Chapter 3: Storms on Sea and Land

PAUL

We cleared Fort St Elmo at the mouth of the north harbor at sunrise the next day, on a course south of east toward Crete, which was about 550 miles away. We were making the voyage in that direction because we wanted to stay away from Libya. The last time we went in THAT direction we had had to convince some of the locals not to board and kill us. I made our argument with a couple of well-placed 50 caliber rounds from the Barrett that I still keep.

Even though we were sure that that attack was a random event we were not eager to give any of the pirates in that area another crack at us. The distance to Crete was in the same league as it would be to Derna in Libya, which is where the last problem happened. Plus, the view of the coastline along that stretch of Libya is mostly a collection of 2,000 foot high dust clouds. So, we decided to take the more classical route of the Roman grain ships and call in at Matala in southern Crete before turning almost due south toward Alexandria.

I steered during the stretch that I had NOT covered in the first boat, just to complete the trip. Buster and I had been about 100 nautical miles out of Valetta when we were hit by one of those winter storms that you only get in the Mediterranean.

Atlantic storms are a lot more vicious than Mediterranean ones. But the Mediterranean is like a bath tub compared to that ocean and because of its relatively shallow depth you can get rollers that are higher than five story buildings. The boat ran into one of those and never came back up. Fortunately, I had deployed a life raft and my pal Buster and I survived to be rescued because of my wife’s brilliant management of the effort. Now it was almost 19 years later and I wanted to steer the last 100 miles just to complete the voyage.

I thought of my buddy all the way. We were kindred spirits, him, and me. It is something that all dog owners understand when they have that “special” dog. And I STILL miss him a lot, even after seven years. I handed the helm off to Hilley in the open ocean, in the approximate location of the sinking of our first boat. I think that she was mystified by all of the eye wiping I was doing but she is a very practical young lady.

As I stepped back and looked at her, I couldn’t help but notice how strong and competent she seemed at the wheel. Sailing is not like driving a powered vessel. It is an art that requires being in touch with the boat and the wind that powers it. The essence is to be able to meld those two things into forward motion.

Hilley has always been something more than a daughter to me. There has been a psychic connection with her that started at the moment she was born. As they were just cleaning her up after the birth, she suddenly stopped crying and seized my finger in her little hand. You can give me all of the logical explanations you want, like she recognized my voice from hearing it inside the womb. But my only explanation is that we are connected souls. Needless to say, I love her beyond describing.

Hilley was wearing a dark blue one piece bathing suit and a yellow yachting hat pulled down over a pair of polarized Bulgaris that must have set her mother back $800 bucks. She is already golden brown but she was clearly trying to get some more sun while still retaining a modicum of decency. Seeing her - just moving into the prime of her beauty, I am constantly struck by the fact that I will eventually have to share her with another man. My only aim is to make sure that that man values and loves her like I do, if that is even possible.

I am her father. But I am also a man and enough of an objective critic to know that Hilley in a bathing suit is a spectacular sight. Her mother is short and stunningly voluptuous. Hilley is a combination of the two of us. Her long sleek legs are ideally shaped and perfectly muscular. The animal that I most often think of is a thoroughbred. Nonetheless, like her mother she is completely, elegantly feline, and so a more appropriate comparison might be the cheetah.

She is taller and is not as wide in the hips as Janey, even when Janey was a teen. But Hilley has her mother’s perfect hip structure and muscular buns. Her waist is proportionally tiny and her chest and shoulders are as wide as you would expect them to be in a world-class athlete. Her breasts are big and firm and they are smaller which ideally fits her rangier frame.

Nevertheless, her real glory is her face. She has the same “golden ratio” proportions as her mother, huge eyes, a little turned up nose and a wide mouth with beautiful full lips. Janey’s mouth is sensual. The best way to describe Hilley’s mouth is “impish.” But those odd azure blue eyes in her dusky face give her an uncanny beauty that has an indescribable effect. My little voice always marvels when it sees her, “God help the men of this world!”

Now that she is a full grown woman, she has developed her mother’s most striking special feature, which is a low, contralto voice with considerable huskiness in it. Because of the smokiness in their voices those two would sound incredibly sultry just reading the phone book. I remember hearing her mother’s voice for the first time, before actually seeing her, and thinking “WOW” that is one sexy woman. THEN I SAW her mother and my first instinct was to fall on one knee and propose marriage. As it turned out, the marriage actually happened and I consider myself the luckiest of men; particularly because Janey gave me this enchanting creature as a daughter.

