Jasper never saw what hit him, at least that's what the authorities claimed. He had crawled inside the gaping metal mouth of the wheat harvesting combine that sat idly in the field, having broken down Saturday afternoon. Something to do with the wide rubber conveyor belt that pulled at the row of metal teeth that snapped the wheat straws from the ground, the combine operator had told him. Combine mechanics don't usually make a habit of crawling inside the machine to see what the problem is, but there had been a good reason for it in Jasper's case.
It was Sunday morning and the field workers were off to church. In other nearby agro-businesses in the South Dakota countryside there were plenty of land owners who refused to let their laborers off on Sunday, especially during the planting and harvesting seasons, but Mr. Olson, a god-fearing man had always been a fair employer insisting that his workers show their faces at Church, to keep up his own good reputation if for no other reason.
Then, too, the semi-trucks that hauled the wheat to its storage bins ten miles away were already sitting brimming full of the ripe kernels, so there was no point in combining more wheat when there was no where to put it. The truckers already had their work cut out for them on Monday morning. In fact, the combine operators wouldn't be starting up again until late Monday morning.
And then, of course, Jasper had been a little too hung over from the night before. He'd been known to finish off a half pint of Jack Daniels and that, the coroner had added on the death report, might have been the reason for the sudden activation of the combine that literally chewed him to bits.
He had been called to the fields by one of the operators, though no one knew who, to look over the gigantic machine to see what had caused it to suddenly stop. At one time the loss of one machine would have been no emergency matter. There had been four combines once, but the extra combine that had sat idly by, had been sold to pay off last year's taxes when Mr. Olson, the owner of the wheat fields had been killed in a plane crash along with his wife, Erma. Now, although the wheat ranch was being run at a greatly reduced capacity, the loss of another combine could .mean thousands of dollars lost if the wheat sat ripening in the sun one more day. So Jasper, being a one-time employee of Mr. Olson when times were rosier, had responded to the urgent call for help.
He had driven his two-ton Chevy truck to the dirt road that followed the irrigation ditches and parked it near the glen of symmetrically planted pine trees that served as a wind break against the threatening summer lightning and wind storms that whipped across the South Dakota plains. Carrying his battered black metal tool kit in one hand, he trod through the waist-high wheat field admiring this year's crop, and headed toward the monster that shimmered like a ripe orange in the Sunday morning sunshine.
He had climbed atop the harvesting machine, and sat for a few meditative moments in the driver's seat, staring out over the wavering sea of wheat that stretched for miles around him, punctuated only by the wind break and a ghostly Minuteman missile, before putting his foot on the gas of the combine and turning the key. He wanted to see if the problem was a engine one. The combine's engine heaved in a lurching answer. Satisfied, he turned it off, knowing the problem had to be in the inner mechanics, 'the guts' of the machine. Jasper climbed down from the umbrella-covered driver's seat and set about his work.
He walked around the combine looking for any sign of a clog-a prairie dog may have gotten mashed in the spokes which would cause the machine to stall, or a part may have come loose. Sometimes the simplest things could cause the worst trouble, as these were very sensitive machines. He found nothing out of order.
That left one possibility-an internal malfunction, probably with the conveyor belt that drove the motor that pulled at the lethal metal fingers. Jasper hesitated and sucked in his breath. Damn, he didn't have the right tools with him to loosen the bolts and screws that held the spikes in place. Shaking his head, Jasper got down on his hands and knees and stared into the gaping mouth of the combine. The first rule in fixing a combine is never, never crawl inside, even if the machine is turned off. He sat in the cool shade of the orange monster and considered the situation. Either he could go back to the shop and pick up the right tools to remove the front end of the machine, including the spikes, or he could chance it. He realized though, that one wrong move and something, anything as small as a foot tapping against the delicately balanced spikes could trap him inside. Jasper took a deep breath, drinking in the heady odor of the ripened wheat and thought back on when he used to work for old man Olson and made his decision. Olson had been a damned fair man and his daughter deserved a break.
He pulled the bill of his cap down over his eyes to shade them and tucked his overalls inside his boots so they would not catch on the spikes. That precaution taken, he rolled up his shirt sleeves and crawled inside. Once there he saw that the conveyor belt had been sliced clean as a sawed board, and it hadn't been an accident. Jasper swore. What kind of idiot would deliberately cut the conveyor belt?
Jasper never found out the answer to that question. A fringe of the shaking umbrella tickled against the browned skin of a man's cheek, as he sat in the driver's seat and turned on the engine.
