“Darling babe, if you’re not hungry now, you’re not human.”
Billy opened her eyes, blinked in confusion and realized that she was in a warm bed with a wonderful-smelling, naked man she’d met only hours before. That’s more like it, she thought lazily, good show, very very good show. Sam was rocking her gently awake, nibbling tenderly at her lips.
“I was hungry before, but I didn’t want to wait … I couldn’t … have lasted through lunch …” She yawned twice, groaning with the pleasure of it. “How could you keep going on and on about food?”
“I couldn’t just say, ‘let’s fuck,’ could I?”
“Why not? I couldn’t, but you could.”
“Why couldn’t you say it?” he asked, finding her breasts under the sheets.
“Old American tradition, man has to ask first. Now it’s my turn. Let’s fuck.”
Billy Ikehorn, widowed, divorced, rich, famous, always observed and judged, couldn’t say “let’s fuck” to anybody, but Honey Winthrop, schoolteacher on the loose in Paris, could say anything that came into her mind. Her students back in Seattle could hardly object. “Let’s fuck,” she repeated buoyantly.
“Oh, babe, let me see you first.” He pulled back the sheets and blanket, looking in the deepest pleasure at her body, a superb female body that had reached perfection. Billy had always possessed a secret lushness of flesh that was hidden in clothes because of her height. Naked, the rich ripeness and swelling, supple mounds of her soft breasts and the voluptuous span of her white thighs were astonishingly evident. Her nipples were so deep in color that they looked as if she had rubbed them with rouge. She was a cornucopia of intoxicating volumes and curves. For long, reverent minutes Sam ran his fingers over the shapes of Billy’s body, reveling in finding the soft places and the firm places, the succulent, throbbing bounty he had not had time to look at earlier.
“Oh, Sam, Sam, couldn’t you do that later.… or are you measuring me to see if you want to sculpt me?” Billy was proud of her body and she felt no false modesty, but if he kept touching her like this much longer, she risked losing her mind.
“I … do … nonfigurative … stuff,” he said, tracing the outline of her bellybutton in total absorption.
“Turn over on your stomach,” Billy suggested, dry-mouthed, filled with madcap inspiration.
“Huh? What?”
“Fair’s fair. I want to look at you the way you looked at me.”
He followed her wish, and intoxicated, in a dream, Billy straddled him at his waist so that she could run both of her hands down through his hair and along his spinal column. She trailed her fingertips over the tenderness of his sides, drifting over the wonderfully smooth skin that ran down from his armpits to his waist, brushing him there with her burning touch until she could hear his breath come more and more roughly. Now she shifted her body, sitting across his lean, muscular thighs. She traced a light line of fire very slowly from his waistline to his coccyx and back. He moaned and shifted on the bed, lifting his ass quickly and spreading his legs slightly apart before he lay back again. Billy slid down so that she was sitting on his calves and looked her fill at the juncture of his legs. His penis was already so hard that it had risen up under his stomach, but the heavy globes of his testicles lay on the mattress between his legs. Lawlessly she bent forward and hovered over them, her mouth dry as she realized how completely he trusted her. Finally, with an open mouth, she began to puff little teasing breaths just above his testicles, warming them and watching the clenching of the muscles of his ass as he cried out in wordless desire.
“Now turn over,” she whispered as she released him from the weight of her body. He obeyed, lying utterly exposed, his eyes closed, all of his taut, thin length revealed. Billy intended to touch him slowly and lingeringly on all his most sensitive parts, his furrowed forehead, his temples, under his jaw, inside his elbows, his nipples, all the places that men love to have caressed as much as women do, but when she saw how rampantly distended he was, she instantly abandoned that idea. She had to have his cock in her again, right now, and she moved lithely, flinging one of her legs back over his body and balancing on the bed on her knees while she held his robust penis, swollen savagely now, in both hands so that she could guide him inside her. His eyes were open and he watched her face until the tip of his penis just nuzzled at the lips he’d entered so brutally before, watched as she gradually pushed him into the warm, quivering place between her legs. He didn’t stir as Billy gradually eased the pliant column of her body down until he was enfolded deep, deep into her flesh. She lay forward on his chest so that her head was pillowed in his neck. He allowed her to set her own pace, rising and falling above him for a few crucial inches, using his penis as her plaything, her possession. He held himself back brutally and gave himself utterly to her, delighting in the increasing rapidity of her movements, avidly watching the purposeful, building tension of her body as she drove herself closer and closer to the sought-after moment after which there was no turning back. At last she threw back her head in sightless ecstasy, her whole body shuddering uncontrollably, gasping in a fine heedlessness, until she collapsed back onto his chest, pulsating in the still spasmodic aftermath of her orgasm. Only then did he lift her in his powerful arms and turn her over so that she was lying on her back, only then, like a heathen worshiping a deity, did he smoothly reenter the pasture of her body and, with an exquisite concentration and sternly controlled fierceness, slowly allow himself to possess her again.
“Order something you can eat with one hand,” Sam told Billy, “because I’m not going to let go of this one.”
“Not even if I promise to let you have it back?”
