Crash! It sounded like a vase shattering against the door. Llona shut it hastily.
The approaching couple was closer now. Frantically, Llona darted across the hall to the opposite door. She turned the knob. It was locked. She turned around just in time to meet the eyes of the people walking toward her.
They were a man and a woman, middle-aged, well-dressed. They froze, their mouths hanging open, their eyes staring at Llona’s nudity.
“Excuse me,” she said politely, elbowing past them.
“Excuse me,” they chanted automatically in return.
Their eyes followed her as she walked sedately down the corridor.
“It must be some kind of advertising gimmick,” the man said finally as she turned the corner and vanished from sight.
“Probably. But what could they be advertising?”
“Search me. But whatever it is, let’s buy a couple of dozen.”
Once out of view, Llona sprinted for the first door and pulled it open. It turned out to be the door to the stairwell. Confusedly, she raced down the stairs and emerged in the hallway of the floor below. Cautiously, she tried another door. It was locked. She tried a second and it opened. But she could hear the murmur of voices from inside, so she quietly slid it shut again. Then she tried a third. It also opened. No voices. She slipped into the room and closed the door behind her.
The room was empty. It looked as if it wasn’t being occupied at all that night. The bed was made and the windows were shut tight. Llona turned on the light and then quickly switched it off, afraid that it might reveal her presence. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark and tried to think.
What was she going to do? Somehow she had to get back up to Lansing’s room and retrieve her clothing. But was it safe to go back there? And dare she run the risk of going through the halls nude again? Suppose somebody called the house detective? Or suppose she got back to Lansing’s room and he was still there?
No, the best thing to do, she decided, was to just stay put for as long as possible. Let things die down. Maybe spend the night in this empty room. Then, in the morning, she could sneak back up to Lansing’s room. They wouldn’t be looking for her any more by then and it would be much easier to get her clothes and get out of the hotel.
So Llona settled back and decided to relax and maybe even grab a cat-nap until morning. In the privacy of the empty room, she was beginning to feel more confident that she’d get out of this mess. She was even smiling to herself as she remembered the look on poor Mr. Tweedleberfs face when he looked up and saw his wife.
But Llona’s ease was short-lived. There was the muted sound of voices outside the door of the room. There was the sound of the doorknob being tried, but Llona had locked the door behind her when she entered. Then there was the sound of a key being inserted in the lock.
Llona’s eyes grew very large. She trembled. It looked like she’d been caught. She tried to steel herself to face the music.
Chapter Five
PEOPLE get married for the damnedest reasons. And the reasons aren’t always the same for the two people involved. So it was with Joe and Alice Barker.
When the bellboy let them into Room 401 of the Marlowe Hotel that night, Alice Barker had been Mrs. Barker for exactly three hours and forty-seven minutes. Before then she had been Alice Murgatroyd, deflowered spinster, age twenty-one. Before then she had been consumed by one aim in life -- to get married --, and now that goal had been fulfilled. Marriage had wiped clean the slate, a slate which, after all, had only been adolescently sullied, and so ineptly by the half-dozen boys involved since her sixteenth year that it was certainly a girl's prerogative to consider it erasable.
The last of the half-dozen had been Joe Barker. On his head had fallen the stored-up tears engendered by his five predecessors. Onto his shoulders had been shifted the total weight of the guilt shared by all. Alice had confronted him with his responsibility for her de-virginization as though her five previous lovers had never even existed.
At first Joe reacted in the usual masculine fashion by raising a valid technical objection.
“I was very active as a young girl,” Alice told him demurely. “I did a lot of horseback riding. The doctor says-—”
And who was Joe Barker to argue with a medical opinion? It wasn't so much that he was naive as that he was emdly intimidated by Alice. This was a tribute to her, for In terms of experience, Joe had come to their marriage far more devirginized than Alice had.
Yet all his experience hadn’t prepared him for the ambivalent emotions Alice stirred in him from the first. Yes, the very first time he besmirched her honor, he unknowingly put himself in the position of a fish nibbling at the marital bait. The site of this initial floundering was a lakefront beach to the south of the city of Caldwell.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Alice Murgatroyd said when he kissed her for the first time under the stars. And then she giggled, for the line was a bit of dialogue right out of the Doris Day movie they’d just come from seeing.
“Why not? Didn’t you like it?” Joe Barker didn’t even faintly resemble Rock Hudson, but years of cinema-going left no doubt in his mind as to what his answer should be.
“Well, yes, but—”
“But nothing!” He kissed her again. Masterfully.
Alice returned the kiss and melted-—as the saying goes —into his arms. She felt every bit as good there as she looked. And, from Joe’s point of view, she looked very nice indeed.
Alice Murgatroyd wasn’t a beautiful girl. Nor was she an overly sexy one in the way that a Brigitte Bardot or a Sophia Loren might be considered sexy. She had a vivacious, freckle-nosed quality and the slender kind of figure that’s often described as “boyish”, but just as often turns out to be surprisingly voluptuous when freed of the tailored suits or sack dresses favored by its owner. Red hair and green eyes added a certain sexiness to the modest bosom and hips. And the way the moon over the beach made both hair and eyes sparkle lent an air of intrigue rather than concealment to the sack dress which covered her from shoulder to knee.
With the second kiss, Joe Barker’s hand slid to the bodice of the sack dress. “You shouldn’t do that,” Alice murmured, making a feeble effort to brush the hand away. Joe squeezed gently, but didn’t reply.
Alice caught her breath and the breast under Joe’s hand inflated. She stopped trying to push the hand away. Encouraged, Joe slid his other hand around her back and fumbled with the zipper of her dress. When he’d ‘slid it down to the waist, he unclasped her bra and reached around under her arms to caress her bare breasts.
It was hard to tell much about those breasts from that angle. Nevertheless, his continued caressing had its effect. Alice moaned low in her throat and her little teeth nipped passionately at his lower lip.
Joe started pushing the top of the dress down off her shoulders. Alice sat bolt upright immediately and pushed him way. “No!” she said firmly.
“No?” Joe echoed. “Why not?”
“Because.” And that’s all that Alice would say.
It took Joe half an hour to get back to the point at which she’d stopped him. When he did, he carefully refrained from trying to remove her dress. He didn’t want to make her balk again.
Instead, he allowed his hand to slip under her dress and edge up the silken length of her stockinged leg. Alice writhed under this new intimacy. Her body arched slightly. Her hips moved in a series of little, spasmodic jerks. Her bare thigh-flesh quivered under his hands.
His arm growing stiff from crooking his elbow, Joe started to push the dress up over her legs to make things easier for himself. Again Alice sat up sharply and pushed him away. The dialogue was repeated. “No!” she said firmly.
“No? Why not?”