“Ssshhh …”
“I can’t.”
“If memory serves, you most certainly can.”
The shorts dropped to his ankles, and her long fingers closed around him.
“This isn’t right.”
“Of course it isn’t. That’s the point. It never has been.”
“Mitzi …” He took her by her bare shoulders and raised her to her feet, proud of his resolve. “I don’t want to.”
“So why are you getting harder in my hand?”
Did she really think him so powerless in the face of her desire?
He was on the point of posing the question when she dropped once more to her knees, and all thoughts of resistance were swept aside by the warm embrace of her mouth. His hands went instinctively to her head, his fingers entwining themselves in her soft hair.
It always surprised him that she appeared to derive so much enjoyment from having him in her mouth. Her pleasure seemed almost to equal his own, if the low moans she emitted every so often were anything to go by.
Breaking off, she peered up at him. “You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rising slowly to her feet, she added, “You don’t have to follow me. I’ll quite understand if you let yourself out.”
With that, she made off down the corridor, a dim form fading into the gloom.
His thoughts turned to Lilian. He imagined her standing there in the darkness beside him, observing him, waiting to see what he did, and yet he still stepped out of the shorts gathered around his ankles, leaving them where they lay.
Mitzi was waiting for him on the bed. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear the faint squeak of the springs as she adjusted her position. He removed his shirt and laid it carefully on the floor, aware of the eggs, two in each of the breast pockets.
“I should warn you, I’m very wet.”
He shed his desert boots and his socks and lay down beside her, naked.
“I’ve been wet for hours, thinking about you.”
She liked to talk, and she liked to take her time, he knew that, just as he knew that her lovemaking with Lionel had always been a rushed and entirely silent affair.
“Are you sure you didn’t start without me?”
“I might have, just a bit,” she admitted coquettishly. Reaching for his wrist, she drew his hand down her body, guiding his fingers between her legs. She could have raised the hem of the negligee, but chose not to, preferring that he first feel her through the material.
“You see? I wasn’t lying.”
He slowly worked a finger inside of her, as far as the restraining tension of the moist satin would permit. Her mouth reached for his, her tongue edging between his lips, mimicking the movement of his finger.
Apart from the first time, when he had gone to her room at the Riviera Hotel and found her naked beneath the sheet on the mattress on the floor, underwear of some kind or another had always played a role in their lovemaking. Underwear lent an illicit frisson to their trysts, a whiff of the forbidden, its flimsy barrier a token gesture to Victorian prudishness.
Max didn’t mind; it cost him nothing to play along. It was also an excuse to draw out their few precious moments alone.
On this occasion, though, Mitzi’s characteristic restraint seemed to desert her suddenly. Straddling him in one swift movement, she guided him into her.
“I’m sorry, I need to feel you inside me. Just for a moment. Just for a moment …”
The moment was heralded by the eldritch scream of the air-raid siren, its sickening cadence somehow all the more ominous for the fact that it had gone unheard for so long.
“Oh God …,” Max breathed.
It wasn’t the siren. For all he cared, two hundred German bombers could have been closing in on Malta with instructions to obliterate Number 18 Windmill Street. They were nothing when set alongside the sensation of Mitzi lowering herself onto him.
“I’ll stop if you want,” she teased. “We probably should.”
He placed his hands on her hips and drew her down the rest of the way. She winced, adjusting her position to accommodate him.
“My God, you’re a good fit. Any more would be too much.”
His hands climbed to her small firm breasts, the nipples hard beneath the satin. She placed her hands over his, holding them there.
“We’ve still got time to make the shelter,” she said, almost drunkenly.
“Oh, I think I’ve already found safe harbor.”
It was a terrible joke, a childish
