“I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.”
She laughed a little; it had a musical sound. “I can’t help liking you.”
“Why fight it? Do you do anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, go to school, or…do rich girls like you ever work?”
“Of course we work! If we want to.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t want to…. But maybe I’ll have to, someday. I’m not so rich, you know. We got hit hard in the Crash.”
“I didn’t feel a thing.”
She flashed me a quick frown. “Don’t be smug. It’s not a joke, people jumping out of windows.”
“I know it isn’t. How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Are you in school?”
“I might go to college. I wasn’t planning to, but…”
“What happened?”
“I was engaged to this boy.”
“You were?”
“He met someone else.”
“Not someone prettier. That wouldn’t be possible.”
Her eyes studied the dark water. “He went to Europe. Met her on the
“Ah. Shipboard romance.”
“Maybe it started that way. He’s engaged to her, now.”
“I know an excellent way for you to get back at him.”
“How’s that?”
And when her head was tilted up to look at me while she asked that question, I kissed her. It started out gentle and sweet, but then it got hot and deep, and when we parted, we were both damn near panting. I leaned over the rail and caught my breath and watched whitecaps rolling over the inky sea.
“You kissed fellas before,” I noted.
“Once or twice,” she said, and she kissed me again.
Her stateroom was just across the hall from mine, but as we paused there, I took a moment from us pawing each other and said breathlessly, “I gotta get something from my room.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You know…something.”
“What…Sheiks?” She swatted the air. “I have some in my train case.”
I guess you’ve guessed by now she wasn’t a virgin. But she wasn’t all that experienced, either; she seemed surprised when, after a while, deep inside of her, I rolled with her, moving her around and up on top. I had a feeling her former fiance had been strictly a missionary position sort of guy.
But she soon got the swing of it, and was liking riding rather than being ridden. Her eyes were half-hooded, as if she were tipsy with desire, her body washed with ivory from the porthole, the shadows of the half-open shutters making an exquisite pattern on the smooth planes of her body as she leaned forward, hips grinding, breasts swaying. Those breasts, lovely, perfectly conical, not big, not small, were peaked with large, swollen aureoles, like those of an adolescent girl just entering puberty. She was well out of puberty, however, and the smooth warmth of her around me, the movie star loveliness of her hovering over me, turned me tipsy, too….
She slipped out of bed, and into the bathroom while I plucked a tissue from the nightstand to dispose of the lambskin armor she’d provided me. Two or three minutes later, she returned, and slipped the compact curves of her flawless young body into her undergarment, a creamy little teddy, got herself a Camel from her purse on a bamboo chair, and lighted the ciggie up with a tiny silver lighter.
“You want a tailor-made?” she asked.
“No. It’s one bad habit I haven’t got around to.”
“We used to roll ’em, back at girls’ school.” She inhaled, exhaled, the blue smoke drifting like vapor. “You got anything to nip at?”
“There’s a flask in my jacket pocket…no, the other pocket.”
Cigarette dangling from the Kewpie mouth, she unscrewed the cap on the silver flask and had a jolt. “Ah! Demon rum. Want some?”
“Sure. Bring it back to bed with you.”
And she did, passing me the flask as she eased under the covers next to me.