I was thinking all of this very surreptitiously since, even though I was only sizing my daughter up to better plan the way forward with her, Hilley would be embarrassed to tears to think that her father was looking at her like a woman instead of his little buddy. I know that Janey has to be the “decider” in guiding Hilley’s development as a woman. But I am better in touch with the minds of our opposition. And every male out there is the adversary as far as I am concerned.

Janey thinks she knows everything there is about what goes on in our primitive brains. But all she really knows are the civilized parts. There is a lot more going on down there than any woman can conceive of. And I know that no woman has ever completely explored that jungle because they are still willing to mate with us.

The wind was picking up and it was looking a little stormy as we continued to move to the east. So, Janey and I shortened sail to just the mainsail. And I planned on dropping it and going on diesel if things started to get worse.

That stretch of the Mediterranean is a mixing bowl of weather and it is tough at any time of the year; even though the monster storms like the one I ran into nineteen years earlier only blow up in the winter months. I think it has something to do with the fact that the weather out of Africa meets European weather there.

The Bible has a long passage about St. Paul and a similar shipwreck in that very place, at around the same time we were traversing it. So, it wasn’t a case of the weather being nasty just because I was sailing through it. The lightning off in the distance to the northwest was telling me that we needed to batten down and since things had gotten rough, we dropped the mainsail.

We were only about 120 miles west of the westernmost bays at the tip of Crete and the sun was beginning to set. I took the helm and Tilley and Janey began stowing things. The waves were breaking over the port quarterdeck and I was planning on running with the storm. The wind had actually pushed us up to about 12 knots and we were moving along at a rate that would get us into the bays around Chryssoskalitissa by shortly after midnight. I wanted both women to get into the cabin and batten down but those two stalwart ladies wouldn’t hear of it.

Instead, Janey took the starboard helm while I held the port and we guided the boat together. Hilley went down into the galley and appeared a few minutes later with two steaming mugs of some incredible oyster soup that she had just whipped up in the middle of a serious Mediterranean gale. One sip of that changed my attitude about the situation entirely.

We were in full weather fighting gear and each of us was secured to the boat by lines. That was necessary because the waves were breaking over the port quarter railing. The companionway door was closed and battened with Athena inside. She is an older dog now, and although she is a faithful beast, she was not capable of enduring a storm on the open ocean.

So, the boat was basically waterproof. The wind was still coming in off the port quarter, which was helping our progress. I did not want a following sea, which might have swamped the engines and if the wind came around any farther to the stern I would have had to turn north. But instead, the wind moved more toward the bow and we continued to beat through the waves.

Hilley was either working the throttles on the two big D4 Detroit diesels or she was down in the engine room watching over them. Her handling of the propulsion system was as masterful as a 40 year old veteran engineer.

Hilley has been a marvel with machines since we hired Ada’s husband as the Villa’s handyman ten years ago. When we did, we discovered that, besides being a huge good-humored German kid, who was Ada’s exact male analog, there was absolutely nothing mechanical or electrical that he couldn’t maintain or fix.

The bonus, beside the fact that Ada adored him, which kept both of them in our family, was that Hilley followed Fritz around like his personal apprentice handing him tools and generally getting in his way. Most young men would have insisted that Hilley leave him alone while he was working. But Fritz would patiently explain things to her as he worked along. As a result, by the time she was ten Hilley was as good at mechanical things as Fritz was and better than most men, including me.

There is no experience like being condescended to by a ten year old girl because you did not know about the inner workings of one of the villa’s sump pumps. She had spent the day digging around under the villa with Fritz to repair one and she couldn’t imagine any experience more interesting. That also explained why she was covered with mud, no doubt. I remembered thinking at the time, “That put to rest any thoughts that this little girl will EVER grow up to be a spoiled preppie princess.”

Little did I know how amazingly capable with machinery she would eventually turn out to be. At eighteen, instead of Oxford, or Cambridge, which is where all entitled young heiresses go to “study the classics”, she is entering Imperial College London. Imperial might be the top science and engineering university in the world and Hilley’s genius is particularly pronounced in the physical sciences.

She is taking a degree at Imperial to continue her already graduate level research in computational mechanics. She got interested in computers at the chip level when she was nine. That interest took her further and further into the realm of numerical analysis. I lost her at eleven when she started creating discrete mathematical models. But fortunately, I have a few friends in the business who could take her as far as the boundaries of the field went.

It is intimidating to go into your teenage daughter’s room and find the walls covered with linear algebra instead of posters of boy bands. And she is a totally different person when she is working on a problem in electrodynamics. That is when you can see the fierce mind that lies underneath that gorgeous female body; and it is a daunting sight.

