Martinique is a lovely island. You might think all Caribbean islands are lovely if you don't have much experience of them, but they're all different. It's real life with good weather. Martinique is green - it has lots of trees. And it's not a building site like some islands, which are great around the edges but grim further in.

I was staying in a village in an area called Les Trois Ilets and the "village" looked new and was full of touristy shops and restaurants, but it did have that sense of community that modern places often lack.

The sociability aspect even extended to the beaches. There was a little group of three at one end - one long beach divided into three by boulders piled up as breakwaters. The first one faced across the bay, protected by the diagonal rocks, and it was about fifty yards wide, with soft sand by the water's edge but firm areas at the top, shaded by coconut palms.

It was a family beach, which might not sound like rich pickings when you're looking for available women, but even the attached ones can be fun. I amused myself, ostensibly reading a book but really looking at the female scenery, and my first connection was a thirty-something black woman with a white husband and teenage son. They were just leaving, so she was wrestling with clothes, balancing as she changed out of swimsuit into streetwear.

I watched her calmly, subtly, and after a while, she knew I was doing it. But as I have remarked before, it's okay if they know you're doing it. It only becomes a problem if other people know they know.

So this woman gave me delicious dark peeks into the neckline of her tee shirt. Getting into the spirit, I lay on my back and pulled the legs of my loose beach shorts up a bit. She couldn't really see anything because of the netting they put in to support your balls, but she had the pleasure of knowing I was happy to show her what I had and would do so at close quarters if the opportunity arose.

Pervy? Only if you pick the wrong woman or, as previously stated, if someone else notices. It was harmless mutual flirting.

I knew she was looking for an opportunity to show me her knickers. I had already seen her in a bikini, but underwear is somehow different: more risqué.

Sure enough, she managed to lean on her husband’s shoulder and hoist a knee to get her undies comfortably ensconced and she gave me a fabulous shot of fabric and naked crotch in the process. She glanced at me to check I had received it and I looked back with blank, defiant thanks.

The family moved off and returned to their world as I too landed back on planet earth.

My attention was soon grabbed by a young girl of about five or six, on the beach with her grandma and giving the old lady the runaround. I had no way of knowing, but something told me the woman was local and perhaps the girl was visiting for a summer holiday.

This woman was slim in the rather slack, remodeled way of older people who suddenly decide to lose all the padding they have carried for their whole adult life and at least be slender even if their looks are decaying on them. She had red/blonde hair, medium length and pulled back into what would have been a ponytail if it hadn’t been frizzy. But it was, so it burst from the scrunchy that held it back, and flamed like a sunset. She must have been seriously gorgeous in her youth, and now that she had matured at the same rate as my taste in women, she was the walking embodiment of desirability.

Big breasts, too.

Her face was pretty but tired and she screwed it up and narrowed her eyes when she yelled at the girl, her mouth small and round and puckered, like an arsehole – and I mean that in a nice way. I wanted to kiss her mouth and I wanted to lick her arse.

I watched her while I was swimming: she was standing, adjusting her hair and watching the girl playing with some other kids, and when I came out, on impulse I walked right over to her and spoke to her in French – it’s a French island.

“Madame,” I said quietly into her ear. “Vous etes tres belle. Ne l’oubliez pas jamais.” That is (probably not quite correct but close enough, “Madame, you are very beautiful. Never forget that.”

She was slightly taken aback, but recovered quickly and mumbled, “Merci, monsieur”. I smiled and went over to my spot to dry off. When I lay down on my beach bed to resume my daydreaming she had called the girl to her and they were both getting changed. She helped the youngster and then got down to it herself, using a towel awkwardly to put on a dry bikini. She fumbled while putting the top part on and the towel slipped, revealing breasts even larger than I had thought, and gloriously pale in their nakedness.

She looked quickly at me and I could see a nanosecond’s change from, “Oh my God I’m showing my tits,” to, “There you are, monsieur. I hope you enjoyed that.”

The briefs are easier to change because there is plenty of towel down there, but then it’s a question of what you do with them, and she lingered on that, making the white gusset visible to her secret admirer. It was just a piece of fabric and at that distance, I could neither see little stains nor smell what made them, but it was an unmistakable unspoken gift to me. She placed them on a rock and climbed quickly and without incident into the fresh ones.

