The Pleasure Seekers (29 page)

Then he released her, still holding her hand, and gazed into her eyes. At the best of times D’Arcy and most everyone else could only see that Max de Bonn was a handsome, powerful and exciting man, one whom men admired and women hungered for. In love, and filled now with lustful desire for her, Max seemed to D’Arcy like thunder roaring in the sun.

She squeezed his hand and while gazing into his eyes, just before she kissed him, she whispered, ‘Tonight.’

They were to have had a long and luscious lunch but it didn’t happen that way. They had expected it to be a rather depressing affair after visiting the prison and Melina, but that didn’t happen either. Max and D’Arcy’s excitement over their togetherness, and for the night that awaited them, set them aflame and full of joy. It was infectious, and Manoussos, who adored them both and had insisted on relating how magnificent D’Arcy had been with Melina, got caught up in the sexual aura they were creating. The fun was back in their lives again.

It was Max who was first intrigued by an elegant woman on the far side of the room. She was beautiful but remote and she was dining alone. He had been watching her for some time before the others arrived and now that they had it was the woman who seemed intrigued. She kept stealing glances at Manoussos. Always the tease, Max was quick to point this out to his dining companions, who had fun with it. She might just steal Manoussos away and keep him for her pleasure for the rest of his life!

Joke as they might there was for Manoussos something
exciting about this woman who looked so out of place in the taverna. As there was little excitement about lunch and lingering over food for D’Arcy and Max, who clearly had other things in mind, Max decided to solve everything. He excused himself from the table and went first to the taverna keeper and spoke with him. D’Arcy and Manoussos were amused by the despair in the taverna keeper’s face, the throwing up of his hands. Max’s charm and a sum of money seemed to calm the man down. They were less amused when the waiters arrived to whisk away the platters of quail and roasted pheasant, a mound of buttered rice with the aroma of cardamom, cinnamon and lemon zest with sultanas and slivers of almond. A deep dish of peppers and aubergine and caramelised baby onions, a salad of flat-leafed parsley and diced tomatoes, spring onion and bulgur, a bowl of rich yoghurt flavoured with cucumber and garlic, a platter of small round freshly made peta bread vanished from sight. Before they realised what was happening even their plates had been removed with what little food they had managed to get on them, and D’Arcy and Manoussos were left with just the forks in their hand.

They watched with wonder as Max and the taverna keeper walked past their table to the lady sitting alone. No more than a few words between the three and Max was sitting with her. Both D’Arcy and Manoussos were amused. They could hardly stop laughing long enough for D’Arcy to ask, ‘What’s going on, Manoussos?’ This was the old Max, doing what she had seen him do hundreds of times. She felt no jealousy, merely curiosity.

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t mind him abandoning us but I do wish he had not taken the food with him.’ Then they both began to laugh again.

Max was very quick. He could not have been away from their table more than three minutes when he rose from his chair, kissed the woman’s hand and returned to D’Arcy and Manoussos.

‘You weren’t jealous?’ he asked D’Arcy.

‘No, not in the least.’

‘You’re so sure of me?’

‘Yes, actually,’ she answered, and beamed at him with a smile that made him melt, falling in love with her a little bit more.

‘You trust me, would trust me with your life?’

‘Without question.’

He rose from his chair and pulled D’Arcy slowly up from hers, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. His kiss made her feel dizzy with loving, and she felt a rush of sexual pleasure. When he released her he told her, ‘For that I’m going to make you the happiest woman alive for the rest of your life.’ Then he turned to Manoussos and said, ‘Her name is Chadwick Chase and she would like to invite you to lunch. Can you find your own way home or shall I come back for you in the morning?’ Manoussos stroked his moustache. There was a twinkle in his eye when he said, ‘I could have managed that myself, Max, and yes, I think I’m old enough to find my own way home.’

A knowing smile passed between the two womanisers before Max said, ‘I know that. But to be honest, I couldn’t
wait for you to get around to it, I so much want to take off with D’Arcy.’

