“Have you ever felt God watching you, Jonah?” she asked. If a crimson Lincoln rose had a voice, it would sound like hers.

They were below deck in the great room of the Aphrodite, an 83-foot schooner moored to a boat slip in California’s King Harbor marina.

Jonah shared the Aphrodite with a dozen bikini-clad vamps who had all gone to New Year’s Eve parties much louder than the private party he was hosting with this one beauty who put the rest to shame.

Jonah liked his seductions to take place with music playing softly in the background. The first song drifting through the Aphrodite tonight was Fun, Fun, Fun by The Beach Boys.

He poured Beringer white merlot into a tall-stemmed goblet of foggy amber glass and sniffed the wine’s sweet cherry aroma.

Her hands slipped around his waist from behind and worked to unbutton his blue, Hawaiian-flowered, short-sleeve shirt. He could feel her heat through the cotton. “Wasn’t your mother Amanda a gambler?” she whispered, her warm breath caressing the back of his neck. “Didn’t she play cards in speakeasies during the twenties to win this boat?”

Jonah stepped away from her, and her fingertips lingered briefly on his hips before they were gone.

Amanda had done more than play cards, Jonah thought. She started the family fortune in New York when she was seventeen in 1910.

Jonah turned and held out the glass of wine. It was difficult to keep eye contact with her, because a master carver had chiseled her butternut body into sculpted perfection. Though he wanted a visual feast before sleeping with her, drooling over a woman’s body was against his rules of seduction because he knew it made most women nervous.

This one was decades younger than his eighty-seventy. Like Picasso, Jonah wasn’t attracted to women over thirty. When they were young, their smooth skin smelled of the sea and wind. Once the bloom withered, he lost interest.

“Take us out to sea, Jonah,” she said. “Just like your mother did with the whores and gamblers.” Her eyes were blue with green flecks of light dancing in them. She put the full goblet of wine he had handed her on the bar.

He sipped his wine, thinking that the last time the Aphrodite had been away from its berth had been the week before Pearl Harbor was bombed and that Amanda’s prostitutes had probably elicited enough sperm here to sink the ship.

“Didn’t you sail with Amanda when you were a boy?” she asked, and the tip of her tongue ran seductively along her lusty top lip. She wore tight, frayed, cutoff jeans. A shoulderless halter top barely covered her breasts, but not the smooth, muscular surface of her flat, naked abdomen. He thought, maybe I’ll call this girl Butternut because of the color of her skin.

“Would you prefer something stronger.” Jonah reached for a bottle of aged Glenlivet Scotch whisky. He poured an inch into a tumbler, hoping this would stop the questions about Amanda.

He didn’t like distractions from foreplay. Hundreds of seductions had taught him that more than ninety percent of the enjoyment of sex was the game that led up to the orgasm, and he loved touching a woman’s naked body more than he enjoyed the orgasm. Besides, with age, he couldn’t get as hard or last as long as he had when he was younger.

She sipped the tumbler of Glenlivet dry and watched him over the rim of the cut crystal like a cat watching its prey.

“How many bedrooms on the Aphrodite?” she asked. “Have you had women in all of them? I heard that your mother produced pornography on this boat. I understand she even owned a high-class escort service at one time before she built the club. Is it true that she stopped producing pornography because she didn’t want the attention of the Meese Commission?”

Jonah peered at her suspiciously. He couldn’t remember her name, and he wondered if she was a reporter attempting to trick him into giving away the family secrets. “Amanda liked Scotch,” he said, and poured her another inch of the Glenlivet. “Every morning when we docked and the clients went ashore, she would drink a full tumbler before going to bed.” He recalled those nights fondly. After all, he had been Amanda’s bed warmer before and after he married her oldest daughter. Amanda never married, and she had a different handpicked man for every one of the half-dozen children she gave birth to in her thirties.

“I want to make you happy,” she said, and slipped the zipper of her jeans down an inch, revealing more of her trim, muscular abdomen. “Why do you call her Amanda and not mother?”

