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Part One
Chapter One
Kennebunkport, Maine. 1973.
Billy Hamlin watched seven little boys in swimming trunks run squealing toward the water, and felt a surge of happiness. The kids weren’t the only ones who loved summer at Camp Williams.
Billy had been lucky to get this job. Most of the camp counselors were Ivy League kids. Tuckers and Mortimers and Sandford-Riley-the-Thirds on a “break” between Harvard College and Harvard Business School. Or the female equivalent, Buffys and Virginias passing the time between graduation and marriage by teaching swim class to the cute sons of the New York elite. Billy Hamlin didn’t fit the mold. His dad was a carpenter who’d built some new cabins at Camp Williams last fall, earning enough goodwill to land his boy a summer job.
“You’ll meet some interesting people up there,” Jeff Hamlin told Billy. “Rich people. People who can help you. You gotta network.”
Billy’s dad was a great believer in networking. Exactly why, or how, he thought a summer spent rubbing shoulders with spoiled bankers’ sons was going to help his charming, unqualified, and utterly unambitious boy get ahead in life remained a mystery. Not that Billy was complaining. By day, he got to hang around on the beach playing the fool with a bunch of sweet little kids. And by night, Camp Williams had more freely available drugs, booze, and what his grandma would have called “fast” women than a New Orleans whorehouse. At nineteen years old, Billy Hamlin didn’t have many skills. But he did know how to party.
“Billy! Billy! Come play pothum in the middle with uth!”
Graydon Hammond, a knock-kneed seven-year-old with a lisp brought on by at least five missing upper teeth, waved for Billy to come into the water. Graydon would grow up to inherit a majority of shares in Hammond Black, a boutique investment bank worth more than most small African countries. Waving people over to do his bidding would be a big part of Graydon’s future. But right now he was so sweet-natured and lovable, he was tough to resist.
“Graydon, leave Billy alone. It’s his afternoon off. I’ll play possum with you.”
Toni Gilletti, unquestionably the sexiest of all the Camp Williams counselors, was supervising Graydon’s group. Watching Toni run into the surf, her Playboy Bunny body barely contained by her white string bikini, Billy was mortified to feel the beginnings of an erection start to stir in his Fred Perry swimming trunks. He had no choice but to dive in himself and use the ocean as a fig leaf.
Like all the other boys at camp, Billy lusted wildly after Toni Gilletti. Unlike the other boys, he also like
d her. They’d slept together once, on the very first night at camp, and although Billy had been unable to persuade Toni to repeat the experience, he knew she’d enjoyed it and that she liked him too. Like him, Toni was something of an outsider. She was no workingman’s daughter. Toni’s old man owned a string of thriving electronics outlets along the Eastern Seaboard. But neither was she a prissy freshman from Wellesley or Vassar. Toni Gilletti was a wild child, a thrill-seeking troublemaker with a taste for cocaine and unsuitable lovers that had gotten her in deep shit back home in Connecticut. Rumor had it she’d only avoided a prison sentence for credit-card fraud because her father, Theodore Gilletti, paid off the judge and donated a seven-figure sum to pay for a new bar and wet-room at the local country club. Apparently Toni had stolen the gold AmEx from a neighbor to keep her latest dealer boyfriend in the style he’d become accustomed to. The Gillettis had packed their daughter off to Camp Williams as a last resort, no doubt hoping, like Billy’s dad, that Toni might “network” her way to a better future; in her case, marriage to a decent, well-bred white boy—ideally one with a Harvard degree.
Toni had kept half of the bargain, dutifully sleeping with every Harvard grad at camp who wasn’t completely physically repulsive, before settling on Charles Braemar Murphy, the richest, handsomest, and (in Billy’s view) most obnoxious of them all. Charles was out on his parents’ yacht today. The Braemar Murphys had “stopped by” on their way to East Hampton, and Mrs. Kramer, who ran Camp Williams, had given Charles the day off. It was irritating, the way Old Lady Kramer favored the rich kids. But every cloud had a silver lining. Charles’s absence gave Billy his best chance yet to flirt with Toni Gilletti uninterrupted and try to persuade her that a second night of passion with him would be a lot more satisfying that sticking with her stuck-up stiff of a boyfriend.