The whole thing was quite wonderful and mad. A taxi had been called and all the food packed in containers and the containers packed in baskets and placed in the taxi and they were soon fighting their way through traffic to the dock where Max had moored the sea plane.

‘Is life with you always going to be like this?’ asked D’Arcy.

‘Maybe not just like this but it will always be full of surprises. We just want each other too much to wait. Or am I wrong?’

‘No, certainly not wrong,’ she said, and slipped her hand beneath the belt around his waist and under his shirt to caress the firm flesh of his belly, run her fingers through the mass of curly pubic hair. He removed her hand, pulled her into his lap and told her in a voice husky with need,‘You’re playing with fire there, D’Arcy.’

Once they had taken off the water they circled Iraklion and he flew over the little taverna on the outskirts of the town where he had left Manoussos. Max deliberately made a spluttering sound with the engine and seconds later Manoussos and Chadwick Chase appeared at the door and waved. Max dipped his wings and they flew off for Livakia.

He was clearly delighted to have D’Arcy next to him in the cockpit. ‘Would you like to learn to fly?’ he asked her.

‘I must have been on the verge of asking you to teach me a dozen times or more.’

‘Great! In time we can co-pilot each other. I want
to do so many things with you, take you to so many places, show you off to so many people. Tonight . . . I want tonight to be special for us so we’re going to the hunting cabin I keep up in the mountains. I’ve never taken a woman there. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To have your first night of sex with me in a bed where no other woman has been?’

‘Max – the other women . . .’

‘Like the other men you’ve had in your life, they’re all past tense.’

‘Are you sure about that, Max? Because I am about any other men in mine.’

They were home by four o’clock. Max had radioed in for his house men to meet the plane and when D’Arcy jumped down on to the pontoon she was surprised to see the donkey boys ready to load up and haul the lunch baskets and them through town and up to the caves where they kept their cars.

‘We’ll take the 2CV, it needs a run. Now you’re not going to play some macho game with me and insist on the jeep?’

“Wouldn’t think of it.’

They stopped briefly at D’Arcy’s house where she tossed a few things in a bag: warmer clothes, toothbrush, nightdress. Max gave her no time to change because of his concern for the time. They had at the very least a two-hour drive and more likely three to his hunting cabin.

They soon caught up with the donkeys and followed behind them, arms round each other’s waist, and D’Arcy asked him, ‘Max, how could I have been so blind to us?’
She stopped in her tracks and placed her arms around his neck and kissed him. He lifted her from the ground and held her tight in his arms, so tight she could feel his need for her and sex throbbing hard between them. He released her, aware of her hunger for him.

He cleared his voice before he spoke. ‘Because timing is everything. You were smart enough to know that, when I didn’t. I always did like and respect you for your cleverness.’

With that he swept her once again into his arms and raced ahead to one of the donkeys. He placed her on its back, and holding her hand, walked by her side as they made the last of the steep climb through the village to the clearing on the cliff.

Max watched D’Arcy walk away from him to back the 2CV from the cave. She was dressed in a mocha-coloured suede skirt that hung to the middle of her calves and was cut on the bias, a soft thin suede that moved sensuously with every step she took. Her jacket was short and finished tight to the waist with wide revers. He found her clothes sexy as hell. But then, he had to admit to himself that whatever she wore he had always found her sexy as hell. For years he had known that she was a foxy lady in and out of bed and had always admired her from afar for her lust and her bravery in enjoying sex to the fullest and without pretence. He realised now that he loved her for being the sexually free lady that she was, for the libertine that some claimed she was, for being the erotic adventuress that soon would be his.

He had always been attracted to D’Arcy because she, like Brett, like himself, was a romantic. Max had been
one all his life and he knew from Manoussos that so had D’Arcy, ever since she had been a little girl. Does romance kill young girls or make them better? It was a subject that had often been discussed by Max and his men friends and he had always claimed that it made them infinitely better. D’Arcy was living proof of that. In all the years he had known her she had been happy in herself, sure of herself and her sexuality. She was like him in many ways. They were pleasure seekers, adventurers in life and lust, and now they would be together as partners in those same things.

