The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Cheryl Mildenhall

  ‘Do you want to know what it’s like to make love to a woman, Hillary, is that it?’

  Hillary shook her head vehemently, shocked at the suggestion. Then she felt herself overtaken by the realisation that Odile might have uncovered something she hadn’t been prepared to admit even to herself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘It’s not something I’ve ever thought about consciously but I’ve enjoyed the odd fantasy, every woman does. That doesn’t make me a lesbian, does it?’ Deep down she knew the answer to that one but nevertheless her question finished on an uncertain note.

  Odile smiled reassurringly. ‘I’m not a lesbian either, Hillary.’ She laughed then. ‘Look at Theo, for goodness sake, do you think a man like him would tolerate a relationship with a dyke?’

  Hillary had to admit that she had a point. She stared straight ahead and tried to make sense of her thoughts before she spoke again. Before she had a chance to say anything else, Odile broke the silence between them.

  ‘You’re probably feeling a little foolish right now but you shouldn’t, you know.’ Something in Odile’s tone captured Hillary’s attention, deep within her she could feel a faint fluttering.

  ‘Why?’ Hillary’s voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘Because I am attracted to you, that’s why.’ Her admission came out in a rush and then she sighed deeply. ‘And now I suppose I should go back to my own room and chastise myself for ruining our friendship.’

  Hillary trembled, acknowledging that deep down she had known what Odile’s reply would be. Had she hoped for it? She put out a hand, tentatively touching Odile’s arm and feeling the soft, warm skin under her fingertips where the light downy hairs stiffened as she spoke. ‘Don’t go, Odile.’ She wasn’t sure if the young woman would take her invitation at face value, or use her feminine intuition to see past the thin barriers Hillary had erected around that so far undiscovered facet of her sexuality. Odile didn’t speak, nor did she move. Hillary closed her eyes and tried not to think about the young woman lying next to her in the warm comfort of the double bed. They were all alone, she thought, cast adrift in the middle of a storm.

  She was reminded of the dream she had been enjoying earlier as she sunbathed, before Darius had turned her thoughts upside down. Thinking of Darius made her wonder why she bothered with men at all, perhaps lesbians were the wise ones? In her dream she had been physically attended to by natives but not all of them had been male, she now recalled. One of them, the one who brought her most pleasure, was a young girl, slim, long legged, with lustrous auburn hair. Smiling at the recollection she turned to look at Odile. Their eyes locked.

  Hillary held her breath, conscious of the ferocity with which her heart was hammering in her chest. Slowly, deliberately, Odile sat up and pulled her nightgown over her head. Shaking her mane of hair free of tangles, she waited until Hillary had composed herself. It was obvious to Odile that her companion was stunned by the sight and proximity of her now naked body. Unabashed she allowed Hillary to satisfy her curiosity, sitting upright while Hillary stared at her. Although they had sunbathed naked before, she appreciated that this wasn’t quite the same.

  Finally, Hillary followed suit and pulled off her nightdress, feeling acutely embarrassed as she sat next to Odile, her nipples tightening under the young woman’s open gaze. This can’t be happening, she thought to herself, it’s just part of my dream. In her dream, though, she had not felt the intense churning in her stomach, nor the throbbing anguish between her legs. In her dream she hadn’t been able to smell her own arousal.

  When she thought Hillary was ready, Odile put out one slender, well-manicured hand and touched her shoulder, running her fingers lightly down Hillary’s arm until they were level with her breast before moving across to stroke the softly swelling flesh. Despite her trepidation Hillary moaned, her pleasure increasing as Odile rubbed her thumb lightly across her nipple. Then she moved her hand to the other breast and did the same. Hillary waited, half of her mind enjoying the sensation of Odile’s hand upon her body, the other half wondering what she should do in response.

