Marcus Van Heller (John Stevenson) wrote this book for Olympia in 1961. The work presents detective Nick Harding, and wraps a thriller between amorous adventures and recollections of same.

Excerpt:

In the taxi on the way to her flat in a small street off Trocadero, he pulled her to him and kissed her. Her lips were soft; the kiss was warm and strangely comforting, as if this woman were the embodiment of her sex and its eternal comforts. She gave a little murmur and he ran his palm down her face to feel the soft, teenage contour of it. He saw her eyes for a moment looking at him. They were dark and deep as black gems, and then the lids closed over them and she breathed his name, and her pink, silvery tongue brushed his mouth ever so gently and pushed through his lips against his teeth and then on beyond onto his tongue. He smoothed her soft, sleek hair and the nape of her neck with his hand that was large and strong. The incense smell of her began to overwhelm him as if he were lost in some secret Eastern shrine. She broke her mouth away from his and ran her lips over his cheek and down his chin to his neck. She was breathing heavily. He was excited by the reserves of passion he sensed in her ready to be unleashed.

The taxi slid to a halt and they separated slowly.

“Here we are,” she said huskily.

They got out on separate sides and he paid the driver, hardly hearing his “Merci, Monsieur” at the size of the tip.

When they reached the front door, she pressed the bell and it swung open, leading into a broad, pillared entrance hall. She called her name at the concierge's door—“Lecoeur”—and Nick noted with satisfaction that she'd told him the truth. They went through another door, which was made of glass panels in a wrought-iron framework, and crossed a narrow hall on the left.

“Third floor,” she whispered.

Nick dug his toes into the carpet as he pulled back the lift gates. “You don't live too badly,” he said. “I always heard only the wealthy lived in flats like this in this part of the city.”

“Depends what you mean by rich,” she said.

He closed the lift gates after them and pressed the third floor button. As the lift rose smoothly with a faint humming sound, she turned her body towards him, the same body he remembered that had been so exciting in the spotlight and had seemed so strangely inaccessible. She pressed against him and he bent and kissed her neck, sucking the flesh into his mouth so that when he moved his head away, there was an impression of his lips, dark and burnt-looking on her olive skin.

They got out of the lift and she took a key from her evening bag. He let her walk before him into the flat, feasting his eyes on her slim shoulders and her waist and rounded hips and buttocks that contained such supple power. All of it would soon be his, he thought.

She switched on the lights. They were in a hall that contained a couple of carved cherubs on gilt stands. The taste was garish, but powerfully effective. Apart from the ornaments, the hall was bare but for a small mahogany table with a telephone on it and a long, built-in cupboard. A door opened off to the left into a kitchen, another into a bathroom. Doors on the right opened into a salon and a bedroom, respectively.

She led the way into the salon. It was exquisitely furnished. It had a huge, high ceiling with Empire-striped walls, a couple of antique pictures in gilt frames, a marble mantelpiece with carved torches flanking a mirror. There was a long divan, some Louis XV chairs, a table with extending leaves, a bureau and a cocktail cabinet. The whole of the wall opposite the door was a French window that opened out onto a broad balcony overlooking a tiny courtyard with a single huge plane tree just reaching the level of the balcony floor.

While he was quietly surveying the magnificence of the room, she turned on a couple of table lamps that threw rings of light onto the olive-colored carpet.

She went to the window and pulled heavy, dove-gray curtains across. “It will soon be dawn,” she said.

“The time of day doesn't worry me,” he said.

She came towards him then and put her arms around him. Her hands caressed the back of his head as he kissed her and then moved onto his shoulders.

“Would you like a drink?” she whispered.

“I'm high as a kite already,” he said. “And why would I want to waste time with drink when looking at you has more effect on me than a dozen Mickey Finns?”

“You don't take your drink very well,” she said. “The bedroom's next door.”

He took her hand and drew her from the room. They didn't stop to switch out the lights. In the bedroom, he guided her blindly towards a bed. They fell on it. It was high and luxurious and springy as a trampoline.

She reached across him and turned on a bedside lamp.

“I like to be able to see,” she said.

