All Sexual Encounters In This Story Involve Persons 18+ Years Old
********
By his reckoning, Philippe Pique’s slow descent into hell began on June 17, 1929. His younger brother, Michel, had been expected to arrive in Basel with his wife, Mai Nguyen and their ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Trang. Philippe would have guided them all on a lovely three-day country tour of Switzerland, after which Trang would remain to study at L’Ecole et Lycee Internationale. Instead, their flight on Imperial Airways crashed into the English Channel on the leg from Croyden Airport in Surrey, England, to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, France.
Michel, Mai and five other souls were lost to drowning. The two air crew, three other adult passengers and Trang survived with varying injuries. Philippe later learned it was his niece’s childish insistence to sit in the rearmost seat of the craft, rather than up front with her parents, which saved her as the plane hit the choppy water nose-first. That fact, however, was no consolation for the inconsolable new orphan.
After hospital for what were remarkably minor injuries, Trang was released to her uncle’s care and guardianship. Though hardly surprised, Phillipe was still unprepared for the imposition. At thirty-eight, he was very much enjoying the comforts accompanying both his bachelorhood and his business success. How could he have anticipated that the terms of the will, drawn up a half-dozen years previously with his sincere cooperation, would ever come to fruition?
Yet, there Philippe had stood, in the reception lobby of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Folkestone, England, with a tearful slip of a girl clinging to his wool trousered legs. Grieving their loss with her, he put aside his selfish anger at his petit frère’s untimely demise. He had not seen Trang since her christening when she was barely six months old. While he stared down at her shaking little arms, he had marveled at their ivory porcelain complexion and thought, “Tu n’étais pas le premier homme blanc dans la ascendance Nguyen, n’est-ce pas, Michel?”
Aloud, Philippe said, “Et bien, ma petite. Allons-y!”
“But where shall we go, Oncle Philippe? What am I to do?” Trang’s consternation and fearful sadness were overwhelming.
It had been all Philippe could do not to visibly crumble. Sighing softly, he took his niece’s small hand in his and answered, “For tonight, we will go to my hôtel, then tomorrow we will ride trains back to Basel and you shall go to school there just as your Maman and Papa planned. On Holidays and breaks between school terms you will live with me. I always will be your family and love you.”
Trang had nodded sagely then whispered, “D’accord, Oncle.”
During the next seven-and-a-half years Trang matriculated in security both at school and at home with Phillipe. The calamitous world economics and increasing drumbeats of another great European war had no negative effect on the protected trust her canny financier father had established for her safekeeping. Quite to the contrary, Michel’s sound investments and her uncle’s own industrial support of the Swiss government’s national security defense needs kept the Pique household in excellent condition. The only external threat was the uncertainty of the times themselves.
Phillipe was assiduously dedicated to his assigned task as Trang’s surrogate father. He was at all times caring and honorable, though her increasing innocent beauty haunted him more than his brother’s shade ever could. During the times between school terms when she was living in his household, he never caroused or socially entertained any of his several girlfriends, except under the most discreet circumstances. Still, nothing had stopped The Devil from presenting test after test and even enlisting Trang herself to tempt him into iniquity.
Philippe knew well that he had fallen beyond hope and that it was his own thoughtlessness that had left him vulnerable. He wondered, “What if I had been discovered in the moment? Would my shame have been enough to save me?” When he recalled how the first events had actually unfolded and escalated, it gave him chills.
Trang’s Lycee had let out for its three-week Christmas Holiday on Friday, December 11, 1936, the day after her eighteenth birthday. Her girlfriends wanted to celebrate with her before they all went to their respective homes and she had asked him could she host a small party that Saturday evening in the townhouse. Philippe not only agreed, but generously gave his live-in staff, Eric and Ursula Lindt, the entire weekend off so they could visit their new grandchildren in the canton countryside. He had then promised Trang, “We can go shopping in the afternoon for a cake and favors to make the girls happy.”
When they returned from their spree in the downtown district, Philippe took the cake into the formal dining room and arranged four little gift boxes at place settings around the table. Trang clapped her hands with delight, pecked his jowl sweetly and exclaimed, “Merci beaucoup, Popo!” Then, while he walked up the sweeping alabaster stair to his library on the second floor for a book to read, she rode in the shiny brass birdcage elevator to the third-level rooms to prepare to meet her classmates.
As the lift rose past him, Philippe looked up over his shoulder and caught his niece grinning happily down at him. He smiled back and blew her a small kiss. While he browsed his shelves, he touched his jaw where her lips had landed so feather-light. Noticing his late-afternoon stubble, he grimaced and thought, “My time will be better spent with a razor than with a book if I don’t want to embarrass Trang in front of her friends.”
Decisively, Philippe returned ‘Ciceronianus’ by the Dutch philosopher, Erasmus, to its place and left the library. Continuing up the stairs toward his own rooms on the third floor, he fatefully paused on the landing when he distinctly heard water splashing. As he turned his head and cocked his ear to the sound, he saw that the door to the bathroom adjoining Trang’s suite was ajar. Even today, he still felt sure that his intention when he walked toward the noise had been simply to close the door.
When he reached out his right hand to the doorknob, Philippe was transfixed by what he beheld through the fifteen centimeter gap between the jamb and the stile edge. Clearly reflected in the baroque gold-framed dressing mirror to her left, Trang stood facing the great claw-footed bathtub with her back to her uncle. He tried to look away, to draw the door shut, to retreat to propriety; but he could not. Instead, he had looked on and tugged his lips between his teeth, lest he inadvertently announced his presence.
