The Best Laid Plans Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 1969 by Coronet Communication, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Popular Library

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Popular Library is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Popular Library name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Coxeman name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: May 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54139-8

  Contents

  ROD DAMON CAN’T MAKE LOVE! ARE HIS DAYS AS A COXEMAN OVER?

  OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES BY TROY CONWAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  ROD DAMON CAN’T MAKE LOVE! ARE HIS DAYS AS A COXEMAN OVER?

  Rod Damon—The Coxeman—uncovers a bizarre plot to assassinate several world leaders. HECATE, the enemy force, has planted remote-controlled “bugs” in the brains of its agents—“bugs” which are programmed to make the men kill on command.

  Rod tries to join HECATE in the hope that he can destroy it. After several unusual entrance exams—including a test of his virility—Rod makes the grade as a HECATE agent.

  The Coxeman is “bugged” for murder.

  But he can’t neutralize the assassination plot.

  And he can’t make love—except on HECATE’s orders.

  What can he do?

  Read on . . . and see for yourself!

  OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES BY TROY CONWAY

  The Berlin Wall Affair

  The Big Freak-Out

  The Billion Dollar Snatch

  The Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am Affair

  Its Getting Harder All The Time

  Come One, Come All

  Last Licks

  Keep It Up, Rod

  The Man-Eater

  CHAPTER ONE

  The big red Buick was doing eighty miles an hour.

  It was coming along Alumni Row, which fronts the University Memorial Union building, and it was like a scarlet bullet. I saw it and stopped at the crosswalk. Rhea Carson saw it and stopped beside me.

  Rhea Carson is a lady diplomat, highly connected in the State Department. She is a very valuable person to the United States. She is the only person in our known world that the Arab States trust, and that the Israeli government also trusts. Abdel Nasser likes her, as do King Hussein of Jordan, Shah Mohammed Reza Palayi of Iran, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Houari Boumediene of Algeria, and the President of Syria, Noureddin Attassi. So, too, do Moyshe Dayan and Premier Levi Eshkol of Israel.

  When the red car was a hundred feet away—

  Rhea Carson leaped in front of it.

  I had just turned to ask her a question. I had been selected by the Board of Trustees to escort Miss Carson around the university campus. She was here to make a speech in the new gymnasium that holds upwards of eighteen thousand people, this very evening. Not a vacant seat could be found for that address.

  Her topic was to be: The Prospects of Permanent Peace Between Arabs and Israelis in the Near East. Not only university students were to be there, but members of the United Nations, some congressmen, and a couple of foreign ambassadors.

  Rhea’s work at the United Nations behind closed doors with members of the United Arab Republic, and behind closed doors with Israeli representatives, had brought the faint promise of hope to all Middle East negotiations. Instead of war, there might be peace. Her silver tongue, her calm confidence, her liking for both Arab and Israeli as members of the brotherhood of men, were world famous.

  She must live to continue that great beginning.

  But now—

  Rhea Carson was trying to commit suicide!

  I did not stand there frozen. My name is Rod Damon, I am a sociology professor at the university. I am also the founder of the League for Sexual Dynamics, which I work with as an adjunct to the sociology program. Add in the facts that I do secret agent work for the Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation and that I am trained to react with lightning speed to the new or unusual, and you may get some idea of why I did what I did so fast.

  She was in mid-air when I jumped, diving at her the way a Green Bay flanker back dives for a runner. I went off my feet, my arms pincered in on the Carson hips, my head bent to ram her thigh with extra force.

  The car was on top of us.

  It was going to be a near thing, at best. My arms went around a pair of soft thirty-six-inch hips and locked tight. My momentum carried us both forward. I heard Rhea Carson give a shrill cry. Of dismay? Of despair? Of delight? I could not tell.

  Something hit my ankle, spun me.

  Then the lady diplomat was going down hard on the pavement of the road with me on top of her, and the red car was a scarlet blur out of the corners of my eyes. Rhea Carson bounced. I bounced right along with her. We lay there panting, staring into each other’s eyes.

  “What the hell were you trying to do?” I rasped.

  Her green eyes filled with tears. Her red lower lip quivered. “I—I d-don’t know. All of a sudden—I had to hurl myself in front of that car.”

  She sniffled and her body began to shake in nervous tremors. She lay gasping under me and her soft flesh moved and all I could think was, she felt damn good against my hard body.

  I realized where we were and that students were running toward us across the campus. Hundreds of eyes were glued to our quivering bodies. I tried to smile down at her as I wriggled off her belly and got to my feet.

  I caught her wrist and lifted her up.

  “You all right, Professor?” a girl called.

  “Like, man, that was a rare scare!” a boy howled.

  “How about you, Mrs. Carson?”

  She was smiling, brushing at her blouse and skirt, flushing a little, trying to be a good sport about the attention. I gave her a hand to dislodge some of the dirt adhering to her skirt. It was then I noticed she had no girdle on. Her buttocks were soft, smooth and they jiggled where I touched them.