She inherits her genius from her mother, who is probably the only summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania in computer science, with a Wharton MBA, who also managed to be the queen of the campus hotties. Because of her spectacular beauty, nobody looking at Janey can imagine the sheer power of her deep and comprehensive mind. But she might rival her daughter when it comes to IQ. Me; I have a GED that I got from the Army along with a correspondence school engineering degree. But I can keep a CH-53 Pave Low flying in any weather and I made a fortune in data analytics.

The storm was nine hours of extraordinarily natural violence. But with Janey helping with the helm and Hilley keeping the engines perfectly functioning we weathered our way through the thunder, lightning and lashing rain until the coast of Crete loomed in the dark. That was around 2 AM. We dropped double anchors protected by the Chryssoskalitissa inlet. All of us were thoroughly beaten up from the almost nine hours of constant battle with the ocean. So, we dumped our rain gear in the lockers, unbattened the cabin and went below.

Athena was beside herself with sheer unbridled Labrador joy. According to Hilley, who can speak to her, Athena thought that we had abandoned ship with her on it. After Hilley had gone through the requisite assurances that Athena was still her best friend and sister, in perfect French I might add, Hilley fixed some more of that wonderful soup and we all sat around getting our nerves settled. We had triumphed together.

An achievement like we had just pulled-off is probably not as meaningful to a woman as a man. But men are pack beasts. So, the intense teamwork and close companionship of moving a big boat through a fearsome storm touches some atavistic chord in a guy. I don’t know if I will ever feel as proud and content as I felt at that minute. My staunch companions happened to be the two most beautiful women I have ever known. But through the entire storm we were just the helmsmen and the engineer, which actually made me tear up as I was looking at those two gorgeous, but totally exhausted, creatures.

I had a last snifter of brandy to sooth my nerves. I knew we were out of danger but I was still jazzed up from the struggle with the storm. The two women dragged themselves down to their bunks. Athena following Hilley with that lab tail of hers wagging frantically, clearly communicating, “You’re not getting out of my sight again mademoiselle!”

I made my way down to the companionway, opened our cabin door and found my fellow helmsman propped up naked in bed with the night light accenting her enormous breasts. She was eyeing me with a speculative look. Both of her prominent nipples were extended to maximum length and she had her feet placed flat on the bed a couple of feet apart, knees bent.

I did not have to be a mind reader to figure out what she was thinking. I walked slowly over to the bed shedding my clothes as I came. She turned slightly toward me, her heavy breasts swaying with her as she turned. Boobs like Janey’s don’t shake or jiggle when they move. They are too heavy for that. Instead, they sway gently in graceful arcs with almost hypnotic momentum. I sat next to her and looked into her eyes. There was huge hunger there. I turned quietly and lay beside her in the bed. She scooted to accommodate me. Then she turned and put one perfectly muscular leg over the back of my thighs and pulled me toward her.

Janey is the most steadfast person I know; a companion who you can always count on in a tough situation. But she always needs physical affirmation after facing danger. It is like her fear drives her sexuality. The more frightened she has been the more she needs to have me inside her; like the physical connection we have reinforces our special bond. Her pulling me to her easily slid me into her tight, soaking, and white hot pussy without any help required. I moved up into her to the top. We both groaned with the sensation. I could feel the little flutters and nips that her passage always gives my cock when I am deep inside her.

She had her hand at the back of my neck looking intently into my eyes, like she needed to find something there. My eyes sent her a message of my profound love for her. But the look on her face told me that I wasn’t even close to getting it. Then the heat, the smell, and the sensation of being enfolded in that dreamily silky wetness hit me like a freight train and I kind of lost it. She had let the animal out.

Maybe the danger had built something up in me too, because I suddenly had to pound her pussy like she was a red hot horseshoe and I was the blacksmith. She was no longer my lifelong friend and companion. I had to breed her like she was my bitch, fuck her brains out! I heard a voice that must have been mine give a low animalistic growl and then I threw myself on top of her. My last rational observation was the smirk of sheer satisfaction that came over her face as I set about ravaging her.

I put my hands under her thighs, lifted them and spread her wide. She actually moved her legs a little bit further apart and rotated her hips, like she was saying, “Is that your best shot!!??” I started pounding down on our pubic bone grunting like a wild boar, just humping my entire lower body forward into her, like I was trying to crawl through her. I normally know what she is doing as we fuck but all I could see was a lustful red haze. Every conscious thought had long since left the building.

I could feel things stirring in my balls that indicated that great forces were about to be unleashed. Then there was a cataclysmic eruption that would have rivaled Vesuvius sitting on Mt. Etna’s shoulders and I added stars to the red firmament that surrounded me. I have never been so out of control in my life and the coming was so violent it actually hurt. I was having a hard time catching my breath so I lunged out of her body to lie gasping next to her on the bed, not knowing whether she had come; and not really caring at that point.