Philippe had never before seen Trang dressed in anything other than her navy-and-maroon school uniform, or her various summer-weight corduroy jumpers. He only ever thought of her as a demure little girl. Squeezing shut his eyes, he then slowly re-opened them, but the scene had not changed. She was caught momentarily posed in a flimsy, not quite knee-length, silk slip.
Though Philippe estimated Trang certainly could not be more than a centimeter or two taller than the one-and-a-half meters the sports mistress at the lycee had measured at the beginning of the fall term, nor weigh more than a gram over forty-four kilos, she seemed anything but child-like. Her mysteriously iridescent chemise shimmered with shades of palest gold and lightest green as it hugged slight, yet unequivocal womanly curves. Her highlighted round features brought to his mind sémillon grapes blushing in the sun. Unconsciously, he lowered his left hand to his swelling cock and pinched its pulsing head through his trousers.
At that moment Trang leaned forward, bent at the waist, and tested the water’s warmth as it poured from the tap. Satisfied it was to her liking, she straightened up and at at the same time pushed her slip’s thin straps off her shoulders. The lingerie fell straight away to her ankles which did not remain long in the soft pile as she stepped over the tub’s rim. Turning ninety degrees left, she unknowingly stamped her milk-white full-frontal nudity indelibly into her observer’s mind.
Philippe let out a long-held breath and ran his tongue over his upper teeth while he watched Trang drop to her knees in the bath. As she leaned forward to push the rubber stopper into the drain, her vertebrae bumped up on her trim back like cockle shells along a flower bed. Her straight-cut coal-black hair fell forward to hide her face, but nothing obscured her perky breasts. Meager though the mounds were, they were yet sizeable enough that he was surprised he had not formerly noticed their development.
Trang straightened up and sat on her heels with her back erect. Simultaneously, she switched the water flow from the tub spout to the handheld shower head she had taken into her small right fist. While she directed the low-pressure spray against her chest, she tipped back her head and combed her mid-length hair away from her brow with her left fingers. She sighed and drew in a long breath as the wet warmth coated her skin.
From the doorway Trang was visible in the big tub only from her waist up. Philippe continued to gently massage his fattening prick through his pants as he closely attended his unaware nubile niece. He was smitten by the stark contrast between her pallid complexion and dark burnt umber oval areolae. Her taut brown nipples stood stout and strong amid the water stream cascading from her throat to her belly.
Philippe had gotten a flashing glimpse of Trang’s black pubic triangle before she knelt and then sat on her haunches. Now, as she maneuvered the nozzle left-to-right above her hills, she seemed in no hurry to lower her raised left arm. He imagined teasing his tongue over the dark smudge in her stretched armpit and wondered how she tasted. His insistent penis wondered something else.
Trang replaced the portable shower head in its holder, picked up the soap cake and then, abandoning her scalp, she removed a large natural sponge from its wire rack near the faucets. While she introduced the soap to the sponge, her hidden uncle introduced his dick to the open air. She idly scrubbed the soap bar until white foam rose thick from the sponge’s deep holes. He encased his erection in his left palm and slowly circumnavigated its broad spade head with his index finger until viscous droplets bubbled from its aggrieved slit.
Transferring the lather-laced sop to her chest, Trang swabbed her tits generously. Philippe pursed his lips and air-sucked her soapy nubs from afar. She hummed an indistinct tune as she laved under, over and between her slicked slopes. He stifled a groan while his rushing pulse further stiffened his already solid soldier.
With unrushed care, Trang slipped her sponge down her thin arms to her delicate hands before she swished it and them in the pool between her knees. Retracing her path, she squeezed the rinse water out and wiped away the soap traces from her upper body. Then, cautiously, she braced both hands on the tub rim and stood. Once more the dressing mirror assumed its role as her voyeur’s accomplice.
As water sheeted down his niece’s legs and her soaked brunette snatch hairs dripped onto her inner thighs, Philippe consciously bit his cheeks to keep from snorting his excitement. Continuing in a fluid motion, Trang turned herself to face away from her secret spectator. At the same moment that she deprived him of one intimate view, she unwittingly provided him with another.
Spreading her legs and stabilizing her stance in the potentially treacherous bathtub, Trang stooped, then retrieved her sponge and soap. After replenishing its suds, she ran the sponge up from her left ankle to her crotch, then repeated on her right leg. Unconsciously, Philippe coordinated his strokes with hers. As her sliding hand traversed her limbs so, too, did his flexing fist burnish his boner.
At the top of her second cycle on her right leg, Trang pushed the sponge firmly along her perineum to her brown little bung hole and then back to her vulva. Philippe let go the doorknob and grabbed his aching balls with his right hand. With gentle determination, she rooted the cleansing sponge in her feminine delta. Not so gently, he grimly gripped his package parts and battled nature.
Squatting again, Trang drew bathwater up in her sponge and finished rinsing herself. Philippe, having fallen against the door jamb with his throat constricted and his jutted chin pointed to the ceiling, felt his exploded essence flow backward over his closed curled knuckles. Stepping from her bath, she reached for a nearby towel. Both ashamed and elated, he prayed that his heavy panting breaths would not give his position away.
Philippe again raised his eyes and watched through the mirror as Trang swathed her slight lithe body in her towel. Amazed by the sight, he wondered how it was possible for her to be more fetching wrapped in a terry bath sheet than she had been when she was naked and covered with soap froth. He could not avert his gaze while she sawed the nubby drying cloth over herself. Blindly, he yanked a cotton pocket-square from his suit jacket, cleaned his drizzled dick and then stuffed the softened traitor, still covered with his cum-clotted handkerchief, back behind his boxers.