Now that the moment was imminent, his hands trembled as he stripped off his clothes. They watched each other undress with deep, hungry eyes. Nick put in abeyance all his plans. This was the loveliest creature he had ever had—Venus and Aphrodite in one human skin.

She stood ready. The naked, olive body was unexpectedly familiar from having watched it at the club. She came close to him, her dark eyes slitted between drooping lids.

“You looked like an athlete—and you are,” she whispered. She ran her trembling hands over his shoulders and arms and dropped them suddenly down to his genitals.

He felt the gossamer touch shoot through him like an electric spark and he caught her to him, lifting her, writhing and murmuring, off the surface of the bed. He crushed her to him. She bit his neck and then she bit into his mouth. The pain was sharp but not nearly as overwhelming as the sensation of the mixture of the full, lush imprint of her body against his, her sharp nipples digging into his chest like knife-points, the soft, luscious flesh of her belly and loins and thighs rubbing against his counterpart flesh as she moved in his arms.

He laid her out on the bed. He fell on her, sucking the tips of her breasts into his mouth. She clawed at his head. Her olive-colored skin was plentiful and firm and tasted of the strange incense that seemed to envelop her. He ran his lips over her warm, lovely body, and her throat contracted in a moan. When he moved his hand down to her loins, gently exploring between her thighs, she was wet and warm and wide open for him.

“Don't wait, darling, don't wait,” she whispered and her dark, almond eyes opened and implored him.

Nick needed no urging. He couldn't wait for preliminaries and it seemed they weren't necessary. Her fingers trembled on the thick, stiff shaft of his penis, pulling back the foreskin delicately, fondling the glans so that it throbbed in the pain of deprivation.

She opened her thighs and caught at his shoulders. “Darling, please,” she whispered.

He slid his flesh over the hilly contours of her body. Her thighs closed in on him on either side, pressing convulsively against his hips, so that she had to pull her thighs back a little to allow him entrance. She reached down, searching for his penis. When she found it, she pulled it to her cunt. Nick allowed her to place it, breathing hard.

“There, darling,” she said, and there was a break in her voice.

He pushed gently, feeling the opposing flesh enclose the tip of his prick. The flesh of her cunt spread out around his length and then slid warmly, closely down the whole rigid rod as he drove gently into her.

She uttered a long, low animal cry. Her eyes closed and her hips wriggled under the weight of his. She arched her neck so that a vein, over which Nick placed his parted lips, stood out, and her breasts pushed hard into his chest. Her breath heaved in her throat and broke from her lips in little sobs.

Nick was pervaded with an immense sweet pain, which found its apex in the very tip of his prick and extended downwards to his toes. He ran his hands over her lovely flesh, clutching at her shoulders, her arms, her breasts, her waist as he screwed up and up into her. And then he slipped his hands under her round, warm buttocks from either side so that he held one in each hand. He squeezed the flesh, weighing it in his hands, hardly able now to believe that this was happening but for the lovely body that writhed in torment and adoration underneath him.

“Oh darling—do that again,” she breathed, looking at him through half-open eyes as he stabbed right up into her cunt and held his stroke there for a full second.

“Do that again. Thrust hard up into me and stay there,” she whispered.

Nick did and she closed her eyes and jiggled, impaled like an insect on his organ, letting out little gasps of breath between her half-opened lips.

Her fingers grasped his chest and he thrust into her again and again, stretching her buttocks with his hands, finding the rosebud anus, digging his finger deep into it so that she clawed at his back so hard that it stung.

Her thighs moved wildly to and away from his. Her whole body heaved and swayed, their flesh rubbing to each other's so that a heat of passion grew over the mass of their moving contact, and in the luscious effort of their sex, their bodies sweated and glowed and were flushed the deep color of crimson.

Nick couldn't get enough of her. He wanted to feast on her buttocks that were in the palms of his hands, to crush her breasts, which poked hard into his chest, to a powder, and to shatter that moist, warm channel, which contracted around his cock in a continuous ebb and flow, to a million pieces. This destructive urge he felt while fucking her was inexorably linked with such overwhelming pleasure. Perhaps the thought that such power, the power to give or to withhold pleasure to tormenting extreme, could reside in another body was too much to bear. His knees dug pits in the bed to the sides of her buttocks. He arched his hips at her upturned thighs, trying to force himself farther and even farther into the soft, squeezing delight of her cunt.

