced gray-green eyes, a delicate aquiline nose with thin and flaring wings, and a firm, incisive mouth. The figure shaped out by the neat and very chic and at the same time quite modest black Jantzen was so exciting that Arthur Hadley almost forgot his manners. She had high-perched, round, closely spaced breasts, a delightfully slender waist from which ripe, ample, yet solid hips flared. Her thighs were long but beautifully and fully rounded, and her calves were sleek, upstandingly rounded and quite mobile, which the rippling play of fascinating muscles along her sunbronzed skin delightfully evidenced.
"I do hope you weren't inconvenienced," she said in a pleasant, rich contralto voice. "Betty was keeping up with me and perhaps threw just a little too wildly that time. I hope you'll excuse us both."
"But there's nothing to excuse, I assure you. In fact, I hope you won't think it impertinent of me if I invited myself to share your game. As I told your daughter, I was just hoping for a chance to get a little exercise."
"Why, that's very gracious of you. My name's Eleanor Stanfield, and this is my daughter, Betty," the handsome brunette matron smilingly made the introductions.
"And I'm Arthur Hadley, and I have a daughter too, but she's in the hotel at the moment," was his rejoinder.
"Come along then, and we'll find a stretch of unoccupied beach and have a little game. I can see you haven't been here too long, seeing that you don't have a suntan yet," Eleanor Stanfield gaily remarked.
"No, it's only my third day. I really haven't had a vacation in about two years, and the last time my wife was with me. I'm a widower now, you see," he explained. Somehow, curiously, he felt the need to explain himself to this beautiful, mature woman who seemed so poised and who also seemed to have her daughter so well in control.
He observed, however, a few singular marks on the girls legs. Betty, who could not have been much more than sixteen, was about five feet five, with a heartshaped face, gentian-blue eyes, a dainty little snub nose, a sweet rosy mouth, round, dimpled chin, and an absolutely breathtaking body. Her skin was a baby-pink, her thighs were magnificently rounded as were her calves, but her buttocks were shaped out so snugly in the blue suit as to indicate the magnificent resilience and rondure of their contours. Yet on her upper thighs, as they marched along now in search of their unoccupied little playground, Arthur Hadley could see a few faint bluish blotches on both legs, just where the hems of the bathing suit left off. Apparently, Betty was extremely athletic. Her golden hair would have been the envy of many women twice her age, and far more worldly. It was a thick pageboy, with the curls turned under, and it was unencumbered by any bathing cap.
"I'm sorry about your wife, Mr. Hadley," Eleanor Stanfield sympathetically replied. "In a way, we're sort of in the same boat."
"How do you mean?"
"Why, I'm a widow myself," was the unexpected rejoinder. "My husband passed away six years ago."
"I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Stanfield."
"Please do call me Eleanor. The other is so formal. And I'll call you Arthur, if I may. It would never do to play ball and to say 'please throw me the ball, Mr. Hadley!', now would it?"
"Not at all," he laughed heartily. Arthur Hadley felt a great weight lifted from his heart. It had been Providence itself in the personage of that deliciously pretty golden-haired girl who had roused him from his lethargy and from feeling sorry for himself.