But this back belonged to a married woman, the wife of a friend. Monty had always held very strong moral convictions, and the civilized portion of his brain easily overrode the older animal instincts. Sexual lust hardly had a chance to rear its ugly head before it was replaced by nothing more than pure admiration of an exceedingly beautiful sight. Still, the shock of suddenly coming across such an unforgettable vision had upset him enough to cause him to stumble, and he felt another unwanted physical reaction begin to manifest itself. In elementary school the teacher had taught about autonomous muscles over which a person had no control, the example given being the heart muscle. Since pre-puberty, Monty had been one of those boys afflicted with a different autonomous muscle, which frequently began flexing itself at inopportune times, as it was doing now. "Oh, God, no!" thought Monty desperately. "I hope I can get past and up to the house without her seeing me like this!"
But to camouflage his problem in the meantime, Monty resorted to the maneuver he had developed as a youth. A teen advice column in the Sunday supplement had advised wearing loose-fitting pants: that had been a total disaster, giving as it did the impression that some Lilliputians had pitched a tent in there, down below his belt buckle. Instead, he wore tight-fitting jeans low on the waist, and perfected a gesture which involved tucking his thumb into his belt, then sucking in his stomach to make room as he gave a couple of quick, surreptitious digs with his dangling fingers so that the offending member rose to a vertical position just behind the zipper. While Monty wasn't in the same league as porn movie stars, he was endowed in the upper percentile range, and he had no trouble tucking in behind his belt buckle until nature eventually took its course in reverse. And so, even as he was recovering from his misstep, he almost automatically hooked a thumb into his belt and remedied the problem .
"Oh, Meester Marteen?" came Mercedes' voice shyly, as she turned to face him, her questioning inflection destroying any hope that he was going to be able to escape with just a smile and a nodded greeting.
He turned to face her, just as she turned toward him and leaned over to drop the sheet in a large wicker hamper. Monty winced as she bent from the waist, and the halter top did little to hide the shape of her firm breasts, looking like some wonderful, exotic ripe fruit, barely constrained by the flimsy material of her halter top. He tried to take his eyes off her, but when she straightened he was confronted with a bronzed midriff which mirrored her back, the two shallower ridges of vertical muscle on each side of a faint declivity which ended in a tiny navel, and below that a couple of inches of perfectly flat stomach which disappeared into the cutoffs.