“Regular cocktail party routine, Raul. Same people, just a different time and place.”
“No, my dear, not routine at all. The women vie. Yes, they vie. They beg, they implore, they demand. Unlike the animal world, it is the women who compete in style and showy displays of flesh to entice the opposite sex into accepting their advances. For instance, look at yourself.”
Sharon turned and looked at him, smiling wryly. “I seem to be on the conservative side, don’t I?”
The smile he returned was deliberate, eyes dropping beneath the level of her own. “Not really,” he said. “Assuming that professional women are all properly coiffed and made up, carefully tailored and impeccably mannered, can you explain why you are not wearing a brassiere, nor why neither seam nor hem of undergarment shows beneath that silken Pucci minisheath you’re wearing? Except for your dress and shoes, you are completely naked, and when you stand erect certain basic hirsute attributes are proudly evident despite the outer covering.”
“I didn’t think it showed,” Sharon said. She knew the red was showing on her shoulders, but the blush wasn’t in the casual tone of her voice.
“Perhaps I have a more experienced eye than most. And perhaps I think you are lying. You do know it shows.”
“Then you shouldn’t be looking in that direction.”
“Why not? It is the reason for your ... undressed appearance. Flaunting the female plumage, no? An admirable approach. I am thoroughly enchanted. And why not? Your skin is flawless, your physique perfect. Of all the women in the room, your breasts are by far most suited for their purpose. Large enough to be the objects of attention, to sustain themselves without implementation, yet not so large as to interfere with more important actions.”
“Is sex all that you have on your mind?” she asked him. His half-shaded eyes unveiled themselves momentarily in surprise and she was pleased that her voice had held no expression of excitement he had deliberately tried to implant in her.
“That is generally true,” he told her. “Can you suggest something that should take precedence?” He sipped his drink and waited for her answer.
“Try gainful employment.”
Raul shrugged and smiled again. “Hardly necessary. I am quite wealthy. Working for more would only be a pretense. I would rather spend my time and energy working on you, my dear. You interest me immensely.”
“For what purpose?”
“The ultimate purpose,” he said, “of taking you to bed with me, totally naked and ready for the unlimited capacity of Raul Fucia. Your enjoyment of my efforts would be profuse.”
Sharon let her eyes range over him, then her teeth glinted in a small grin. “I’m afraid I’d be a disappointment to you, Raul. You see, I’m quite virginal.”
“Lovely,” he said. “A woman virginal in spirit is a wonder to behold.”
“In body, my friend. I’m a complete maidenheaded virgin. How about that?”
There was no denying the tone of her voice at all this time. She had calculated it to perfection without any effort at all and for a moment nearly enjoyed the consternation that showed in his face.
“Impossible!”
“Not so impossible. I’ve just never been laid, that’s all. I never met a man I wanted to get that close to. Simple, when you consider it.”
He put the drink down, pulled up the ottoman beside her and sat down quickly, his hand reaching for hers. She let him take it without resisting. “Then, by all means, you must have me. I insist, you must!”
“Why?”
“Because the initial experience has to be a momentous occasion. Only a man of experience can ...”
“Raul ... balls. When I want to, I’ll go. Not before. You’re not the man either.”
“But you have not seen me.”
“You’re beginning to show, Raul. The thought of a possible virgin in your life was a little too much. Was that why you sat down?”
“My dear Sharon ...”
“I’ve been around, my fine foreign friend. I’ve necked, petted and experienced orgasm. I’ve engaged in a few sexual episodes that produced the proper physical pleasures and enjoyed it and I’ll probably do more of the same again when I want to. I know all the tricks, positions and erogenous zones and I’ll be a real terror when the time comes. Only right now I still have the little goodie that makes me an unpenetrated virgin and I’m going to keep it that way.”
She felt his hand slip away from hers slowly, his eyes uncertain. “You are a ... a ...”
“Lesbian?”
He nodded.
“No, though I allowed myself the pleasure of experimenting in that direction several times. Does that startle you?”
