Stranded! by Pepper Pace Read Free Book Online Page A

hair back in a braid and tucked several orchids into it. Marshall had pulled on a button-up shirt from the pack and had actually buttoned it. They ate their meal properly instead of laying sprawled out on the mat, joking and spilling topsy turvy cups of water and coconut milk.

It was so polite, it felt like a date. And so like a date, there was tension.

"So, that guy you used to date...Franklin was it?"

Oceans quickly chewed and swallowed, while nodding her head. "Yes."

"You and he never thought about marrying?"

"Well...I thought about it. He wasn't interested in making us legal. I mean...why should he? I was already doing everything a wife would do."

"When you left to take care of your Dad, didn't he..." There were too many things that he wanted to say like: try to get back with you, miss you, fly down to stay with you...

Oceans answered his unfinished question. "No. I called him for a few months but...he never made any attempts to contact me first. It was obvious that I was just an intrusion on his life."

Marshall was shaking his head in disbelief. "He was a fool." Oceans met his eyes and then looked away quickly. Marshall's eyes lingered on the outline of her breasts beneath the thin material of her sundress. It had become a stupid, inconvenient waste of time to don a bra every day so recently she had stopped the habit.

Oceans wasn't top heavy by any means, so she thought that Marshall probably wouldn't even notice. She was wrong. He quickly used his bread to scoop up more greens which he chewed with deliberate concentration. He needed to think of other things then the way her darker nipples could be clearly seen against the thin material of all of her clothing. Marshall had never been with a black woman. Were their nipples always darker than their skin? God...he shuddered.

Oceans peeked at Marshall, watching his face color. She knew what brought that color to his face. A woman knows when a man's eyes are on her body. She felt like it was suddenly very hard to breathe. She hadn't been touched by a man in years. Living with her dad, she was much too busy to think of such things, and even when someone looked twice at her—her father's friends would run them off, as if they had to protect her virtue for the ill man.

Lately, she'd been thinking of it. She didn't think much of race; though her two previous lovers had been black. She was familiar with a black man's penis and tight ebony scrotum. Her cheeks felt warm as she remembered the time she'd seen Marshall naked. He didn't know it but he had been taking his daily swim in search for fish. That day she had decided to take a break from weaving and had walked down to the wall where he'd been fishing of late. Marshall had just left the water and was holding a piece of parachute line that had three fish strung on it. He was also completely nude. Oceans had ducked out of sight but she couldn't help herself as she peeked from behind her hiding place, watching him drop the fish onto shore. He swept his hands through his longish, wet hair. She remembered gasping at the sight of his perfect body. His sun bronzed skin was devoid of any fat. He had been fit before but now he was in athletic condition!

He crouched there nude and quickly cleaned the fish, tossing the guts back into the ocean and quickly rinsing himself clean. His hands ran over his nude body and Oceans had unconsciously licked her lips. The penis and scrotum of a white man was completely different than that of a black man's...mechanically they were the same...but looked completely different.

Oceans turned and ran back to camp before she got caught.

Now her mind was back to the water, darkened hair between his legs and the ruddy color of his shaft; the water droplets that trailed down his chest, over his defined abs, down to his cock...

"Oceans."

Her head popped up. "Huh?"

He gave her a curious look and she blushed. "After dinner do you want to swim in the quarry?" The fresh water lagoon that they had