There was an abrupt whine of the gears meshing, a clatter as the spokes circled wildly, and a shrill scream from inside the combine. For a hundredth of a second, Jasper sensed the terrible acceleration as the disengaged 'gut' of the machines shoved him violently around like the vortex of a washing machine and sent him whirling into the teeth of the deadly spikes. For an instant of time he was confusedly aware of imminent danger, and then the world dissolved into an inferno of searing pain that lasted for only a fraction of a second. Then all was dark.
A great fountain of blood spurted out from the spokes of the combine as the teeth tore through Jasper's diabolically positioned body. It spurt onto the golden wheat ten feet away, the thick liquid dripping from the ripened wheat kernels down the proud stalks to pool at the roots.
The combine chugged a few feet and then stopped, the spikes whirling uncontrollably until the key was turned off and the machinery rumbled to silence. A man jumped down from the driver's perch and darted across the wheat field, head tucked down to his shoulders as he ran. A car choked into life, was revved up and then died away down the dirt path leading to the main road.
In the wheat field, the cloying, sick-sweet stench of blood and mashed flesh overlaid the crushed wheat as the Sunday morning sun congealed the blood spattering the ground. Beneath, the flies were buzzing over the gray splotch of brain tissue and ropes of coiled intestines.
CHAPTER ONE
The young woman bending over to pull the ragweed from the patch of marigolds was tall and lithe, with silken tanned arms the color of ripe wheat. The patched cut-offs she wore showed her small waist and the richly contoured swell of her hips and the curves of tapered thigh and calf below. Her sleeveless blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, was thrust out provocatively by the twin mounds of her full, wide-set breasts, and there was a mass of red-gold hair cascading about her sturdy shoulders.
Leaning against a tree, the bulbous man in the overalls stared down at the lush lines of her high-breasted body and chewed on a blade of crab grass. For some inexplicable reason, with him, his nibbling lips looked obscene. "Mona?" he called. The man crossed his arms over his chest. "You sure you don't wanna sell this old house? Sure as hell looks like too much work for a little old lady like you to take care of."
Mona clenched her teeth in exasperation. The man's name was Sylvester, and he was her step-mother's only son. He lived in town where he ran a gas station and garage, and it wasn't the first time he'd come out to the ranch to look around. "No, Sylvester," she sighed with exasperation. "I don't want to sell the house, or the land, or the business. I love this land-and it's my land."
"But it's just too damned big," he persisted, spitting out the green chlorophyll pulp between his teeth. "No young lady should be stuck with such a responsibility. . . . "
"Look," the redhead sighed again, grasping at an obdurate clump of crab grass that threatened to choke the delicate marigolds. "
I don't want to discuss it any more, Sylvester. I've made up my mind."
"Just as stubborn as your paw." Mona Olson stiffened with annoyance. Really, this pestering step-brother was getting on her nerves, but out of due respect to her deceased step-mother she would have to listen to his ramblings. But those ramblings were becoming more insistent with each unwelcomed visit, and no matter how many times or ways she tried to explain her feelings to him, it didn't seem to sink into that balding head of his. Mona threw the handful of crab grass on top of the swelling pile and rose to her knees. "Okay, Sylvester, what's your offer this time?"
Sylvester watched as she threw the crab grass over the barbed wire fence and into the chicken yard where a single rooster and three hens pecked the dusty earth. The chickens, like everything else on the wheat farm, were aging. Long ago, it used to be one of the largest wheat farms in the county. It was located ten miles out of De Grey, on the Pierre side. The Crow Indian Reservation was only twenty miles down the Oahe River that irrigated the Olson's wheat farm during droughts. The Olson farm had been one of the richest ranches around, but as Old man Olson poured more and more money into the farm and as the droughts continued, the place had become neglected for lack of funds. Now, after the tragic death of he and his second wife, Erma, the ranch house was in bad need of a paint job and new screens, not to mention the rotting foundation that needed a face lift. The barn where the family's pet riding horses used to chomp on fresh hay was nothing but an empty, dusty shell. The gardens that used to intoxicate the nostrils with sweetness were now beds of ragweed and crab grass. With the price of construction these days, thought the step-brother, Mona is crazy for not accepting my offer.
Mona slipped her feet into her sandals. "Okay, Sylvester. What's your offer this time?" she said smothering her hostility.