  “I—I’m all right,” she told the students, blinking in her nervousness. My hand caught her elbow firmly.

  “You’re coming along with me, young lady,” I said, turning her on a heel and helping her to the walk.

  “Oh, but really! I don’t want to be any bother,” she said hurriedly.

  I knew how to deal with women. It’s a big part of my job. In my roles as professor and sexologist, I am in constant contact with girl students, lady teachers and administrators, female deans. Mostly, I can read them like a book.

  Rhea Carson wanted to be pampered. She wanted a male to fuss over her, reassuring her against the fright that still etched lines on her face. But she could not come out openly and say so; she had to rely on my instinctive understanding.

  “My hose, my face,” she was saying, almost running as I hurried her along. “I must be a fright.”

  “My pad isn’t far. A few minutes. It’s just off campus, really. You can lie down and take a rest. I’ll bring you Irish coffee, in the proper glass.”

&nb
sp; She laughed, half sobbing.

  While I was lifting out the key to my apartment in the four-apartment house where I am a tenant, she began to cry. The tears just welled up in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. It was her feminine reaction to her near-miss with death; I was damn glad it hadn’t happened sooner. I could handle a hysterical female in my rooms, but on the street it might have been a different matter.

  I pushed open the door; my hand at the small of her back pushed her forward into the living room of my little suite. She bent her head, let her face fall forward into her cupped hands, and bawled.

  “I—I wanted to do it, I really wanted to kill myself,” she sobbed. “The man in the car wasn’t trying to kill me!” I had thought of that possibility, but now I discarded the notion completely. Her wet face raised to look at me. “I actually t-tried to c-commit suicide!”

  “But that’s silly. Why should you want to do that?”

  “I d-don’t know. That’s what frightens me.”

  She was shaking all over in the first stages of incipient hysteria. I had to do something to snap her out of it, or she would become a hospital case. And with her talk due for eight o’clock tonight, this would be front page news stuff.

  I guided her to an easy chair. “You sit down there. I’m going to make you comfortable.”

  As she sat, I knelt down and reached under her skirt, sliding my palms along her stockinged thighs. She forgot her tears and her fright and sat up a little straighter.

  She said, “Oh!”

  “I just want to take your stockings off, to check for bruises.” I smiled up at her startled face. My fingers were working on the garterclasp, unfastening it and its two mates. I began rolling down the black nylon.

  “But—but really. . . .”

  Her thighskin was very smooth. Creamy. Was I mistaken, or did her leg give a little shiver where my fingertips caressed her? She did not push my hand away, but her color heightened.

  I undid the other garter and rolled down the other stocking. With the nylons crumpled at her ankles, I slipped off her shoes and removed the stockings. Her legs were damn shapely, naked with her skirt hem pushed to her upper thighs.

  she half laughed, “I’m showing you a lot, Professor.”

  I was putting her stockings in her shoes as I let my eyes assess her legs. I nodded, saying, “But you aren’t worrying about what happened back there.”

  Her laughter rang out. It was nice laughter, a little deep and throaty. Cleopatra might have laughed like that, or Delilah, or even Jezebel. There is much of all those women in every female born.

  I leaned forward and kissed her soft thigh, well above the knee. Her flesh smelled good, with the faintest trace of Shalimar perfume. Up this close, I could see beneath the skirt hem to her black girdle. Rhea Carson wore no panties, so my eyes had a treat.

  “Well, really,” she gasped as her fingers caught my head and held it motionless. “I ought to feel insulted, Professor! What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

  Her voice told me with its quaver that she was not as averse to my kisses as her words implied. Her fingers were quivering on my head, but they did not move my lips away from her soft thighflesh. Rhea Carson was poised on a psychic fence. One wrong move and she would flop one way; the right move, even the right words, might topple her over on my side where the fun was, and where there was no incipient hysteria.

  “You’re a damn attractive female, Rhea,” my lips told her, moving against her thighflesh. “I think you forget about that when you get so involved with the international situation.”

  My lips kissed along the soft thigh. The hands on my head went right along with me, as if they were mesmerized.

  It would have been fatal to tell her I just wanted to get her mind off the near-accident. I would have insulted her femininity, which means: her appeal to a male. A woman can forgive almost anything but that. Rhea Carson was no exception, diplomat though she might be.

  “I’m going to tell you something you can file away and then forget,” I went on, still kissing up and down her shivering thigh. “When I saw you, I told myself you were one female I’d like to take to bed.”

  It was a risk. She could get to her feet and go storming out of my pad, assuring me she was going to make a complaint to the university authorities. I might get the sack for what I was doing, for what I’d just said. But if I knew my women—and as the founder of L.S.D. I flattered myself that I did—she would sit and take it, and silently beg for more. It had been a long time since Rhea Carson had thought of herself in terms of legs, breasts and her own latent sexuality.

