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AuthorHouse - Robert Beatty

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297 pages

English

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Description

George and Arthur are identical twins, both are in college and living in late 1930s America. They come from a rich upper class Baltimore family. Their father had been taking the family on summer vacations to Miami Beach. Finding Miami Beach to be too crowded, the father changes directions and takes the family to a remote and less known vacation resort in South Carolina. There the boys meet and fall head over rich privileged heels in love with a beautiful local girl who works as a cleaning girl who cleans the rental vacation cottages. When they return the next year they start up a full blown love and sexual affair with the girl, Melissa. The girl falls in love with them; both of them. Both brothers want to marry the girl. The situation lead to quite a rivalry between the two brothers which could lead to a serious break between them in the family.
The problem is that Melissa said she wants to marry BOTH men. She says that she loves them both equally and cannot choose between them. In the end she refuses to choose between them saying that if they will not agree to a three-way marriage she will live with them both in a menage-a-twa arrangement anywhere. While that could be worked out in backwoods mountain country, it would be totally unacceptable in straight laced conservative Baltimore Brahmin society. The boys do not want to leave their family home and situation.
By a series of events that include a savage barroom between the brothers and locals over the girl, a fight in which one of the brothers seriously mutilates a knife welding redneck thug, facing possible serious danger from angry locals who falsely blame the girl for provoking the fight, the girl comes home with the boys to live with them as a cleaning girl in the family home in Baltimore, much to the chagrin of the boys straight laced mother. At home behind closed doors, the boys carry on in secret the affair they started in Carolina. At their sister's wedding reception both of the brothers propose to the girl with the one she does not choose agreeing to drop out of the picture. Sill as much of a stubborn hillbilly girl as she was when they first met her, Melissa again refuses to choose between them. The issue unresolved as ever, the affair otherwise continues in secret at the family house. The years roll on, Melissa marries out of necessity, but which one did she choose? Find out how this convoluted love affair ends.

Sujets

Policier & Thriller

Thriller

Romance policière

Action

Fiction

Romance

Adventure

Informations

Publié par	AuthorHouse
Date de parution	14 décembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781665578165
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

My Melissa
Volume II

Robert Beatty

AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 833-262-8899

© 2023 Robert Beatty. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/13/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7817-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7816-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
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148
“Stand by for torpedo attack!” the captain called out from the bridge.
“That’s us,” the chief torpedoman said.
The crew torpedo crew jumped to their feet, George with them. As he stood up, George looked out over the ocean in the direction the ship’s guns were pointing. The target cruiser was steaming forty degrees off the starboard bow at about ten thousand yards distance, within maximum range of their torpedoes.
Torpedoes are the great equalizer among warships. They enable smaller ships down to the size of PT boats to deliver a killing blow to the largest ship. Packing warheads filled with three hundred pounds of Torpex high explosive, the Mark 15 torpedoes George’s ship carried, were twenty-five feet long and almost two feet wide. Their explosive power was equal to, if not greater than, the eight-inch shells the cruiser was firing at them, and instead of dropping down on a ship’s deck from above, torpedoes are made to attack a ship at its most vulnerable point, below the waterline.
Using the hand-aiming wheel, the chief torpedoman cranked mount number one out to the starboard side and trained it 110 degrees relative to the ship’s heading, just abaft of the beam of the lead cruiser in the four in the four-cruiser column. George helped him crank the wheel. The torpedo chief directed mount number two to be rotated out to 125 degrees relative. When this was done, the chief torpedoman looked toward the bridge and raised his arm and hand to signal the tubes were ready. In his other hand, he held the wooden mallet that could be used to fire the torpedoes if their igniters failed. George looked up toward the captain.
“Fire torpedoes!” the captain called out from the bridge.
With a sharp rush of compressed air, the torpedoes leaped from their tubes, one following the other at three-second intervals. Flying out horizontally, they dropped and struck the water with heavy splashes. Already spinning, the torpedo’s twin sets of counter-rotating propellers clawed into the water. Sinking to a preset depth of six feet, the torpedoes turned in the direction that their gyros had been set for and accelerated to a speed of twenty-seven knots, running “hot, straight, and normal” toward the leader of the four-cruiser column. Along with the explosive the torpedoes carried, they carried with them the destiny of the two opposing ships, the battle-and-destiny question of a lot of men on both sides as to whether they would go home. One of those destinies hanging in the balance was George’s.
Not waiting to see the results of the inbound torpedo strike, the captain ordered hard about in order to drive the ship at top speed in the direction of the vulnerable carriers of Taffy 3. The ship leaned to the side as it went into the full-over rudder maneuver. George held onto the now-empty torpedo tubes as the ship swung and leaned. Upon straightening out in its course, the twin screws of the destroyer, driven by the combined sixty thousand-shaft horsepower of her steam engines, drove at flank speed back toward the carriers of Taffy 3 that so desperately needed assistance.
As George’s ship pulled away, the flashes from the Japanese guns and the concussion of their blasts eased only slightly as the distance opened. As he led them all away, the captain of George’s ship wove the ship in and through the spotty localized rain squalls dotting the area. While they were passing through the rain shafts, they were momentarily out of sight, and the fire directed at them abated until they came into view of the spotters on the Japanese ships. But there was not enough rain to cloak the ship completely or for long. It was daylight. The Japanese guns had the decided range advantage. That day, the rising sun favored the fleet that flew its pennant on their fantails.

