Chapter 4

Waking up next to Mademoiselle Danielle Bastien in the morning was a wonderful thing. For one thing, Danielle recalled buying a nightgown sometime in the past, but she couldn’t remember where she’d put it. It didn’t seem to matter; she said she went to bed for one of two reasons—and neither required clothing. That suited me just fine.

Secondly, Danielle was a morning person. She woke up wanting to snuggle and kiss; she liked making love then too.

It was July, winter south of the equator, and our day would be cooler than normal; probably in the low 70’s, sunny and with a nice ocean breeze. My daughters and I ruefully compared our first “hideout” in rural Mexico with our current abode. They couldn’t have been less alike.

Danielle was laying with her back to me, stretched out on her left side. After caressing the soft flesh over her firm buttocks for a little while, I hitched myself a little closer and began kissing her from her shoulders down her side to the point of her hips. Still half asleep, Danielle was soon purring and beginning to move around, undulating delightfully. Finally, she rolled onto her back, smiled without opening her eyes and reached for me, sliding her arms around my neck.

We kissed for a few moments while she finished waking up. I kissed the tiny starfish tattooed on her shoulder, then swept my hands down her smooth back all the way to her buttcheeks and back up, gradually adding in kisses to her nipples and a palm on her outer labia. She was already wet and her legs spread invitingly. I pushed her gently onto her back and was ready to mount her for some early morning loving when she pushed back, leveraging me over and onto MY back.

“Non, non,” she protested. “It is my turn to be on top,” she told me.

“Oh, no!” I complained facetiously. “You mean I have to play with these lovely boobs, and you’re going to get to do all the work?” I grinned.

“Oui, exactement, mon amour,” she murmured, climbing on top of me. Whatever might have been was suddenly ended when Danielle caught sight of the clock sitting on the nightstand.

“Mon dieu. I’m going to be SO late!” She scrambled off me and away from the bed in a rush to get to the bathroom. I heard the shower flowing a moment later.

“Want me to do your back?” I called.

“Hah, pas probable!” she replied. “If you come in here to wash my back, I will NEVER get there!” she added, shutting the clear door to the shower stall.

I grinned. I had no idea where it was she had to go, but she knew me pretty well. Warm water, slippery soap, and my hands on her satiny flesh were a recipe for tardiness. I lay on my back smiling at the ceiling, waiting for her to finish so I could shower and make my way home.

Danielle and I had a comfortable relationship; we hadn’t used the “L” yet, and I really didn’t know if we ever would. I didn’t have a clue if we were in love or not. Certainly, we were more affectionate than simply “friends with benefits,” but I didn’t know if it would ever mature into something more than what it was right now. For now, it wasn’t love, but it wasn’t bad. No sir, not at all.

Danielle had been on the sea voyage to get some space between herself and a badgering ex-husband, and my experiences with my ex-wife hadn’t left me with any overwhelming desire to jump into a more binding attachment either. So there we were. We enjoyed each other’s company, we had enough differences to talk about, and there were numerous things we had in common. Being with Danielle felt damn good.

Sex with Danielle was ... interesting. The life-threatening experience of the pirate threat had turned out to be a catalyst, ushering Danielle into a decision that she wanted to explore a number of things in the bedroom she’d never imagined doing while she was married. I, being the accommodating gentleman I am, cooperated with her desires to investigate lots of new things.

... So, we did just about everything a man and a woman could do together. We tried anal sex, twice, because she wanted to make sure she didn’t like it before discarding the idea. It turned out to be a thing we never did after the second time. I’d never cared for it, myself, and Danielle didn’t get anything good out of it either.

We started working our way through the pages of on-line versions of the Kama Sutra—at least those that looked interesting to Danielle. Then we tried other sources, porn sites, on the web. Danielle was captivated by the idea of having sex with another woman and doing threesomes, so she brought another woman into the mix on occasion.

She watched some videos of two men on one woman but wasn’t interested. She said it was too crude and brutish ... but two women and one man was beautiful and exciting. I didn’t have any problem with her reasoning; I just nodded wisely, keeping a gleeful smile to myself.

