Lauren liked living naked, but not exercising that way.
Janet had never been a clothes horse but her nature was to prepare for all eventualities. So she'd packed for a business trip to Kai'ulau as if she were embarked on an around-the-world cruise. She had running shoes to lend that fit well enough. Her sports bra was too snug for Lauren but it was better than having the girls flopping around.
Lauren considered a run down to Atunai, the island's main settlement. She wanted a less carefully guided tour than her hosts had allowed so far. But she decided that the trail was too far and too steep for her first morning's run in weeks. So she started out just after dawn with a couple of circuits around the flat high ground upon which the Hermitage stood. By her third lap she was using the debris at the edges of the courtyard as an obstacle course, vaulting the bigger chunks of collapsed masonry and upturned flagstones. Her metabolism was in overdrive.
On impulse, she veered off down the steep, winding stone steps of the isthmus connecting the Hermitage to the rest of the island. The way back up would be a challenge, but her confidence in her strength grew with every stride. At the far end of the steps, trails branched in several directions. One led toward a concrete lot lined by garages and sheds with the paved road beyond it, others down toward the ocean shore. She chose a shore path.
The tropical slopes were redolent with the strong fragrance of the Tiare. It reminded her of vanilla and burnt ginger. Kai'ulauans cultivated the red blossoms on the hillsides, but it flourished wild over most of the island as well.
At the foot of the path, the lush undergrowth yielded abruptly to a field of bare volcanic rock that stretched hundreds of feet out to the water's edge. She stood above a tide pool carved out of dark porous stone by the relentless tide. The flooded basin looked about half the length of a football field. A narrow inlet at one end had been sealed with blocks hewn from the surrounding pumice to fully enclose the pool. At high tide, the surf crashing over that dam could probably grab a swimmer and drown them, or else smash them to death against the rock in an eye blink. But now was ebb tide. The water was calm and shallow enough to stand in some places.
Lauren walked a little way along the rim, pretending to herself that she was weighing the risk she'd already decided to take.
She glanced at her fitness tracker as she undressed, impressed at the pulse and respiration readings. It usually took a week or two for her to get into this kind of shape after a layoff. She stuffed the wristband in her shoe and shoved it into a rock crevice along with her clothes. Awarding herself mental points for having the sense not to dive head-first into the rocky and uncertain depths, she sat and scooted off the edge to lower herself into the pool.
First contact with the warm water snapped her nipples and clitoris to full attention. With a sigh of mixed pleasure and exasperation, she pushed off and swam hard out to the middle, rolled, and floated on her back. She opened her legs, drifting with the current, letting water flow around and over and lap at her inner thighs. She inhaled deeply the scent of the ocean...and the blossoms.
According to Jan, Lib's effects were cumulative. Day by day, the stuff insinuated itself into Lauren's awareness, an unceasing and ever-growing hum of sexual desire. It was as if she were being rewired to be hot and bothered all the time.
Where did this all end?
Aleksandra might represent one answer: fit and healthy in her seventh decade, beautiful and sexually voracious. Lauren had found her with Jan a day ago, the two of them tag-teaming a couple of big islanders. Lauren didn't recognize either guy and hadn't asked for introductions. She was determined not to be so easily seduced and initiated into the horny girls' club.
And then there'd been Aleksandra's father Lukasz, literally scaling mountains as he'd approached the century mark. Alas, he'd become a nuisance, hadn't he? Until the daughter he was probably fucking had kicked him off the face of a cliff.
Lauren was willing to bet money that was how it had happened.
So what would the world do when confronted with a jaded, geriatric generation who refused to make way for the young? It was hardly a new problem, but the advent of Libidramine onto the scene would lend it fresh urgency.
There were times that Lauren envied Jan her untroubled, grateful acceptance of this place at face value. An ease and a
joie de vivre
shone in her eyes, reminiscent of times long ago when they'd first grown to love one another. That spark of joy had dimmed in Jan over the years. The pair had rediscovered it here, that first day in the courtyard, but only briefly. Lauren's continued questioning and voicing of her unease made Jan uncomfortable.
So, it was little wonder that Jan preferred the company of her new BFF, Aleksandra. But Lauren disliked being cast in the role of the Serpent in this new Eden.
She had tried to reconcile what she saw of this paradise with the admittedly spotty reading she'd done online before flying out to New Derby. Nowhere had she found so much as urban legends about Kai'ulauan aphrodisiacs. And she'd seen few relics here of the original French colony other than the Hermitage itself. The French government had ceded control of the island without reluctance in the early 1960s. It was tiny, hundreds of miles from the nearest of the Marquesas, and all attempts up until then to exploit its resources, such as phosphate mining, had come to naught for reasons unexplained. Had all the settlers just gratuitously folded up the
Tricolore
, made their tearful farewells to what must have been legions of indigenous mistresses, and set off again--
Eastward, Ho?
The morning sun beating down on Lauren's exposed face and breasts both soothed and aroused her. She gave up her rumination and surrendered to instinct, running her palms flat over her stomach, moving down, massaging her hips and the hollows of her upper thighs. Her fingertips drew lazy patterns on the round hill of her mound, one nail grazing the tented hood of her clitoris.
Not here.
She looked around and felt silly for the self-admonishment. Why
not
here?
She traced the border of her swelling labia. Even underwater she could feel her pussy leaking. When she touched her nipples an arc of excruciating excitement shot through her. Christ, playing with herself at all nearly brought her to instant orgasm! She wasn't sure how long she could live like this and stay sane. She'd become like Jan, demanding sex constantly.
And would that really be so bad? Why not join Jan, fuck Stefan together, and then all the delicious young men and women in the Hermitage. Aleksandra, too. And Chelsea. All the young studs of the island, waiting for turns at the four of them, holding and kissing them and passing them one to the other, pumping hard into them, never stopping until the women cried
