She was stretching up to remove the clothespins holding a bed sheet, and the brilliant white sheet reflected the intensity of the sunlight like a photographer's backdrop lit up by studio lights. Millions of California girls, in pre-melanoma days, had spent countless hours baking on beaches, their nubile bodies slathered with lotions guaranteed to produce a Coppertone tan, and this girl had achieved that perfect tint through nothing more than genetic inheritance and a minimum of exposure to the sun. So incredible was the picture she made, with her bronze skin and long black hair against the blinding pure whiteness of the sheet, that Monty felt as though his eyes were a camera lens which had snapped open and were recording this scene for eternity. Certainly, Monty knew that it was a picture which would never fade from his memory.
She had been inside, and to escape the heat had dressed in cutoffs and a halter top, slipping on a pair of low white tennis shoes as protection against the yellow star thistles when she went out to get the clothes. She was up on the toes of those shoes now, the muscles in her shapely calves and thighs taut under that burnished skin, the muscles of bare shoulders and arms tensed too as she stretched both arms skyward to reach the clothesline above. Her head was thrown back, and the mass of wavy black hair gleamed in the sun, cascading down her back so that it almost hid the narrow straps of her white halter top. Below that, her back was an expanse of that perfect tan, the sides curved in to define her small waist before curving out again to disappear into the waistband of her cutoffs.
The cutoffs, too, were almost white: they had been created from very faded jeans, and had been washed countless more times in their reincarnated form. They now hugged her hips like a second skin. And very nice hips they were, Monty noticed, with the muscles smoothly bunched against the strain of her stretching. Whether she had miscalculated and cut the jeans a little too short originally, or whether the repeated washings had frayed material from the bottom, the cutoffs were definitely so short now that the faint beginning of a curved cheek could be seen where the denim fringe ended. That little detail, however titillating, was not what caused Monty to catch his breath and simultaneously stumble so that his boot heels thudded on the hard ground, causing Mercedes to turn around and break the tableau.
Monty had a theory that every man had some particular part of a woman's anatomy which he found especially seductive (assuming that he was a man who found women appealing). Not at the gross level where men identified themselves as leg men or breast men, but down at a finer level where one man would be totally captivated by a jaw line, another by the curve behind a knee, yet another by just the right shape of eyebrow. For him, it was the middle back, and the one in front of him today had all the qualities which triggered the reaction which had made him suddenly weak-kneed. There was something about the contrast between the strength of those two smooth ridges of muscle and the fragile little valley where the spine lay between them, and the proximity of that most perfect curve in all of nature, the concave curves at the sides of a woman's waist. Something deep in Monty's genetic makeup told his mind that when he saw such a back, he should spend hours gently sliding his long fingers up and down that precious valley, his palms cupped to caress those muscle ridges, until he finally enveloped that curving waist in his large hands, and he and the owner of the perfect back abandoned themselves to mad, passionate, animal love-making.