Vanessa Vesuvio -- look, even her name breathes trouble. The truth is I risk my neck, and my balls too, telling you too much about my little sister-in law, Miss Vesuvio.
At 18, Vanessa Vesuvio is a tempting young minx who'd give any Hollywood siren a run for her money. She's blonde, she's beautiful, she's silly, and she's trouble. She's also been my closest kept secret, but now this can't last for much longer. I worry the whole mess is about to unravel.
It's not simply that Vanessa is barely legal. Or that she's my wife's kid sister. Maybe I could scrape through all that with just my reputation ruined, but there's a bigger joker in the pack - her family, or to be more specific, her powerful father Emilio Vesuvio. He is a "man of honour" (as they say) and not to be messed with. And because of Vanessa and Emilio, I spend my life checking locks, watching strangers, and looking over my back. So how did I get myself in this fix?
I'll start at the beach club at the bay. It was here, I think, that Vanessa launched her campaign to catch, and then seduce me.
It was a hot Sunday afternoon, with no cooling breeze. I swam the length of the bay, paused a few minutes on the rocks fascinated by the tiny fish trapped in the pools, then raced myself back. Still breathing hard, I got the Sunday newspapers, sat down at the club's front bar with a coffee Americano, and looked out across the white sand beach to the sparkling emerald water. Vanessa was sunbathing in the private beach area in front of the club, her straps pulled down, and her bathing suit pulling tight across her perfect young ass. It was impossible not to take the odd surreptitious stare. The other member voyeurs were peeping across their newspapers too, the old perverts. I read on, sipping my coffee.
Suddenly Emilio Vesuvio's daughter was by my side. "I've done sunbathing," chirped Daddy's Girl. "Any chance of thumbing a ride back home? It's so hot I'll fry if I have to walk up the hill."
Of course I agreed. My wife's little sister scrambled into the front seat wearing her Madonna celebrity sunglasses, and her white monogrammed club robe. She kicked off her thong sandals and began chattering about her coming school formal. Maybe she was flirting too in a schoolgirl sort of way. Five minutes up the winding avenue, I pulled up outside Emilio's palatial pile, and walked round to open her door.
"Thanks a mill-- See ya," she said, catching my eye as I helped her out with her beach bag,
She wriggled her shoulders and suddenly two peachy breasts jumped out from her robe. They jiggled naked for a moment, inches from my nose. Their perfect pear shaped beauty, their hard pink nipples, and the sheer surprise, jolted me like a five hundred volt shock. For a moment she held my eyes. "Whoops," she giggled. She fumbled her bouncy breasts back into her robe, turned, and sped up the marble front steps, swinging her pert little backside.
"She didn't really mean to flash me -- it was an accident," I thought as I drove off, surprised by the sexual power of her young body, and a surge of excitement in my stomach I hadn't felt for a long time.
But something didn't add up. Vanessa was still wearing the swimsuit that clung to her tight little backside on the beach. I'd glimpsed the swimsuit as she swirled round to wave goodbye. And it was a one piece, whose top wouldn't just fall away to let her tits fall out. Not by itself. Or could it?
I've known Vanessa since she was an awkward kid, but in recent months she's transformed into a fiery young beauty. It was Vanessa's eldest sister Helena, who was my wife. Six years ago while I was away at a sales conference, Helena was killed when she drove her car off the road late at night. It was the next morning before my secretary found my hotel room, and connected the bad-news call from the police. For a price, a contact in the Commissioner's office hid the evidence she was crazy drunk, and I told nobody - especially not her father -- that she'd died in her tennis dress. She'd been driving home from her coach's apartment. It was as tawdry an unfaithful wife story as that.
A month after the funeral, I'd calmed down enough to pay her coach a visit. I took the lift to the 10th floor of a trendy new apartment block, and when I rang the buzzer, a caretaker carrying a mop, answered the door. "Don't know where he is," the old geezer told me. "I'm cleaning the place out for the landlord, because he's re-letting it."
"So where'd he go? Did he leave a forwarding address?"
"Not that I know of. Look -- a couple of big guys were also asking for him, but that was a fortnight back, and he hasn't been seen since. His red Mustang's still parked downstairs. Mail box is overflowing, television still on. It's like the man just vanished."
Helena was hard yards but I'd loved her once. I felt lost and -- I thought -- left by myself. But the Vesuvios pretended they knew nothing of her affair, or her alcohol problem. Emilio insisted on me coming home to their big weekly family dinner, and that's where I watched Vanessa grow into a beautiful 18 year old who was spoilt, and way too keen on pushing boundaries.
Her father was a forceful and darkly charismatic bigshot -- a Calabrian immigrant who used brains, and "interesting" connections, to become a big dick in the road transport business. The Vesuvio trucking firm had depots across thirty states.
Emilio's wife Lorna came from some snotty New England family, and married her good looks into more raw power than she quite understood. Vanessa had Lorna's blonde hair and startling blue eyes -- with the impact heightened by the smooth olive skin she took from Emilio's Mediterranean blood. Between them, Emilio and Lorna had come up with that striking rarity -- the Italian blonde.
The middle sister Antonia, was dark haired, serious, and a respectable Associate Professor at the State University, who spent her spare time shut in her room writing a book she'd announced was an "Elizabethan historical novel."
Vanessa's brothers, Ricky and Bernardo? Well they were lazy, and pretty much useless to Emilio, so after I married Helena, I found the head of the Vesuvio family virtually adopted me as a third son. He came up with wise advice and influential introductions when I set up my ceramic tiles business, and tried -- sometimes too much - to help from the side,
When my business took off, I deflected his hints that he invest and become a partner. I wanted to preserve my independence, and I worried about the complications that came with Emilio Vesuvio. To build his trucking empire, Emilio worked hand in glove with the big guys at the Teamsters Union. He made big-moolah political donations which meant senior politicians welcomed him to their homes, while steering clear of him in public. A city public relations firm got paid a small fortune to keep the media focussed on Emilio's many good works, rather than the rumours about the volcanic Vesuvio temper, and gangster connections. Mostly they were successful.
Funnily, you couldn't have asked for a better father in law. Strange, isn't it, how we can be bound to someone we're very scared of? Like Emilio Vesuvio, and I guess Vanessa, in her own way, too.
A month after Vanessa's swimming robe tit-flash, I called at the house on a Friday evening to drop off a book Professor Antonia had insisted I better myself with. Bumper and Bollo, the German shepherd guard dogs, scrabbled excitedly at my knees, as I rang the doorbell. Nobody answered, so I put the book on the step, and was turning to leave when the door cracked. Vanessa peeped through.
"Hey Uncle David -- Antonia said you were coming," she said. Vanessa calls me "Uncle" -- but obviously I'm not. Shit, the twenty years between us is hardly a generation, is it?
"Everyone's out, but can you come in? I'm being picked up for a School Formal, and I think I've got the dress wrong." She took my arm and led me down the hall past Emilio's "good citizen" citations and his art collection, to their huge family kitchen.
"I'll get you a drink," she said, and inexpertly fumbled a bottle of her father's best pinot grigio from the bar fridge. "So what do you think? Will this dress pass the test?" Vanessa asked, stepping back and striking a modelling pose, her chin inclined, breasts thrust out, and a stockinged leg peeping through the gash up the side of her spangled outfit.
"You'll knock 'em dead, kid, " I said honestly, admiring her as I sipped the white wine she'd wrongly splashed into one of Emilio's special Riedel claret glasses. He'd have had a fit.