In silent haste, Philippe slunk back to the master suite just in time to avoid detection. No sooner had he snicked its door’s latch tight than he heard Trang shut the bathroom door. He held his breath and listened intently until he was sure she had entered her own room. Feeling safe for the moment, but never in more existential danger, he exhaled his relief and went to the master bath to shave and clean up properly for the upcoming party.
Philippe was in the sitting room opposite his library when Trang indecorously shouted up from the foyer, “Popo! Popo, come down and meet my friends!” Putting Erasmus’s treatise on the walnut end table by his red leather wing-back armchair, he proceeded down the stairs to the entry hall where his niece’s three classmates stood smiling in their uniforms.
As she swept her arm from right to left across the lined up girls, Trang introduced them, “Nanine and Nadine Corbin and Dagmar Bjerke, this is my uncle, who as you noticed, I call ‘Popo’ because he is so dear!” She laughed, hugged herself up against Philippe’s right hip, then amended, “But, of course, he is more politely known as Monsieur Philippe Pique.” Pulling herself even tighter against his suit coat, she teased, “N’est-ce pas, Popo?”
Flummoxed by the overt familiarity, Philippe was abruptly reminded of the womanly form behind Trang’s modest peacock-blue ruffle-necked crêpe party dress. He feigned a cough and raised his right hand to cover his mouth while a hot flush smoked his newly shaved cheeks. As he recovered himself, the teens in the hall chorused, “Bon soir, Monsieur Pique!”
Hoping to lighten the oppressive weight in the center of his chest, Philippe replied, “Enchanté demoiselles, you are most welcome. And, if it makes the party any more gay for you, you may feel free to call me Oncle Philippe, or even ‘Popo’ if you like. I will not mind, I promise.”
While the chums thanked him for his cordiality and Trang grinned up at him adoringly, Philippe scanned the new arrivals. From the navy-and-white mixed yarn topknots on their maroon felted wool tams to the gleaming gold-tone simple buckles on their low-heeled black patent leather Mary Janes, they were three peas in a pod. In fact, Nadine and Nanine were so much identical, right down to their gold wire-rimmed round eyeglasses, that he already had forgotten which twin was which.
Trang gently jabbed her uncle in the ribs and urged, “Come on, Popo! Let’s hang up their coats!”
Philippe blinked and properly assumed his role as host. “Yes, of course,” he answered. Then, noticing the two identically monogrammed portmanteaus on the floor beside the twins, he joked, “Are you planning to spend the whole night?” Turning to Dagmar, he asked, “And what about you? I do not see any luggage at your feet.” He made sure to smile throughout so that his meaning could not be mistaken.
The teenagers looked among themselves wondering which should answer first, then all three spoke at once and immediately laughed before falling quiet in their embarrassment at the confusion. Philippe chuckled, then pointed to the left-most twin and said, “You tell me.”
“Non, Monsieur Pique, don’t worry for us,” Nadine replied, shaking the shoulder-length teak brown hair beneath her maroon tam. “We only are here for Trang’s birthday party. Nanine and I must be at the bahnhof by eleven this evening to catch the night train home to Paris.”
Dagmar undid her long navy serge overcoat’s gold buttons while she watched Nanine nod agreement as Nadine explained the sisters’ itinerary. Then she said, “And I have a ticket for the morning DNL flight to Gressholmen Airport in Oslo. My father will meet me when I land, but for tonight he arranged a room for me at the Hotel Krafft. My things are already there.”
“Oh, well the evening is young but it won’t stay that way,” Philippe observed blandly with no idea of his peril. “Hang your coats and tuck your valises under the stair here, then step into the dining room across the way. The table is set and ready.” Stepping out of the way, but not far away, he studied the students while they hovered around the closet and put away their outer things.
Dagmar was the first to shuck her overcoat. Philippe very much appreciated the way her buxom bust elevated behind her white linen shirt. Her chest’s rising mass lifted her knit wool school tie to nearly horizontal from its knot to its midpoint before the maroon-navy-and-white stripes broke at her shelf’s edge and then paraded in a normal vertical drop to its squared end. As he surveilled the cinnamon-haired Norwegian, he noted how her maroon felted wool blazer’s lapels spread naturally to accommodate her bulk and how the gold-black-and-white embroidered coat-of-arms patch on its breast pocket was necessarily pushed entirely askew.
The twins, by contrast, were both a little taller and somewhat less sturdily built than Dagmar. Nonetheless, when they had reduced to their pleated navy wool A-line skirts and crisp long-sleeved shirts, Philippe readily appraised their figures, which were even more developed than Trang’s earlier discovered comely curves. Anxious to delay the young ladies’ departure to the dining room, he opined, “It is certainly nice of you not to rush home to your families, but to want to be with my niece for her birthday party. I’m not sure any of the lads would have done the same for me way back when I was at school.”
Nanine laughed a small laugh and said, “We remember when we had our eighteenth birthday…”
“Oui,” butted in Nadine. “Except it was in the middle of last August and we already were home…”
Finishing her sister’s thought, Nanine continued, “… and there were no girls that we knew who could come and sing songs with us!”
Dagmar stepped forward and draped her right arm around the twins backs as she chimed in, “And this past September, when I became eighteen, it was my first term in the school and I had not yet made new friends because I was shy.”
“So, you see, Popo,” concluded Trang, as she hugged her friends from the twins’ other side. “It’s like a big birthday party for all of us! Tout le monde peut fêter ça!”
Philippe used the happy moment to gawp at the lined up misses with their sweet figures on modest, but full, display. Chuckling through his grin, he said, “Then I am doubly pleased that you will each find small gifts waiting for you in the dining room. They are trifles, it is true, but Trang and I are sincerely glad that you are here.”
