Judith Krantz (35 page)

Jazz raised her head inquiringly, but his eyes were squeezed closed. “Is this … too much?” she murmured.

“God no … no …” he replied in joyful, shuddering supplication.

At least he wasn’t wearing a belt, Jazz thought, as she unzipped his jeans. She went still, holding her
breath. He wasn’t wearing anything but his jeans, and the open fly revealed a penis so thick, so long, rearing so strongly upward from its tangle of blond hair, that she was unable to go any farther.

“I … can’t … you have to,” Jazz said in awe, even as her shaking fingers began to undo the buttons of her work shirt and liberate her breasts.

“No … you have to … I have to know you want me.” Sam’s voice was strangled but adamant.

“Oh, I want you, all right,” Jazz muttered as she stood up, never taking her eyes off him, and stepped out of her jeans and her panties. He’d won this game already, by whatever rules there could be, but since he still insisted on playing, she’d give him a match to remember, she thought, in luscious vengefulness, and she lowered herself until her knees were on the rug. She opened her thighs wide apart just in back of his head so that her mound was placed above his mouth, but she held it high enough so that his tongue couldn’t possibly reach it as long as he lay where he was. Jazz bent forward over his body so that her hair would fall and touch his penis. Then she moved her head gently from side to side so that his straining, jerking organ was lashed softly by a million little whips. Her hips swayed in supple unison with her head and, once again, she had the feeling of knowing exactly what he was seeing above him in the firelight.

Now she heard him groan again and again, but she didn’t falter in her teasing rhythms, nor did she approach any closer to his body. She knew that the revealing moisture of her parted lower lips must be clearly visible to him in the leaping flames, but she continued her shameless, slow motions. She knew that he could see her whole body above him, the full, hanging globes of her breasts, the swollen circles of her nipples, the taut swell of her belly, the whiteness and softness of the insides of her thighs.

No man could stand this forever, she thought, as she moved more purposefully, lowering her head so that her lips were almost on top of his penis, so that he could feel the warmth of her breath and die for the
touch of her tongue, a touch that didn’t come. She was right, as Sam reached one long arm up and pushed her carefully down to the rug, turning her over and holding her down while he pulled off his jeans. He opened her with one hand and entered her with one steady push, for she was so ready for him that there was no resistance. Then he stopped and held steady, although the need on his face matched that on hers. Still he didn’t move, although he was inside her as far as he could go. For the last time he asked, passion now unmistakably bright in his eyes, “You’re sure?”

“You win, you bastard! You win! Yes, I’m sure!”

Liberated at last, steadily, strongly in command, thrusting deliberately and knowingly, Sam Butler gave Jazz the long, piercing climax that she was so instantly ready for, waiting until she was in the middle of her splendid, frenzied release before he allowed himself to grind into her body without holding back and join her own spasms to the first mighty, relentless strokes of his masterful orgasm.

V
alerie Kilkullen Malvern and her sister, Fernanda Kilkullen, temporarily Fernanda Nicolini, lived in a chronic condition of mutual disapproval, yet, in the manner of so many sisters, found each other indispensable. No other friends in their individual worlds could be trusted so implicitly. No other friends could be so counted on for sound and shrewd advice as could these two women who shared a common history. No other friends could understand and feel true sympathy for certain of their basic points of view. Mutual disapproval was an insignificant price to pay for their deep complicity.

They knew many of the same people and traveled in many of the same circles, although Valerie’s life had been one of a single conservative marriage and Fernanda’s one of constant upheaval and travel. More often than not, they made the time to end their afternoons with a quick telephone call before dressing for dinner, so that they kept informed of each other’s activities.

Several months after they had returned from the
Fiesta at the ranch, they spoke together as the New York twilight, exciting with the promising glow of a crisp winter, deepened outside their well-lit apartments.

“Did Mother reach you on the phone today?” Fernanda asked.

“Yes, but I was out,” Valerie replied.

“Lucky you. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. Poor timing on my part, so you owe me one.”

