“That’s the only way I’m going to get close to him.”
“Peter-” She placed her hand on his forearm, but then she could not go on. Instead she stared at him silently and her eyes were green and dark and unfathomable. He saw there was a pulse that throbbed softly in her long graceful neck, just below the ear. Her lips parted, as though she were about to speak. They were delicately sculptured lips,
and she touched them with the pink tip of her tongue, leaving them moist and soft and somehow defenceless. She closed them, without speaking, but the pressure of her fingers on his arm increased, and the carriage of her whole body altered. Her back arched slightly so her lower body swayed towards him and her chin lifted slightly.
“I have been so lonely,” she whispered. “So lonely, for so very long. I only realized how lonely today while I was with you.” Peter felt a choking sensation in his throat, and the prickle of blood behind his eyes.
“I don’t want to be lonely again, ever.” he had let her hair come down. It was very thick and long. It fell in a straight rippling curtain shot through with glowing lights, to her waist.
She had parted it in the centre; a thin straight line of white scalp divided the great black wings and they framed her face, making it appear pale and childlike with eyes too large and vulnerable, and as she came towards where Peter lay the glossy sheets of hair slid silently across the brocade of her gown.
The hem of the gown swept the carpet, and her bare toes peeped out from under it with each step. Narrow finely boned feet, and the nails were trimmed and painted with a colourless lacquer. The sleeves of the gown were wide as batwings and lined internally with sat in, the collar buttoned up in a high Chinese style.
Beside the bed she stopped and her courage and poise seemed to desert her, her shoulders slumped a little and she clasped the long narrow fingers before her in a defensive gesture.
“Peter, I don’t think I am going to be very good at this.” The throaty whisper was barely audible, and her lips trembled with the strength of her appeal. “And I want so badly to be good.” Silently he reached out one hand towards her, palm upwards. The bedclothes covered him to the waist, but his chest and arms were bare, lightly tanned and patterned with dark wiry body hair. As he reached for her the muscle bunched and expanded beneath the skin, and she saw that there was no surplus flesh on his waist, nor on his shoulders and upper arms. He looked lean and hard and tempered, yet leas the lash of a bullwhip, and she did not respond immediately to the invitation, for his masculinity was overpowering.
He folded back the thick down-filled duvet between them, and the sheet was crisp and smoothly ironed in the low rosy light.
“Come,“he ordered gently, but she turned away and with her back to him she undid the buttons of the embroidered gown, beginning at the throat and working downwards.
She slipped the gown from her shoulders, and held it for a moment in the crook of her elbows. The smooth pale flesh gleamed through the fall of dark hair, and she seemed to steel herself like a diver bracing for the plunge into unknown depths.
She let the gown drop with a rustling slide down the full length of her body, and it lay around her ankles in a shallow puddle of peacock colours.
She heard him gasp aloud, and she threw the hair back from her shoulders with a toss of the long, swan- white neck.
The hair hung impenetrably to the small of her back; just above the deep cleft of her lower body it ended in a clean line and her buttocks were round and neat and without blemish, but even as he stared the marble smoothness puckered into a fine rash of gooseflesh as though his eyes had physically caressed her, and she had responded with an appealingly natural awareness that proved how her every sense must be aroused and tingling. At the knowledge Peter felt his heart squeezed.
He wanted to rush to her and sweep her into his arms, but instinct warned him that she must close the last gap herself, and he lay quietly propped on one elbow, feeling the deep ache of wanting spread through his entire body.
She stooped to pick up the gown, and for a moment the long legs were at an awkward coltish angle to each other and the spheres of her buttocks altered shape. No longer perfectly symmetrical, but parted slightly, and in the creamy niche they formed with her thighs there was an instant’s heart-stopping glimpse of a single dense tight curl of hair and the light from beyond tipped the curl with glowing reddish highlights, then she had straightened again, once more lithe and tall,
and she dropped the robe across the low couch and in the same movement turned back to face Peter.
He gasped again and his sense of continuity began to break up into a mosaic of distinct, seemingly unconnected images and sensations.
Her breasts were tiny as those of a pubescent child, but the nipples were startlingly prominent, the colour and texture of ripening young berries, dark wine-red, already fully erect and hard as pebbles.
The pale plain of her belly, with the deep pit of the navel at its centre, that ended at last on the plump darkly furred mound pressed into the deep wedge between her thighs, like a small frightened living creature crouching from the stoop of the falcon.
The feel of her face pressed to his chest, and the tickle of her quick breath stirring his body hair, the almost painful grip of slim powerful arms locked with desperate strength around his waist.
The taste of her mouth as her lips parted slowly, softly, to his and the uncertain flutter of her tongue becoming bolder, velvety on top and slick and slippery on the underside.
The sound of her breathing changing to a deep sonorous pulse in his ears, seeming to keep perfect time with his own.
The smell of her breath, heavy with the aromatic musk of her arousal, and blending with the orangy fragrance of her perfume and the ripe woman smell of her body.
And always the feel of her the warmth and the softness, the hardness of toned muscle and the running ripple of long dark hair about his face and down his body, the crisp electric rasp of tight, tense curls parting to unbearable heat and going on for ever to depths that seemed to reach beyond the frontier of reality and reason.
And then later the stillness of complete peace that reached out from the centre where she lay against his heart and seemed to spread to the farthest corners of his soul.
“I knew that I was lonely,” she whispered. “But I did not realize just how terribly deeply.” And she held him as though she would never relinquish her grip.
Magda woke him in the cold utter darkness three hours before dawn, and it was still dark when they left the chalet. The headlights of the following Mercedes that carried her wolves swept the interior of their saloon through each bend in the steep twisting road down from the mountains.
On take-off from Zurich Magda was in the Lear jet’s left-hand seat, flying as pilot in-command, and she handled the powerful machine with the sedate lack of ostentation which marks the truly competent aviator.
Her personal pilot, a grizzled and taciturn Frenchman, who was flying now as her co-pilot, evidently held her skill in high regard and watched over her with an almost fatherly pride and approval as she cleared Zurich controlled airspace and levelled out at cruise altitude for Paris Orly before she left him to monitor the auto-pilot and came back to the main cabin. Though she sat beside Peter in the black calfskin armchairs, her manner was unchanged from the way it had been during their last flight together in this machine. reserved and polite so that he found it difficult to believe the wonders they had explored together the previous night.
She worked with the two dark-suited secretaries opposite her, speaking her fluent rippling French with the same enchanting trace of accent that marked her English. In the short time since he had joined Narmco, Peter had been forced to make a crash revision of his own French. Now once again he could manage, if not with eclat, at least with competence, in technical and financial discussion. Once or twice Magda turned to him for comment or opinion, and her gaze was serious and remote, seeming as impersonal and efficient as an electronic computer and Peter understood that they were to make no show of their new relationship before employees.
Immediately she proved him wrong, for her co-pilot called her over the cabin speaker.
“We will join the Orly circuit in four minutes, Baroness.” And she turned easily and naturally and kissed Peter’s cheek, still speaking French.
“Pardon me, chill. I will make the landing. I need the flying time in my logbook.” She greased the sleek swift aircraft onto the runway as though she was spreading butter on hot toast. The co-pilot had radioed ahead so that when she parked in the private hangar there were a uniformed immigration poficier and a douanier already waiting.