He watched her back the car up towards him, and his mind wandered for a minute over the last few nights they had spent together, their sexual restraint, no more than discovering each other in nakedness, the odd kiss, the odd caress, but no sex. This had been a new kind of eroticism for them both. The power of the passion and lust they felt for each other came as much from what they didn’t do as the things they did. He loved her, he loved their being together, for those nights of sexual restraint.

It had all come so naturally to him from the very moment he looked at her and realised that they were meant for each other and no one else. It just happened, this steady campaign to win her to him. His courting of D’Arcy had woken love for them both, and now lust. It had all happened in the right order because at this time of their lives that was what they needed. Fate had decreed it so.

He smiled as she popped out of the car and began pulling the roof down. Max went to help her. They smiled across the car at each other and she told him,
‘I think I’ve never been so excited about life as I am now.’

He shouted over to the donkey boys to load the car and then, walking around it, he took D’Arcy by the hand and led her back into the cave and to the farthest wall where the light from the entrance just missed it. Max stood her in the shadows against the wall and raised her arms above her head. He held them together by her wrists with one hand and placed a very hungry, deep kiss upon her mouth. Their lips parted and tongue found tongue while their hearts raced with the intensity and intimacy of that kiss. Max raised her skirt above her waist and tucked it behind her. He tore the silk strings holding the triangle of silk between her legs and slid it ever so slowly, in the most sexy and tantalising way, to drop on to the stony ground. He felt her give in to his caresses. A man knows when he’s setting a woman on edge for sex and orgasm, and Max knew his women, what seduced them to the god Eros, how to make them come with infinite pleasure.

He too was inflamed by the feel of her baby-smooth mound, and the long cleft beneath – so very sexy. Too dark to see her in the shadows of the cave in all her naked glory, he used memory of the nights they’d had together and grew more bold. He fingered that cleft, and separated her most intimate female lips. She was like silk velvet, warm, moist, slippery smooth in her lust. His thumb sought out that small bud that could bring women an orgasm other than penetrative. He hardly knew what he was doing when he used his fingers to explore deeper, as deep as he could, as his thumb teased open the floodgates
of orgasm for D’Arcy. She never uttered a sound, she couldn’t, for he never stopped kissing her. But her heart raced so fast, and beat so hard, he feared for her. She lost herself so completely in the pleasure he was giving her that she bit hard into his lips and struggled to free herself from him. Impossible. He held her fast, and felt the warm flow of her first orgasm with him. She was everything he had always thought she would be and this he told her in a whisper filled with love and passion for her erotic soul before he helped her to compose herself and they left the cave.

They drove off, D’Arcy at the wheel, through the wild terrain of mountainous Crete, the island they both loved so much that they had made it an important part of their lives. They talked with no embarrassment about what had happened in the cave. And as they drove through the rugged and thrilling stony landscape of the Lefka Ori range and the little 2CV climbed its peaks and took some of the flat upland basins in her stride, and they saw caves that seemed to create yet another landscape within a landscape and the sea become nothing but a thin ribbon of blue far off in the distance, Max entertained D’Arcy with stories of the erotic wonders he had seen and experienced in the Arab and African worlds he loved so much.

Exciting? Of course it was exciting to hear of such sexual happenings, of course it set the imagination and her fantasies going, and of course all that had been calculated by Max, not to frighten but to give D’Arcy a taste of what was to come, to prime the woman he loved for a sexual life that would keep them together. They knew they were experienced in the many and varied ways of sex, how
important an adventurous sexual life was for them both. They had given themselves up to this new phase in their relationship back there in the cave and the more Max excited D’Arcy with his sexuality and seduced her with his erotic tales, the more she realised she was ready to follow him on any erotic road he would take her down, until death do them part.

They were driving now during those few minutes between dusk and nightfall. The dirt road had been winding and turning up the mountain towards its peak and several minutes before they arrived at the gatekeeper’s one-room house it came into sight. Max took one of his shotguns from the back seat, and fired twice into the air.