Гарольд Роббинс - The Raiders

He was naked. She had learned not to stare at the ugly purplish scar where a German bullet had crashed through his lower right ribs and nearly killed him — or at the lesser white scar in his left armpit, the mark of a flesh wound. She knew she was welcome to stare at what hung between his legs: oversized, at least in her experience, and straight and powerful. He was tanned. He had spent the summer before — that is, the summer of 1947 — at home in Mexico and had spent a great deal of time in the sun, playing tennis and lounging around a pool. He was a trim, sleekly muscled man, not lacking in self-confidence.

She was naked, too, except for a pair of white rayon panties. Antonia was exquisitely beautiful. Her hair was dark-brown, her eyes big and brown, her mouth narrow but her lips fleshy, and her face was stretched over well-defined cheekbones and a firm jawline. She carried no extra flesh, except perhaps for her breasts, which were large and firm and tipped with big rosy nipples. Her panties covered a commodious shiny-pink cleft, with which he had become profoundly intimate.

He had learned of Toni that she was comfortable exposing to him her legs and hips and belly and breasts and was never in any hurry to cover them but that she was not comfortable exposing her crotch and would not pull down her panties until absolutely necessary.

Right now she did not need to have her panties down.

She ran her tongue around his scrotum, then up the length of his penis to the tip. He drew a deep breath and let it out in a low moan.

"You really like that, don't you?" she asked, grinning.

"I had to teach you how," he said, squeezing her shoulder affectionately.

"Well ... if somebody had asked me two months ago if I'd ever do it, I'd have told them hell no, and you're crazy if you think I will."

"That's about what you said when I suggested it."

He had suggested it because they were in bed together and had just discovered they had no condoms; the package was empty. She had shaken her head indignantly. "You mean you want me to fellate you?" she had sneered. "What do you think I am?" Even so, she had lowered her head and impulsively, also a little sullenly, kissed his penis. The next afternoon, after they had coupled, she had pulled off his condom, wiped him with Kleenex, and kissed him again. Then very tentatively she had licked him — including his foreskin which again gleamed with his fluid. She had looked up at him, frowned, then quickly and decisively opened her mouth and shoved half his length into her mouth. She had held it there for ten seconds or so before she pulled away. "Just what you always wanted," she had said. "Your own personal fellatrix."

A week had passed before she actually brought him to an orgasm in her mouth.

Now — comfortable with it, and practiced — she worked rhythmically with her tongue and lips. She had her own way of doing it: without vigor, without bobbing her head up and down, without using her hands, using only her mouth, expertly finding his most sensitive nerves and flicking her tongue over them, drawing the shaft in and sucking on it to tighten her wet caressing lips. "Don't you dare come," she said. "It's too soon."

"I'll try not to spoil your fun," he said.

She murmured a small laugh. "It is fun ... sort of," she said. "But you — you love it, don't you?"

Bat put both hands on her head, gently caressing. "What I love is you, Toni," he said solemnly.

She pulled her head back and held his penis between her hands. "I love you too, Bat. You know how much I love you."

She was in her senior year at Radcliffe, he in his junior year at Harvard. They had met in a psychology class about six weeks ago. She was the same age as Bat, but she was a mature woman with mature ideas about what she liked and what she wanted.

Antonia did not remember when there hadn't been a boat. Her memories of the 1930s were of days of sunshine, many of them spent on the blue water. She remembered nothing of the Depression, but she remembered that there had always been a boat hanging from the davits or tied at the canalside dock behind their home in Fort Lauderdale. The first one she remembered was a nineteen-foot utility fisherman, powered by a gasoline engine. She remembered always wanting to go fishing, insisting she must not be left behind, then growing bored and a little sick and sometimes frightened as her father and mother fished. They would not let her take off her life jacket, ever. She remembered the humiliation of having to squat over a jar to pee, since the boat had no head.

She remembered the day when the alligator waddled out of the canal behind their house and snapped up her cocker spaniel puppy. Her father had come running from the house with a baseball bat — and also a pistol — but by the time he reached the shrieking Toni the gator had dragged the puppy into the water. That, after all, was how it killed the dog; it drowned it.

She remembered her mother and father driving her to the rail at the bow of the boat while they landed a lunging, snapping shark on the stern deck. Her father had brained the shark repeatedly with his baseball bat, but even after it was quiet it was still dangerous, they said; and Toni had to cling to the bow in terror that it would come to life and do to her parents what the gator had done to her dog.

She learned to swim before she was three. They had a pool behind the house. Sometimes you had to drive off the big birds before you could use the pool. Her mother bought chicken necks and hand-fed them to herons and pelicans, with the result that the Maxim family had more birds than other people had, which did not endear them to their neighbors. Her father built a chain-link fence around the backyard, so no more gators could come, and Toni's next puppy thrived. She called her Pupp'l, and so the dog remained, even when she was old — Pupp'l.

The next boat was a forty-one-foot offshore twin-diesel fishing cruiser, which they called Maxim's. On Maxim's they could stay at sea an entire weekend. Toni loved that boat. It had a galley and a head, and when she was tired she could nap in her own bunk. The fisherman who hooked a big one would shift into the rotating fighting chair in the cockpit and sometimes fight a fish for more than an hour. That was exciting.

Even Pupp'l went to sea. It was Toni's duty to clean up after her.

Toni was eleven when she caught her first big fish, a four-foot mackerel, and thirteen when she caught her first sailfish. The sailfish was mounted in the den.

Dr. Jean Paul Maxim was a handsome, personable man, a psychiatrist. Toni observed early that a psychiatrist made a lot of money, that Dr. and Mrs. Maxim were well off, even among people who lived along the Fort Lauderdale canals. It was much later before she figured out what a psychiatrist did to make that money. Later she would tell that and add a quip that she still didn't understand it.

Her mother, Blanche Maxim, was a formidable woman with sun-tanned skin and sun-bleached hair, cold pale-blue eyes, and large prominent teeth.

Toni did not go to the public schools. Her parents sent her to a girls' school called Seaview Academy. In her high school years she became an editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, a member of the drama club, and president of Le Cercle Français . She played basketball and tennis.

In at least one way, Antonia was an odd girl at Seaview. Her parents remained married. She was one of few girls who had both parents at home. Then that oddity evaporated. She had heard the arguments around the house. But she was surprised when, at fourteen, she found herself being interviewed by a kindly blue-haired woman with great thick eyeglasses, who asked her whether she wanted to live with her mother or her father.