A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

And Judd asked, “Shall we go?”

She nodded.

Judd hailed a horse-drawn carriage for a romantic ride to the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. She wanted to kiss him out there in public but he primly insisted, “We cannot lose our head

s.”

She noticed the green patina of the hotel’s oxidized copper roofing, and Judd told her it was called verdigris.

She asked, “Have you heard that expression ‘Ignorance is bliss’?” Then she smiled as she held up a shushing finger to his lips.

She admitted she’d never been inside the neighboring, brown-stone, Victorian hotels that the Astor family had joined into one. The famous George C. Boldt, who was said to have invented the modern hotel, had retired as general manager and was replaced by a gregarious Norwegian woman whose name, Jorgine, had been Americanized to Georgia. She’d talked with Judd before, and she grinned as she said, “Hey, sailor. What ship?”

Judd took off his skipper’s hat and said he didn’t believe she’d met his wife, introducing Ruth as Mrs. Jane Gray and signing the register that way.

Walking up the staircase, Ruth whispered, “Aren’t you feeling naughty?”

“Deliciously so,” Judd said.

She looked down and said with amazement, “This carpeting is soft as a sponge!”

“John Jacob Astor called it the most luxurious hotel in the world. Of course, that was thirty years ago.”

She grazed her fingers along the flocked wallpaper, then stooped to praise a tazza urn on a hallway credenza. When they reached their room, she fondled the silken draperies, the tapestried furniture, and the woven fabric on the wide bed. She flipped off her high heels and flopped down on it and smiled. “The springs don’t creak!”

“Were you excruciatingly poor as a child?” he asked.

She seemed to take that as an insult. “Was I too dizzy?”

“Oh no, darling. It just makes me feel so good to give you things you haven’t had.”

Ruth crooked a finger inside the front of his belt and pulled him to her. “Ditto,” she said.

But then the field of force shifted and he said, “My turn,” as he lifted Ruth to her feet so his clotheshorse hands could deftly undo and tease off a hushed waterfall of jeweled white evening gown. In the still-new flapper fashion, she wore nothing underneath but a garter belt and silk stockings, and she liked his shock at her sudden nakedness and the frank wolfishness of his gaze as it seized information of her body. With a faint groan of veneration, Judd fell to his knees in front of her to unfasten each stocking and tug it free while offering tickling, reverent kisses to her inner thighs, her calves, her feet. “Sit,” he said then. “Lie back.”

She took off the garter belt and did so, and watched the city’s flashing lights affect the Waldorf’s ceiling as she heard him taking off and folding his glasses, and then Judd was kneeling again and widening her legs in a firm, medical way, his face finding her crotch and wetly nuzzling there as his soft, almost feminine hands palmed and squeezed her breasts. She gasped with excitement as his mouth fluttered, examined, and worried her sex in a hungry, fervent ravishment, and she said, “Oh, you’re so good at that.” She said, “Oh, that feels so nice.” And still he continued, with no hint of duty or impatience, and she felt a finger stroking inside her, two, and she felt her heart going like mad, and she thought this freedom, this fun, this letting go was all she’d ever wanted from Albert, was just what Albert could not give, and it was right to have this intimacy, this tenderness, this sharing of sheer pleasure—it would have been cold, inhuman, and wrong to deny it—and she wanted to thank Isabel or whoever it was for teaching him so well, this Judd who was so selfless and generous and as talented with his tongue as a fantasy lover, and she could feel his fascination, his awe for her, his gratitude for the gift of this, and she couldn’t hold back, she cried out and bucked up from the bed again and again, shuddering in orgasm, and then inviting him up from the floor and guiding his erection inside her and joining him so tightly in the clench of her thighs and the hug of her arms that he could not possibly have seen she was crying.

Afterward Judd phoned room service and ordered ginger ale for them and Waldorf salads. “And pretzels,” Ruth added.

“And pretzels,” he said. Earlier he’d raised all the windows but it was still hot, so they stayed naked atop the fresh-smelling sheets, propped up against a six-foot-high Victorian headboard. Judd reclined on his elbow and admired her body for a while, softly grazing a scar near her navel as he inquired, “What caused that?”

“I had an appendectomy when I was eleven.”

He petted near it another scar from an incision. “And that?”

“Surgery so I could get pregnant. Some female things were knotted up. Al blew his stack when he found out. He hates kids.”

“I hope we never meet.”

“You won’t.”

Judd gently cupped the underside of Ruth’s right breast as though weighing it.

She smiled. “C cup.”

“I just can’t get over seeing such a gorgeous woman in the altogether like this. With me.”

“I’m guessing Isabel’s a prude.”