Dave Id

Tough-To-Tame

Chapter 1

Nan Mikell shook out the full length of her glowing auburn hair until the tips, hanging far out over the sparkling blue pool, dipped lightly in the water. Her brown, firm-fleshed arm lazily went over the edge of the pool and followed it; she watched the prismatic effect of the water bend her arm, immersed up to the forearm, at an acute angle. She saw the scarlet-tipped fingers of her hand waving gently at her under the water.

Nan rolled over on the cushion. The water of the pool was icy cold; the air was warm and humid. The effect of the two temperatures on her skin was sensual in the extreme. And the Florida sun beat down body, leaving a fine film of silvery sweat over her aroused body. For she was aroused, after all. No use trying to hide that from herself. She had been lying here in the sun on the deck of the big Bal Harbour house for an hour now, and her reverie had passed from her body-slim and brown in its fashionably Palm Beach string bikini, too daring for wear among any but the most intimate of friends-to the mornings calls, to the appointment book (with its dreary succession of charities and obligatory appearances), back to her body again.

And a fine body it is, too, she thought-the Hard masculine practicality of her thoroughly divided mind asserting itself again. Thinking of it, she closed her eyes and, lying back on the cushion, she ran the fingers of one soft brown hand down the silky skin of her flank, naked all the way down except for the soft string that held the shamelessly tiny piece of cloth over her crotch. Little goose bumps broke out along the length of her nude thigh as the fingers touched, caressed, stirred the tiny sub-bleached golden hairs on her leg. Still, not wanting to rush her little game to its conclusion, she kept up the soft caresses, barely touching herself. It was a game, after all-a game she played with herself.

A game she played with herself daily now, whenever the schedule showed a break, whenever she had an hour or so alone to herself in the big house, with its decked pool cantilevered out over the carport and the lush garden below. These early afternoons had come to be almost the only thing she liked about the echoing emptiness of the house: the warm air and the delicious feeling of aloneness…and the accompanying fantasy-rich and opulent and exotically un-Florida, un-stodgy Bal Harbour-that accompanied it all.

The fantasy had already begun in her mind. It varied, daily, with the different impressions that she had absorbed in the morning. Always there was the same delicately handsome young body, tanned and muscled, the same masculine, but ever so gentle, hands on her eagerly receptive skin, the same soft lips covering her with hot, insistent kisses, building her excitement up ever so slowly to a frenzy of passion, again, again…and then bringing her back down slowly from the heights, slowly and carefully, wary of breaking the magic spell that lay upon her as she lay back and absorbed it all with a delicious passivity that required nothing of her but that she respond.

The face…the face changed daily. It was now the face of a fresh, unspoiled beach boy she'd spotted coming out of the surf, some yards down from the limits of her private beach. Another time it might be a bronzed young faun she'd run into, coming out of a Miami Beach bar a week before. It was always a face that had made an impression of…what? Innocent, puckish sensuality? The abandon of adolescence half-corrupted? It didn't matter. It was the impression made that mattered. No. The face could fade. It was the strong and smooth young body, the thing that did not change, that mattered. It was the gently insistent hands. Most of all, it was the questing, soft, infinitely tender lips, touching her here and there…

She shivered and arched her back to let one of her own brown hands reach behind her back and slip the string of her tiny bra loose. As she did, a stray wisp of cool breeze broke through the dampness of the Florida air, slipped inside her bra, caressed the unseen dark nipples of her little breasts so that they sprang to a delicious stiffness, still under the barely-confining cloth.

Her eyes remained closed. That was part of the game. The lover would remain an imagined lover. The caresses, the kisses would fall in silence upon her, unseen. And soon the reality of her own two hands, miming his, would be joined by a kissing mouth, touching here and there on her body, coming hotly to rest at last in a wild crescendo of excitement: that part was where her dreams, her fantasies, took over. And the ecstatic uplift of it all-the "high," as her daughter Monica had called it once-was enough. It was enough to blot out the dreariness of her world. The loneliness of it. The emptiness.

Nan Mikell hadn't had a man in nearly a year now.