Her Hungry Heart (4 page)

Barbara was not exactly dressed for a winter night in her gun metal grey silk taffeta. A gown cut on the bias with string-like slip-straps over the shoulders. A glamorous evening dress that accentuated the fullness of her breasts, the long slender torso, small waist, slim hips. She wore white gardenias in her hair, and no jewellery. Her fashionable waist-length silver fox jacket lay open. He reached out and pulled both the jacket closed and her into his arms. He held her there and moved his hands down her back to caress her full, rounded bottom. ‘You’re not dressed for this cold night.’ He removed his hands to take her face in them, caressed it, and kissed her on the lips. It was a kiss that built slowly into passion. A kiss that lit a fire in her.

‘Where do we go from here?’ he asked.

She knew that was a loaded question. But she was too warmed by the fire he instilled in her and the sensual sound of his voice to be bothered with some trite, teasing answer. ‘Dancing. I am going to take you dancing. You do like dancing?’

‘Very much.’

‘But not at Gertie’s or a club where I will have to share you with a lot of strangers, making merry and waxing sentimental over the end of a dreadful year. I know the perfect place where we can dance and dine, and where we can make love.’

She enjoyed the pleasure she gave him with her suggestion. It showed in his face, in a smile that inspired her to touch his face with the back of her hand. He took it in his own and brought it to meet his lips. It was she who felt the urgency, she who broke the spell when she took him by the hand and started running up the street. He struggled into his coat as best he could while on the run. When they
turned the corner on to Fifth Avenue she slowed down and they broke apart. He was tying his belt. She turned round and flung her arms around his neck. After turning his collar up against the wind, she gave him a wildly passionate kiss.

All her life she would remember how he threw back his head and laughed. It was a kind of joyous expression of pure pleasure. He placed his hands on her hips and lifted her off the pavement and swung her in a circle several times. When he placed her down again, he told her before he took her hand in his and they half ran, half walked up Fifth Avenue, ‘Tonight we forget the war, the world. We’ll be selfish for each other and our erotic dreams. We’ll live as all great lovers do, to satisfy our hungry hearts.’

For blocks they rushed on, only to stop suddenly for a kiss, a look, a hug, then raced on again to their destination. The night was crisp and cold, and the wind now carried large, fluffy snowflakes that fell to the ground and vanished, leaving the pavement wet and the lamp-light like so many moons shining up at them from it. Several times Karel broke away from her to try to catch a taxi. Impossible. They didn’t care.

The Avenue, the night and New Year’s Eve were working a kind of magic on them. In that dash up Fifth they were accomplishing miracles. A closeness, a kind of loving and admiration, a certain togetherness that usually comes to lovers with time. But they knew there was no time for them so time became irrelevant for Barbara and Karel.

Near the Sherry Netherlands an old woman selling flowers, bunches of violets tied with red ribbons, huddled in a doorway. He bought Barbara a bunch of violets. They were the colour of his eyes. They rushed on past the Pierre, but not before he crushed her against the stone façade of the hotel. He tried to pick the snowflakes from her hair. He tilted her face up. The light from the lamp-post played upon it. He studied it. She shivered from the cold, and he pulled her roughly into his arms and kissed her. He bit hard
into her cold lips and sucked on them. She savoured the warmth of his mouth. He found her tongue: passion burned bright for them in that kiss. She returned it by biting even harder into his lips. She was more hungry for him than even she had realized.

She gathered her skirts up above her ankles, as they hurried through the now-settling snow. Her satin pumps, stained with wet, stuck to her ice-cold feet, and she seemed almost to hop from one foot to the other as she ran.

‘How far?’ he called.

‘Just there. And it’s a good thing. My feet are so cold I can hardly feel them.’

It was only a few yards. He scooped her up off her feet and into his arms. The doorman rushed to open the door and then through the walnut-panelled entrance hall to put a key in the private elevator that went directly up into Barbara Dunmellyn’s penthouse flat.

Karel placed her on her feet and they were immediately overwhelmed by the warmth of the overheated lobby. She shivered and he placed an arm around her shoulders. They walked towards the now open elevator and the doorman standing at attention next to it.

‘Happy New Year, Miss Dunmellyn. And you, sir.’

‘Happy New Year,’ they chorused in reply. Barbara reached for the doorman’s hand and shook it, Karel followed suit, and they realized as they entered the elevator that they did feel happy. Very happy. And on such a night: New Year’s Eve, which they both usually dreaded for its false
bonhomie,
and most especially this 1943 war-torn one, dreaded for so many public and personal reasons.