In unison, the guests squealed their delight, then flooded Philippe with shouted gratitude as they bounced excitedly on the their shoes’ low heels. Trang grabbed Nadine’s hand and cried, “Allons-y! Let’s open them up!”
As Trang led the group across the foyer’s checkered tiles to the dark-wood paneled formal dining room, Philippe hung back. His rambunctious prick was swelling in his trousers and he needed to reposition it before the innocents noticed. It did not help that the girls’ pleats swished seductively across their bottoms as they ran. Nor, that their white opaque cotton knee-socks clung wonderfully to their departing taut and toned calf muscles.
Finally adjusted for comfort and safety, Philippe followed the troop to the great polished oak dining table. The teens had been too impatient to wait for him, or for each other. Gift wrap and ribbon littered their plates as they yanked the lids from their little boxes. Each contained an identical trinket: A delicate cloisonné chalet pendant on a fine braided gold wire chain.
When the hubbub had died, and the girls were looking around comparing presents with one another, Nanine called out from the far side of the long table, “Monsieur Pique! Please come and help me fasten this around my neck!” Immediately the chaos began anew as Nadine, Dagmar and Trang all clamored their own demands to be the first to wear the new favor.
Philippe waved his hands to quiet the teens and assured them each would get his help as he walked to Nanine and said, “Alright, I will start with you. But, you must tell me: Are you Nadine or Nanine? I cannot tell you two apart!”
Nanine laughed aloud and said with a coy wink, “I am Nanine and when you put on my necklace you will see how I am not the same as ma souer!” As Philippe approached, she removed her school tie and opened the top two buttons at her shirt’s throat. Spreading the plackets to her collarbones, she resolved his mystification by pointing to a small dark mole at the apex of her suprasternal notch.
“Maman calls this my beauty mark,” Nanine bragged. “Nadine does not have one!”
Nadine hotly exclaimed, “Well, I was born first and will always be that much older and wiser than you!”
Standing behind Nanine’s chair, Philippe’s view took in more of her chest than she might have wanted. Her buttermilk skin was delightfully smooth and he felt his cock thickening again as he peeped past her beauty mark to the creamy valley between her young breasts. Hoping she would not feel his fingers tremble, he hooked the necklace clasp then let it drop to her spine behind the shirt’s collar.
“Moi! Moi!” Nadine chirped and beckoned. Like her twin, and Dagmar, too, she had already stripped her tie and undone her collar in preparation for adornment. Philippe came around to her and Dagmar in turn. Effectively using his increasing experience, he lingered to look upon their exposed bosoms as long as he dared while he added the jewelry to their ensembles.
At last turning to his niece, Philippe asked carefully, “Your dress ruffles are full and high, ma petite. I don’t think the chain is long enough for you to wear your necklace on top. Do you want to put it on later?” Sympathetically, he added, “I have another present you can open and wear instead.”
Trang could not hide her disappointment and wished now that she had not been so keen to show off her fancy new crêpe frock. She knew that her friends would be wearing their uniforms. If she had done the same, then she could enjoy wearing her petit chalet in their company. In an inspirational burst, she blurted, “No, Popo!”
Reaching behind her nape, Trang uncoupled the hook-and-eye at her ruffles while she exclaimed, “Unzip my dress in the back, Oncle! I want to wear the cloisonné… Maintenant!”
Philippe scarcely had believed what he heard. Not two hours earlier he had spied on his niece in her bath. Now, she was actually inviting him to unzip her gown. With effort he moved without stumbling behind her chair, placed his hands lightly on her shoulder points and then spoke into her left ear, sotto voce, “Are you certain you want to do this? Here? Now?”
“Bien sûr, Oncle,” Trang answered in a perplexed tone. “Whatever do you mean? You yourself said the chain is too short to wear over my dress. Please help me, I want to see how it looks!”
Sighing, Philippe slid his hands along Trang’s trapeziuses and then tugged the hidden zipper tab down to her mid-back. Once more, but much closer, he saw her spinal column divide the clear ivory flesh between her scapulae before it dove under a silvery satin camisole beneath the bright blue crêpe. Oh, how he had wanted to kiss each bumpy little vertebrae from her scalp to her tailbone! Shaking his head, he cleared the evil thought from his mind and declared, “Voilà, it is done!”
Trang handed her trinket to her uncle and, in the same motion, pulled her bodice midway off her shoulders as she directed, “Bien! Now fix the little clasp, just as you did for Dagmar, so the pendant hugs my throat.”
Inadvertently perhaps, when Trang lowered her dress sleeves she took with them her camisole’s spaghetti straps. As she spoke, she was blithely unaware how dangerously close her brassiere-less poked-up promontories were to being wholly bared by her drooping lingerie. However the topographical facts were plain to Philippe. Ducking his head, he tucked his chin to his neck and next to her soft cheek as he fumbled blindly with the dainty necklace clasp while his lidded eyes freely roved her torso.
As she felt the tiny weight settle on her upper sternum, Trang twisted her face left and kissed her uncle’s smooth jowl. “C’est parfait, Popo,” she intoned quietly. “Now, what was it you were saying about another present?”
“Why, yes,” Philippe said with a smile. “I have it just here in my coat pocket.” He patted his chest and continued, “I was going to give it to you later, but since Desmoiselles Corbin will need information from you if they are not to be late to the bahnhof, perhaps it is well that you get this little gift now.”
“Oh, Popo! You are too mysterious,” Trang protested. She kissed him again lightly and demanded, “Don’t tease me! Give me my present, please!”
