Chapter 2

Carmel. The name conjures up a particular image. It is, quite simply, a tourist town on the coast of central California. It is that, and much more. Carmel: playground for the rich and the rich-retired. A quaint little town, once a village, now grown, yet still having many attributes of a village with no sidewalks, trees growing in the middle of a street, no street addresses or street lights. There are still many board-and-bat cottages built back in the days when it was truly a village and an artist's colony.

Carmel happens to be set down on a peninsula, at the mouth of a fertile valley, at a piece of coastline that is unique in the world and breathtakingly dramatic. A melding of sky, sea, mountains, and river-mouth delta land. Carmel is like a jewel nestled in a belly-dancer's navel. The Carmel River empties into the sea, and the deep royal blue of the Pacific crashes wedding- cake white waves on hoary rocks that stand off shore like prehistoric reminders of another time. The St. Lucia mountain range seems to rush--to plunge down into the Pacific as the dramatic end to the land, to America. Carmel is part of the peninsula that juts out into the Pacific and holds two other towns, or communities: Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach.

Pacific Grove is a quiet area of families and retired couples of modest means. It is a religious town and it is one of the few islands of abstinence, a dry town and proud of the fact. Consequently, Pacific Grovians have to drive outside of the city limits to package stores and is literally ringed with liquor stores. At night, the people drink at home, quietly, behind drawn shades.

Most of the people who live in Carmel and Pebble Beach regard Pacific Grove as a quiet place and seldom go there.

At the entrance to the peninsula sits Monterey with its harbor and fishing fleets and Cannery Row of John Steinbeck fame. Cannery Row is nothing more than a tourist place now with only one cannery operating and the rest of the canneries and warehouses housing craft shops and clothing stores.

Hippies, with a record store, a health food shop and a leather craft shop, have made a foothold on one end of Cannery Row.

Hippies are seen in Monterey and Pacific Grove and Carmel. They are a problem because Carmel lies between San Francisco and Big Sur. It is an attractive stop-over point for hitch-hikers and a problem to the city fathers.

There are no hippies in Pebble Beach. It is more a community than a town. Here, in breath-taking loveliness, behind walls and gates that are guarded, live the very rich. Here is the famous Del Monte Lodge where only the wealthy and famous can afford to stay. Here is the world-famous seaside links of Pebble Beach, scene of the glamorous Bing Crosby Clambake once a year. Here are movie stars and society matrons, all with an elegance and fresh clean good looks that go with the peninsula. Here, on any day, one is apt to see a blonde with that scrubbed, spanking-clean, mint-mouthed smile and dazzling white turtleneck sweater and slacks striding through the Beach Club or to Club Nineteen or seen walking down the fairway, following some golfers.

Here, at Pebble Beach, behind guarded gates, the beautiful, talented, and rich people gather to play and party, and some of them stay to live.

Pebble Beach has its own security force which guards the gates, charging admission to tourists who look respectable and patrolling the roads that cut through the forests and parallel golf courses. They patrol past the gates with gravel roads that twist and lead up to grand homes. Most of the elegant houses are hidden from sight by shrubbery and fences, for residents of Pebble Beach pay well for beauty and privacy.

There are famous admirals, generals, movie stars, and business men living there. By and large, far and away, you couldn't find a group with more character. There were a few; those that had inherited their money and couldn't handle it. There were those that came from old money, had a good family name yet suffered the inevitable consequences of too much in-breeding that bordered on the incestuous. Such a person was Web Hardman. His home at Pebble Beach was one of the best. Hidden from the road, it commanded a sweeping view of the Pacific, had a private beach and was ringed on the land side by a high cyclone fence that spawned barbed wire at the top. The gate was opened electronically, but only after a visitor had obeyed an amplified voice command and stepped up to a pillar where a television camera scanned them.

Such precautions were not out of the ordinary in Pebble Beach, for it was expected that people valued their privacy and the security patrol was there to reinforce it.

Web Hardman seldom went out and played a very respectable and passive part in the peninsula's social life. No one, outside of a trusted few, ever suspected what went on in his house. Lights late at night, parties and music, were far from uncommon at Pebble Beach, and the security patrol's principle problem at night was seeing that tipsy drivers got safely home. Whenever Web's name was mentioned in the Peninsula's paper, The Monterey Herald, he was described as, "One of the coast's most eligible bachelors." Web did his best to keep his name and picture out of the paper.