Sylvester thrust his hands into his overall pockets and stared down into the face of his step-sister. Her face, hardened slightly by impatience and irritability, was still beautiful. The nose was short and straight; the eyebrows curved impeccably over luminous green eyes; and above the determined chin a generous mouth turning upwards at the corners testified to the warmth and humor underlying the girl's impetuous nature. He only wished that some of that warmth would be aimed at him, for ever since his mother's marriage to old man Olson, young Mona had showered him with disdain, finding him coarse and unpolished.
"Well, what's the offer this time?" she asked again curtly, eyeing her step-brother's baggy figure with disfavor. She had never liked Sylvester; that was no secret. Mona had always found him too unsophisticated and rude for her educated taste. and Sylvester realized it, painfully.
Sylvester played with the snap of his overalls. "First of all, you don't know anything about business, Mona...now, now," he said, raising his free hand, shaking his head, knowing a protest would follow, "I don't mean that as no insult you understand. It's just that this place is too big for you, taking care of the house and the land too. I'm just trying to do you a favor and take the house off your hands. I know you was born and raised here, but a woman can't handle a whole damned wheat farm by herself."
"Now just a minute, Sylvester," she snorted, true to her redhead nature. "Advice is one thing I don't need from you." Mona rested her hands on her hips and stared him in the eye. "I admit I'll need someone to take Jasper's place," she admitted somewhat sadly, shaking her head.
"Yeah, that was a damned shame the old boozer crawled into that combine with the engine on." Sylvester reached down to pluck another blade of grass to stick between his tobacco-stained teeth. "Drinkin'll cause accidents every time."
"Accident? That was no accident, and anybody with a bird brain could figure that out! Jasper was the best mechanic in South Dakota...he knew better than that. Why, Jasper was Dad's right-hand man."
Mona stared off into the distance without speaking. When she had come back home from school to take over her father's wheat farm left to her in the will, she had found Jasper her surrogate father, always ready to help in just a moment's notice. His death was no accident, and she knew it. The lawyer who'd settled the estate, Jack Jordan, had at first been a source of solace and confidence...up to a certain point; and then, for seemingly no reason at all, he'd clammed up, tighter than a vacuumed can. She'd put in several .calls to him, but none were answered. Jack Jordan had turned his back on her for a reason the young heiress failed to comprehend.
"Now, Mona, don't take it so hard. Everybody in De Grey knows Jasper was a drinker. Why, the townsfolk have it he's been hittin' the sauce real hard since your Dad died. It ain't no secret...."
"Jasper was no alcoholic, and it was no accident. Now I don't want to talk about it any more." Mona crossed her arms over her breasts and clenched her teeth. Everything was getting so crazy, so out of control; but she'd resolved to keep on trying, no matter what adversities life threw in her path. And Sylvester was one of those negativities, she realized-her own step-brother!
Sylvester nibbled on the blade of crab grass, studying his step-sister's stiffened posture. "Let's get sensible," he said straightening, "I know you love this land 'cuz you was born here, but it don't seem right for a young lady like you to hole herself up on a godforsaken wheat ranch. But if you love it that much why don't you keep a couple acres...say twenty maybe . . and build yourself a little house. Get married, have kids. But sell the rest. Damn, I'm just tryin' to help you out, sis," he said, smacking his beefy lips.
"Yeah, sure!" Mona snickered. "You're just mad because I'm the one who inherited this place. But it's mine, you hear? MINE!" She jabbed her index finger in the air, gesturing toward herself. "I'm not selling, Sylvester, and I wished you would quit bugging me about it. Now I've got a lot to get done around here-I've got trucks sitting out there in the fields, full of wheat to be stored, then sold. I've got insurance policies to dig up to help settle this issue with Jasper's wife, and I've got back taxes to pay. Now if you would do me the favor of letting him have a little peace and quiet...."
Sylvester stood up straight as a ramrod; he spit the grass down to the right of his dusty shoe. "A hundred eighty-five grand...that's what I'm offerin' ya. And your a damned fool if you refuse, Mona. I'll even give ya twenty acres for yerself
Mona's lower jaw was working back and forth.
"NO! How many times do I have to say it? NO, NO, NO! You seem to think you have some god-given right to this land just because your mother married my father. If you want me to go in the house and bring out a copy of the will, I'll do just that. This ranch was left to me, the sole offspring of Guy Olson. This land is worth a hell of a lot more than that paltry sum, and you know it. This is the choicest land in the county...I've got irrigation, I've got woodlands, and I've got pride in it...now, if you'll excuse me, I'd like to weed mamma's marigolds." Mona turned her back and kicked off her sandals.