  Eventually, curiosity overcame her reticence. Tentatively, she mirrored Odile’s actions, feeling the natural resistance of the other woman’s breast as she touched with her fingertips. Then she too stroked the soft flesh, moving around and around the smooth globes until she dared to touch a nipple. She enjoyed the way the puckered flesh instantly stiffened under her touch, a reaction much more pronounced than on a man. She looked up at Odile’s face, noting how her eyes were glazed, her lips slightly parted revealing the tip of a soft pink tongue. Suddenly she wondered how that tongue would feel on her body and shivered, realising that it would probably not be long before she found out.

  They lay on their sides facing each other and for a long time the two women contented themselves with stroking the upper half of each other’s body. Odile wanted to make sure that Hillary was completely relaxed and ready before moving on to the next stage. There was no hurry, they had all night.

  Gradually, as she stroked the length of Hillary’s back, Odile let her fingers drift a little lower, skimming the upper swell of her buttocks. Hillary inhaled deeply, it was happening, it was really happening. The realisation that they were set on a course released Hillary from the last of her reserve. Feeling quite bold, she ventured her hands a little further, stroking them over the whole curve of Odile’s taut behind, enjoying the way the muscles quivered beneath her fingers. She trailed her fingers down the cleft between them, her long nails slightly stimulating the sensitive flesh. Odile moaned loudly and, despite her good intentions, thrust her pelvis towards Hillary’s, feeling the soft down of their pubic mounds mesh together.

  Hillary stiffened, startled at first. Then she relaxed again, it really was quite a nice feeling. With a slight sigh of contentment she urged her body even closer to Odile’s until their breasts made contact too. At that point it seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to kiss – two pairs of soft feminine lips touching for the first time. It was sublime, the sweetest kiss she had ever had, Hillary thought. When she went over the whole thing in her mind later, she realised that what she had enjoyed the most was the softness and gentleness of the whole encounter.

  Men, she decided, could be unnecessarily rough, even when they were trying hard to be considerate. It wasn’t their fault, they just didn’t realise their own strength. And, of course, a woman had the added advantages of being an instinctive lover and of knowing precisely how she liked to be pleasured herself. Therefore it stood to reason that she could interpret another woman’s needs much more accurately than any man.

  They kissed for some minutes then Hillary relaxed back against the pillow, her body language issuing an open invitation for Odile to explore further and introduce her to all the delights a female lover had to offer. She closed her eyes, allowing each new sensation to sweep over her in waves.

  The first thing she felt most keenly was the luxurious caress of Odile’s soft, silky hair, the long auburn tresses trailing over her body as the young woman began to kiss her throat, her shoulders, her chest, and then her breasts. She sucked and licked each nipple in turn, rolling them around her tongue like boiled sweets. Then her tongue trailed lower, across her rib-cage and down her stomach, leaving a wet zig-zag trail across Hillary’s burning flesh. It paused for a while at her belly as Odile inhaled the heady, musky aroma of her friend’s arousal, then continued downwards, becoming entangled in the thatch of hair that covered her pubic mound.

  Hillary felt her mouth go dry – every nerve ending was tingling, sending urgent messages to her brain for release. Using only her tongue, Odile probed between Hillary’s labia, finding the source of her desire and opening the floodgates with one simple flick of the soft pink tip. Moaning, Hillary forgot all her inhibitions and spread her legs wide to invite the young woman’s tongue to enter her most secret, tempting places. She felt Odile’s sweet breath upon her inner thighs and sought to open herself still wider. Now
that she had given in to the power of their encounter, there was no way she could hold back.

  Desperately she clutched her own breasts, kneading them, rolling the hugely swollen nipples between her fingers. She flung her pelvis upwards and Odile caught her, a buttock in each hand, raising Hillary to her lips as if her throbbing vagina was a precious goblet, filled with nectar. Then she licked and sucked and drank, oblivious to the other woman’s screams of glorious agony.

  All through the sultry, storm-wracked night the two women alternately slept and pleasured each other, always finding new ways to stimulate and excite. Hillary, tentative at first about touching Odile intimately, soon discovered to her amazement that it opened up a whole new realm of sensuous, erotic enjoyment. For Hillary, nothing would ever exceed the pleasure of discovering the other woman for the first time. With shaking fingers she had lightly spread the fleshy pink outer labia, then the darker inner fold of flesh, exposing the hard bud of her clitoris and the deep, dark tunnel of her vagina.