Carmel is a tourist and retirement center. It also has a population of young people, many of whom work in its stores and shops. They are usually young, intelligent, ambitious, and attractive. They are the type of people concerned with where they live, concerned about beautiful surroundings. They are usually ambitious people, eager to get ahead, drawing some sort of identity from waiting on or associating with the rich.

Unlike Pacific Grove, Carmel is far from dry and it harbors some of the best bars on the peninsula. The Red Lion, a facsimile of an English pub; Su Vecimo with its Mexican motif; La Playa with its casual elegance and thick adobe walls; El Matador with its austere, regal, bullfight atmosphere. On any weekend, the mentioned bars--and more--swing late, crowded with attractive couples. One such couple sat in a comer of El Matador, drinking Irish coffees and gazing soulfully into each other's eyes. They had that sad, tender, troubled look that soulful lovers sometimes wear. The man, rugged, tall, and good looking, was obviously containing his anger and disappointment. He will be leaving the next day for the jungles and rain forests of South America where he will engineer a camp and build a bridge. His wife looked at him bravely, holding back her tears. She must, for they both know that others in the bar are looking at them, the males especially. Men always look at her. She had a wild mane of naturally red hair it frames her face in an untamed flame-licking way. Her skin was that creamy white that so often goes with red hair and her eyes are a vivid blue and set wide apart. Her mouth is large, almost but not quite too large and her wetly glistening lips are full- formed. Her profile was pure and clean and made one think of the poets in Ireland and the misty isles and a natural kind of majesty and royalty. If her face and hair weren't enough, there was her body. God must have been in a wild and ecstatic mood when he created her. Most women would give a fortune to have her body. Tall, with sensually flaring hips and long elegant thighs, she possessed a slim waist that rose to two perfectly round breasts that bulged excitingly beneath the soft sweater she was wearing. She leaned forward and put her elbows on the table as she looked wistfully at her husband, and every man could see that she wasn't wearing a brassiere by the molten, rubbery way her breasts moved. Those breasts, those two firmly jutting mounds of flesh with their nipples straining and pointing through the wool, were real! They were almost--not quite--too big for her slim build.

She had two black moles--beauty marks--on her face: one on her cheek and one on the side of her chin. She wore only a little makeup and she didn't even need that. Her eyelashes were unusually long, and her generously fun lips seemed always to be wet, to have a sheen to them. Her smoky, startlingly blue eyes had a hot provocative look to them. That look was always getting her in trouble because men misread her intentions.

This attractive redhead, this girl who reminded men of Raquel Welch, was Kim Stewart! She sat staring at her husband, Hank Stewart, engineer, husband, a scion to a Pebble Beach fortune. He was cut off from that because he eloped with Kim. Kim had worked as a waitress in a local restaurant, The Butcher Shop, when she had met Hank. He had swept her off her feet, rushing her beyond her belief. Within two weeks of meeting, they were married and Kim was walking about a quarter of an inch off the ground when their world came crashing down.

First it had been his family. They didn't approve. They were proud and powerful people. They were lofty and the family tree went back to New England and the Mayflower. She was coldly ignored, and Hank was told in formal and frosty terms that he was being cut off from any funds. This, in itself, wasn't too much of a blow. Hank had money of his own and a profession: engineering. He opened a small office in Monterey, and they rented a one- bedroom cottage in Carmel near the beach. They were happy with chilly night walks on the beach and hurrying home to a bright fire and hot toddies. They would sit by the fire, listening to the waves crashing on the beach and feeling the warm glow of the fire. Hank reassured Kim that in time, his parents would come around. "They'll see what kind of a person you really are."

Although she didn't say so, Kim was determined to show them by example what kind of a person she was. They would see that they were wrong, that she was an asset to their family even if her parents were poor and she had to work for a living. They would see Hank happy, and they would realize they were wrong. Kim vowed to lead a life that would be beyond reproach.

And that vow led to and helped sharpen their real problem. Despite her looks, Kim was not sensual. In fact, she was exactly the opposite. She felt her body was too well-endowed, that it was too shapely and provocative and as a result, she went to great lengths to hide it. And, the more she tried to hide it the more she called attention to it. Even her walk got her into trouble because it was a liquid thing that made the bottoms of her buttocks twitch in a way that made men grit their teeth. Kim was aware of her walk and when she tried to slow it down, repress it, keep it subdued, she only succeeded in making it slow and slinky. It was the same walk used by a stripper who stalks across the stage and removes the last tantalizing shred of clothing and stands magnificently naked except for a trivial G-string, sheer black stockings, and high heels. Kim walked with that breath- taking expectation of something lewd happening.