Then she packed the beach bag and rummaged in it, bending over as she did so, to give me a long, deliberate look at her rump. I’ve thought about this over the years, and concluded that it isn’t a woman’s invitation to fuck her up the arse, nor even to steam in doggy-style; it’s a primeval way of indicating that she is available for the furtherance of the human race and, in this day and age, purely for your mutual pleasure.

When she was ready she checked the little girl and they walked past me to leave. As they did so she dropped a business card, which fluttered to the sand right next to me.

Cécile Pouivet, interior designer, based right in the village. And a phone number, but as I was only visiting the island I had no usable phone. There might have been a simple way like Whatsapp but that’s a challenge for me and I had no one to ask for advice. There was also an email address.

I dressed quickly and hurried back to my apartment, sent her an email and hoped she was in the habit of checking her mail regularly.

“C’est moi de la plage. Je voudrais te voir ce soir, si c’est possible,” I said simply. "It’s me from the beach. I would like to see you this evening, if possible."

She replied within half an hour, saying yes, okay, she would like that too but she had to look after the girl and couldn’t leave the apartment. Would I like to eat with her there?

What’s French for, “Is the Pope a Catholic?”

I replied just “Yes, please. What time?” and it was all lined up. Eight o’clock at her place above the bakery.

I was ready at five, champing at the bit, dying for a drink to calm down but aware that I shouldn’t arrive apparently half drunk. I forced myself to read my book and watched a bit of French TV. It was a ten-minute walk to her place so I left at 7:30, bought the best Cabernet Sauvignon I could find in the little supermarket and had a quick beer in the village before knocking on her door on the stroke of eight.

No reply. I knocked again. Still nothing.

Then I heard the patter of footsteps on the stairs and turned around to see the woman and the girl, fresh from another swim somewhere.

They were cold in the evening cool, and the girl needed a shower and a story to get her ready to sleep, so I went back over to the bar and had another Corona. When I shoved the lime wedge down, the beer fizzed and shot out of the neck, like a premonition of what I was hoping for later.

I gave them a good forty-five minutes: incredible self-control, I thought, before returning to the apartment and knocking quietly.

The girl was sound asleep. When you finally got her down, she slept like a log, Cécile told me. That was why she had taken her for another swim.

Cécile had not had time to shower. Her skin was cool, as I found when I touched her with feigned innocence on her arm. She offered to have a quick shower now, but I said only if she really wanted to. She had been in the water half the day. There is something erotic about that cold post-swim state, and if there were grains of sand in her crevices it would merely be a reminder to me that I was in those crevices. But that was getting ahead of myself.

We sat and chatted over glasses of Entre Deux Mers, which is light and fruity and subtle and has been steamrollered by the world’s obsession with Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay.

Cecile was a woman of the world, a classic French woman of the old school, like a character from a Françoise Sagan novel, who has studied and learned and loved and lost and married and divorced, all of which had resulted in a mellow, complex personality. If she knew about wine and literature and films, she probably knew plenty about physical love too. That was the hope, anyway.

She raided the fridge to produce a thoroughly French spread of ham, salami, brie and terrines and rillettes, which I had only recently learned were not actually paté, even though they were similar. To cut through all this richness there were saucers of cornichons, little crunchy miniature pickled cucumbers. And there was crisp French bread, which they buy fresh every day, as and when they need it.

I spoke halting French and she did her best with limited English. We sat on the little balcony overlooking the village, with the sea one-hundred yards away, and listened to 60s-era Françoise Hardy through a little speaker attached to her iPod.

Whenever the conversation stalled through linguistic incompetence we laughed and looked into each other’s eyes, and eventually, those looks became deeper and were accompanied by hands clasped in a curious mixture of companionship and desire.

At one point I found myself kneeling in front of her as we both smiled our heads off, and I kissed her hand and she stroked my hair. I lowered my head and kissed her thigh, which was warming up but still had the chill of the sea. Her nipples were hard beneath the bikini top.

“Come,” she said, standing up. “I show you my work.”