Apparently it did. The bewilderment touched his mouth and he reached for his drink again. “But ... when you could have had a man ...”
“I have,” she said firmly, “but not in the primary circumstance. I have felt and tasted several men. There was great mutual enjoyment. Have I been explicit enough? There has even been penetration of another nature I found extremely satisfactory. So no, I am not a Lesbian, I am not frigid, I am not sexually abnormal. I am simply hanging on to an asset a man might consider quite valuable someday.”
Raul finished the drink, found an empty spot on the end table beside him and put the glass down. “American women,” he said. “You are quite shocking.”
“At my age I can afford to be,” Sharon told him. She deliberately leaned forward, knowing he was able to see the full sweep of her breasts beneath her dress in the movement. The slippery feel of the fabric made her nipples thrust forward prominently. “Now, why don’t you practice your erection on someone more appreciative.”
Somehow he managed to contain his frustration and rose to bow in a continental manner. She took his fingers in a gentle handshake. “I feel sorry for you, Sharon Cass,” he said.
She smiled again, a flash of amusement in her eyes. “I feel sorry for you, Raul. You know what you are missing and there is no possible chance of getting it at all.”
“Not quite true, my dear.”
“Quite true, Raul. I would deball you before you could rape me. My thirty-two years have been very athletic and, like I said, I know all the tricks ... even those.”
His exit was graceful, she thought, for someone who had to revise all his thinking. Tonight he’d have some woman tucked under silken sheets next to him, wondering if somewhere along the primrose path he had lost his touch. His performance wouldn’t be up to par at all and tomorrow he’d begin to worry. So he’d try for her again and lose the battle again and the decline would begin. Like the gross income chart on S. C. Cable’s wall behind his desk.
“Would you really deball him?”
It was a funny voice, oddly scratchy with a strange accent she couldn’t quite place, a Brooklyn voice with the New Yorkese deliberately rubbed out. She half turned and looked at him, then smiled because he was out of place somehow and she couldn’t tell why either. She let all the reasons compute in her analytical mind and decided that he was too big in the shoulders and chest for one thing, and his hair too short for another. It was what they used to call a crew cut. His black suit was new, but molded from a different era, as if he were conscious of only one style and couldn’t care less for what the “in” crowd had adopted. He looks like an eagle, she thought.
Suddenly she was back in front of the mirror again. She felt the tiny blonde hairs rise on the backs of her forearms and a prickle go across her shoulders. It was like dropping into an abstract vortex of time and sound and colors she couldn’t understand at all. Her stomach muscles seemed to tighten until juices were being squeezed right out of her. Inside her mind a faraway voice said, “I have a funny, funny feeling.” And she answered back, “No. It’s silly and childish. It never will really happen.”
“Well?” he asked.
“It wouldn’t have been very difficult.”
“Your destruction of the boy was, a little more practical,” he said.
“I didn’
t think there was an eavesdropper.”
“Hell, kid, I wouldn’t miss a scene like that for the world. I was envying his approach until you dropped him. You really mean all that stuff?”
A curious laugh escaped Sharon’s lips. “Yes. It was all true.”
“Even about being a virgin?”
“Does it sound odd?”
This time he grinned and shrugged, toasting her with his drink. “Sounds crazy, kid, but it’s your game.”
She wondered where he had found a beer in Walt Gentry’s supply. It was something Walt only brought in for his slumming parties. “What’s your game, Mr....”
“Kelly. My first name’s a beaut. It’s D-O-G-E-R-O-N, but people call me Dog. I don’t take offense.”
But it did happen. It was too quick, too fast and she wasn’t prepare for it. It was the bomb blowing up in your face before you even had the time set for it. It was the world rocking to a standstill when a second before it was serene and placid. It was a chasm opening under your feet while you were walking up a beautiful path lined with flowers and happiness and the sense of accomplishment. Discipline and self-denial reacted before she was aware of it ... ages of fighting the battle of the sexes brought out the instinctive armor of words and demeanor. And always that little thought ... she could be wrong. The chances were that she was.