He didn’t tell her it was because he wasn’t Amanda’s son, but rather her son-in-law. He’d changed his last name to Casanova because Amanda wanted her two daughters to have children with the family’s last name. Besides, Amanda had taken him in when he was ten in 1913, and no one had ever discovered she wasn’t his real mother. He’d been homeless, and she had wanted a son without going through the pregnancy. But, as far as the world knew, he was one of Amanda’s children. Later, she decided to have her own.

“Meet me halfway for a kiss,” he said.

A moment later, they were on the floor and her cutoff jeans and halter top had been cast aside. With Butternut naked, Jonah’s hands explored all of his favorite places.

“I want to surprise you, Jonah,” she said. “So close your eyes.”

He watched as she pulled his pants down around his knees and left them there. He wore no underwear. She leaned down, and her long, straw-colored hair tickled his stomach as she took his soft pecker in her hand.

He watched, savoring the moment.

“No peeking, Jonah,” she said as she pulled away. “Or there will be no surprise.”

He wanted to touch the throbbing pulse of excitement he could see beating wildly in her neck. It reminded him of a baby bird ready to fly. She leaned down to kiss him, and her lips and tongue had the smooth, velvet taste of the Glenlivet.

He gently caressed both of her breasts, and felt her nipples harden. She leaned back, stretched her torso tight, and tossed her head to clear away the long hair that had covered her eyes.

She discovered he was feasting on her perfect body with his eyes, and she pursed her lips and wagged a finger at him. “What did I say, Jonah?”

He closed his eyes and waited, anticipation holding his breath hostage.

“No cheating,” she said, and she stepped away from where he lay on the floor toward her purse on the bar. She reached inside for the foot-long marble dildo, the one she’d stolen from a long-dead Greek god. The god’s immortal dildo was going to be Jonah’s final gift, to pay for Amanda’s sins and his own.

Learning over him, she said, “Open your mouth, Jonah.”

When he did as she asked, she shoved the marble shaft down his throat, shattering his teeth and destroying the inside of his mouth. His eyes flew open in shock, and he struggled to free his arms, which were pinned to his sides by her long, strong, tanned legs.

She shoved the dildo deeper into his throat.

Pain roared through his body like a tornado. One of his hands fluttered toward the security camera hidden in the bulkhead across the room, seeking help that wasn’t there, because, wanting privacy, he’d turned it off before she’d arrived.

Once she was sure he was dead, she pulled the marble dildo from Jonah’s throat and washed away the blood and saliva in the sink before putting it back in her purse. Then she dressed, slipped on latex gloves and cleaned everything she had touched. She found a vacuum and went to work. When she finished, she took the bag out of the vacuum and put it in a trash bag. She put her purse inside the bag, too, and then sealed the bag with a double knot.

She inspected the room once more before she went out on the aft deck of the Aphrodite and looked across the boardwalk at the nightclub, with its pulsing magenta walls singing God Only Knows. The music created an illusion that the nightclub was a throbbing heart, while the ocean glowed from phosphorescence as if heralding an army of horny aliens about to invade from the sea.

With her lips pressed tight, she reached in the back pocket of her shorts and took out a black business card with flaming Gothic letters across one side that read, “‘Men in the last days shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, and he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword’ ─ 2 Timothy 3:2 & Revelation 10:13”

She went back inside and placed the card across Jonah’s gaping, bloody mouth. With regret, she caressed his face with her fingertips. She enjoyed sex, and this fit old man had aroused her interest. “Happy New Year, lover,” she said, and blew him a kiss.

She checked the time on the clock behind the bar and saw that fifteen minutes remained until the new year. She tied the plastic trash bag to a belt loop on her shorts and slipped over the side of the Aphrodite and into the salty, cold water. She didn’t have that far to swim, and the Glenlivet was still keeping her warm.

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The first 20% of this murder mystery is offered free every Sunday, one episode at a time for 15 episodes, starting September 27 and ending January 3, 2015. The e-book of the novel will go on sale December 5 to 7, 2015, and be offered for three days at $0.99 (75% less than the original price).