He already knew he had a chance. Toni was a free spirit with a libido like a wildcat. Only a few days ago she’d come on to Billy outrageously in front of Charles. It was a crass attempt to make her boyfriend jealous, but it worked. Later, Billy had heard Charles Braemar Murphy grilling Cassandra Drayton, another of the girls Billy was known to have slept with, about his appeal.
“What is it about Hamlin that women like so much?” Charles demanded angrily.
Cassandra smiled sweetly. “Do you want the answer in inches or feet?”
“He’s a fucking carpenter, for God’s sake!” spluttered Charles.
“So was Jesus, darling. Don’t be bitter. Anyway, it’s his father who’s the carpenter. Billy just sticks to fucking. And boy, does he know what he’s doing.”
As gratifying as it was to hear Cassandra Drayton sing his praises, the truth was that for all her flirting, Toni Gilletti had yet to allow Billy to seduce her a second time. The longer she held out, the more Billy wanted her.
Toni was like no other girl Billy had ever met. Not only was she a wildcat in bed, she was funny and smart, not to mention a brilliant mimic and natural performer. Her impression of Mrs. Kramer, Camp Williams’s elderly proprietress, had her fellow counselors crying with laughter. Toni had balls. Way bigger balls than he did, for all Cassandra’s kind compliments about his attributes. To Charles Braemar Murphy, Toni Gilletti was a trophy, a toy to be enjoyed over the summer. To Billy Hamlin, she was everything. Though he’d admitted it to no one, Billy was head over heels in love. He was determined not just to seduce Toni again, but to marry her.
Toni watched as Billy dived into the water. Just look at that physique. She loved the way the muscles rippled across Billy’s broad swimmer’s back and the way his powerful arms cut effortlessly through the water like twin scimitars slicing through silk. Charles Braemar Murphy was good-looking in a preppy, chiseled sort of way. But he had none of Billy’s raw sensuality, none of that animal magnetism, that predatory, erotic hunger that oozed out of Billy’s pores like sweat.
What Charles did have was a trust fund the size of Canada. With each passing day Toni Gilletti found it harder to decide which she wanted more: Adonis the Love God? Or Camp Williams’s answer to Croesus?
Last night she’d fantasized about screwing Billy again while Charles was making love to her. Lying back on a cashmere blanket, with Charles diligently pumping away on top of her to a sound track of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me”—terrible song, but Charles had insisted on bringing along his portable eight-track to “set the mood”—Toni remembered what it felt like to be pinned beneath Billy ’s powerful, masculine thighs. If he kept pursuing her like this she was bound to give in eventually. Toni Gilletti could no more stay faithful to an unsatisfying lover like Charles than a lioness could become vegetarian. Billy had been a wonderful lay. She needed fresh meat.
“C’mon, Toni! You’re suppothed to be pothum. Try and catch the ball!”
Graydon Hammond looked up at her plaintively. He had his arm around Nicholas Handemeyer, another adorably geeky seven-year-old and the heir to a vast estate in Maine. Dark-haired Graydon and the angelically blond Nicholas were probably Toni Gilletti’s favorite boys at Camp Williams. For all her carefully cultivated bad-girl ways, Toni was a popular camp counselor and naturally maternal. Her own mother was so interested in shopping and vacations and spending Toni’s dad’s money, she’d have been hard-pressed to pick Toni out of a three-kid lineup. But in spite of this poor parental example, Toni warmed toward small children and found them a blast to be around: funny, energetic, loving. Best of all they didn’t judge you. Toni loved them for that more than anything.
Today, however, hungover and in serious need of a line of coke, she could have done without the noise, and the questions, and the endless sweaty little hands pawing at her.
“I’m trying, Graydon, okay?” She sounded grumpier than she meant to. “Throw it again.”
“Let me help.”
Billy Hamlin had materialized beside her, his sleek blond head emerging out of the crystal-clear water like an otter’s. After scooping up a giggling Graydon and Nicholas under each arm, he dropped them in the shallows, dividing the other boys up into teams and getting the game started. After a few minutes, Toni swam over, allowing her bare arm to brush against Billy’s as she retrieved the ball. Just that small hint of physical contract was electric.