Forget it, little blonde girl. Coincidences do happen and it’s hard to remember anymore. That was all a long time ago and you’ve romanticized the image. You’ve held on to a stupid dream too long and now it’s starting to show. Like the time two years ago when he turned out to be a Brazilian engineer with ten kids. And the seaman on the Esso tanker with the same name. Only he was sixty-three and a grandfather. There is no real Dogeron Kelly. You left him there at the train station and now he’s dead. The whole family says so.
“So Dog’s your name, but what’s your game, Mr. Kelly? You look like a cop. Are you?”
He shook his head. “Hardly. I’m an individual entreprenuer. I do whatever is profitable and comes to hand. I’m a specialist in generalities and it would have been fun to watch you deball your friend.”
“You think I couldn’t?”
He gave a tight-lipped shrug and then grinned at her. “It’s not very hard. I’ve ticked off a few knotheads that way in my time too. It’s just that it’s an extreme penalty to pay.”
“For rape?” she asked quietly.
“Come on, nobody would have to rape you.”
“Now you’re on a sex kick too.”
“Kid, you brought the subject up. I wouldn’t bother raping you.”
“Oh? What would you do?”
He let out another strange, raspy laugh. “Hell, I like it better the other way around. I’m the lazy type myself. Prolific, imaginative, but lazy. Half the time the only thing I get into is a conversation.”
“And the other half?”
“That’s another story not fit for virginal ears,” he said.
She almost had an answer for him, but he winked and walked off, sipping at his beer. For some reason she felt annoyed. Raul Fucia had been right, of course. She had known what she was doing when she dressed for the party, instinctively aware of her potential, but it was not more than any of the others had known. No one was needed to tell her that she was beautiful and well constructed. They had, but the mirror was enough. Raul’s reaction was enough to satisfy her judgment, but then that damned Dog had to come along and shatter her illusions. He couldn’t have cared less.
She picked up her drink and tasted it, swirling the ice around in the glass, feeling a little smile pulling at the comers of her mouth. Hell, the dog, yes, small “d” dog, did it to her. He couldn’t have cared less. And she wasn’t too old, either. She was just right, absolutely prime, beautiful, knowledgeable, apt and exactly right.
The smile widened when she realized she had put her finger on it. She had been around just a little too long in the fast-moving world of show business where judgment had to be quick and correct if you wanted to survive not to miss it. She had put him in the forty-plus class, but the full head of short hair and only light touch of gray had fooled her. That and the strange lack of aging and the musculature. Heredity. Dog Kelly was a real, total predator.
And now he was stalking. She watched him across the room, his complete unconsciousness of what he was doing. The women’s eyes would drift and follow him, return blankly a moment to what they had been doing, then drift again. In the small groups he would join there was an un-comfortableness among the men, barely discernible because they were aware and the act they chose as a facade would cover them. Sharon knew they felt the same way she did. They wondered what he was doing there.
For some obscure reason a funny thought ran through her mind. She wondered if he were carrying a gun.
It was Darcy Taylor who took the initiative as always. A sweet thing on the screen, but a wild one when a man passed she wanted. She left Raul in midsentence and had her arm through Dog’s, taking the glass out of his hand to taste his drink with a mock shudder and steering him out of sight to the bar beyond the French windows. It just wasn’t Raul’s day at all. Sharon felt sorry for whoever he managed to go home with this night.
“Enjoying yourself, Sharon?”
She looked up, smiling, knowing the voice. “Hello Walt.”
Walter Gentry III was the prototype of any and every bachelor who ran his own private world with inherited millions that Hollywood had attempted to emulate. The major difference was that this, the last of the fabulous Gentry clan, had, by shrewd business acumen, more than doubled his inheritance, another factor he had inherited along with a natural aristocratic appearance and charming manner. He had been the target of women from monied families for the past twenty years, but somehow never bothered to become permanently attached to any of them.
“I see you met Dog,” Walt said.
“Yes, who is he?”