So we tried that several times with young women on the island. The island girls had a tradition of happy sensuality dating back before Captain Cook’s explorations, so Danielle had already found four girls eager to explore Danielle’s sexuality with her, and me. Life on this Pacific island had turned out very well for me and my daughters, and it seemed to only be getting better.

After Danielle left, I showered and got dressed. I had a fair selection of clothing here in Danielle’s home and she had a closet full in the three-bedroom place where my daughters and I lived.

My daughters knew about the relationship I had with Danielle; they couldn’t miss it. It was curious to me that they didn’t remark on it very much at all, except to ask whether I’d be home for breakfast on some occasions. They didn’t seem to worry that Danielle, though she and I weren’t married or even contemplating it, had taken their mother’s place in the bedroom.

My relationship with my daughters was closer than ever. When I thought about them collectively, I still called them my girls, but they weren’t girls any longer. Megan was seventeen and Evelyn sixteen, and they were fast turning into mature and poised young women. Back in the world we’d had in the U.S., they’d have been dating long before now and, as cute as they both were, they’d probably be collecting boyfriends like a philatelist collects stamps. There weren’t that many eligible boys on the island, though, and most of the young men around knew the story of how we came to live there, including the stories of how these attractive young women had helped destroy a pirate attack by fire-bombing them to death.

Also, I’m sure my daughters’ maturity intimidated many of the guys who might have been interested in Megan and Evelyn. The “girls” had gone through two life-threatening experiences, crucibles that tested their souls, and they’d come out the other side confident and ready for whatever life threw at them next.

... And then there was the fact that the first young man coming to our home to collect Megan one evening saw me cleaning my Glock at the living room coffee table. He brought Megan home well before curfew and never called again. The word apparently got around.

We’d solved the issue of their continuing education. While we’d been in Mexico, we simply ignored the problem because our intent at the time was to dig a hole, disappear down it, and pull it in after us. When we arrived on the island, we located an online school offering high school equivalent education and degrees. I found a hacker on the main island who set us up with connectivity routed through any number of servers around the world. No one could track us down using our computer access.

I suspected we’d be moving back to the U.S. at some point under another assumed family name, probably about the same time Danielle returned to France. Danielle knew of my daughters’ increasing need for contact with young men and women, in their age group ... and we knew Danielle was going to be leaving the island and going home too, eventually. It was just a matter of when.

Thinking of these things occupied my mind on the way back to the bungalow my girls and I shared. On the other hand, none of the problems needed an immediate solution; we had plenty of time.

I grinned. The problem du jour this week was a renewed campaign by my daughters. They wanted tattoos, just like all the girls back in the real world. Just small ones, they said, like the one on Danielle’s shoulder, though maybe they’d do it on an ankle. They’d been trying to convince me for a long time now.

What the girls failed to take into account was that there were no modern tattoo machines on the island. Danielle’s small tattoo had been painfully acquired at a shop run by “Mama BeBe” who used a needle, ink, and a mallet to produce Danielle’s starfish. I didn’t think my daughters really wanted understood what was involved, and I knew damned well I didn’t want them to endure what Danielle told me she’d suffered.

At home, I found a note from my girls to the effect that they had gone shopping with Danielle and not to expect them home for lunch. They’d see me at dinner this evening.

I shook my head. Apparently, the shopping trip was why Danielle rushed off in such a hurry this morning. It made me grin. Danielle’s sense of priorities always amazed me. A visit to her office in the only four-story building on the island sometimes was placed ahead of everything else, and sometimes a shopping trip with my daughters took precedence. One just never knew.

I left the house en route to my own office. I had a job on the island, one that no one else had the experience nor aptitude to accomplish.

I was the island’s “Jondee.”

The island was a holdover from French colonial days. Danielle’s position in the island society was that of a full, or part, owner of most of the island’s businesses. I was the only “cop” on the whole island, and I was seriously under-worked. Other than an occasional drunken singer trying to stagger home, there was little for me to do.

The word for an armed policeman in French is “Gendarme,” and to an Anglo’s ear it seems to be pronounced “John Darm.” During WWII, a small detachment of Army Air Corps personnel had been positioned on the island as weather watchers. Among them, gendarme was transformed to Jondee. It was eventually adopted by the locals as the name for the person tasked with keeping the peace on the island. That was me.