Sweet as Sin

by Felix Baron

  She nodded. Her slender young shoulders were heaving. Rolf had no choice but to go to her and hug her, patting her back and murmuring, ‘There, there’, and fighting the growing erection that holding her slender body close to his inspired. What sort of monster was he? The girl was in terror and suffering from a past trauma. How could he be so aware of the way her sobs made her small breasts quiver against his chest and of the way the sweet curve of her hip felt under his ‘comforting’ hand? As soon as her sobs subsided, Rolf backed off, sure his face was crimson, and finished his cold breakfast.

  Penny drove her new car into Sag Harbor, to take her mind off things and pick up a few groceries. Rolf got dressed and went looking for Trixie. He found her in the room they’d decided would be his home office, cum library, cum den, cum TV room. In a tiny flared skirt and a gingham blouse that tied between her breasts, she was busily unpacking and sorting his books. His heart melted. What an angel she was! If he’d ever harboured an unkind thought towards her, he swore he never would again.

  They unpacked and sorted and shelved, together. Even doing that; even with a wisp of hair falling over her forehead and needing to be puffed away; even with a smudge of dust on the tip of her nose, his bride was still incredibly sexy. She allowed him an occasional kiss. She let him hold her thighs when she climbed onto his desk to reach a high shelf. Trixie didn’t let him go beyond that, ‘Or we’d never get your books put away!’

  They lunched on crackers and pâté. He offered to mix her a martini.

  ‘Are you trying to seduce me with strong drink, Mr Carmichael?’ she accused.

  ‘If that’s what it takes.’

  ‘Try again, later, after supper,’ she said. ‘I promise it’ll work.’

  For the rest of the afternoon. Rolf whistled, off-key. Trixie didn’t object.

  His mood crashed when Penny returned, shivering and hugging herself.

  ‘What is it?’ her Mother demanded.

  ‘Him!’

  ‘The Blair boy?’

  ‘One of the Blairs, I think. I never got a good look at him, but he followed me all over Sag Harbor village.’

  ‘Come on,’ Rolf said. ‘We’ll go back and find this bastard and I’ll have a word with him.’

  ‘You won’t do anything rash?’ Trixie asked.

  Rolf made tight fists. ‘Of course not. I’m not a violent man.’

  They drove to Sag Harbor and scoured the surrounding area for hours, but neither Trixie nor Penny were able to catch sight of Penny’s persecutor. Rolf pulled into a crab-shack for a late supper and they called it a day. When they got home, neither Trixie nor Rolf were in the mood for love-making.

  The next morning, Rolf took them to the police. The desk sergeant opened a file but apologised that there wasn’t much more he could do unless they could make a positive ID of the shadowy figure that Penny had thought she’d glimpsed, and not unless the alleged stalker actually did something.

  That night, Rolf was nuzzling between Trixie’s thighs and she’d just started to squirm and pant when there was a rap on their bedroom door. Trixie rose, put on a robe and answered it. Penny’d had a nightmare. Trixie returned with her daughter to her bed, to comfort her.

  Rolf tried to sleep.

  Twenty

  Rolf announced, ‘We should get a dog – a big dog – maybe two. Having dogs around would make Penny feel more secure.’

  Trixie shivered. ‘I’m afraid of big dogs.’

  Penny said, ‘You’re scarier than any dog, no matter how big, Rolf.’

  His chest expanded. ‘But I can’t be here watching over you all the time. I still have work to take care of.’

  Penny asked, ‘How about a gun?’

  ‘I could never shoot one,’ Trixie declared. ‘Horrible things!’

  ‘I could,’ Penny claimed, ‘if Rolf would teach me how.’

  ‘I have a revolver at my office,’ he said. ‘My work has sometimes taken me into places where carrying one is a good idea. I could bring it home. It’s legal – I have a permit.’

  Rolf’s revolver was a double-action, .38 calibre, Ruger GPF-840, seven pounds of blued metal with a rosewood and rubber grip. Trixie claimed it was the most repulsive thing she’d ever seen. Penny seemed to find it fascinating. Rolf knew enough pop-Freudian psychology to understand why her admiration for his deadly weapon pleased him, and to try to dismiss it.