Hank compounded the problem. Although from a proper WASP (White, Anglo Saxon, Protestant) family, he was more Latin in bed than anything. In fact, when he had too much to drink, he was positively brutal and lewd in bed.

Kim wasn't sensual or didn't think she was. She had been raised in a strictly religious home and sex was always something dirty and sinful to her. On top of her natural reticence, there was her determination to show his family that she was worthy. She kept imagining the day when they would finally invite Hank and her to their house. When that day came, Kim was going to be able to look Hank's mother in the eye, and Mrs. Stewart was going to see that Kim was a decent girl, not some cheap slot. His mother was going to see it in her face because Kim was determined to live that way.

She knew Hank was frustrated, but she felt he would understand. She felt that deep down he didn't want her to behave in a lewd way. Not really! If she behaved in that way he would eventually lose respect for her. No, Kim was firm and stuck to her guns.

The situation worsened with the coming of the South American job. It was a big job and an important one and Hank felt he was lucky to have landed it. The rain forests of the upper Amazon basin was no place for a bride. It was a wilderness, and none of the men were taking their wives. Besides, there would be no time for women, only time for carving a camp out of the jungle and building a bridge.

At first, Hank wasn't going to take the job. Then he began to feel that time apart might help their marriage. He had never dreamed that his wife would be such a cold fish in bed. Everything about her led one to believe the opposite. Kim would let him have sex with her while she lay underneath him, stiff and unresponsive eager to have it over.

Now, tonight, while Nichole was in the Pebble Beach home of Web Hardman and uttering Kim Stewart's name, she was having a farewell drink with Hank. He would be leaving early in the morning and she wouldn't see him again for six months. Half a year! Hank was being polite and grim and, to Kim's concern, he was drinking too much.

So far, their parting had been tender. They left the Matador late, saying good bye to domino playing friends at the bar. Hank shook hands with the bartender and told him to keep an eye on Kim. He was polite and careful, the way he always got when drunk. Kim knew--and dreaded--what the next step would be.

Hank drove home along Scenic Avenue, above the beach of white sand that seemed almost to glow in the moonlight. Long white breakers came out of the night and broke on the shore. Far out at sea, mysterious off-shore lights winked and moved steadily along. Hank didn't have much to say on the drive home. Nor did he say anything when they went to the bedroom and Kim fled into the bathroom, closing the door and changing into her negligee. Hank slumped down on the bottom of the bed, staring at the floor, his lower lips thrust petulantly out. She, Kim, carried the modesty thing just a little too far to suit him. She wouldn't wear a brassiere because she thought the undergarment made her breasts stick out too much. As a result, her taut little nipples poked against her sweaters and blouses and drove men nuts.

He clenched his fists as he thought of her getting up in the Matador and slinking to the ladies room with every stud in the place drooling and looking at him with that "You-sure-are-getting- yours" kind of envious look. And watching her come back to the table with that wild hair and cool look and her hips twitching and her breasts cargo-shifting, rubbing together, under the sweater. It's a wonder she wasn't raped.

A drunken leer came across his face, and he gunned at the closed bathroom door. Rape! She was carrying it just a bit far, changing in there. After all, it wasn't against the law for a husband and wife to be naked together. He snorted, realizing how long it had been and knowing that she was shortly to come through the bathroom door clad in an ultra-respectable nightie--probably something made out of flannel and real itsy-poo.

He was right. Seeing things distorted through a prism of too much Scotch, he lurched to his feet as she came into the room. To him it seemed she was playing the little girl with an ugly nightie up to her Adam's apple, wearing a gown with ribbons and bows on it and only her bare toes peeking out from underneath.

Essentially, he was right. The negligee was demure and she did have a polite smile on her face, hoping he would respond in kind. She yawned in front of him as he stood swaying before her, breathing heavily through his nose. "We'd better get to bed. We've got to be up early, so you can catch that plane," she said, trying to calm him.

"Nuts. Bull! The hell with the plane," he growled as he lurched toward her. His big hands seized her by the shoulders.

"Hank! You're hurting me!"

"So what? Take it off, baby!"

"Hank, stop this instant!"