I lay there only slightly removed from a heart attack, with my sanity slowly coming back to me. I finally got enough of my mind gathered back together to roll on my side and look at her. She was lying there, out colder than a mackerel, with her huge breasts rising and falling rapidly, nipples exceptionally extended. Her legs were spread as wide as I had left them when I bailed out of her and my sperm was leaking out of her.

I rubbed her arms and shoulders and kissed her cheek. She finally popped one eye open and looked at me with profound smug kitty-like satisfaction. I said, with sincerity, “I’m sorry if I hurt you.” She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “Hurt me!!! You just set a new orgasm record for me!!! It’s nice to feel YOU lose control once in a while!!” We put ourselves back together and lay down this time with the intention of sleeping as late as we wanted to tomorrow morning. I still didn’t understand what had hit me.

As I fell asleep, I was thinking that our closeness sometimes keeps me from seeing the fundamental animal that underlies our marriage bond. She is my friend and woman companion most of the time. But she is also a totally sexual creature underneath all of that. And with sex, when you strip away the civilizing influences you get male and female animals fucking. Sometimes you need that just to find out where the limits of your passion for each other lie.

That was obviously the case here. And it was clear from the way I felt and acted during that last little bout that those limits extend so far down in the depths of my own soul that they probably will never be fully grasped. The fact that her much smaller body could handle the pounding that I gave her and enjoy it to the point of passing out only reinforced the suspicion that women are a stronger and much more superior version of the species.

JANEY In twenty three years of married life Paul has proven over-and-over to me that he cherishes the gift that I have given him and that is why our marriage will never be stale. More importantly he always treats my love as my offering, not his right. That is why I will always be his.

Unfortunately, I cannot say that is true for anybody else I know. Nine years ago, Paul and I went to the wedding of my friend Emma and her ex-husband Spyros. I was her wing-chick the night the two of them met in Athens. I remember thinking at the time that the guy had everything that a woman like Emma could want; looks, charm, sophistication, and a lot of money. What neither of them had was a moral compass, or the ability to love anybody but themselves.

Emma is stunningly beautiful, rich, and socially prominent and she can fuck a man with the kind of abandon that you rarely get from a sex partner. I know she can do that because I witnessed it once. How could any man want more than that is a mystery? But her husband was cheating on her within three years of the wedding.

That would have been very sad if it were not for the fact that Emma herself had started cheating immediately AFTER the wedding. She always had a problem with alcohol and whenever she reached a certain level of intoxication, she would want to fuck whoever she was standing next to.

I remembered the first panicked phone call I got when she got drunk at their beach house one afternoon, only two months after she was married, and ended up fucking the young Greek guy who took care of their garden. She was mainly afraid that her husband would find out. But there was also something in the conversation that indicated that she was frightened by her willingness to stray outside of the boundaries of the marriage at the first opportunity she had. In that case, her husband never found out. Nonetheless, there were a number of times over the succeeding five years when she simply “couldn’t help herself” ... at least, when it came to attractive men.

I never lose sight of the fact that Paul and I are in a continually evolving state of marriage, not something that was set in stone the moment we said, “I Do.” Both of us realize that marriage is a fragile bond, which has to be continuously reinforced in everything we experience together as a couple. It takes being sensitive to each other’s feelings and moods and it takes a willingness to work at the little things to keep the marriage alive. Emma would never understand that because as far as she is concerned the world begins and ends with her needs. And if the essence of the marriage is just the sex, I imagine people will eventually stray, because variety is the spice of life.

With sex, men and women are really not very different in one arena, which is the conquest. I admit that I like to hunt. Most women do; especially the women who look like me. Otherwise, there would probably not be a multi-billion dollar fashion industry. Women enjoy that precious little moment when they know they have, “bagged another male admirer.” But my marriage is everything in the world to me and so I do my hunting within the confines of a strict set of mutually agreed on rules of propriety.

I spent enough time with Emma to understand that having sex with strangers was just a sport for her. It was a way for her to feel good and prove once again that she could have any man she wanted. If that sounds a little shallow that still describes the attitude most of my friends, both female and male. And it is one reason why I treasure the fact that Paul feels the same way as I do about sex. Paul and I get so much out of the total package of our commitment to each other that fantastic sex is simply one of the by-products of the special level of respect and trust we maintain for each other.

I don’t want to leave the impression that we never argue. In fact, we have our moments several times a week. I am as headstrong as he is and I have a much worse temper. So, we clash about things. But there is a difference between sorting out a disagreement between two individuals who love each other and who want to be together as husband and wife, and people who are committed to nothing but their own selfish needs and desires.