“No. I don’t trust you that much. You’re a bossy babe.”
“Is that why you picked a pizzeria?”
“Maybe. Or maybe because there are four of them on this street. I eat in this one almost every night.”
“The French would call it your cantine.” Billy was divinely disheveled, although she’d tried to do something about her hair with Sam’s hairbrush. She had managed to brush her teeth with his toothbrush, and take half a bath in his tiny tub. She wore one of his sweaters, an ancient, yellow, V-necked Shetland that covered one shoulder and fell off the other. It was cinched in at the waist with an old blue tie she’d found in his closet, but nothing had erased the traces of lovemaking that left her cheeks patched with red where his whiskers had rubbed her and her lips swollen and her dark eyes huge and bright and heavy with gratification.
“I knew you’d get around to giving me a French lesson if I waited long enough,” he said.
“Don’t count on it, I have other things planned for you.”
“Could you describe them?”
“Not here, Sam, not in a public place.”
“Nobody’s listening. Anyway, they’re all French.”
“Do you want to get hard again?” Billy’s voice was soft and certain.
“It’s not about want. I need to eat two or three pizzas … but after dinner, yeah, that’s just exactly what I want.”
“After dinner, Sam—if you think you can handle it.”
“Are you sure this is a sabbatical year, or were you run out of town by the PTA?”
“You’ll never know,” she laughed. “I have my little secrets.”
“Babe, let’s go to your place first, wherever it is, and pick up anything you need to spend the night and tomorrow and tomorrow night and—”
“Oh … no … let’s not. That would … oh, you know … take too long. There’s a drugstore open at the corner. All I need is my own toothbrush and a comb. I have simple tastes.”
“You look better in my clothes than in yours.”
“I don’t always dress the way I did today. You can’t teach in jeans and sneakers.”
“We can go to your hotel tomorrow, then, and get your clothes and stuff.”
“Sam, wait a minute! I’m not planning to move in with you.”
“Why not?”
/> “It’s … well, it’s just not a good idea. It’s too soon to do anything like that, in the first place, and besides, I have to be independent. That’s just the way I am.”
“You mean I’m rushing you.”
“Sort of. It just isn’t—sensible.”
“You’re not a sensible girl, babe.”
“True, I’m not, I never have been. It’s one of my major fatal flaws … and if I move in, you’ll find out all the other ones.”
“Okay, I’m willing to find them out one day at a time. But the invitation’s open. My house is your house, my clothes are your clothes, my bed is your bed.”
“Sam, how could any woman let you get away? How come you got divorced?”
“We married too young, right out of college. I didn’t have the brains to know that sculpture doesn’t pay unless you happen to hit it just right … and by the time I had a dealer and started to sell enough to support us, she’d lost patience. I never blamed her. And you, Honey, darling—no, I simply can’t deal with that name—babe, darling, why did you dump your husband?”
“I found out that he was a basic shit. A first-class basic shit, mind you. I guess you can’t blame a man for his character—you have to blame yourself for your choice. But to hell with it, if I were still married I wouldn’t be here, and that idea—the very possibility of missing this particular day of my life—it’s.… unthinkable … entirely out of the question! Oh, Sam, what if I hadn’t bought that bottle?” Billy asked, suddenly appalled at how much had depended on her last-minute purchase.
“Come on, you know I’d have found a way to talk to you, once I saw you sitting there alone. The bottle was the perfect excuse.”
“Is it or isn’t it a Chinese apothecary bottle, Sam?”
“Look at it this way, why shouldn’t it be? If you really want to know, darling, we should ask an expert. I haven’t got a clue.”
Billy returned to the Ritz early Monday morning, leaving Sam, who had been working in his studio since shortly after dawn, as was his habit. She found a large pile of phone messages and invitations waiting for her on the desk in her sitting room. She read through them impatiently, threw them back on the desk and settled down on a couch to think. All these pieces of paper represented an entire life that she could no longer lead and still be with Sam. He thought she was going to spend the day at the Bibliothèque Nationale, but she’d promised to return with a bathrobe and a few clothes at four o’clock when he always quit work.
She picked up the Michelin green guide to Paris that she kept handy for planning the museum excursions for which she still hadn’t found time. On one of the first pages she pounced on the map she needed. Billy put a red X in each of three places, the Place des Vosges, the Place Vendôme, where the Ritz was located, and the Rue Vaneau. The X’s formed a greatly elongated triangle with the Place des Vosges at its longest point, to the north of the Seine. It was the easternmost square of historic Paris, as far distant from the Ritz, on the Right Bank, as it was from the Rue Vaneau, on the Left. She drew a circle around the Marais, stopping short of the Pont Neuf, that popular stop on the tourist circuit of Paris. Many people she knew would be taking that inevitable stroll across the Pont Neuf as spring advanced, she thought, wishing desperately that nobody had ever decreed that a visit to Paris in the spring was an obligatory part of the good life.