“What did she have to say, besides making sure that everything’s in order for her visit?” Valerie asked.

“How do I always manage to block out the date of her arrival?” Fernanda giggled.

“How is it that I always get stuck with having her stay with me?”

“Now, Val, you know I can’t have a guest the way things are with Nick right now. Especially not Mother.”

“But you must admit that it’s utterly unfair. You always have the same excuse, Fern. One day even you will run out of husbands, and I’ll make you take her for keeps.”

“But those men gave me so much trouble,” Fernanda said plaintively.

“Fern, that just doesn’t impress me. I think you do it on purpose, to provoke.”

“Oh, Val darling, I’ll send tons of caviar and flowers and champagne and I’ll take her for lunch and dinner as much as possible but I just can’t face having Mother living in my guest room, the way Nick is carrying on.”

“Damn the department stores,” Valerie hissed.

“And their damn sales,” Fernanda concurred. “It’s too much, four times a year.”

The sisters paused, a pause that admitted that there was nothing that would stop their mother from descending on them for one of the three or four visits to New York that she made each year.

Lydia Stack Kilkullen had made her permanent home in the Spanish resort of Marbella for three decades.
After her divorce and Mike Kilkullen’s immediate remarriage to Sylvie Norberg, she had devoted long hours of calculating thought to the problem of where to establish her future home. She didn’t take her daughters into consideration, since she planned to send them to boarding school in the United States, no matter where she decided to live.

London, although there would be no language problem, was totally out of the question. It was Philadelphia society’s favorite port of call. Historic friendships and close family relationships existed between London and Philadelphia, London was the foreign city in which a Philadelphian would feel the most at home, and Liddy had determined, in the hours following the discovery of her utter humiliation, to get as far away from her native city and its gossiping citizens as possible.

She eliminated Rome for another reason. It was the period of
La Dolce Vita
; in that noblest of cities, international moviemaking was at its height, and Rome was known as “Hollywood by the Tiber.” Liddy had no intention of finding herself in the same city in which her husband’s new wife would reign as a queen whenever she chose to arrive there.
Two
Mrs. Kilkullens? Impossible.

Paris presented other problems. Liddy still could speak some Foxcroft French, and she imagined that she could conquer the language if she applied herself. She had an ear for languages, and she’d heard enough about Paris from her mother and her aunts to understand that without French she could never live there happily. It was the only key to the city. But Parisians, of the kind she would hope to move among, Parisians of the upper class, simply did not get divorced. Religion and tradition combined to make even the most unhappy marriages last forever, and she, an unknown American divorcee, would find herself very much the odd woman out. She assumed that even in Paris, given enough time, she’d find a few friends, but why set herself up in a position in which she would start out as an underdog?

At last she decided to move to Marbella rather than to any large, cosmopolitan center. In 1961 it was barely a year since the Austrian prince, Alfonso Hohenlohe, had begun to make the little fishing village into an international resort, and three hundred million dollars was earmarked to be quickly invested in Marbella and its surroundings.

Marbella, the ancient home of a few fisherfolk, was a port on the Costa del Sol of Andalusia that had never before existed in the eyes of the world. Liddy cleverly understood that she would be among the first residents, a distinction which would give her an instant, established position among the visitors, as well as put her on a basis of equality with the European aristocracy, largely Austrian, who were busily developing the resort.

Just as important was the fact that in any resort, by its very nature, there would be no line drawn between the divorced and the married. Languages would be no problem, since most of the people whom Hohenlohe would attract spoke English as their second or third language. And the stream of temporary visitors would be so full of lively, ongoing gossip that no one would bother to remember or repeat anything as essentially dull as the story of a cast-off wife who’d lived in the outback of Orange County and had been raised in Philadelphia’s equivalent of cold roast Boston. Nobody would have heard of the Kilkullens, or even of the Stacks, strange as that might seem. It was the perfect chance for a fresh start.