Paul and I always know that we are together in life no matter how intense the argument is. And we always eventually resolve our differences by communicating with each other. Just like our first meeting, which was marked by misunderstanding and conflict and which quickly resolved itself into a lifelong bond, the makeup sex after one of our “differences of opinion” is always beyond fantastic.

As we made progress past the point where Paul’s boat sank it looked like we were in for a repeat of the experience he had. There were clouds and as the day progressed, they got heavier, with flashes of lightning on the horizon and thunder in the distance. That got closer and closer until it was pitch dark overhead and the wind had picked up to 20-30 knots, with waves smashing continuously over the port quarterdeck. The rain followed in sheets.

We broke out the foul weather gear, red Henri Lloyd Ocean Pro Jackets and High Fit Bibs and slip proof Sperry Women’s SeaRacer Boots for me and Hilley and a Yellow version of the same gear for Paul, with slip proof Dubarry Ultimas. With the hoods up and the storm goggles on, we were more-or-less waterproof. And we could navigate the deck no matter how much it was pitching. although it was hard to see with the rain lashing our faces.

I manned the other helm with Paul. He is strong as an ox but it was a super hard strain to keep the boat on course and so I took some of the load off him with my lesser strength. Hilley in the meantime was handling the throttles and occasionally going below to check the diesels. The way the boat pitched in the troughs of those huge waves it took a master of timing to keep the propellers engaged at peak efficiency and she was working the throttles almost as adeptly as Paul was steering the boat. So, we were making efficient headway even though the wind, waves and storm were intense.

This went on for several hours and eventually we could see the waves breaking on the cliff faces of the island of Crete. Our course was set for a very sheltered inlet at the closest point on that island to our location when the storm blew up. And as we worked our way into the protection of the shore that surrounds the bay the winds abated almost completely and we were able to drop both anchors fore and aft with very little buffeting from the waves.

It was perhaps 2, or 3 AM at that point. We were all exhausted. Paul had used his massive strength to the limit and Hilley looked even more drained then he was. But she cooked us some of the excellent soup that she had prepared for us during the storm and we sat around quietly drinking it and getting our nerves settled back down. The double anchors made the boat as stable as if we were sitting on dry land, which was a huge change from the roller coaster we had been on for the prior nine hours.

For those nine hours we were a crew and not a family and it was a bonding experience that exceeded any I have ever had with the two of them. If any one of us had failed in our duties we would have probably been bobbing around in a life-raft now. Not drinking soup.

Paul’s physical and mental powers are extraordinary. During that entire period, he held the boat steady with the resolute look that his Viking ancestors must have had as they steered their dragon headed longships through the icy waters of the North Atlantic. I helped take the strain off of him but it was still an incredible feat of strength. And the confidence that he was radiating gave Hilley and I all of the courage we needed to do our part.

Throughout the last couple of hours Paul’s display of stoutheartedness was making me want him in a strange new fashion. In anything but extraordinary circumstances we make love as husband and wife. That should go without saying. But there have been times when he does something that makes me feel wanton, not loving.

The night he saved me from those men on Mykonos I felt that way. It wasn’t a man and his wife making love then. It was a female animal wanting to be pounded and bred by an alpha male. I imagine that is something wired into a woman’s DNA. But sometimes, when you see your man in a certain light, you want to be TAKEN by him in the most aggressive and brutally physical way possible. That was the fire that was burning up my loins as we sat in the galley drinking soup.

Paul of course wanted to linger for one more drink. So, I made my way down to our blessedly soundproofed room and waited lying spread out on the bed as seductively as I could make myself. The little lady in my head was wearing her antique nightcap and absolutely nothing else saying, “I think he’ll get the message dearie but why don’t you spread your legs just a little wider anyhow.”

It was already very hot and wet down there so the breeze was a relief. I could smell my own arousal and that turned me on even more. He came into the cabin a couple of minutes after I had settled myself. I had carefully arranged the lighting to show off my breasts and he actually stopped and stared.

He had been fighting the helm for almost ten straight hours and he looked beat but the minute he saw me spreadeagled like his willing little whore, his dog-tired attitude changed to one of extreme hunger. Danger does that to him. The little lady in my head smirked and said, “That’s what we were aiming for dearie. Now let’s turn up the heat.”

He dropped everything on the way over and I scooted over, grabbed him around his massive neck with both arms and pulled him into me with my leg. He slipped in without further assistance and slid all of the way up to the top. I was wet enough that I wasn’t surprised. His filling me like that did what it normally does. It set off a fire that had to be quenched by a pounding. So, I looked deeply into his eyes telling him that I wanted.