The doors slid closed and Barbara turned the key. The elevator carried them upward. The heat, the quiet, except for the dull hum of its motors, seemed to sober them up. Karel opened his coat. She slipped out of her wet shoes. He reached for her hand, she ran her fingers through his hair and leaned in against him and licked the cleft in his chin
with the point of her tongue. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and she reached up and kissed first one, then the other. She stepped away from him, just enough to give him an adoring smile certain to melt any man’s heart.

Noiselessly the doors opened and they were greeted by a middle-aged Chinese man wearing grey pin-stripe trousers and a white jacket. ‘Lee, we’ve come home to dance in the New Year.’ There was a surprised look on Barbara’s houseman’s face. She began to laugh as he helped her out of her jacket.

‘And why are you still here? You should be long gone to your own celebrations.’

‘I’m on my way,’ he answered. ‘I was just putting the last touches to your New Year’s Day dinner.’

‘Lee this is …’ She flushed with embarrassment.

He came to her rescue. ‘Karel Stefanik. Happy New Year, Lee.’

‘Happy New Year to you, sir.’ Lee helped Karel off with his overcoat.

They were standing in the entrance hall, a balcony several steps above the vast sunken living room. Half a dozen French windows overlooked Central Park where it was fringed with a haze of light shimmering through the snow-showers from the surrounding buildings. The room was bathed in soft warm light from ivory-coloured silk lampshades dotted around it. Karel leaned on the rail of the white marble balustrade and surveyed the room. It had the kind of cosmopolitan chic he had never seen before. She slipped her arm around his waist and they looked at each other. ‘You’re not surprised?’

‘No, more pleased than surprised.’

‘Then you like it?’

‘Very much.’

Now they surveyed it together and watched Lee put a taper to the open fires laid in the pair of impressive white marble fireplaces at each end of the room. The folded tissue
paper and kindling burst into fire. Bright orange flames flared up and caught the pinecones and applewood logs. In the dimly lit room the pink glow of the flames danced in reflection in the window panes.

Ching Lee turned on another lamp, only to be told by Barbara, ‘No, Lee, no more light, thank you.’ She all but skipped down the stairs, pulling Karel behind her and walked him to the windows overlooking the park.

‘There, I give you New York.’

She left him standing at the window admiring the spectacular view and walked to the far side of the room to warm herself by one of the now blazing fires. She watched him walk from the window around the room, taking it all in.

‘And the most warm and perfect ballroom for two.’

He smiled at her from across the room before he bent down to take in better the sweet fragrance of white lilac from one of the many bouquets of spring flowers. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘New York steams in the luxury of central heating while London burns and Prague freezes.’ But he quickly wiped the thought from his mind. It sounded too bitter, too crass. Had he not promised her for their time together to forget the world and its wars? He knew what their hearts hungered for. Karel felt a surge of sensual pleasure while looking at her. She was an erotic, sublimely exciting woman. He liked her the more for not concealing the voracious appetite she had for him. He was filled with admiration for her and the ambience with which she surrounded herself.

Persian carpets of great age lying on a dark polished wooden floor. Seventeenth-century Chinese lacquered cabinets, French and Italian silver-gilded consoles with sumptuous marble tops, bronze and silver gilt candelabra and Venetian wing chairs. Chinese Chippendale sofas, and deep, comfortable, tapestry-covered French chairs with elegantly curved walnut arms and legs, all of the same
period. Tables, Directoire, of ormolu birds, whose spread wings carried upon them circular tops of luscious black marble. Roman and Greek bronzes sat comfortably on them. A life-size ballerina cast in bronze by Degas, and a Rodin male torso stood on black marble pedestals near the windows. The splendid draperies and cushions and walls were covered with white silk damask. Paintings alone splashed colour about the room. Soutines, De Chiricos, Picassos and Braques, a Seurat, several large Matisses and Gauguins in ornate carved and gilded frames.

They were hauntingly exciting and beautiful in the dim light. They turned the comfortable, luxurious room into an island of creative energy. A room of fabulous passionate paintings, works of art that set the senses aflame. He looked again at Barbara and wondered what lay behind this very sexy lady, this privileged young woman who surrounded herself with a world of high art, and the illusion that the world was a place of tranquillity and beauty.