Destroyer men have one thing in common with submarines: they experience no greater suspense than while counting the minutes and seconds of their torpedo’s impacts. George’s ship had fired all ten of the torpedoes that had been loaded with the aid of a crane into the tubes at a naval base before the ship had left for action. They had no more torpedoes below deck in a magazine to reload with. The long, bulky, and heavy torpedoes would have been impossibly heavy for the crew to manually bring up and reload into the tubes. George had the feeling that the captain still had a large reservoir of daring left in him, but anything further would have to be carried out with something other than torpedoes.
At seven twenty-four, lookouts on the Japanese cruiser reported three torpedo tracks close off the starboard bow. The captain ordered an immediate hard overturn. Knifing through the water at more than thirty knots, the ship was traveling too fast to make a tight radius turn.

Looking out between the squalls and smoke, George saw a bright flash erupt at the waterline of the cruiser near her bow. The long, dark form of the ship lifted slightly as if stuck from below by an enormous fist. A massive geyser of water shot upward, obscuring the forward part of the ship. As the water cascaded back down, the gracefully tapered form of her bow seemed to detach, drop away, and disappear into the sea. As the smoke and spray cleared, all that was left of the forward-most part of the ship was a squared-off tangle of jagged metal.
On the wounded Japanese ship, watertight doors clanged shut, sealing off the undamaged compartments from the water sliding in from the torn-open and blown-away bow. In order to keep the already-heavy hydraulic force on the watertight doors from being further compounded by the massive force of the water they were plowing through at thirty knots from collapsing the other watertight bulkheads in sequence, the captain slowed the cruiser down to a crawl. The ship’s power was intact. They could still shoot, but they couldn’t travel at meaningful speed.
To keep the other fast-moving ships in the column from crashing into his ship from the rear, the captain moved his ship out of line. While the other cruisers pressed on at full speed, another cruiser came alongside the damaged one to give aid and assistance. Far from being a quixotic gesture, the torpedo attack by George’s ship had effectively taken two enemy capital ships out of action.
Cheering broke out from several places on the ship that had a view of the battle. One voice called out, “That’s cutting them down to size!” George could have patted himself on the back for the minor role he had played in their ship’s success in their mismatched killing attack, but he had a more immediate question.
“What do we do now?” he asked, holding on to the empty torpedo tubes. “We’ve shot our wad. We don’t have any more torpedoes left. There’s nothing we can do standing here. What battle station do we go to now?”
“I guess the captain will tell us,” the chief torpedoman said.
George looked up to the bridge again. The captain was outside, but he wasn’t looking at them or signaling to them. He was still looking away at the other half of the battle they were rushing to join and the carriers they were protecting. As the first traces of the wet scent of rain from the squall they were approaching reached him, George left the ruined bridge and headed down to the holed and ruptured main deck stained by blood and death.

Back at the home George had left behind, in the bedrooms still permeated with the sense of foreboding that had woken her up, Melissa fell asleep. But sleep would prove no refuge from nightmares. The formless dream images and feelings of peril, pursuit, and the destruction of love hadn’t left the room or her mind. Soon after she had fallen back into her troubled sleep, they started up again.

After seeing the explosion of George’s ship being hit and thinking it was a cruiser exploding and sinking, the