Chapter One: Swiss Watch
In which Trang Nguyen Pique becomes her Oncle Philippe’s ward.
By his reckoning, Philippe Pique’s slow descent into hell began on June 17, 1929. His younger brother, Michel, had been expected to arrive in Basel with his wife, Mai Nguyen and their ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Trang. Philippe would have guided them all on a lovely three-day country tour of Switzerland, after which Trang would remain to study at L’Ecole et Lycee Internationale. Instead, their flight on Imperial Airways crashed into the English Channel on the leg from Croyden Airport in Surrey, England, to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, France.
Michel, Mai and five other souls were lost to drowning. The two air crew, three other adult passengers and Trang survived with varying injuries. Philippe later learned it was his niece’s childish insistence to sit in the rearmost seat of the craft, rather than up front with her parents, which saved her as the plane hit the choppy water nose-first. That fact, however, was no consolation for the inconsolable new orphan.
After hospital for what were remarkably minor injuries, Trang was released to her uncle’s care and guardianship. Though hardly surprised, Phillipe was still unprepared for the imposition. At thirty-eight, he was very much enjoying the comforts accompanying both his bachelorhood and his business success. How could he have anticipated that the terms of the will, drawn up a half-dozen years previously with his sincere cooperation, would ever come to fruition?
Yet, there Philippe had stood, in the reception lobby of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Folkestone, England, with a tearful slip of a girl clinging to his wool trousered legs. Grieving their loss with her, he put aside his selfish anger at his petit frère’s untimely demise. He had not seen Trang since her christening when she was barely six months old. While he stared down at her shaking little arms, he had marveled at their ivory porcelain complexion and thought, “Tu n’étais pas le premier homme blanc dans la ascendance Nguyen, n’est-ce pas, Michel?”
Aloud, Philippe said, “Et bien, ma petite. Allons-y!”
“But where shall we go, Oncle Philippe? What am I to do?” Trang’s consternation and fearful sadness were overwhelming.
It had been all Philippe could do not to visibly crumble. Sighing softly, he took his niece’s small hand in his and answered, “For tonight, we will go to my hôtel, then tomorrow we will ride trains back to Basel and you shall go to school there just as your Maman and Papa planned. On Holidays and breaks between school terms you will live with me. I always will be your family and love you.”
Trang had nodded sagely then whispered, “D’accord, Oncle.”
During the next seven-and-a-half years Trang matriculated in security both at school and at home with Phillipe. The calamitous world economics and increasing drumbeats of another great European war had no negative effect on the protected trust her canny financier father had established for her safekeeping. Quite to the contrary, Michel’s sound investments and her uncle’s own industrial support of the Swiss government’s national security defense needs kept the Pique household in excellent condition. The only external threat was the uncertainty of the times themselves.
Phillipe was assiduously dedicated to his assigned task as Trang’s surrogate father. He was at all times caring and honorable, though her increasing innocent beauty haunted him more than his brother’s shade ever could. During the times between school terms when she was living in his household, he never caroused or socially entertained any of his several girlfriends, except under the most discreet circumstances. Still, nothing had stopped The Devil from presenting test after test and even enlisting Trang herself to tempt him into iniquity.
Philippe knew well that he had fallen beyond hope and that it was his own thoughtlessness that had left him vulnerable. He wondered, “What if I had been discovered in the moment? Would my shame have been enough to save me?” When he recalled how the first events had actually unfolded and escalated, it gave him chills.
Trang’s Lycee had let out for its three-week Christmas Holiday on Friday, December 11, 1936, the day after her eighteenth birthday. Her girlfriends wanted to celebrate with her before they all went to their respective homes and she had asked him could she host a small party that Saturday evening in the townhouse. Philippe not only agreed, but generously gave his live-in staff, Eric and Ursula Lindt, the entire weekend off so they could visit their new grandchildren in the canton countryside. He had then promised Trang, “We can go shopping in the afternoon for a cake and favors to make the girls happy.”
When they returned from their spree in the downtown district, Philippe took the cake into the formal dining room and arranged four little gift boxes at place settings around the table. Trang clapped her hands with delight, pecked his jowl sweetly and exclaimed, “Merci beaucoup, Popo!” Then, while he walked up the sweeping alabaster stair to his library on the second floor for a book to read, she rode in the shiny brass birdcage elevator to the third-level rooms to prepare to meet her classmates.
As the lift rose past him, Philippe looked up over his shoulder and caught his niece grinning happily down at him. He smiled back and blew her a small kiss. While he browsed his shelves, he touched his jaw where her lips had landed so feather-light. Noticing his late-afternoon stubble, he grimaced and thought, “My time will be better spent with a razor than with a book if I don’t want to embarrass Trang in front of her friends.”
Decisively, Philippe returned ‘Ciceronianus’ by the Dutch philosopher, Erasmus, to its place and left the library. Continuing up the stairs toward his own rooms on the third floor, he fatefully paused on the landing when he distinctly heard water splashing. As he turned his head and cocked his ear to the sound, he saw that the door to the bathroom adjoining Trang’s suite was ajar. Even today, he still felt sure that his intention when he walked toward the noise had been simply to close the door.
When he reached out his right hand to the doorknob, Philippe was transfixed by what he beheld through the fifteen centimeter gap between the jamb and the stile edge. Clearly reflected in the baroque gold-framed dressing mirror to her left, Trang stood facing the great claw-footed bathtub with her back to her uncle. He tried to look away, to draw the door shut, to retreat to propriety; but he could not. Instead, he had looked on and tugged his lips between his teeth, lest he inadvertently announced his presence.