"...Two hundred thousand . . . "
Mona turned her reddened cheeks towards the pudgy thirty-year old gas station owner. "Where the hell do you think you're going to come up with figures like that? That business of yours isn't worth more than ten thousand and you know it . . . "
Sylvester's narrow eyes thinned to slits. "I've got investors, people with money who're willin' to back me. I could come up with the money tomorrow...."
"Yeah, who?" Mona's green eyes flashed like traffic lights.
"They wanna stay anonymous, but they're there, Mona, they're there all right!" He thrust his hands into the baggy pockets of his overalls, and
Mona could see the dark circles of sweat under his arms.
Mona breathed hard. Sylvester had appeared at her house almost every day since she'd come back from college to take over the ranch. At first he'd tried to solace her, offering his assistance in his clumsy manner. With time he'd become more insistent, to the point of becoming a nag. Even after the house furniture had been divided up and the family heirlooms proportionately decided upon, he'd come back, finally with the excuse of wanting to help her fix up the house. Now he wanted to buy it-had wanted to for the past two months. She was becoming angry-angry for him putting a price on the land she'd grown up on; angry at the intrusion on her privacy; angry because he was deceitful, and angry because she was doing everything she could to try to keep the place going, and all he did was remind her of impending disaster, should she make one unwise decision.
In fact, however, any lawyer or accountant-maybe even Jasper himself-would have advised her to sell. But Mona was an idealistic romantic. This was her land, the land where she had been born and raised; it was a part of her. On top of her bull-headed persistence, she was a tempestuous, hard-riding country girl who loved the challenge of hard labor. Her determination was now loaded by the fact that she despised her step-brother and his desire for her failure. Though he didn't admit it, that revenge showed in his eyes.
"Okay," started Mona, fighting her temper that smoldered in her green eyes. "I've told you once and for all: I'm not selling, nor will I ever sell this land. Daddy left it to me, he entrusted it to me, and I'll do everything within my power to keep it in the family. And if you ever come back here again, I'm afraid I'll have to have a restraining order issued on you. Is that clear, Sylvester!"
She stood before him, her lushly ripened breasts heaving, her lip curling scornfully as she jerked her tawny head imperiously toward the driveway. Sylvester flushed darkly as he spit the green chlorophyll saliva onto the grass. His eyes lingered for a moment on the sensually swelling contours thrusting out her blouse. He'd bet ten dollars to a nickel the bitch wasn't wearing any bra under that blouse. He could see her tits move softly under the stretched material as she breathed-and the nipples were clearly outlined at the tip of each tautly up-thrust mound! His fingers whitened momentarily on the denim suspenders as he hooked his thumbs around them; then he said:
"This is your last chance, Mona. Do you or do you not want to sell?"
She shook her head. There was no explanation to be made.
Sylvester's eyes too were glittering angrily now. "Let me tell you one thing, sister, one last thing." He smacked his lips. "One day you will be sorry."
Raking her voluptuous body once more with his insolent eyes, he swung on his heel and headed for his jeep parked under the elm tree in the drive. A moment later the motor of the jeep revved into life and then ground away down the gravel path that led toward De Grey.
His prophecy rang in her ears with the rapacity of a top-ten tune, but she blocked it out, obdurately.
CHAPTER TWO
Mona Olson couldn't sleep.
For the past week after Sylvester's last visit her head had been ringing with unanswerable questions. Why would Sylvester insist on buying a ranch that was still owing last year's taxes, not to mention bank notes? Sylvester had never been a farmer; why the sudden interest in a new occupation? Everybody knew the United States had a surfeit of wheat as it was. My God, the Russians were buying it all up, anyway. The cost of farming was on the rise everyday, and the Republicans had done nothing about it, despite their promises. The middle-man, as always, not the farmers, was making the money. So why did Sylvester want to buy the land? And the house-that posed another bewilderment. Why the interest in the house, too? Maybe that's what he was after. On the real estate market, it was worth little, painfully little. Anyway, he owned a house in De Grey. Who would want to rent it? The plumbing was in anxious need of repairs, and so was the electrical system. Just last year Mr. Olson had been forced to call the fire department to put out a small blaze in the main fuse box in the basement. And who were these investors he bragged of?