Liddy found a rambling white villa, in rather poor condition, but with a view of the sea. She bought it in the nick of time, before the prices started to go up and continued to rise for decades. The villa was within a short stroll of the hub of all activity, the lively hive of the Marbella Club, which she joined instantly, for she saw that it was going to become a magnet for the fun-loving world.

One of the worst deprivations of her married life had been that of lively company, Liddy had realized during the year she had just spent in Philadelphia.
Even the muted, feminine hum of the Acorn Club had been like Mardi Gras compared to the stillness, the remoteness of the ranch. Except for Deems and Nora White and the people she had come to know through them, she would, by choice, have had no social life at all. And of all the Whites’ group, only Deems had been important to her. She missed him terribly, she missed him every day, but she could hardly have remained linked to Mike Kilkullen just to continue her burning, ardent friendship with a married man she could only see in public.

Now, in Marbella, Liddy found that lively company was what the place was about, the grail of both the aristocratic Europeans who followed the lead of Prince Alfonso and came to Marbella in increasing numbers, and the bands of international sybarites, beautiful and famous moneyed drifters, who asked nothing more than sun, sex, drink, dancing and a bit of dinner, so long as it wasn’t served a minute before ten-thirty at night, when the languid, possibility-filled night of Marbella officially began.

All over the western world there are a few women like Liddy Kilkullen who can astutely analyze the problem of what to do with their otherwise unsatisfactory lives, and decide, with all the facts laid out hardheadedly before them, that the answer is to become a certain kind of hostess.

Single, widowed or divorced, such women judiciously and prudently accept the fact that they must not lead their lives in expectation that a man will come to their rescue. They determine, as Liddy did, to rank among the famous hostesses—not an easy métier, nor one for a woman who is lazy, inefficient, or without connections and iron nerve.

Within their different means, these clever women entertain with rigorous regularity; some give modest cocktail parties, some give grand dinners, some can afford to invite people to country weekends; knowing that if the fashionable world can be lured to gather at their homes, eventually there must be reciprocity.

If hostesses set themselves up to wait patiently, and never falter in the
dependability
of their entertaining, soon they will be asked here and there, and eventually everywhere. Liddy never had any intention of settling down in Marbella and staying planted there. Her villa was designed to become the vehicle by which she would eventually regain all the potential worldliness she had forfeited when she married Mike Kilkullen.

Liddy allotted herself the most insignificant bedroom and bath in her new home. She spent most of Mike’s settlement money on restoring the villa, putting in a swimming pool and doing up the three large guest suites she carved out of the various rooms of her large establishment, turning them into accommodations so well conceived that in them the most world-weary guests would feel pampered.

Each suite had a big, pretty bedroom, well lit for reading, with deep chairs, wonderful beds, and a dressing table with a comfortable bench and a big triple mirror. French doors opened to a private balcony that looked out at the ocean. Each bedside table held a large carafe of cool bottled water, an airtight tin of freshly baked cookies, a new box of
Boules Quies—
the French wax ear plugs that had saved many a marriage—an unopened box of tissues and another of imported chocolates. The sitting rooms were as spacious and comfortable as the bedrooms, for Liddy knew that no couple wanted to spend all the free time of a holiday holed up together in the same room; that sometimes one or another would want to nap or read without disturbing the other.

The new bathrooms she had designed were conceived with every thought for convenience and luxury. The towels were the thickest in Europe, the plumbing was up to the minute, the bidets and the toilets each had their private cubicles.

These suites were designed for visits of at least two weeks; the closets held dozens of padded hangers, the embroidered Spanish bed linen was more luxurious than anything that could be found in the United
States, the pottery vases of fresh flowers were changed every other day, and the magazines, from many countries, were replaced every week. Liddy’s Spanish chef was trained to cook in an international style, and when she had guests, she always gave parties in their honor, asking the most impressive of the local residents and their guests: the Bismarck clan, Prince and Princess Alfred Auersperg, the Baron Guy de Rothschild and his wife, and Baron and Baroness Hubert von Pantz.