  Much later, Hillary had dared to venture into that moist velvety place, first with her fingers and then with her tongue. What surprised her the most was how sweet Odile tasted, not harsh and salty like any of the men she had sought to sample but delicate, almost succulent and very, very moreish.

  Odile undulated gently at first under Hillary’s gentle probing, then, as her friend became bolder, her touch more assured, she writhed and moaned with abandoned ecstasy. And so their pleasure continued. Eventually, as the first fingers of dawn’s early light prodded their entangled, dozing bodies, Odile said she should go back to her own room.

  ‘I doubt if either Alicia or Chloe will be awake for hours yet.’ Hillary smiled, contentment written all over her face.

  ‘Even so.’ Odile was firm, she didn’t want to embarrass Hillary or herself for that matter and if Theo ever found out she’d been unfaithful, even with another woman. She sighed.

  Hillary noticed Odile’s troubled expression. ‘What’s up?’

  Odile looked down at her hands, suddenly feeling embarrassed. ‘Hillary, you won’t ever tell Theo about this? I mean about last night?’

  ‘No, of course not. I won’t tell a soul if you don’t want me to.’ Hillary looked Odile squarely in the eye. ‘You don’t regret what we’ve done, do you?’ It seemed crazy that she should be the one asking that question.

  The young woman shook her head and smoothed the creases in her satin nightgown. ‘No, never in a million years. It’s just that to Theo it would seem a betrayal, just as if you’d been a man.’

  Hillary said she understood, although she couldn’t quite accept that by sleeping with her Odile had been unfaithful to Theo. ‘By the way, he didn’t telephone yesterday,’ she said.

  Odile sighed. ‘I wasn’t expecting him to really, I just hoped, that’s all.’

  Hillary smiled sympathetically, suddenly everything was back to the way it had been before, with Odile fretting and missing Theo like crazy and herself reminded about the previous day and therefore about Darius. Logic had told her that things could never be quite the same between herself and Odile but she now doubted that they would turn out to be that different after all.

  12

  Hillary stared at her reflection in the mirror, marvelling that the woman who gazed steadily back at her was scarcely recognisable. Tall, elegant and carefully coiffured, she was a vision in a thin white sheath of fluid silk. She turned this way and that, admiring the way the garment clung to her body covering everything from shoulder to ankle yet revealing all.

  The dress had been Odile’s choice. She picked it from her own wardrobe and handed it over with an instant generosity that typified her. At first Hillary had been doubtful. Despite her assurances to Darius that she knew how to dress for such an occasion, a quick glance in her own wardrobe that morning had confirmed her worst suspicions, she had brought nothing remotely suitable to wear to his party. Of course, both Alicia and Chloe had harangued her about not going shopping with them.

  ‘You only have yourself to blame,’ her sister had asserted self-righteously. ‘You were invited on our shopping trips but you preferred to stay here and lounge around in the buff.’

  Hillary bit back several retorts knowing that nothing would silence Alicia. Instead she agreed, albeit reluctantly, to go with the three other women to a beauty parlour in King’s Lynn. The party was important enough in Alicia and Chloe’s estimation to warrant an all-day session. In Hillary’s case this included a sauna, a facial, leg and bikini-line waxing, a manicure, a pedicure, full make-up and, in every way the crowning glory, a new hairstyle.

  Much to her surprise, far from finding the experience tedious, she actually enjoyed it. Wallowing in all the attention and pampering, she felt as though she was being prepared for something momentous. Idly, her mind had drifted to a film she had once seen where a young virgin girl was undergoing preparations to marry the prince of some exotic desert kingdom. In the film, the other wives in the harem busied themselves about her body, washing and drying it carefully, anointing it with oils and finally dressing her in wedding finery. Obviously the elaborate ritual was destined to make her feel and look her best for her husband-to-be.

