“Don’t worry about it. I won’t even bother having it washed. Maybe I’ll pin it up in that trophy room I showed you.”

“What?”

He laughed. “Just joking. I’ll have it burned up. But they say the first man a woman makes love to is the last man she’ll forget. How do you feel about that?”

“I feel a little sick,” I said.

He laughed again.

“I do!”

“It’ll pass. Just relax. Everything will be better for you this next time. You won’t have to wait long. I’m loaded for bear tonight.”

“What does that mean?”

“My father’s expression. Now that we’ve opened the door, tilled the soil, let’s return to where we were,” he said. He took a long sip of his glass of limoncello, and then he looked at me and smiled. “This never disappoints,” he said, holding up the glass. “And you liked it, too.”

Liked it, too? Right now, I felt I had been hypnotized and drugged with a sweet-tasting arsenic. I was on the verge of crying, bawling uncontrollably. I think he saw my lips tremble and moved quickly to lie beside me again.

“Now, now, Corrine. Don’t blame yourself for making things more difficult for us tonight. All of it had to be overcome eventually anyway. It’s all part of growing into a woman. My own mother told me that, not that I was old enough at the time to understand a word of it.”

I grimaced. What kind of a mother would discuss such a thing with her son? Her daughter, yes, but tell him a woman’s deepest secrets? I couldn’t get my own mother to do it. Why didn’t he go to his father for that sort of information anyway?

He stroked my hair.

“Don’t despair. You’re a woman who simply can’t look anything but beautiful before, during, and after great lovemaking.”

Normally, I would have wanted so much to hear those words, but right now I felt nauseated. He was actually starting to annoy me with the odor of the cigar on his breath and his fingers traveling over my shoulders and breasts like a spider.

But if he saw any of this in my face, he ignored it. He leaned over and began to kiss me, starting from the small of my stomach, but not, as I was anticipating, moving up my body.

I tried to shift away, but he held my hips and kept me from moving.

“Another man might run, but most don’t know there is so much pleasure in satisfying all your senses at once when you have the opportunity to do so. Besides, I like the smell of you.”