She couldn't think about it any more. There was too much paper work to be done, not to mention budgeting. But however difficult it might be, no matter how many nights she must stay up burning the midnight oil, she must make it work. Her Norwegian stubbornness was up, and her stepbrother's insistence only served to strengthen her resolve.
And strange, unaccountable things had been happening on the farm, too. Production was not going as it should. One of the combiners (she suspected the man who'd called for Jasper) had been trying to instigate a strike amongst the workers, saying that she was not paying minimum wage, which, according to the law, was illegal. It had taken a week of meetings to get the men to agree to accept a set rate of interest in this year's crops to keep them on the job and the wheat from rotting on the stalk.
Out in the fields one of the combiners had fallen from the machine and broken his leg. Now his lawyer was threatening to sue Mona for failure to have her equipment up to standards. And Ben had been one of her most trusted laborers.
Strangest of all, Mona had wakened in the middle of the night to hear the high pitched wail of a chicken. In the morning she'd found the rooster nailed to the clothesline post-minus his head! Whoever would do such a perverted thing?
Someone was trying to get her out. Who?
And the tongues were wagging in De Grey. People whom she'd known since she was born were suddenly turning their backs to her and sticking up their noses when she went to town. The Farmer's Cooperative, of which her father had been President for eleven years running-an elected official-had suddenly refused her credit.
Mona had lifted her determined chin and shrugged it off. It would take more than their nonsense to cut her off from the land she loved.
So Mona had reason to not sleep. She had gone to bed early after an exhausting day of negotiating with the laborers who were becoming more and more demanding each day. The truckers were now talking of getting their share of the pie, too. Tomorrow she'd resolved to go to Pierre and find another lawyer to handle the sticky business. She hadn't time. The wheat was sitting in the trucks waiting to be hauled to the storage bins, and in the farming business, time is money.
It was with a sigh of frustration that Mona got out of bed at two o'clock in the morning and headed for the kitchen cabinet where the sherry was stored. The doctor had suggested tranquilizers, to ease her insomnia during these most harrowing of days, but she'd found her own cure in the bottle.
Just as her red-nailed fingers touched the light switch to the kitchen, she noticed a light out in the shed next to the barn where the unused machinery was housed. Frowning, she groped for the flashlight. With the price of electricity these days she could hardly afford to burn bulbs all night, and the fire in the fuse box had scared her too much to shrug it off.
Mona tutted with annoyance. She had to keep a clear head and be more careful, not to mention frugal. Flicking on the flashlight, she groped her way out the door, down the creaking back porch steps, holding up her long nightgown to keep it from dragging in the powdery dust that tickled her ankles.
The flashlight beam centered on the eerie shadows of the shed, casting deep caverns of moving shadows before her eyes. She rubbed her eyes. Were they playing tricks on her? Well, she hadn't been getting enough sleep, that she knew. Had she seen the shadow of a man? She stopped and listened. A cat mewed somewhere in the darkness of the shed, probably hunting for a mouse. Times were hard; she smiled to herself. At least the animals weren't demanding! Outside, next to the shed, leaves tapped lightly on the window panes.
Mona was neither nervous nor suspicious now, but she shivered again and held her long nylon nightgown more closely about her body as she tip-toed into the shed and flicked out the light.
She turned, heading back toward the house, her pace quickening now. In the darkness, somewhere in back of her she heard the unmistakable noise of shuffling feet...as if...as if...someone were following her!
Before the horrifying thought had time to crystallize in her mind, a human hand closed in a vise-like grip around her bare forearm.
Mona screamed.
Another hand clamped itself cruelly over the curve of her bare shoulder as she made an instinctive dash to get away, holding her powerless between the two sets of steely fingers. She screamed again, a high, wild cry of terror sawing into the dark as she struggled frantically to wrestle free of the unknown intruder's brutal grasp. A coarse voice chuckled just behind her ear and the hot breath jetted revoltingly over her neck and cheek, a smell of chewing gum and tobacco.
Heavy boots scuffed the dusty floor, as she kicked out wildly with her bare legs, and the voice chuckled again and then said coarsely: "Jeez! This looks like a hot one, Sam! I can see I'm gonna need some help."
Footsteps pounded on the earthen floor. The next moment, hard hands were at her knees...and then a pair of arms locked around her legs and she was swept off her feet, a helpless, writhing prisoner held between the two intruders like a trapped animal.
For the third time, Mona Olson screamed. The man behind her laughed aloud. "Yer barkin' at the moon, honey," he panted. "There ain't nobody gonna come help ya."