He listened to her giving Ching Lee instructions, but heard nothing. He was distracted by the way she kept her eyes fixed on him. He could feel Barbara giving herself to him, willing herself into his psyche, stripping him down to his naked self, setting him free. He was flattered by her desire for him to take her into an erotic world where they could lose themselves in lust. The firelight reflected on the silk taffeta of her gown. The glow seemed to accentuate even more her magnificence, a body that yearned to be tamed by him, that he would make his own.

She lit two tapers and handed him one and they walked through the room lighting dozens of candles and switching off the lamplight. They danced to the music of the big bands – Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo – before they broke off to dine at the table Lee placed in front of the fire. He served them champagne and caviar, sizzling crispy duck in a black cherry sauce, mangetout, potato puffs. Then he discreetly vanished.

Chapter 4

Over dinner they did not speak about themselves or the war. No personal or political small talk either. They spoke about sex, their erotic desires, their sexual fantasies. At one point he thought he might have gone too far in relating the pleasures of having two women, or of sexually enslaving a woman until she abandoned herself first to him and then to the bliss of sexual orgasms and beyond. At some point he asked her, ‘Do I shock you when I tell you that’s the way I want you?’

‘No. It excites me. That’s where I want to be.’ He rose from his chair and removed his jacket. Circling the table he went to her and took her hand in his and helped her from the chair and into his arms. Together they chose more music to dance by: Jimmy Dorsey, Cole Porter, the piano of Eddie Duchin, the seductive voice of Billie Holliday. They hardly spoke to each other except with their bodies. It felt so good, so right, that dialogue.

Enveloped in his arms, Barbara felt him taking her over, herself slipping into a vortex of desire that was pulling her down and away from all the realities of life save sex. She kept pressing harder, always harder, against his body, as if she wanted to melt into oneness with Karel Stefanik, whoever that might be. His powerful presence had about it a kind of danger that excited her imagination. His silences – and then, when he did speak, the sensual voice – rubbed her raw with sexual innuendo. She visualized herself impaled upon his rigid cock. She closed
her eyes, the better to keep hold of the pleasure she so acutely sensed from that vision. She came in a long and luxurious orgasm. He stopped dancing and tilted her chin up and smiled, and then he laughed. He sensed that she had come for the first time with him. Pleasure for her shone in his eyes. ‘And so here are our beginnings,’ he told her.

She licked his lips with her tongue, loosened the knot in his tie and slipped it slowly from around his neck. He removed his shirt: she ran her hands over his chest and kissed his nipples with a hunger he liked. He slipped the belt through the loops of his trousers and placed it in her hands. She watched him undress. When he stood naked before her she was surprised at how muscular he was, how broad in the shoulders. For all his slimness, he had a powerfully strong, robust body. A man in his late thirties, yet he had the body more of a man in his youthful prime. There was about him a virility that excited thoughts of debauched, depraved sex.

If she had surmised by her physical attraction to him that here was a libertine, now, seeing Karel standing naked before her in the candlelight, she was certain of it. Sexually he was better endowed than any man she had ever had: a knobbed penis, beautiful for being thick and long, a scrotum large and luscious-looking. He was a man to be admired naked as one would a Roman god carved in marble; a mature man cast in bronze like the Poseidon in Greece. A nude man of flesh and blood who was an Adonis, whose sexuality was as much a part of his life as breathing. Here was a man by whom to be made love to, worth giving oneself up for, with whom to explore the extremes of Eros, and pass into sexual oblivion. Such thoughts were thrilling but frightening, too. Dangerous. Like swimming with the sharks.

He hadn’t touched her, and yet she knew there would be no holding back in the sex they would have together. That very thought excited her own sexual nature. And there was
something else: the man standing before her, whom she hardly knew but to whom she was sexually committed, who had a powerful presence not only erotically but as a man, was subordinating her to him. That he should be able to do that was not only intriguing but thrilling to Barbara.

She crossed her arms in front of her and, bending down, raised her gown from the hem up and over her body, her head, and discarded it. As he reached out and straightened the white gardenias in her hair, plucked with one sharp tug the delicate, black lace panties from between her legs, he told her, ‘You’re lovely. More than lovely, and very sexy.’

That accent again. The voice, the look in his eyes: they made her tremble. When he roughly pulled her into his arms and caressed her body with searching hands, they touched, thigh to thigh, bosom to chest, skin to skin. She felt a sensation she had rarely known before, as if they were being scorched by each other.

