Free A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen Page B

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 whatAlbert 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.”
    “Oh yes. She manages to be clothed at all times. She even wears these hideous, mannish pajamas that she must find in some sort of
neuter
shop. She’s afraid a glimpse of her flesh will get me, as she puts it, ‘riled up.’”
    She waggled him. “So that’s what he was earlier? Riled up?”
    “But you soothed the savage beast,” Judd said.
    Ruth rolled over onto him and softly laid her head on his hairless, alabaster chest. “Tell me about Isabel so I won’t be like her.”
    “I frankly don’t know a lot. And I have been connected to Isabel in one way or another for sixteen years. Yet I can’t honestly say what Isabel’s ambitions