  Her eyes were mere slits, staring down at me. Her tonguetip was moistening her full red mouth. Almost for the first time, I looked at her as a possible bedmate.

  She was in her late thirties, she was four inches over five feet, and she weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty pounds. This poundage was nicely distributed. Her hips were wide, her middle was slim, but she carried a pair of breasts that made big bulges in her tailored blouse. It may have been my imagination, but the bulges looked bigger than they had been before I took her stockings off.

  “Better undress,” I informed her happily. “Please stand.”

  “You must be j-joking! I haven’t taken my clothes off in front of a man in five years.” She was still poised on the borderline between hysteria and anger. Her eyes were wide, her full lips trembled. Shock had entered her system by this time, but I was giving her something beside her troubles to think about, and I could only hope it would work.

  “You should have . . . lots of times,” I told her, putting a palm on her calf and sliding it up to her soft outer thigh and back again. “You’re a very attractive woman.”

  “I’m a woman with a curse,” she whispered, her fear showing again. Under my hand her thigh trembled, but her libido had nothing to do with it.

  I lifted to my feet. She made a pretty picture, seated on the big divan with her legs nude from upper thighs to her red toenails. I sat down beside her, put my left arm about her shoulders. She was going to require the gentle, slow approach. So I set about it, drawing her closer.

  “Tell me,” I breathed.

  “I—I’ve tried to kill myself before this,” she whimpered. Her head fell sideways onto my shoulder. Her eyelids closed.

  “It was in a Paris hotel. I tried to throw myself out a window of the ninth floor. Luckily, the chambermaid opened the door just as I was sliding a leg over the sill. She caught me and dragged me back.”

  My right hand was stroking her cheek and throat. I let my palm slip downward so that it could feel the heaviness of her breast. She stirred a little, her thighs pressed together, she opened her lips to breathe. I was transferring one emotional spasm to another, and she didn’t fight me.

  “If you didn’t have suicidal tendencies, you wouldn’t have tried to kill yourself,” I pointed out.

  “But I never have had them,” she whispered defensively. “I’m a happy woman. I have money, everything I want. I’m well thought of, everywhere.”

  “What about your husband? Could trouble with him cause you to have a death complex?”

  Her nipples were getting hard under my hands. She was twisting a little to the sensations building in her flesh. I went on caressing her breasts.

  She licked her lips while her head shook back and forth. “My husband died some years ago.”

  “Perhaps subconsciously you want to join him?”

  “No. Nothing like that. We were never madly in love. He was in the diplomatic service too. We would go months on end without seeing each other.”

  I am an amateur psychologist, in connection with my sociology work, but her problem was too deep-rooted for me to find. All I could do was prevent hysteria until a psychiatrist took over.

  When she began to cry again, softly, I drew her sideways and with my fingers under her chin, lifted her mouth to my kiss. I caught her lips between mine. I kissed her gently, wetly. Her body shivered, she pressed her
mouth to mine and let her lips go wide.

  Her lips were moist, her tongue was a silent voice calling out to me for help and reassurance. My own mouth and tongue gave her that reassurance while I used a finger and a thumb to draw down her blouse zipper. As she felt the cool air on her back, she let her breasts mash into my chest.

  When she drew back for air, mouth open and her cheeks flushed, I drew her blouse off her shoulders and down her arms. Her plump shoulders were indented by blue brassiere straps, her milky breasts overflowed the bra cups in creamy softness that shook as she breathed.

  I kissed her bared shoulders, I ran my mouth down to the swells of her breasts where they bulged up out of the C cups. My tongue ran across that warm breastflesh where it was exposed.

  “I must be crazy,” she gasped. “I feel as if I’m in some sort of dream. I only met you an hour or two ago and now I’m letting you treat me like—like a call girl.”

  “Why not—a wife?” I whispered.

  She shivered, still half in her dream world.

  “I admit I haven’t been myself lately,” she murmured above my head. “Ever since I had that accident in Paris—ooooh, you must stop! I—I can’t think straight when you’re . . . doing that.” Her soft palms cupped my face. Instead of lifting my mouth away from her, she moved my lips from one breast to the other.

  “You do too much thinking,” I breathed. “It’s time you relaxed a little. Everybody needs relaxation, even famous lady diplomats.”

  Her voice was a throaty murmur. “If I didn’t knew better, I’d think you were trying to seduce me, Professor Damon.”

  My hand was moving inside her brassiere, sliding fingers under her breast. I could hear her panting above me. She damn well liked what I was doing. She could talk all she wanted, but she needed this loveplay the way a sick child needs medicine.

  I got the breast out, so that its weight was held by the downpulled brassiere cup. It quivered, big and white and swollen, and the dark brown nipple was an inch long. I kissed her nipple while I freed her other breast. She was sighing steadily and she turned her torso sideways until her unkissed nipple almost touched my mouth. I drew it in, welcoming it with a lashing tonguetip.