He was tantalized by her breasts: heavy but firm and high, and fully round, capped by a nimbus as pale as a peach, with nipples thick, long and erect. They were raunchy breasts that begged to be handled by a man, sucked on. Provocative breasts that excited a man’s passion. He held them in cupped hands, and caressed them, at first tenderly, and then the excitement was too great: tenderness turned to a rougher handling of them. They were breasts that demanded a mouth to suck hard on them, sexual ardour, the unbridling of a man’s lust. He obliged her. Karel listened to her protestations of pleasure. Then his own urgency made him swoop her off her feet and into his arms. She placed her own arms around his neck and clung to him with her legs wrapped around him. He carried her thus towards the open log-fire while searching out that place between her legs where he wanted to be. Hungrily, he kissed her on the mouth while his fingers thrust unceremoniously deep inside her warm, moist slit. A sharp cry of pleasure escaped her. He caressed that place he knew
from the moment she had approached him was to be his. ‘Lovely,’ he repeated again and again.

She watched him rise. The size and power of his erection took her breath away. She wanted to caress him with her hands and yearned to have him inside her mouth, her cunt, but was frightened by the very size and splendour of him. Her fear died, was killed by desire. She caressed the knob, folded her fingers around the pulsating organ. ‘No,’ he told her. It was an emphatic no. She retreated.

‘I want to make love to you first. To pleasure you. Later. You can do what you want with me later,’ he told her in that honeyed voice of his.

He placed her on her feet and kissed her. Then he put his fingers in her mouth, inviting, ‘Lick them, a taste of yourself.’ She licked her fingers, and then he kissed them. They walked together the remainder of the way to the far end of the room and the fireplace there. Now his kisses and caresses were more aggressive, incited by a need to get inside this woman and feel her to be his. While pulling her down with him on to the white marble hearth, he licked her with an eager tongue, kissed her flesh with a hungry mouth. He sucked on her fingers and licked her wrists. She felt as if she were being devoured by him. He held her foot in his hand and kissed the arch, licked it, sucked on her toes, kissed her ankle, rose to the inside of her thighs.

On his knees between her legs now, he buried his face in her mound of silky blonde pubic hair. She was like an aphrodisiac for him. He spread her luscious long limbs as far apart as possible, the better to view her most intimate self. He revelled in her ripe femininity. Quite tenderly he raised those long shapely legs and placed them on his shoulders, then lowered his mouth to the cleft between them. He searched out her clitoris with his tongue to tease and tantalize it.

He was ruthless in his desire to give her pleasure. His was a rough and passionate sucking of her moist fleshy labia,
those seductive outer lips of cunt. He bit into them and heard with pleasure her groans of ecstasy. He ravished her with his mouth. With deft fingers he wrenched open those lips and placed his tongue as deep as he could into the opening.

He found the taste of Barbara’s now-repeating orgasms ambrosia. He felt her squeeze on his tongue with her cunt as she dug her long red fingernails into his back. She writhed with pleasure under his sexual generosity. She came with an orgasm so powerful that her body shuddered. So sublime was the sensation of this orgasm with him that she wanted it never to stop.

She asked him, ‘Take me. Please. I want your cock inside me, to feel it moving in and out of me. Fuck me, Karel.’ He held back. She begged.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘Soon, sexy lady. Soon, glorious Barbara.’

He left her only for a few minutes. When he returned he lay down next to her and gathered her in his arms, rocking her gently, and whispered in her ear, ‘Ours can never be a love story, but I will always love you for tonight, for your lasciviousness, because we share a lust and a sexual freedom that allows us our erotic fantasies and the courage to change them into realities. You’re a luscious lady, Barbara, sublime.’

She reached out to take his cock in her hand. He stopped her with a tap on her hand, a playful slap on her cheek, and sharper slaps across her breasts, interspersing the chastisement with passionate kisses. It was sexy, and he incited her to give in to him. She liked being enslaved by his sexuality. She told him in a husky voice, ‘Whatever you want, so long as I come, and we are together in our depravity.’

He smiled. How quick she was to understand where he was taking her. How clever to show him she still retained command in their relationship. It excited his desire to tame
her further, to break her down until she was his unconditionally.