The captive redhead twisted her head and sank her teeth into the thumb of the hand grasping her shoulder.
"Fuck!" the man shouted, snatching his fingers away so that the girl sagged almost to the floor, supported only by the hand around her forearm and the second man's grip around her knees. "The fucking bitch bit me!" The night exploded into a sudden clangor of pain as the injured hand slashed violently against the side of Mona's face.
"You try that once more, you little bitch, and I'll fuck you in the ass!"
The second man laughed. His voice was deeper and in some was stronger than the first. "You said you was ready for a fightin' piece of ass," he chuckled. "C'mon, Dan, let's get outta this fucking shed."
Dan shifted his grip, shoving his hands under the struggling girl's arms so that her head and shoulders were crammed against his hard chest and his cruel fingers dug into the tender mounds of her breasts through the thin nylon of the nightdress. "Okay, Sam, you'll get your chance to touch some flesh. Her tits are enough to make your goddamn mouth water!"
Between them, they bundled the terrified girl through the sliding doors of the oil-smelling shed and dragged her to the patch of grass between the barn and machine shed.
"Let me go!" Mona sobbed. "Put me down, you bastards. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?"
Her mind was a chaos of fear and shock and horror. What were her brutal captors doing here? Were they burglars or arsonists? Passing bums who had broken into the shed and were looking for a place to sleep? Sex maniacs? Indians from the nearby reservation out on the prowl? What were they going to do with her...and were there any more of them around? Even if there weren't, she could never escape these two.
The penultimate question was to be answered only too soon. Once under the tree, Dan let go of Mona's legs and Sam flung her violently face downwards on the ground. She breathed in the moist freshness of the dew that created goose bumps on her naked flesh. An instant later, a ham-like hand caught her two wrists and twisted them sadistically up into the small of her back; another descended heavily onto the nape of her neck, screwing her face sideways and forcing her head down hard into the cold wet ground. She was pinned there as helplessly as an insect on a board, the hard ground grinding cruelly into her pelvic bone through the creases of her hips, her legs flailing wildly in the air behind.
"Let me go, you bastards!" she wailed again. "I don't have anything for you to steal. All I've got is a handful of depts...s-so let...let me go!"
Sam's grating laugh knifed through the dark.
Thanks, honey, but you ain't seen the end of yer bad luck yet," he chuckled.
As the frantically squirming redhead rolled her body vainly from side to side on the ground under the remorseless pressure of Sam's hands on her neck and wrists, her anguished mind took in the meaning of her captors words...and a cold chill ran the length of her spine. Surely they couldn't be going to . . . ? Surely men even as brutal as these appeared to be wouldn't sink to such bestial depths of depravity as to . . . ? She had read often enough of women and girls being assaulted and violated by intruders but surely it couldn't be happening to her? Oh, God, it couldn't!
The second man's deep laugh sounded from somewhere behind her flailing legs. And a half second after rds she knew with a tingle of horror that her won ears were about to be realized.
Calloused fingers dug into the backs of her thighs, forcing her legs down; powerful knees covered in harsh denim slotted into the hollows behind her own knees, splaying her legs apart. And then the hands that hauled the hem of her nightgown roughly up over her naked young hips and the cold air of the night was playing over her shamefully exposed cunt.
"Aaaaggghhh!" Mona screeched like a frightened owl. "No! No!...No!...Not that!...Please don't do it to me!...Nooo . , . . ! "
She began to thresh even more frantically on the ground, trying to free her legs from the imprisoning pressure behind the knees, trying to break the iron grip on her wrists and escape the hold on her neck that was thrusting her cheek down and squashing her painfully straining breasts against the cold ground.
Her struggles were cut short by Sam's hand slashing brutally across the tender flesh of her buttocks; once, twice, three times, four...in savage, stinging blows that reduced her sobbed entreaties to gasps and whimpers of pain. "Shuddup!" he snarled. "I'll fuck you in the ass if you don't shuddup!"
Mona's heart quailed at his words. Abruptly she froze.
She lay mewling softly between them, her mind reeling. There was nothing she could do now. She had fought as hard as she could, but they were too strong for her. She was completely at the mercy of the two anonymous men in the dark, pinioned helplessly between them as defenseless as a rag-doll, a toy that they would use to satisfy their brutal animal lust.
There was the unmistakable metallic rip of a zipper being opened and then Dan's voice.
"That's better," he growled. "Just relax and go with it, honey. For Jeez' sake I'm being as gentle as I can."
