The Pleasure Quartet by Vina Jackson Read Free Book Online

frame and were held high with a push-up bra, its rich purple-blue tone clearly visible through the pastel peach blouse she wore over it. When she leaned forward to check my name in the book, the fabric fell open, revealing the firm mounds of her bosom almost all the way to her nipples. She peered at me again.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I got caught in the rain. I’m with Aurelia. Aurelia Carter. Over there.’ I nodded in Aurelia’s direction.
    ‘No problem,’ she replied. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
    ‘Summer,’ Aurelia called out, stepping past the hostess and kissing me lightly on each cheek. ‘So good to see you.’
    ‘And you.’
    She was bone dry. Regally impervious to the elements.
    ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said, although a quick glance at the Dali-style melting clock on the far interior wall indicated that I was exactly on time.
    Aurelia bent down, picked up a cream duffel bag and handed it to me. Her dress rode up her thigh as she did so and revealed the tail and body of a peacock, rendered stylistically in deep indigo and green tones across her flesh. It didn’t look new, and yet I was sure that the last time I saw her, she had displayed the body of a whale etched in plain black on that particular part of her leg. The landscape of her skin seemingly ebbed and flowed with the seasons and her moods, just another of Aurelia’s many mysteries. Merely a trick of the light, she claimed. I no longer believed her insistence that the intricate map which I knew was etched into every inch of her flesh, including her most intimate parts, was mere illusion. I had resigned myself to the existence of magic since I had been in Aurelia’s employ.
    ‘I was sunbathing before the rain started – there’s a few spare dry things in there. If you want to change?’
    The hostess straightened her posture, an action that I felt certain was directed at me.
    ‘Oh, thank you.’ I took the bag and headed towards the restrooms, weaving my way through the tables to get there, careful not to bump into anyone in my bedraggled state.
    I stepped into one of the cubicles, peeled off my wet clothes and scrubbed the water from my skin with Aurelia’s beach towel, which was clean and dry, and not littered with so much as a speck of sand. Her bag contained a high-waisted, fire-engine-red bikini bottom and matching top, both designed to cover the wearer’s parts in full, totally unlike the Brazilian string-style that was ever in fashion around here. I disregarded the bikini, presuming that it would be too small for my more pronounced curves, and instead pulled on a loose white long-sleeved sun-dress. The baroque framed mirror above the sink indicated that it did absolutely nothing for my figure, but at least it wasn’t see-through, so while my shape might make onlookers guess that I was not wearing anything underneath, my breasts weren’t actually visible through the thin material. God only knew that I was not shy with my body and had lost count of how many had seen it in all its glory or otherwise, but sometimes discretion was the better part of valour.
    I dug through the duffel bag’s pockets and located a small toiletry bag with a comb inside, next to an old paperback romance novel. A woman wearing a tight corset and full skirt adorned the front cover. I flicked through the pages, stalling for time. It was the most unlikely book for Aurelia to carry. I just didn’t think of her as a die-hard romantic somehow.
    We’d had this meeting planned for weeks, and yet I still wasn’t sure what I was going to say to her.
    I was confident that she was going to ask me to continue working with the Network, the organisation that I had been ultimately employed by for the past two years. Initially in New Orleans, running The Place, an upmarket erotic dance bar, and more recently here in Brazil, organising the latest Ball, an erotic, circus-style festival of the senses behind which Aurelia pulled the strings with almost supernatural