Philippe had never before seen Trang dressed in anything other than her navy-and-maroon school uniform, or her various summer-weight corduroy jumpers. He only ever thought of her as a demure little girl. Squeezing shut his eyes, he then slowly re-opened them, but the scene had not changed. She was caught momentarily posed in a flimsy, not quite knee-length, silk slip.
Though Philippe estimated Trang certainly could not be more than a centimeter or two taller than the one-and-a-half meters the sports mistress at the lycee had measured at the beginning of the fall term, nor weigh more than a gram over forty-four kilos, she seemed anything but child-like. Her mysteriously iridescent chemise shimmered with shades of palest gold and lightest green as it hugged slight, yet unequivocal womanly curves. Her highlighted round features brought to his mind sémillon grapes blushing in the sun. Unconsciously, he lowered his left hand to his swelling cock and pinched its pulsing head through his trousers.
At that moment Trang leaned forward, bent at the waist, and tested the water’s warmth as it poured from the tap. Satisfied it was to her liking, she straightened up and at at the same time pushed her slip’s thin straps off her shoulders. The lingerie fell straight away to her ankles which did not remain long in the soft pile as she stepped over the tub’s rim. Turning ninety degrees left, she unknowingly stamped her milk-white full-frontal nudity indelibly into her observer’s mind.
Philippe let out a long-held breath and ran his tongue over his upper teeth while he watched Trang drop to her knees in the bath. As she leaned forward to push the rubber stopper into the drain, her vertebrae bumped up on her trim back like cockle shells along a flower bed. Her straight-cut coal-black hair fell forward to hide her face, but nothing obscured her perky breasts. Meager though the mounds were, they were yet sizeable enough that he was surprised he had not formerly noticed their development.
Trang straightened up and sat on her heels with her back erect. Simultaneously, she switched the water flow from the tub spout to the handheld shower head she had taken into her small right fist. While she directed the low-pressure spray against her chest, she tipped back her head and combed her mid-length hair away from her brow with her left fingers. She sighed and drew in a long breath as the wet warmth coated her skin.
From the doorway Trang was visible in the big tub only from her waist up. Philippe continued to gently massage his fattening prick through his pants as he closely attended his unaware nubile niece. He was smitten by the stark contrast between her pallid complexion and dark burnt umber oval areolae. Her taut brown nipples stood stout and strong amid the water stream cascading from her throat to her belly.
Philippe had gotten a flashing glimpse of Trang’s black pubic triangle before she knelt and then sat on her haunches. Now, as she maneuvered the nozzle left-to-right above her hills, she seemed in no hurry to lower her raised left arm. He imagined teasing his tongue over the dark smudge in her stretched armpit and wondered how she tasted. His insistent penis wondered something else.
Trang replaced the portable shower head in its holder, picked up the soap cake and then, abandoning her scalp, she removed a large natural sponge from its wire rack near the faucets. While she introduced the soap to the sponge, her hidden uncle introduced his dick to the open air. She idly scrubbed the soap bar until white foam rose thick from the sponge’s deep holes. He encased his erection in his left palm and slowly circumnavigated its broad spade head with his index finger until viscous droplets bubbled from its aggrieved slit.
Transferring the lather-laced sop to her chest, Trang swabbed her tits generously. Philippe pursed his lips and air-sucked her soapy nubs from afar. She hummed an indistinct tune as she laved under, over and between her slicked slopes. He stifled a groan while his rushing pulse further stiffened his already solid soldier.
With unrushed care, Trang slipped her sponge down her thin arms to her delicate hands before she swished it and them in the pool between her knees. Retracing her path, she squeezed the rinse water out and wiped away the soap traces from her upper body. Then, cautiously, she braced both hands on the tub rim and stood. Once more the dressing mirror assumed its role as her voyeur’s accomplice.
As water sheeted down his niece’s legs and her soaked brunette snatch hairs dripped onto her inner thighs, Philippe consciously bit his cheeks to keep from snorting his excitement. Continuing in a fluid motion, Trang turned herself to face away from her secret spectator. At the same moment that she deprived him of one intimate view, she unwittingly provided him with another.
Spreading her legs and stabilizing her stance in the potentially treacherous bathtub, Trang stooped, then retrieved her sponge and soap. After replenishing its suds, she ran the sponge up from her left ankle to her crotch, then repeated on her right leg. Unconsciously, Philippe coordinated his strokes with hers. As her sliding hand traversed her limbs so, too, did his flexing fist burnish his boner.
At the top of her second cycle on her right leg, Trang pushed the sponge firmly along her perineum to her brown little bung hole and then back to her vulva. Philippe let go the doorknob and grabbed his aching balls with his right hand. With gentle determination, she rooted the cleansing sponge in her feminine delta. Not so gently, he grimly gripped his package parts and battled nature.
Squatting again, Trang drew bathwater up in her sponge and finished rinsing herself. Philippe, having fallen against the door jamb with his throat constricted and his jutted chin pointed to the ceiling, felt his exploded essence flow backward over his closed curled knuckles. Stepping from her bath, she reached for a nearby towel. Both ashamed and elated, he prayed that his heavy panting breaths would not give his position away.
Philippe again raised his eyes and watched through the mirror as Trang swathed her slight lithe body in her towel. Amazed by the sight, he wondered how it was possible for her to be more fetching wrapped in a terry bath sheet than she had been when she was naked and covered with soap froth. He could not avert his gaze while she sawed the nubby drying cloth over herself. Blindly, he yanked a cotton pocket-square from his suit jacket, cleaned his drizzled dick and then stuffed the softened traitor, still covered with his cum-clotted handkerchief, back behind his boxers.
