“You,” she said. “I know you didn’t mean it. I knew it then. It’s not in character with you, Nick. Maybe you might have fooled some girls but not me.”
I recalled how damned perceptive she’d been when I first met her. I felt myself getting a little annoyed at the way she laughed at me.
“You weren’t so damned smart when I told you to play cards right with El Ahmid,” I said. “You believed me then. You accused me of doing anything to save my own neck.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I believed you because that
I looked at her.
She was laughing at me again, her deep eyes dancing pools.
“Then why’d you come back here with me?” I asked.
“Because I wanted you to stay in character,” she said, her eyes twinkling.
She came over to me and slid her hand inside my shirt. Her fingers were soft messengers of desire and her mouth, open and eager, found mine. She had my shirt open and her hand worked at my belt buckle.
I lifted her up and carried her into the bedroom.
“I’ll stay in character,” I promised her, with a tinge of savagery creeping into my voice.
Marina had her dress off and her body pressed against mine. She was filled with desire, once again, but now the burst-dam pent-up desperation was gone. It had been replaced by a sensuous rapture all its own, a gliding, smooth, magnificent body that set its own rhythms and made its own time.
Marina held my head down to her breasts and cried out in ecstasy as my lips found their soft tips. She thrust upward until it seemed she wanted all of her firm, creamy breasts to be held in my mouth.
I caressed her with my hands, with my lips, with my tongue, and she was a woman transported to another world.
We made love slowly, gently, and then with feverish desire but never harshly, never crudely.
Marina hadn’t a crude bone in her body, but then, all of a sudden, she changed.
I’d been stroking her very being in increasing rhythm and she had lain moaning and gasping, and then suddenly she flung her body upward, seized my hand and held it to her and her lips turned back in a wild smile and I saw the wild gypsy creature I’d ridden beside through the Rif mountains.
“Come to me, Nick,” she half-screamed. “Come to me.”
I rolled my body on hers, and she seized my shoulder in her teeth. It was a pain of pleasure and her cries were protests of ecstasy.
The day turned into night, and our bodies finally lay side by side, spent, empty of physical strength but filled with the powers of the senses.
Marina’s breasts rested on my chest and she looked up at me.
“When it’s like this,” she said, “who cares if it’s permanent?”
It was a good question. I made a note to remember it for future use.