He tapped a long cigarette from a gold case and lit it, letting the stream of smoke drift from his lips. “We met in the Army. Quite a guy. He was one of the natural-born killers. He make an impression?”
“Unusual type,” Sharon told him noncommittally. “What’s he do?”
Walt smiled and shrugged. “I often wondered but never bothered to ask. One day he took me to a fraternal club in London and I saw a picture of him in a football uniform. Seems like he was an All American in college.”
“He looks like a cop.”
“I kind of think he dabbled in that business too. He’s got some odd friends.” He picked a drink from the tray of a passing waiter and tasted it. “Good to see you again, Sharon. It’s been quite awhile. How come old S.C. let you out?”
She looked up into his knowing grin and smiled back. “My boss is dangling me like bait on a hook for his enterprises, as if you didn’t know.”
“Lovely bait. How could any fish resist it?”
“You’re not supposed to. I was critically inspected for capture appeal by the great one himself before being turned loose in your pond.”
“And what sort of catch are you supposed to land this time?”
He signaled the waiter over, took another glass from the tray and handed it to her. “Thank you,” she said. “S. C. Cable wants you for a coproduction deal. He figures you for at least a five-million-dollar bite.”
“Nice, he laughed. ”And you’re the bait. I imagine you are expected to give your all.”
“That’s what I’ve been told. You’ll never miss a slice off a cut loaf, and all that sort of thing.”
“Except that your boss doesn’t know ... or believe ... that this particular loaf has never been sliced.”
“He’s been told, but he doesn’t believe,” she said.
“Ah, you demi-vierges must have a rough time. You’re too much for me, young lady.”
“I thought you enjoyed the last time.”
“Oh, I did. And thoroughly too. A little nerve-racking, but absolutely enjoyable. You’re quite a performer. If you must
know, I never had a more pleasant night and day after, but it was a real cliff-hanger with that attitude of yours. Not that I don’t appreciate it. All I can think of is how awful it would be if you ever had an accident, like slipping on a bicycle pedal or something. All your efforts would have been wasted.”
“I could still take a lie detector test,” she said.
“Sharon, I’d sure like to be the lucky man Want to make a trade?”
“For what?”
“Your virginity against the five million?”
“Walt, you’re a wonderful man, but I think I’ll hold out awhile longer.”
“Old S.C. is going to be pretty mad when he hears about the terms you’re turning down.”
She smiled at him, a laugh in her voice. “He’ll never believe it,” she said. “The bonus factor alone is worth five percent.”
Gentry had to laugh back at her. “You know, sugar, I usually can get anything I want with a nice sidewise glance of my gorgeous blue eyes, and if that doesn’t work a cheap diamond compact will do the trick. Except with you. Honey, you’re impossible, but to get you off the hook and let you enjoy your own personal hang-up a few months longer, you can tell S. C. Cable that the deal is on. If you even like me a little bit, tell him you gave me some of that precious stuff just to preserve my reputation.”
“Any options?”
“Sharon ... I’m too lazy to fight for it. Or over it.” He looked across the room to where Dogeron Kelly was standing, leaning against the doorjamb of the French windows, looking out into the misty night with Mona Merrima nuzzling his shoulder. “Watch out for him, Sharon,” he said.
“Why, Walt?”
Gentry took another sip of his drink and idly flipped open a gold cigarette case. “He reminds me of a title of a book. Not the book, just the title.”
“Oh?”
“Call of the Wild,” he told her.
She could feel the heat in her and he was a full room away. When she looked down, her fingers were twisting the ring around ... third finger ... left hand. It was made of brass and she had to wash the verdigris off every night. The stone was glass, green and chipped, something they laughed at but she excused as her good-luck charm when everyone knew she was neither sentimental nor superstitious. Her virgin stone one had named it, still green, not yet ripe, and when it changed color, ready for picking. She had culled out all the answers when they queried her and the answer were enough to stuff up the mouths of the smart ones. She had been around too long and too well. The diamond’s cutting edges were just a little too sharp to touch. Nobody ever mentioned the ring anymore.
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