This is a Romance between a heterosexual couple, it contains some sex and some rude language. If your preferences lie elsewhere, I suggest a back-click. Copyright: neonlyte-06/2006
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Jack had whisked her away from England almost before she'd had time to blink, and certainly before she had time to reconsider the decision she'd taken and the career she'd chosen to abandon. He hired a small business jet for the short flight, for expediency rather than to impress.
"Why Dinard?" she asked as the plane began its descent.
"It's traditional," he answered, holding her hand across the narrow gangway.
"How so?"
"It has long been a refuge for the fallen. In the late nineteenth century it was the home for failed politicians," he paused, "and for adulterers, bankrupt aristocrats and swindlers. Mostly English," he added, "it was known as the 'Brighton of Brittany'."
She laughed, "And which of those am I?"
"Dinard became a great favourite for European gentry in the early twentieth century," he said, avoiding a direct answer, "the fallen could continue mingle with their peers in holiday mansions they had constructed along the cliff tops. Off limit soirees — even the disgraced had their uses. The people who own homes here will surprise you."
She caught the hint. This escape wasn't to be entirely a holiday. "Jack, you've brought me away without a thing to wear."
"We'll shop. I'll enjoy buying clothes for you. Lingerie, it's high time you wore French lingerie."
She slapped the back of his hand playfully, pleased he'd remembered, and sat back in her seat, ready for the landing.
"Nowadays Dinard is famous for its Film Festival," Jack continued, seemingly oblivious to the wind buffeting the small jet on its final approach to the airport, he sensed her nervousness and wanted to distract her, "Hitchcock used to holiday here, on the river Rance, he filmed 'Psycho' at a villa overlooking Plage D'Ecluse. It was not filmed in America, as most people believe."
Jack had booked a suite at the Grand Hotel overlooking the bay. She didn't know whether to be impressed by the greeting he received as a well known guest, or jealous of whom he might have brought with him on previous visits. They shopped, spent time on the beach; he hired a launch to take her down the Rance for a lunch at the medieval town of Dinan. And they spent a great deal of time in the suite, familiarizing at leisure, reclaiming territory.
"So... I'm to be some kind of trophy."
She framed the words as a statement freed of indictment or malcontent, but still delivered with a slight intonation, and managing almost — if not quite — to question him. Jack didn't answer immediately. He remained uncertain as to the extent of her complicity and whether her willingness to accommodate his escalating requests was a measure of her security of their union, or whether she agreed to his suggestions by way of recompense.
She raised her head from the cotton pillowcase covering the duck-down filled pillow, took her weight on her forearms, and turned her face toward him, her grey eyes alerted into attentive wakefulness by his request. In the ensuing silence, he imagined he could hear the air sucking into her pillow as the duck-down strove to assume its natural shape. And she watched him, as his eyes irresistibly wandered from hers beguiled by the relative novelty of her complete and relaxed nakedness, across the tanned skin of her shoulder, to the angular protrusion of her shoulder blade. She monitored the direction of his gaze, down, across the concave expanse of her back, pausing at the base of her spine, hesitating over the dimpled hollows each side of her spine marking the spring of her buttocks; and she smiled, as his eyes rose, crossed the curve of what might be described as an ample bottom, and his tongue dabbed anticipatively at the corner of his mouth. She involuntarily pushed the recently shaved mound of her pubis — another of his recent requests — against the bed. He smiled.
"You want to show me off," she said, with the same soft cadence, her voice calling his eyes back to hers, "some kind of trophy?"
Her quietly spoken words almost made him feel guilty, though it was guilt entirely without a hint of remorse. He regretted nothing, except the wasted years. Only the two of them knew the true extent of the banality forlornly masquerading in public as 'her life'.
They had tried to stay apart. Their relationship, sexually driven from the outset, spanned two decades. It began at university, Cambridge in England, and consummated — despite their political polarities — at snatched moments across the intervening years. Their passion spanned two broken and childless marriages. Jack's marriage had been no more than a failed diversion, an attempt to wean himself from desiring to possess her; and her own, had been loving to a degree, but lacked the compulsion that might have made her wish to bear her husbands' children. She used politics, her career, as her excuse to remain childless, always aware of the price required to have Jack's child growing in her womb. Her husband had the good grace to ask her for a divorce, honourably citing his own infidelity, which only served to raise sympathy with the voting public and her stock in the political arena.
Some people — people to whom she had once extended the courtesy of friendship — judged hers and Jacks to be a sordid relationship. They condemned her, behind her back for the most part, since none of her former quasi-friends rooted in the collegial bonding of high office had the nerve to confront her face-to-face. These so-called former friends conducted their pillorying through the media, as if the squalid media had a reputation to uphold! A divine hypocrisy, she mused, a media with morals, almost worthy of an opera. The 'red-top' newspapers accused her of sacrificing a life that most of her genre would metaphorically kill to achieve. Betrayal was the word of the moment, though one of the 'high brow' newspaper editorials had penned her as 'perfidious'. She'd taken exception to the description, had reached for her telephone intent on extracting an apology, treachery had played no part in her decision to abandon her career. 'They are trying to tease out a statement,' he'd said, 'playing to your intellect. Don't give them the satisfaction.'
"No," Jack said, finally answering her question, . .
yes... but... . .
not a trophy. I explained that."
He was beginning to think he shouldn't have mentioned it, and after all the years, the subterfuge, the wooing, the snatched frantic lovemaking, the fumbling with zips and buttons and clasps and tissues, now that they'd found space, and found time, and shared more than bruised lips stained with desire and genitals swollen and slick with the sheen of lust... now he'd grown uncertain, cautious, frightened her permanent presence might turn out to be no more than temporary, his plan, his request, would ensure there could be no going back.
"Hmmm..." she murmured, recognising the hint of insecurity in his voice. An insecurity he'd displayed from the outset of their relationship, rooted in his erroneous perception of 'his humble background.' He compensated by moving toward the outrageous — in all things — including sex. Not that she minded his wanting to possess her, his demands of her body that bordered tantalising close to the obscene. Surrender was her choice, if he needed for her to do this 'parade', so be it, she had, after all, kept him waiting longer than he deserved, but he'd have to earn the prize.
She turned to face him, lay on her side, brushed strands of dark silky hair from her face, and hooked them behind her ear. She raised a knee up and across the bed, stopping where she could feel the heat of his penis glow against the taut skin of her kneecap, wondering if he'd move to touch her, if his penis would stretch out to caress her, knowing both would happen.
"But you want to show me off. Mark my conformity to your desires for the world to see. You want to show the world that you won the prize."
"I'll be naked as well!"
She let his words hang between them, mocking him with her eyes, until she took pity upon the extent of his exposure.
"Ah! . .
Why Sir, I suddenly feel foolish. Forgive me for my lack of comprehension."
She lowered her eyes in sham humility, just far enough to fix on his penis marking the staining from their earlier lovemaking, wanting him in her again, from behind, like last night when he took her like an animal bending her body to receive the spray of his passion just as he did the first time, when she was barely out of her teens.
"Self deprecation is not your strongest suit," he said.
"Public nudity is neither a desire nor an ambition."
"You go naked on the beach."
"No darling, I go topless on the beach. Perhaps you didn't notice the cerise adornment between my legs. . .
You're a breast man! . .
I'd never have taken you for a breast man!" she laughed, "I'd always imagined my bottom to be the object of your desire."
Again, they let her words hang in the air buoyed on the sparkling shine of her eyes as if she'd discovered the greatest secret that invisibly joined them, gently mocking the indecision in his eyes as he switched between each breast and the crease between her legs... was he expecting cerise she wondered.
"I was concerned..."