Above the terrified girl's head, Sam was breathing heavily. "Attaboy, Dan!" he gloated. "Lay it to her, man! Fuck it to her! Fuck the livin' shit outta her!"
Mona groaned as she felt his calloused hands seize the softly rounded globes of her trembling buttocks, hauling the quaking moons apart...and then suddenly she gasped and jerked convulsively as he let go with one hand, spat on the fingers, and crammed the saliva-wet digits straight into the hair-covered vaginal furrow up between her fearfully quivering thighs.
The next moment she felt a hard, hot, rubbery pressure nosing against the tender folds of flesh at the quaking entrance to her naked cunt.
Dan had taken his long hard cock in one hand and rammed the throbbing head straight at the saliva-drenched orifice of her pussy! Writhing her hips vainly in a futile attempt to escape the lewd assault on her exposed genitals, she began to sob-a storm of rasping sobs that racked her painfully stretched body and sent the hot salt tears spurting from her eyes.
Prying apart the naked ass-cheeks below him with the fore-finger and thumb of one hand, Dan stirred the iron-hard shaft of his pulsating cock into the warm moist folds of cuntal flesh flowering amidst the silken curls of pussy hair mantling the girl's obscenely splayed loins. She felt the muscles and. tendons of his legs tense against the backs of her knees. His denim-clad hips leaned hard against her naked buttocks...and then she gave a strangled moan as the bulging head of his cock crushed through the fleshy, hair-covered lips of her cunt and slid half-an-inch into the wetly heated tunnel of her cunt.
He stirred the rigidly pulsing end of his huge cock into her a few more times, dilating and moistening the tightly contracted hole, stretching the walls of her tight little cunt in preparation for the brutal impalement to come.
Mona moaned again-and then, as he flexed his hips once more and thrust violently forward up into her belly with his raping pole of male hardness, she opened her mouth and gave a shrill squeal.
Dan chuckled lasciviously. Releasing his cock, he grabbed her buttocks with both hands and hauled them apart as he thrust the rock hard length of his heatedly throbbing cock far up into the redhead's cunt. His hips smacked heavily against her nakedly squirming ass cheeks and his sperm bloated balls swung against the damp ground as he plunged his shaft of hardened flesh in right up to the hilt with a grunt of animal satisfaction. Mona squealed with pain as the hotly pulsating cock head bludgeoned against her cervix; Dan's long thick cock was enormous, her belly felt as if it was on fire and she was sure the lips of her painfully stretched cunt must be splitting from the girth of the plank-stiff instrument wedged into her loins.
"How's it goin'? " Sam breathed from the darkness above her contorted, tear-wet face.
"Okay," he gasped. "Man, but it's tight in there! You wouldn't believe how tight she is...but she ain't no virgin. You was right 'bout that. Ahh, Jeez. I gotta take a look at that tight little cunt!"
There was the sound of clothes being fumbled aside, a soft click, and the pencil beam of a small flashlight stabbed the blackness of the room.
"Hey, turn that off!" Sam warned. "You know we ain't supposed to be seen."
"Aw, hell, she can't tell who we are through these ski masks," Dan protested. "Besides, I just wanna aim it at that pretty little pussy of hers."
He caught his breath with a gasp. "Jeez!" he said softly. "Jeez, would you take a look at that."
Keeping his grip on her wrists and neck, Sam leaned heavily across the girl's helplessly prone body. As his weight pressed her even more forcefully down into the ground, Mona almost screamed from the pressure of his body flattening her breasts below her. "Let's have a look, then," he whispered. And then, in his turn, "Holy shit!"
He was staring over the twin moons of the girl's naked buttocks at the circle of light cast by the light. In the pool of illumination, every hair in the obscenely exposed cleft between her ass-cheeks stood out sharp and clear. Below the tiny puckering ring of her anus, the thick white stump of Dan's wetly glistening cock protruded from the gleaming pink flanges of her pussy. "Move it around a little, Dan," Sam said hoarsely. "Let's see you move it!"
He watched, fascinated, as his partner began slowly undulating his hips, thrusting and withdrawing his plundering cock so that the ravished girl's brutally stretched cuntal lips were pulled out lasciviously clasping the hard, thick veined shaft of his cock into her cuntal cavity again each time he fucked the full length of his maledom home in her quaking belly. "Ain't it pretty?" he muttered over and over again.