  Now Hillary felt much the same. At each stage of her own preparations she had closed her eyes and imagined the eventual outcome of all the effort and expense she was currently going through. She could just see Darius and picture his look of amazement and approval as she swept into the great hall turning all the other men’s heads and leaving hordes of envious women in her wake.

  He would come straight to her of course and, ignoring the pleas of others to talk and dance, would stay with her all evening, filling her plate with tasty morsels, her glass with the finest champagne and her ears with delectable words of passion. In the end she would yield to her own desire for him and take him upstairs, away from the noise and the people and the chatter, to a place where they could be totally alone to discover each other with languorous rapture.

  Each time she changed location in the salon the scenario would change slightly too, mostly for the better, although the outcome was always a little more erotically charged than her earlier visualisation of events.

  Every person attending to her asked a variation of the same questions. ‘Are you going somewhere special? The theatre? A party? Do you live locally? Where are you staying? Oh, Harwood Hall.’ A note of surprise and a slight change of tone indicated that the speaker was now impressed. ‘Is it nice there? I’ve only seen it from the outside. Is that where the party is being held?’ And, the final question, ‘Do you know Darius Harwood well?’

  Hillary would be forced to smother a lewd grin at this point. How would the speaker respond if she said Darius had tied her to a tree and caressed her body and that she was intending to get to know him even more intimately by the time the night was out? She hugged her secret close. It added to her excitement, this uncertain certainty of that which was to come.

  Her already turbulent emotions were severely rocked, however, by the older woman who attended to her body waxing with a zeal bordering on enjoyment. Although it was neither what she did nor how she did it that caused Hillary’s stomach to tighten in painful knots. It was what she said.

  ‘So you’re going to the Harwood do, then?’ the woman asked.

  Hillary nodded happily, wriggling on the couch to find a more comfortable position in which to resume her fantasies.

  ‘They say that that woman’s there again,’ the therapist continued, carefully positioning the first strip of wax on Hillary’s waiting body.

  Hillary had reached the point in her mind where she made her grand entrance, but she finally absorbed the question. ‘What woman?’ she said.

  ‘That Ilona what’s ’er name. Harwood’s old mistress.’

  Hillary forced herself not to sit up. ‘Did you say mistress?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She went with the old man for years, right up until the day he died. Mind you, she did all right out of it by all accounts.’

&nbs
p; The relief burst from Hillary’s lips. ‘You mean she was Mr Harwood senior’s mistress?’ She opened her eyes in time to see the older woman nod in agreement.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I meant, right enough, although everyone knows she seduced the young Harwood as well.’ She paused to rip the wax from the tops of Hillary’s thighs. ‘And there’s some people that say that the boy, Torran, is Mr Darius’s son, not his half-brother. Although you can tell the girl’s not his, she’s much too fair.’

  For a second or two Hillary lay mute, simply thinking. Why not just rip out my heart as well while you’re about it? Then she let out a loud yelp of pain as the strip came off. Her mind was whirling. For one thing, she hadn’t even known that Torran and Fearn were related to Darius in any way at all, let alone as half-brother and sister. As for the rest – she didn’t dare contemplate the possibility of the woman’s implication that Torran could be Darius’s son. Eventually, she felt calm enough to speak. ‘I didn’t realise there was a family connection. I thought they came from Scotland.’

  The woman nodded again, then went on to say that the Harwoods owned property all over the country, including a house near Caithness in Scotland. ‘That Ilona woman inherited it when the old man died. That’s what I meant about her doing well,’ she added. ‘And Torran and Fearn inherited part of Harwood Hall.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Hillary considered the woman’s words carefully, then a thought occurred to her. ‘She, Ilona I mean, must have a lot of influence in that family then?’

  ‘About as much as anyone.’ The woman ripped off the last strip of wax. ‘Some say Mr Harwood can’t make a move without her say so.’

  By the time Hillary was ready to leave the salon she had managed to rationalise the new information, deciding that whatever had happened in the past was now well and truly water under the bridge. Obviously, Darius felt obliged to let Fearn and Torran stay at the house and would naturally allow their mother to visit them. As for the rest of it? Well, it was probably based on nothing more than typical village gossip.