  Most youngsters would have been impatient to take the gun outside and try firing it. Penny impressed Rolf by accepting that a revolver isn’t a toy, and has to be learned about. Trixie provided latex gloves to protect her daughter’s pretty hands and spread newspaper on the kitchen table. Rolf taught Penny how to strip the weapon, clean it and reassemble it. He lectured her about safe usage and showed her how to adjust the trigger pressure and what ‘cocked’ and ‘half-cocked’ meant. Trixie giggled at those words and snorted when he told Penny, ‘You’ve picked up stripping and cleaning very quickly.’

  Trixie’s snort warned him that he’d committed a double-entendre.

  Penny said, ‘I’ve taken every camera I’ve ever owned apart, and I’ve fixed a few, so I’ve had some practice.’

  On Rolf’s insistence, she went up to change into jeans and a top with long sleeves. The wooded area in the back of their property was pretty wild and there’d be bugs. He found a hollow, so they had natural ‘butts’, and push-pinned a sheet of paper to the trunk of a dead tree, at about the height of a man’s crotch.

  He strode off six long paces and scratched a line in the dirt with the edge of his boot. ‘This is far enough away, and that’s where you aim,’ he said.

  ‘To hit his – um . . .’

  ‘No. The bullet will often go high, until you’ve had a lot of practice. Aim down there and you’ll be likely get him somewhere in the torso. If you do happen to hit him there, that’ll take care of him just as well.’

  Penny took a two-handed grip and slowly squeezed the trigger, as Rolf had told her. She hit another tree, three feet to the side and five feet higher than her target. ‘Oh!’

  ‘Like this.’ Rolf put his arms around her, from behind. As he was so much taller, he had to bend his knees. His arms went round her and his hands took hers.

  Penny leaned back against him, her bottom against his lap, the scent of her hair in his nostrils. ‘Now I feel safe,’ she whispered.

  Rolf said, ‘Provided you’ve a firm grip, if you point at the target with your index finger and squeeze with your second finger, the bullet will go where you point. Try it.’

  Her second shot hit the right tree but seven feet up. Her fifth clipped a corner off the sheet of paper.

  ‘If that tree had been a man,’ Rolf said, ‘you just killed him, or at least took him down.’

  ‘Really! Oh, Rolf, you are such a good teacher!’

  ‘It’s you who are a fine pupil.’

  She twisted round and flung her arms about his neck. As he was half-squatting, he lost his balance and toppled backwards. Penny’s lithe little body thudded on top of him.

  She sat up, astride his hips. ‘Oh! Did I hurt you, Rolf? I’m so sorry.’

  He should have lifted her off, but where to get hold of her? Sternly, he told her, ‘I’m fine, but no horseplay when there are guns around, OK, Penny?’

  She grinned. ‘Horseplay?’ Her hips moved on him. ‘Gee up, Rolf, my fine stallion.’

  ‘Penny!’ he warned.

  ‘Sorry.’ She climbed to her feet. ‘Can we reload, please, Rolf?’

  A box of ammunition later, Penny could hit the paper with almost every shot and without Rolf holding her hands.

  ‘Once a week, you come out here and practise, OK?’

  In a Western drawl, she said, ‘Sure thing, Wyatt. We still on for that little upcoming fracas at the OK Corral?’

  When they got back to the kitchen, Trixie looked them up and down and plucked a dry leaf from Rolf’s hair. ‘Target practice, huh? You shooting from a horizontal position, Rolf?’

  He retreated upstai
rs to change.

  After six more ‘breather’ phone calls in one week, Rolf had their number changed. That seemed to work.

  Commuting was a bitch. Rolf decided he’d go into the City on Wednesday mornings, sleep over at his old apartment and return on Friday evenings. Penny and Trixie started to go riding at a local stables once or twice a week. They also took up antique hunting, scouring the surrounding towns and villages. As they lived near what had once been a major whaling port, Trixie decided to collect scrimshaw and read up on the subject, to Rolf’s pleased surprise. She surprised him again when she got Penny to teach her photography, and applied herself to that, as well.

  They started by photographing sea- and landscapes but together they developed an interest in portrait photography. Trixie presented Rolf with a small portfolio of glamorous shots that Penny had taken of her. Some of them were very sexy – not nudes or even close – but with costumes and poses reminiscent of the ‘cheesecake’ pin-ups of the forties and fifties. Usually there were generous lengths of her stockinged legs on display.

