Blushing at Both Ends Read Free Page A

it.
    Mon anglais chéri
, Your naughty impertinent thanks you for her lovely spanking –
et pour tout le reste
. My bottom yet glows deliciously and I think of you each time I sit myself down. I leave a little something for you to remember me by.
Bons baisers de ta méchante Claudine
.
    His book lay where he had left it, but again the bookmark had changed. His place was now marked by a pair of delicate cream silk drawers. Charles held them to his nose and, with a sense of ecstasy, inhaled deeply.
    The next day was his last in Arles. In the morning he had his final session with Mme Hubert before taking an afternoon plane back to London. It was tempting – very tempting – to prolong his stay and seek a further rendezvous with the enchanting Claudine. But it would involve an exorbitant additional airfare – and, besides, how could any repeat performance, however delicious, be quite as intoxicatingly sensuous as last night’s? Best, surely, to leave it as a perfect glowing memory.
    Mme Hubert was on fine form, happy to prolong their talk beyond the allotted hour, and Charles’s cassette recorder reaped a last rich harvest of anecdote and reminiscence. In every way it had proved a superbly successful trip, and as he rose to leave he thanked the old lady effusively.
    â€˜Believe me, monsieur Kenyon, for me also it has been a pleasure. I love to revisit these ancient ghosts, and with your help I have recaptured much that I thought lost for ever. If I live so long, I shall be enchanted to read your book, and I am glad if I have aided you a little in the creation of it.’ She smiled, and there was a hint of some secret laughter in her eyes. ‘I trust that my granddaughter too has contributed to the pleasure of your stay in Arles?’
    Charles stared. ‘Your – granddaughter?’
    â€˜But of course; my little Claudine. She works at the Hotel de la Poste – as a chambermaid.’
    As realisation dawned, Charles’s eyes strayed to a photo of Anne-Giselle, all of seventeen years old, strolling arm in arm with Picasso on the Pont des Arts. Of course! No wonder Claudine had seemed somehow familiar. ‘Then – then you knew?’
    â€˜Oh, monsieur Kenyon!’ The old lady was laughing openly now, but not unkindly. Once again the years seemed to drop away, revealing the mischievous gamine who had captivated Paris all those decades ago. La Giselle smiled. ‘At my age there is little one does not know. And besides – did I not promise to do all in my power to make your visit worthwhile?’

2
    Blushing Bride
    THERE SHE STANDS at the altar, my lovely Jenny, my golden girl, the close-cut ivory satin wedding dress outlining her superb figure, its sleek fabric hugging the curves of her beautiful bottom. And there beside her stands . . . someone else entirely. Not me.
    Do I feel bitter? No, not now. Not since last night. Because I know a few things that fat oaf standing beside her doesn’t know, maybe never will. And one of them is that his blushing bride, not twelve hours ago, was blushing far more vividly, and in a very different fashion . . .
    I read Jenny’s letter on a scruffy little Greek steamer somewhere in the further reaches of the Aegean. I’d picked it up from
poste restante
at Piraeus the evening before and thought I’d save my pleasure in reading it until the next day, relaxing on deck with a glass of rough raki in my hand. So I opened it against an idyllic backdrop of impossibly blue sea, soaring gulls and tiny deserted grey-brown islets.
    Jenny and I had been together four years, since I was twenty and she two years younger. My golden girl, I called her. Long honey-blonde hair, skin that glowed like sun-warmed stone, a sensuous mouth, liquid brown eyes and the kind of body men dream about. The only reason she wasn’t with me now, exciting lecherous glances on a Greek beach, was that she had her final exams to finish. The letter, I