In silent haste, Philippe slunk back to the master suite just in time to avoid detection. No sooner had he snicked its door’s latch tight than he heard Trang shut the bathroom door. He held his breath and listened intently until he was sure she had entered her own room. Feeling safe for the moment, but never in more existential danger, he exhaled his relief and went to the master bath to shave and clean up properly for the upcoming party.
Philippe was in the sitting room opposite his library when Trang indecorously shouted up from the foyer, “Popo! Popo, come down and meet my friends!” Putting Erasmus’s treatise on the walnut end table by his red leather wing-back armchair, he proceeded down the stairs to the entry hall where his niece’s three classmates stood smiling in their uniforms.
As she swept her arm from right to left across the lined up girls, Trang introduced them, “Nanine and Nadine Corbin and Dagmar Bjerke, this is my uncle, who as you noticed, I call ‘Popo’ because he is so dear!” She laughed, hugged herself up against Philippe’s right hip, then amended, “But, of course, he is more politely known as Monsieur Philippe Pique.” Pulling herself even tighter against his suit coat, she teased, “N’est-ce pas, Popo?”
Flummoxed by the overt familiarity, Philippe was abruptly reminded of the womanly form behind Trang’s modest peacock-blue ruffle-necked crêpe party dress. He feigned a cough and raised his right hand to cover his mouth while a hot flush smoked his newly shaved cheeks. As he recovered himself, the teens in the hall chorused, “Bon soir, Monsieur Pique!”
Hoping to lighten the oppressive weight in the center of his chest, Philippe replied, “Enchanté demoiselles, you are most welcome. And, if it makes the party any more gay for you, you may feel free to call me Oncle Philippe, or even ‘Popo’ if you like. I will not mind, I promise.”
While the chums thanked him for his cordiality and Trang grinned up at him adoringly, Philippe scanned the new arrivals. From the navy-and-white mixed yarn topknots on their maroon felted wool tams to the gleaming gold-tone simple buckles on their low-heeled black patent leather Mary Janes, they were three peas in a pod. In fact, Nadine and Nanine were so much identical, right down to their gold wire-rimmed round eyeglasses, that he already had forgotten which twin was which.
Trang gently jabbed her uncle in the ribs and urged, “Come on, Popo! Let’s hang up their coats!”
Philippe blinked and properly assumed his role as host. “Yes, of course,” he answered. Then, noticing the two identically monogrammed portmanteaus on the floor beside the twins, he joked, “Are you planning to spend the whole night?” Turning to Dagmar, he asked, “And what about you? I do not see any luggage at your feet.” He made sure to smile throughout so that his meaning could not be mistaken.
The teenagers looked among themselves wondering which should answer first, then all three spoke at once and immediately laughed before falling quiet in their embarrassment at the confusion. Philippe chuckled, then pointed to the left-most twin and said, “You tell me.”
“Non, Monsieur Pique, don’t worry for us,” Nadine replied, shaking the shoulder-length teak brown hair beneath her maroon tam. “We only are here for Trang’s birthday party. Nanine and I must be at the bahnhof by eleven this evening to catch the night train home to Paris.”
Dagmar undid her long navy serge overcoat’s gold buttons while she watched Nanine nod agreement as Nadine explained the sisters’ itinerary. Then she said, “And I have a ticket for the morning DNL flight to Gressholmen Airport in Oslo. My father will meet me when I land, but for tonight he arranged a room for me at the Hotel Krafft. My things are already there.”
“Oh, well the evening is young but it won’t stay that way,” Philippe observed blandly with no idea of his peril. “Hang your coats and tuck your valises under the stair here, then step into the dining room across the way. The table is set and ready.” Stepping out of the way, but not far away, he studied the students while they hovered around the closet and put away their outer things.
Dagmar was the first to shuck her overcoat. Philippe very much appreciated the way her buxom bust elevated behind her white linen shirt. Her chest’s rising mass lifted her knit wool school tie to nearly horizontal from its knot to its midpoint before the maroon-navy-and-white stripes broke at her shelf’s edge and then paraded in a normal vertical drop to its squared end. As he surveilled the cinnamon-haired Norwegian, he noted how her maroon felted wool blazer’s lapels spread naturally to accommodate her bulk and how the gold-black-and-white embroidered coat-of-arms patch on its breast pocket was necessarily pushed entirely askew.
The twins, by contrast, were both a little taller and somewhat less sturdily built than Dagmar. Nonetheless, when they had reduced to their pleated navy wool A-line skirts and crisp long-sleeved shirts, Philippe readily appraised their figures, which were even more developed than Trang’s earlier discovered comely curves. Anxious to delay the young ladies’ departure to the dining room, he opined, “It is certainly nice of you not to rush home to your families, but to want to be with my niece for her birthday party. I’m not sure any of the lads would have done the same for me way back when I was at school.”
Nanine laughed a small laugh and said, “We remember when we had our eighteenth birthday…”
“Oui,” butted in Nadine. “Except it was in the middle of last August and we already were home…”
Finishing her sister’s thought, Nanine continued, “… and there were no girls that we knew who could come and sing songs with us!”
Dagmar stepped forward and draped her right arm around the twins backs as she chimed in, “And this past September, when I became eighteen, it was my first term in the school and I had not yet made new friends because I was shy.”
“So, you see, Popo,” concluded Trang, as she hugged her friends from the twins’ other side. “It’s like a big birthday party for all of us! Tout le monde peut fêter ça!”
Philippe used the happy moment to gawp at the lined up misses with their sweet figures on modest, but full, display. Chuckling through his grin, he said, “Then I am doubly pleased that you will each find small gifts waiting for you in the dining room. They are trifles, it is true, but Trang and I are sincerely glad that you are here.”