  ‘For your eyes only, Rolf,’ Trixie told him, to his relief.

  Every week, Penny gave Rolf a letter to Andrew to mail for her. One week it was a large manila envelope marked, ‘Do Not Fold.’

  Rolf raised an enquiring brow.

  ‘It’s pictures Mom took of me that I thought he’d like,’ she explained. ‘Nothing like the ones of her that I took for you, I promise.’

  ‘Maybe he’d like some like those, of you.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Within decent limits, why not? After all, you two are engaged.’

  Two days later she showed him a picture Trixie had taken of her, to see if he approved. In it, she was posed looking cute, sitting on a fence, in a tied gingham shirt and a wind-blown skirt that had lifted high enough to show a few inches of her golden thighs above the tops of her dark stockings. Obviously, Penny’s pose had been inspired by the same era of pin-ups as her mother.

  ‘Mom told me that men like to see a girl’s legs in stockings,’ she said, coyly.

  ‘I think your mother is right.’

  ‘Is it OK to send this one to Andrew?’

  ‘He’ll find it – inspirational – I’m sure.’ He looked closer. ‘There’s a tiny mark, Penny, down in the bottom left corner.’

  ‘I know. My fault. I spilled something on my camera’s lens. I’ve ordered a special solvent. I don’t want to chance scratching the glass. Does it spoil the picture?’

  Rolf grinned. ‘That little smudge is the last thing Andrew is going to look at when he sees this. He’s a lucky boy.’

  But Rolf wasn’t such a lucky man. The pattern that he’d hoped he and Trixie had left behind in Paris continued. She complained about being very busy, though Rolf couldn’t imagine what with. Antique hunting, riding and photography couldn’t consume all her energies. She and Penny shared the cooking, Penny taking the lion’s share, except for when he barbecued. Two cleaners from a service came in three days a week. There was a laundry service that picked up, so the hi-tech washing machine and dryer were hardly ever used. It wasn’t that Trixie was avoiding sex with him. In fact, sometimes she complained that he was neglecting her that way. It just seemed to work out that once a week was all they could manage, at first, then once every two weeks, and then once a month . . .

  Trixie and Penny returned to the police station. They explained to the desk sergeant that he could close that file. Trixie said she was embarrassed to admit it, but looked like her daughter might have been imagining things. Penny was sorry if she’d caused a problem. The sergeant ran his eyes up Penny’s long bare legs and down into Trixie’s deep cleavage and assured them that they’d caused no problems and to stop by any time.

  Penny adjusted to having a man around most of the time, though Rolf didn’t get used to Penny’s constant presence. As a rule, she didn’t get fully dressed before noon. In the mornings, she wore wraps or robes that would have looked sexy on a sedate young lady. Penny wasn’t sedate. She was athletic and full of energy. She bounced around the house. Stairs were for bounding up and down, two or three steps at a time. When the garment a girl wears is short and only closed by a belt, vigorous movement leads to exposure, usually briefly, but exposure none the less. Rolf took to avoiding the stairs in the mornings, unless he knew where she was.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like the flashes of Penny’s long slender thighs or the quick peeks into her tender young cleavage. The problem was, he enjoyed them far too much.

  The pool service sent a team to clean and open up the pool. Penny was delighted. Her vacation tan had virtually disappeared. Now she’d be able to swim, which she loved to do, and she could sunbathe. The pool was very private, so she wore her skimpiest bikinis, or sometimes just the bottom halves.

  Rolf accidentally discovered that the ten-foot fence didn’t block the view of someone looking down on the pool through the windows of the spare bedrooms. He thought about mentioning that to Penny, or maybe talking to Trixie about how the pool could be seen from upstairs, and have her warn her daughter. If he did, though, they’d know he’d looked down on Penny, sunning herself when almost naked. They’d guess that he hadn’t averted his gaze, because, to his deep shame, he hadn’t. He decided to say nothing. It’d be easier to simply avoid those rooms. Rolf had no reason to enter them, after all. No reason at all. Ever.