He clenched her shoulders in a convulsive movement, bruising them with a sudden change of position. Her face contorted as she dug weals across his back in her passion.

Her full breasts splayed under his weight and he lifted his torso off her while he strained to get a better view of them. He watched them sway and quiver, and looked to the flesh that was taut and stretched over the bones of her ribs, stretching like satin as she wriggled her tortured, naked body. Her belly heaved in great, choking gasps and her thighs were in an abandoned shiver of motion. Her head flailed from side to side as if she were trying to escape from some awful scourge. And then her eyes opened and looked at his with a lost, tormented desperation that heightened visibly as he drove to the depth of possibility into her vagina.

His stomach tightened and shook and his toes trembled with the physical sensation of having her so completely. It was as if she were drawing all his emotion through his cock and into her cunt; drawing it from his mind and allowing time for it to linger at various points in his body where it transformed to physical ecstasy and quivered like quicksilver in every nerve. He savored her body with every fiber of his being. His hands were transformed to the tenderness of bruised flesh as they felt her, his lips to her straining neck, his hands to her breasts, the entire length of his body to her. Inside of her, his cock throbbed and thundered against the walls of her moist, tight cunt.

“Darling, darling—I can't stand it ... can't stand it!” she cried.

She clutched at him so furiously that he felt the pain of it through his ecstasy and squirmed, punishing her for it with a redoubled fury of strokes into her cunt. He quickened his rhythm to a rapid thrusting. He felt his loins responding, deep, deep inside of her, hardly ready yet, but responding with that hint of liquid feeling that was deliriously unbelievable.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she cried. She pulled her thighs up so that her knees were against her shoulders. She wanted destruction. She wanted him to dig into her deeper even than he could go. She wanted the pounding of his cock to obliterate her and she clung with her knees to his shoulders and moaned in the agony of her desire.

“Darling, I'm dying, dying,” she breathed. She could hardly utter the words. Her eyes closed as if she were going to swoon and her teeth seemed to chatter. Her tongue moved across her quivering lips, and she began to pant and her breasts heaved upwards to push against his chest.

Nick's lips moved back involuntarily on his teeth. It was further joy to inflict this sweet pain on her and he could feel he hadn't far to go. His prick felt like lead, a great hard weight of lead, hot lead and sweetly bursting and moist and sticky and ... words and thought failed him.

He heard her shout that she was coming. It was torment listening to her panting as if it were escaping from a damned soul. Then she began to squirm under him and her panting turned to little whimpering cries that he was aware of only through the din in his ears. He heard her choke and she jack-knifed against him, nearly hurling him off of her like a wild horse would its rider. But he stayed with her, riding her hard, and beneath him she quivered bodily several times and then went rigid, releasing her juices with a wild, unearthly cry that pierced through to his brain.

The throbbing of his cock as it absorbed her explosion reached a point of unbearable agony before his white-hot relief raced through him so forcefully that he cried out and stabbed into her, wanting to pierce through to her very throat. He gave a great roar like an enraged elephant and the liquid exploded from his prick, the power of his orgasm seeming to splinter his rigid flesh into a thousand tender pieces.

Afterwards they fell into a deep sleep. When she woke up, she glanced over to Nick who was still sleeping soundly. She looked at his body that was covered only slightly by the sheet. It was a body that commanded attention, that seemed to invite touch. His shoulders were broad and the muscles in his arms were tight and revealed themselves as they stretched languidly in his rest beneath his slightly browned flesh. His chest heaved and fell in his breathing and the hair that grew thick around his nipples stretched out in a line down his navel and grew thick again at the base of his now soft cock. She moved down his body, careful not to disturb his sleep, and took his softened penis into the warmth of her mouth.

It jerked slightly and his breathing remained heavy. She rolled her tongue around and around it until the jerking grew more urgent and her mouth became filled with the growing length and width of his cock. His eyelids fluttered but he did not open them. He was awake, could never sleep through such things, but didn't want her to know it. He thought it was probably more erotic for her if she thought she was arousing him unawares.