Wouldn’t you just know, Billy thought, that a new vogue for living in the dilapidated, formerly royal quarter of the Marais had just come into existence? The glory of the Marais as a residential quarter had reached its height during the seventeenth century, but during the reign of Louis XVI the nobility had started to move westward. After the French Revolution the Marais had been abandoned for almost two hundred years. Wasn’t it just her luck that when she’d found a man who loved her for herself, he’d be living smack in the center of the newest chic place in Paris for finding an old apartment and renovating it?
Still, the interest in the Marais was just beginning, it wasn’t as if Sam had a studio established opposite Dior, and he’d told her that after his long working days he found more than enough café and bistro life in the Marais to keep him there almost all of the time, particularly since getting from the Marais to anywhere else in Paris was difficult by bus or Métro and damn near impossible by taxi. This morning it had taken her taxi three-quarters of an hour to fight its way up the Rue de Rivoli to the Ritz.
Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop, think, she commanded herself. You lied yourself into this double life and now you’ve got to stick with it. If only she weren’t so rampagingly giddy, so dizzily euphoric, so flushed with the kind of dangerous erotic excitement that brooked no consequences. She had to stop thinking about Sam, stop thinking about the firmness, already so dear, of his lips and the amused, slow sound of his voice and those impossibly fascinating hollows under his cheekbones, she had to stop, stop it this very second, stop and figure out what she was going to do.
The woman Sam had met two days ago was a woman no other man had seen with clear eyes since Ellis Ikehorn had stopped to take another look at her when she was a twenty-year-old secretary. Sam had met a woman who was no more, no less than a plain human being, the essential human being of seventeen years ago whom nobody alive now knew besides Jessica and Dolly.… and yes, to be fair, Spider Elliott, who’d never paid the slightest homage to the fact that she was Billy Ikehorn and could buy the Ritz itself if the Sultan of Brunei, the richest man in the world, who had just bought it for himself, wanted to sell.
Billy Ikehorn, the life she led and everything she represented, didn’t exist for Sam Jamison. He probably wouldn’t have anything to say to such a person and certainly wouldn’t dream of getting involved with her.
Involved. That was what they were. Intimately involved. In love? In love with love? In love with that ever-young legend of Paris in April? She couldn’t say exactly, she was afraid to be any more impulsive than she’d already been—it had been the most impulsive forty-eight hours of her impulsive life—but nothing in the world could stop her from being with him tonight and tomorrow and the day after, and that was enough for now. She felt total interest in Sam Jamison. It wasn’t just sex. Since her divorce she’d had a few cautious flings, but sex hadn’t survived her fear of being a mark, of being a target. Sex had never been enough to keep her with a man she suspected was an opportunist. And, Wilhelmina Winthrop, if you don’t stop thinking about tonight with Sam, you’re never going to get your plans made.
Billy jumped as there was a light tap on her door. Almost immediately, even before she could answer the knock, the door opened and a gouvernante entered, carrying a large vase full of the first pale peach tulips from Holland that the Ritz buys by the thousands each week. Each section of the hotel has its own gouvernante, a young, good-looking, smartly dressed, highly efficient woman who speaks at least six languages and whose function in life is to see that all the staff are performing their tasks impeccably and that all the clients are well taken care of in every detail.
“Oh, Mrs. Ikehorn, forgive me, I thought this room was empty. The maids said they’d just made it up and they’d noticed that some of your flowers weren’t quite fresh.”
“I just came in, Mademoiselle Hélène,” Billy said. “Thank you. Please put them down on the table.”
Mademoiselle Hélène’s eyes flicked longingly over the roses on the mantel, and Billy knew that left to her own devices she’d check out the absolute freshness of every last one of the arrangements with which the Windsor suite was automatically filled. But her training was too good for her to be unaware that Billy wanted to be alone, and she left with a quick smile.
As soon as the room was empty, Billy jumped up and started pacing back and forth between the windows that looked out over the Place Vendôme. The Ritz, she thought, the bloody wonderful Ritz! It was like living at home with your parents and two hundred servants, all of whom want nothing more than to please you, a matter that merely requires that they know where you are at all times.
The familiar room-service waiters who brought her breakfast every morning and the second set of waiters who brought her strong tea as she dressed for dinner at night would exchange notes. The men at the reception desk who were in charge of the safe deposit boxes would begin to wonder what had happened to her when she didn’t emerge from the elevator almost every night, fully dressed except for her jewels, which she removed as she needed them, signing a receipt each time she opened her safe deposit box and each time she returned her treasures to the vault. Robert, her driver, who was outside the hotel this very minute waiting for her, would expect to drive her to the Rue Vaneau as usual, to wait for her there and drive her back to the Ritz to dress. Later he would be ready to drive her out to dinner and back again to the Ritz. At the concierge’s desk, messages would continue to pile up; carbons of these messages, as well as all letters and invitations would be routinely sent upstairs and slid under the door. The three concierges of the day shift and the three of the night shift, all six of whom she saw every day, would soon put their heads together. Within a week everyone from the top management of the Ritz down to the sous-sous-chef in the kitchen, who scrambled her eggs every morning just the way she liked them, would know that she was spending her nights on the tiles.
Scruples Two Page 27