Her tone only served to annoy him. He was too far gone in alcohol and frustration to bother to listen. He saw her walking, slinky and sexy, a real prick-tease, across the floor of the Matador with her ripely rounded buttocks twitching and her big beautiful breasts shifting, quivering and wiggling under her sweater. He saw all the bar-rail studs looking at her with one thing on their minds. Mentally they had all fucked her... and what was there for him--her husband? Now, this... this Shirley Temple nightie! He hooked his fingers in the collar of the gown and pulled, tearing the negligee down the front to her slender, ripely flaring hips. He caught glimpses of her voluptuously naked flesh beneath; her protruding musk-melon breasts so round and full, so quivering with softness and fleshy promise; her firm stomach that was curved out of ivory in subtle undulations and the "V" of her lush pubic mound. Everything--her stomach, her sleek young thighs that were as smooth and warm as a baby's skin-- everything seemed to swoop and rush head-long to her loins where her plumply rounded mound of Venus was licked with a tongue of softly curling flame from her sparse red pubic hair!

The drunken engineer's breath came faster as he lurched after her. Kim backed against the wall, her hands and arms trying to hide her breasts that jellied in fright and her naked loins. "Hank, don't you dare!"

He grabbed her wrist and yanked her arm to one side with a brutal ease and her firm young breasts leaped free and quivered m front of his face and he half grunted, half-growled as be stared at her softly fleshed globes. Consistent with her flame-tousled complexion, her nipples were the palest of pink, delicate and finely formed.

It was with an animal savagery that he stepped forward and locked one burly arm around the terrified young wife's slender waist and squeezed, forcing her to bend over backward. Kim tried to protest, but his other hand was clamped over her mouth with a sudden force... and her head was forced back to where it crashed against the wall, causing her to see stars. She was pinned between his hard body and the wall, bent over backward from the waist while her lovely harvest moon breasts were nakedly free and tilting up to where his hot, moistly hungry mouth ravished them. He was close to going berserk as he greedily licked the distended little nipples. Clamping his voracious mouth over them he sucked hard and then bit down on them, feeling their berry-like buds respond, grow taut and buffeted as he rolled them around with his tongue and teeth.

The red-headed wife struggled with all her might, but her frantic squirming seemed only to excite the drunken engineer to more brutality and worsen her position. His powerful hips were being savagely ground into hers, and she could feel the growing hardness of his long thick cock under his pants. Her head was forced back and the negligee had slipped down, exposing her smoothly rounded feminine shoulders and breasts and at the same time, effectively pinning her arms at her sides. Kim's breasts were completely naked now and tilted toward the ceiling; they moistly glistened in the bedroom lamplight... wettened with hot saliva as his hungrily sucking mouth darted from one nipple to the other.

Finally the struggling young girl was able to turn her head to one side, freeing her mouth. "Hank, stop, it's me, Kim!" She knew he was drunk and didn't know what he was doing; she had to bring him to his senses! "It's me, Kim!"

"KIM!" He roared out her name and let go of her, stepping back and standing in a savage semi-crouch, looking at her and letting out a wild laugh, a laugh utterly devoid of humor and full of violence and ugly contempt.

Kim stood against the wall completely naked to her waist, her twin fleshy moons heaving for breath. She tried not to move... not to startle him. My God, he was beyond reason! His eyes were glassy and wild, glazed over with lust and alcohol. She had to get through to him. "Hank, wait a minute. Take it easy. It's me, Kim." She spoke softly, as if to a child or a growling dog she was trying to reassure. "It's Kim. Your wife. Remember? Take it easy. Wait a min--"

She never got a chance to finish her sentence, for she screamed, involuntarily, as he brutally seized her by the wrist and, with a strength she never dreamed he possessed, pulled her to him and then snapped her out, across the room, hurtling toward the bed. He snapped her with an incredible strength, tossed her as if she were a child on the end of snap-the-whip; she literally flew through the air until her knees hit the edge of the bed, and momentum flung her forward --down on her face and stomach to the mattress.

She bounced up from the sudden impact, but the aroused engineer was on her from the rear, his thumb and fingers clamping themselves on the back of her neck like steel bands. They hurt a lot, made her cry out and be afraid to move, as he forced her back face down on the bed. His other hand groped for the negligee and she felt and heard it rip as he impatiently clawed at it until he had torn every last shred away. Now she was pinned helplessly down on the bed, the covers rubbing against her nipples that were extraordinarily sensitive from his ministrations. His heavy breathing was a combination of things: alcohol, exertion, and a growing, yammering, exulting passion. A horny wildness was coursing through his blood and pounding on the iron-hard, heavily- flanged head of his cock that throbbed so hard that it ached.