Chapter 1
The arrogant, slim, black-haired young woman in the silver lame evening gown calculatedly crossed her sleek legs, noticing with a kind of narcissistic satisfaction how the gleaming material lovingly clung to the contours of her uppermost thigh and knee. Deliberately, too, she waggled the strap-on silver-cloth sandal which showed her dainty toes snugged in the gauzy sheathing of charcoal-brown nylons of the very finest denier.
Jack Lurton coughed, lit a cigarette and, as the match flared, stared ardently at the beautiful feminine sculpture. Already he could feel his prick aching and hardening against the tight crotch of his tuxedo trousers. He had never been so hot for any piece of quim in all his thirty years of venturesome life, but there was only one trouble. The girl beside him, who was putting on this prick-teasing show for his benefit alone, wasn't about to perform beyond this stage.
Because it wasn't the first time he had gone out with Theodora Ames, the Gold Coast debutante whose picture was always in the society columns. She was known as the madcap heiress of the Windy City, and not without reason. Ever since she had been expelled from a swanky private school in Evanston at the tender age of fifteen for having collected a dozed frogs and put them into a brown paper bag and the bag in turn into the bed of the autocratic and elderly owner of the school, Miss Jessica Stamford, her exploits had made amusing newspaper copy for the past five years.
Miss Stamford had furiously reported the episode to Theodora's parents with the supplemental comment, "If that were my daughter, I'd wear out several hairbrushes on her impudent bottom, you may be sure! It's just a pity that this state doesn't permit corporal punishment for such outrageous behavior as your impossible daughter has demonstrated here at Stamford School for Girls!"
Of course, Theodora's parents hadn't worn out any hairbrushes on her at all, not ever. Madge and Donald Ames were sophisticated people, and they ran an expensive art gallery on Michigan Avenue near the Congress Hotel. It was an enterprise which took them to Europe several times a year, and although they had had a governess for Theodora while she was a little girl, ever since her fourteenth year she had been left more or less to shift for herself either in one private school or another.
She had even accompanied them to Europe on several summer vacations out of school while they were on their inevitable buying trips, and consequently the black-haired debutante spoke several languages, knew more about Europe and its people and customs than most American schoolgirls her age, and appeared to be in line to take over the art gallery when her parents at last decided to retire and enjoy more extensive world travel.
But if all these advantages had given Theodora Ames opportunities and cultural veneer which the average girl never gets in a lifetime, they had also turned her into a pretentious, heartless and selfish snob, who believed that the world owed her everything and she in turn owed nothing to anyone, since everything was her rightful due.
Morally, to be sure, Theodora's conduct had been exemplary. But, as is often been said of timid virgins, "She made a virtue out of necessity." Once, at the Stamford school, her first semester and just three months before her expulsion over the frog incident, she had tentatively experimented with girl-loving. She had been assigned a roommate, a sixteen-year-old coppery--haired girl from North Dakota who had been quite homesick, and who had cried herself to sleep for several nights after her arrival. Theodora had crawled into bed with her to console her, and the two girls had done a little experimental pussy-rubbing and soul kissing, though at that time neither of them knew very much about the actual technique of Sapphic love. But the fact was that Theodora Ames was much too selfish to lend herself to any erotic experiment if it gave her partner pleasure over her own. That was why, although this was her third date with Jack Lurton, he knew perfectly well that there would be no pussy from Theodora at the end of the date, anymore than there had been the first two times. On the second date, she had put on the act of a grateful, sweet girl who had been most appreciative of the attention he had shown her and she had put up her face to be kissed. As he reached for her shoulders and was about to set his mouth on hers, she had laughingly turned her face away and ordered, "Kiss my left earlobe, that's a nice cousinly kiss and that's all you're going to get, Jack Lurton!"
"Oh, the bitch knew what she was doing, all right," he grimly told himself. He had sized her up the very first date. They had met quite by accident at a cocktail party which his agency boss had thrown for the celebration of the Arts Society of Chicago. Since Theodora's parents were on the board of officers of that cultural organization, they of course had been invited and had brought her along. Jack Lurton himself, who was doing the public relations free of charge because his boss was also an officer in the setup, had met Theodora for the first time and very quickly fallen head over heels in lust with her. Having heard something of her background and knowing that she had been to Europe several times, he had told himself that here was a chick who would really know the score, and who could probably fuck like a mink.
Only it hadn't been that way at all. And tonight, over dinner at the Maison Lafitte on North State, he had been listening to her expound her perverse philosophy concerning men in general and himself in particular. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Jack," she had said tantalizingly after the captain had just poured out their wine and left them to the enjoyment of their dinner, "I know why you want to date me, don't think I don't. You'd just love to get me in bed, wouldn't you? So would any man. But I'm afraid I don't have the same interest, and it's only natural. I know I'm beautiful, I'm rich and I'm better educated than most girls fellows like you would go around with. So why should I give myself to the first man who gets all excited because I happen to have a nice figure and I dress well and I make him look better by being along with him?"
If ever he had heard a bitchy, prick-teasing statement of personal philosophy, that was certainly it. Now he knew how she got her kicks. Simply by raising a man's blood pressure along with his cock and then begging off, and leaving him in a cold sweat while she sat back and giggled at the stupidity of the male species. One of these days, something was going to happen to pull her down from that conceited pedestal which she had erected all by herself, step by step, until it towered just about as high as the John Hancock Building, Jack Lurton irritatedly thought to himself.