He slipped out of her arms and on top of her. Holding her face in his hands while he rubbed her body slowly and seductively with his, he teased her into an ethereal state where she felt as if she were floating through twilight. The feel of his magnificent erect penis rubbing against her made her burn for him. He inched his way down her body with kisses, and was once again on his knees between her legs. They were now both lost to all else but erotic pleasure. She bit as hard as she could into the hand that held her chin. Then he sucked her tongue into his mouth with terrifying passion. She bit into his lips and drew a drop of blood. He laughed at her when, pushed into a violent state of passion, she went for him with the leather belt he had handed her when discarding his clothes. He felt the sting as it cracked across his hip and his buttock. He wrenched it from her hand. With one quick flick he whipped her across the breasts with it, then threw it across the room. Placing his mouth over one of her breasts he sucked on it so hard she called out in frenzied pain and passion. Then, squirming in his arms, she came.

He felt frantic with sexual ardour for her now, and grabbed some of the cushions scattered on the floor around them and propped them up under her. ‘So you can watch as well as feel.’ He reached for the silver jug of thick cream that he had fetched from the dining table when he had left her for those few minutes. Still lost somewhere in the aftermath of orgasm she had hardly recovered as she watched the cream dribble slowly from the jug in a thin trail around the nimbus of her breasts. With his finger he spread it over them until she shone slippery smooth in his hands. He kneaded her breasts and licked them and kissed her: she tasted the cream and laughed, telling him, ‘How delicious. Crazy, sexy and delicious.’

He dipped the jug and trickled a lazy stream of cream
between her breasts, the flat of her belly, trailed it over her curly haired mound. She watched him pour the sensual liquid into the cupped palm of his hand and bathe her cunt-lips, her slit and her clitoris in the cream. She was slippery in his probing fingers. It was an exquisite sensation. He filled his hand again and pushed more easily inside her. ‘Use your cunt, Barbara. Suck in the cream,’ he ordered. He moved now easily in and out of her satiny cunt, stretching her more open as he went deeper in with his hand. Roughly, he raised her bottom. She felt him induce the remainder of the cream into her open and yearning vagina. She watched him fuck her wildly with his hand, and felt a painful thrust when he entered her up to his wrist. She screamed and came and nearly fainted. When she felt him caress the tip of her cervix with the cream and her come, she surrendered: she was his. She lost control and kept coming. She lay open and relaxed and ready for what she knew was all she wanted: the large and pulsating cock he had prepared her for.

He pulled his hand from her: she felt the cream trickle from her cunt to her anus, between the cheeks of her bottom. He caressed and teased her open there too, making her ready for him. What bliss as he moved his fingers from one place to the other. He was a magnificent lover, irresistible. And the more she gave into him the more she climaxed. Sexually she was over the edge, ready for as many little deaths as he could bring her to.

‘And now, we go where you want to be. But this time together,’ he promised her.

It seemed as if she had lived her whole life for this one night with him. The excitement and pleasure he instilled in her brought her to tears. Her heart yearned for more. For him to enter her with his raging penis and make their orgy complete. All sense of ego and self were gone. His fingers moved in and out of her two most intimate places freely now: she no longer knew which of the sensations brought
her to climax again. Nearly all her body was wet and slippery with cream and come, most especially her genitals, the inside of her thighs, the crack between the cheeks of her buttocks.

The tip of his penis, its large and beautiful throbbing knob, rubbed up and down against her pussy’s silken slit. She thought her heart would stop in her moment of terror for the pain she imagined was to come with the onslaught of his penis. Her emotions, already shredded by the sexual delights he had already heaped upon her, were to take on yet more experiences. She held her breath so as not to weep when he gently placed his arms under hers and up over her shoulders, then gripped her tightly and whispered in her ear, while he slowly but firmly thrust his cock between her wet cunt-lips that spread open to receive him with a relative ease she could hardly have imagined. ‘I never again thought that I would feel as alive as I do with you. I thought the war had destroyed me, until you found me. Until I recognized your heart is as hungry as mine is. It’s your hunger that has restored me, set me free to pursue the ultimate in sexual pleasure again. I will always love you for that. Don’t move, just stay the way you are, I want you to feel me take possession of you, not to miss one sensation.’

Those were his last words to her before, with one eager thrust, he was deep inside her. He muffled her cry with passionate kisses. Her heart beat quickly, his penis throbbed inside her, he made her mouth his own. He fucked her with his kisses and his cock. She felt the throbbing of his whole life inside her. She was filled by him. They were in possession of each other. She wanted to weep with joy.