"You silly…" she gasped, giggling. "Must you advertise the fact that we're newly-weds! Mr. and Mrs. Lawson can see!"

"Let 'em look… do you think they've never seen two people in love before?" He slid his other hand under her sweater, chuckling as she vainly tried to remove it.

Jean saw the smiles of the Lawsons before they quickly resumed their game, and she had to laugh in spite of her vague embarrassment. Tom was so like a little boy at times… so lighthearted and easy going. It was hard to believe that he and her first husband, Dan, had been brothers. Dan had always been kind and loving, a good husband, but the monotony of their sex life had never dawned on Jean until she had married Tom. Dan had been such a puritan about it, doing it only in the dark, and then only infrequently. But Tom made sex an adventure, a new thrill each time, and a deep expression of his love. He was her perfect lover, and he had brought new sexual life to her being. Now she enjoyed it, where before it had been just a ritual – a duty.

Jean looked lovingly at her handsome, forty-year-old husband.

Tom had been widowed himself for ten years and Jean had been like a mother to his daughter Linda since the child was five years old. In fact, Linda and Jean's own thirteen-year-old son, Paul, had always been more like brother and sister than cousins. It had been a painful separation for everyone when Tom and Dan had started the copper import business, but it was imperative that they be in South America in order to establish a firm foundation of a business that would assure them financial stability for the rest of their lives. Tom had agreed with Dan and Jean that the children should be educated in the United States, and both the children, Paul and Linda, had elected to stay with their grandparents, rather than boarding at school.

Jean had always felt comfortable with Tom, and more important she respected and cared for him deeply.