She led me past the girl’s bedroom and then her own, to a small room at the end of the corridor where there was a desk and a computer and a small, low couch. She fired up the laptop and showed me some current projects, but the pretence was leaking away as we relaxed in our own little world.

Cécile stood up straight and turned the full majesty of her womanhood on me. Her eyes burned into mine, her breasts radiated some indefinable power and her crotch glowed in my imagination like some supernatural force. I knew I was about to have one of the great experiences of my life.

We pulled each other close and kissed eagerly. Her pubic mound ground against my swelling cock and my hands reached around and grabbed her buttocks.

She broke free and quickly locked the door, then sat on the couch and pulled me down. Pushing me back, she unbuttoned my shirt and put her face to my chest, breathing in my cologne and my manly sweat.

I shrugged off the shirt and lay back again as she unzipped my jeans and pulled them off. She pulled my underpants down enough to get a hand around my cock and balls, which she pulled out like a rabbit from a hat. Then she removed the underpants and I was naked on a couch with a woman in a bikini, my cock prominent, hard and impatient.

Cécile stood up and unhooked her top and stood there, allowing me to enjoy the magnificence of her breasts. Then she stepped forward and turned away so I that when I pulled the bikini bottoms down I was face to cheek with her arse.

I kissed her buttocks gently and lovingly, first one, then the other. She put her hands on her knees to expose herself further and I licked her crack quickly but deliberately, telling her with one movement that I found her exquisitely sexy and there was nowhere on her body I would not go.

I maneuvered her onto the couch on her knees and she slid her elbows forward, arched her back so her breasts touched the seat and I had complete access to her personal charcuterie.

I licked her vagina, which was fringed with sandy coloured pubic hair. I sucked her lips and I drank her juice as she gave soft whimpers of delight. Then I moved up and licked the woman’s arse properly; she shivered with erotic trepidation as a man boldly went where few, or perhaps none, had ever gone before.

Her crack was beautiful, with little ripples radiating from her anus and a fabulous soft smell that is found nowhere else in creation – only in the female human arse. She was salty from the sea and lively with pent-up desire, rubbing against my face and retreating from it, absolutely loving what I was absolutely loving doing to her.

I felt she was on the verge of orgasm when she decided to save it and attend to me. I sat back against the seat as she took my penis lovingly in her hands and kissed the head. Then she took it in her mouth and sucked it like a lolly before licking it up and down, in the nooks and crannies around the head, then down to my balls.

She took one carefully into her mouth, then released it and sucked my scrotum. She understood that such action is mainly to know you’ve been there, done that, felt the texture, tasted the oils and, although a man gets no physical thrill like he does from his cock, he too has the indelible memory of that time this woman adored his balls.

Then Cécile took my cock in her mouth again and bobbed and sucked to give us both the thrill of that classic sexual act. She was covering all the bases, apparently determined to cram a whole relationship’s sexual activity into one beautiful hour.

She knelt on the floor with her elbows on the seat and I needed no further invitation. I got behind her and slid my pulsating penis into her gloriously juicy vagina. I pumped her and she pumped back and gave a muffled squeal as she came, then scrambled out from under, sat me down again and squatted above me, inviting me to look at her raging, animal cunt. Then she wiped it on my face before descending to impale herself on me. She bounced up and down and I felt for the first time the sensation of a woman totally in control in that position, capable of playing my instrument as well as her own.

She was fucking me to orgasm, dictating the pace and revving me up at will. As men, we are trained these days to control ourselves and wait for the female orgasm before indulging in our own, but I was out of control and it was of her own making. She fucked me and her screwed-up eyes relaxed into a satisfied smile as she made me cum inside her. Then, as if my reaction tipped her over the edge, she came again, grinding herself against me and convulsing, muttering soft endearments as she settled on top of me, her tits against my chest as she kissed my forehead.

We showered together and dried each other and lay together on the sofa in the main room, stunned by our compatibility and drunk with a love that existed only briefly.

My time in Les Trois Ilets ended two days later and we had no opportunity for a repeat performance – if it is possible to repeat or even advisable to try. It remained what it had been: an utterly exciting, heavenly experience that would stay with us both forever.