  Twenty-one

  At the ungodly hour of six in the morning, Trixie made her face up and tried on the swimsuit she’d kept hidden at the bottom of one of her lingerie drawers. It was a glossy black ‘sling-shot’ by Cici that she’d bought on-line from Bikini-Beach. The suit was little more than a G-string pouch, with straps that widened to almost two and a half inches where they passed up over her breasts en route to the back of her neck. There, they were joined to a third narrower strip that ran down her back and disappeared between the cheeks of her bottom. Even with the straps adjusted to be as tight as they could go, it was difficult for her to move without fully exposing one breast, or more likely, both.

  She practised, finding how to walk holding her body still, so that the straps still crossed her nipples, and how to move to ‘accidentally’ expose them. Trixie stepped into raffia wedgies that rose five inches at her heels and checked herself in the mirror again. The way she was dressed shouted, ‘Fuck me, I’m a slut!’

  Perfect.

  She’d been planning today’s outing ever since she and Penny had got lost and had stumbled across a golden beach where you could rent cabanas to change in. There’d been several beautiful young people playing volleyball on that beach, so she wasn’t likely to forget it.

  It was important that she be appropriately dressed. Trixie covered her body with a little pink sundress and her head with an enormous pink straw hat. With a pink parasol in her hand and her pink sunglasses dangling around her neck, she crept downstairs. Rolf had left for Manhattan yesterday. He wouldn’t be back till suppertime tomorrow. Penny was still fast asleep. Trixie might get into trouble about how she planned to spend her day, but that was in the future. A woman has needs. She was perfectly prepared to pay, later, for satisfying hers today.

  In the kitchen, she filled a quart thermos with icy gin and added a splash of dry vermouth. The thermos came with a carrying case that had styrofoam compartments for two martini glasses and a small jar of olives. She wrapped a third glass in a thick fluffy towel and added it to the contents of her oversized pink raffia bag. There! She was all ready for her teensy little ‘walk on the wild side’.

  Her Lexus purred around the driveway and turned east onto the blacktop. There were no clouds. The sun was up and beaming benevolently. It looked like it was going to be an absolutely perfect day.

  After an hour’s drive and only two wrong turns she found the beach she was looking for. The tide was out. There weren’t many people about yet. Trixie paid the grizzled old man in the wooden booth and was given a key to cabana number twenty-eight, the furthest and most isolated little hut
. The sand dragged on her sandals but Trixie was sure-footed and stronger than she looked. When she got to number twenty-eight, she judged it ideal for her purposes. There were grass-crowned dunes behind it and between it and the other cabanas, that protected its privacy.

  It was about eight feet-by-eight, with one door and two narrow windows. Inside, it was bare except for the deep wooden bench that ran around three sides. There were hooks on the wall for people to hang their things on. Trixie unpacked her bag, hung her dress up and went outside, ready to be bait in her own trap.

  The cabana came with two deck chairs that were chained to its front wall. Both were patched and rickety. Trixie chose the soundest and stretched out. The only negative was the sun. She hated to discolour her pure talc-white skin. The hat helped some but her parasol was woefully inadequate. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  A young couple passed, hand-in-hand, giggling, obviously heading into the dunes to find their own privacy. A ragged-looking man of about Rolf’s age made his way along the beach swinging a metal detector. The sun rose higher. Trixie was considering whether to head back into the cabana for a little drink when she heard two young male voices bellowing, as young male voices often do. She lifted her sunglasses to her forehead and put her binoculars to her eyes.

  They were tossing a beach ball back and forth. One was a tow-head with too much chin and not enough forehead. The other had a Mediterranean look, with raven hair pulled into a pony-tail. They looked to be about Penny’s age, or maybe a year younger. More importantly, both obviously worked out. They were tanned and had muscles that rippled, with hard pectorals, ridged abdominals and thighs that bulged like jodhpurs. They’d be tireless lovers – probably not sophisticated – but tireless.

  Trixie licked her lips. A glance down assured her that although her nipples were almost exposed, technically, she wasn’t actually indecent. She sucked her tummy in and raised her binoculars again.

  They’d seen her but were pretending they hadn’t. It was strictly by chance that their strolling game of toss-the-beach-ball stopped strolling right in front of her cabana. Trixie smiled to herself and crossed and recrossed her legs. She was the perfect lure for teenaged males. All she had to do was wait.