In unison, the guests squealed their delight, then flooded Philippe with shouted gratitude as they bounced excitedly on the their shoes’ low heels. Trang grabbed Nadine’s hand and cried, “Allons-y! Let’s open them up!”
As Trang led the group across the foyer’s checkered tiles to the dark-wood paneled formal dining room, Philippe hung back. His rambunctious prick was swelling in his trousers and he needed to reposition it before the innocents noticed. It did not help that the girls’ pleats swished seductively across their bottoms as they ran. Nor, that their white opaque cotton knee-socks clung wonderfully to their departing taut and toned calf muscles.
Finally adjusted for comfort and safety, Philippe followed the troop to the great polished oak dining table. The teens had been too impatient to wait for him, or for each other. Gift wrap and ribbon littered their plates as they yanked the lids from their little boxes. Each contained an identical trinket: A delicate cloisonné chalet pendant on a fine braided gold wire chain.
When the hubbub had died, and the girls were looking around comparing presents with one another, Nanine called out from the far side of the long table, “Monsieur Pique! Please come and help me fasten this around my neck!” Immediately the chaos began anew as Nadine, Dagmar and Trang all clamored their own demands to be the first to wear the new favor.
Philippe waved his hands to quiet the teens and assured them each would get his help as he walked to Nanine and said, “Alright, I will start with you. But, you must tell me: Are you Nadine or Nanine? I cannot tell you two apart!”
Nanine laughed aloud and said with a coy wink, “I am Nanine and when you put on my necklace you will see how I am not the same as ma souer!” As Philippe approached, she removed her school tie and opened the top two buttons at her shirt’s throat. Spreading the plackets to her collarbones, she resolved his mystification by pointing to a small dark mole at the apex of her suprasternal notch.
“Maman calls this my beauty mark,” Nanine bragged. “Nadine does not have one!”
Nadine hotly exclaimed,”Well, I was born first and will always be that much older and wiser than you!”
Standing behind Nanine’s chair, Philippe’s view took in more of her chest than she might have wanted. Her buttermilk skin was delightfully smooth and he felt his cock thickening again as he peeped past her beauty mark to the creamy valley between her young breasts. Hoping she would not feel his fingers tremble, he hooked the necklace clasp then let it drop to her spine behind the shirt’s collar.
“Moi! Moi!” Nadine chirped and beckoned. Like her twin, and Dagmar, too, she had already stripped her tie and undone her collar in preparation for adornment. Philippe came around to her and Dagmar in turn. Effectively using his increasing experience, he lingered to look upon their exposed bosoms as long as he dared while he added the jewelry to their ensembles.
At last turning to his niece, Philippe asked carefully, “Your dress ruffles are full and high, ma petite. I don’t think the chain is long enough for you to wear your necklace on top. Do you want to put it on later?” Sympathetically, he added, “I have another present you can open and wear instead.”
Trang could not hide her disappointment and wished now that she had not been so keen to show off her fancy new crêpe frock. She knew that her friends would be wearing their uniforms. If she had done the same, then she could enjoy wearing her petit chalet in their company. In an inspirational burst, she blurted, “No, Popo!”
Reaching behind her nape, Trang uncoupled the hook-and-eye at her ruffles while she exclaimed, “Unzip my dress in the back, Oncle! I want to wear the cloisonné… Maintenant!”
Philippe scarcely had believed what he heard. Not two hours earlier he had spied on his niece in her bath. Now, she was actually inviting him to unzip her gown. With effort he moved without stumbling behind her chair, placed his hands lightly on her shoulder points and then spoke into her left ear, sotto voce, “Are you certain you want to do this? Here? Now?”
“Bien sûr, Oncle,” Trang answered in a perplexed tone. “Whatever do you mean? You yourself said the chain is too short to wear over my dress. Please help me, I want to see how it looks!”
Sighing, Philippe slid his hands along Trang’s trapeziuses and then tugged the hidden zipper tab down to her mid-back. Once more, but much closer, he saw her spinal column divide the clear ivory flesh between her scapulae before it dove under a silvery satin camisole beneath the bright blue crêpe. Oh, how he had wanted to kiss each bumpy little vertebrae from her scalp to her tailbone! Shaking his head, he cleared the evil thought from his mind and declared, “Voilà, it is done!”
Trang handed her trinket to her uncle and, in the same motion, pulled her bodice midway off her shoulders as she directed, “Bien! Now fix the little clasp, just as you did for Dagmar, so the pendant hugs my throat.”
Inadvertently perhaps, when Trang lowered her dress sleeves she took with them her camisole’s spaghetti straps. As she spoke, she was blithely unaware how dangerously close her brassiere-less poked-up promontories were to being wholly bared by her drooping lingerie. However the topographical facts were plain to Philippe. Ducking his head, he tucked his chin to his neck and next to her soft cheek as he fumbled blindly with the dainty necklace clasp while his lidded eyes freely roved her torso.
As she felt the tiny weight settle on her upper sternum, Trang twisted her face left and kissed her uncle’s smooth jowl. “C’est parfait, Popo,” she intoned quietly. “Now, what was it you were saying about another present?”
“Why, yes,” Philippe said with a smile. “I have it just here in my coat pocket.” He patted his chest and continued, “I was going to give it to you later, but since Desmoiselles Corbin will need information from you if they are not to be late to the bahnhof, perhaps it is well that you get this little gift now.”
“Oh, Popo! You are too mysterious,” Trang protested. She kissed him again lightly and demanded, “Don’t tease me! Give me my present, please!”