And then suddenly the lights clicked off. With a lecherous gasp, Dan grasped the half-naked girl's trembling hips and began fucking it into her with long, hard strokes. "Jeez, Sam," he panted, "I just can't...I just gotta . . . "
Face downwards on the ground, Mona was still adrift on a sea of shame and horror. The searing pain of Dan's entry had subsided, to be replaced by a dull ache in the belly that was almost-although she dared not admit it to herself-that was almost pleasurable by comparison in its hypnotic regularity as he fucked in and out in gradually accelerating tempos. The skewering cock fucking into the obscenely milking depths of her cunt was drubbing the tender bud of her clitoris against the wet ground as it slid lewdly up and down the thin wall of flesh separating her cuntal passage from the grass...and already tiny flames of erotic sensation were licking unwantedly through her loins and trembling the nerves of her belly.
The speed of Dan's lunges now suddenly increased...the rhythmic smack of his hips against her nakedly up-thrust buttocks grew more frantic...hesitated...became sporadic...accelerated again-and then abruptly, far up in the hotly throbbing depths of her cunt, she felt his cock bulge and heave. The next moment he gave a choked cry and his raping pole of flesh spewed its white-hot load against the neck of her womb, squirt after squirt of creamy, scalding cum in gradually diminishing spurts.
Mona opened her mouth and cried in horror. The cruel hands were suddenly removed from her neck and wrists, and she heard Sam frenziedly panting: "Let me in there, man! Jesus, it's my turn now!"
But before she could make any attempt to raise herself from the ground a heavy weight flattened her down once more against the ground. Dan had leaped astride her back, pinning her tingling arms to her sides with his knees and leaning forward to rest his sperm-wet hands on the naked cheeks of her ass.
She heard the harsh rip of Sam's pants opening. His flashlight clicked on again-but although she twisted her head around as far as she could, she could see nothing but the silhouette of the man straddling her back and a confusion of dim shadows cast about their ski-mask covered faces.
She kicked out experimentally with her now free legs-but at once her ankles were grasped in a steely grip and the legs were forced relentlessly down to the ground again. "Okay," Sam's voice said from his crouching position on the wet earth. Open 'em up, Dan, and let's see what she's got down there."
The man whose weight was pinning her to the ground grasped her buttocks and slowly, torturingly, drew them apart. Sam whistled softly. "Christ!" he murmured.
In the light, the violated redhead's plundered little cunt gaped wetly open in its nest of damp hair, the glistening pink folds of flesh gleaming stickily with her cuntal secretions and droplets of Dan's cum. There was a trail of sperm shining on the inside of her left thigh and between her quivering ass-cheeks the pouting, wrinkled hole of her anus distended and contracted in time with the ravished girl's labored breath.
As the two men chuckled salaciously together, Mona felt more open and exposed than she ever had in her life. Held brutally down, bent double in a position of abject humiliation while they gloatingly examined each hair and crevice of her shamefully revealed secret parts, she was stripped of every vestige of self respect, robbed of every last shred of decency and pride. More quietly this time, she began to cry again, the bitter tears welling up from her eyes and splashing on to the dew of the ground.
Sam rose slowly to his feet, splaying her thighs apart with his knees as he grasped the hair and cum-covered lips of her fleshy little cunt in fingers and thumbs and drew them slowly apart. The next moment, Mona was squealing with terror as he lunged forward savagely with his hips and slid the great length of his massively throbbing cock into the heated sheath of her hungrily clasping cunt.
There was no finesse about Sam, no slow-burn build-up to climax, no overture subtly orchestrated through to the forte crescendo of the last movement. When he fucked, he fucked...like a bull!
As soon as he felt the scalding elastic grasp of Mona's moistly throbbing cunt close around the hard, veined shaft of his cock, he began slamming it into her with long powerful strokes, panting in a fury of lustful abandon as he jerked his muscular hips convulsively against her naked buttocks.
Crushed as she was beneath the weight of his brutal companion, the violated redhead nevertheless felt to her horror the automatic response of her sensually awakening body to the repeated plundering of her loins. As Sam's lustfully expanding instrument jackhammered in and out of her hotly tingling cuntal passage, the friction of that iron-hard pole of male flesh sawing against the sensitive rubbery shaft of her clitoris, teasing it down through her hair-lined cuntal lips against the dew moistened earth, triggered off spasms of unwanted erotic delight that flamed through her nervous system and sent her mind reeling.
And in some strange way, some bizarre masochistic fashion, the very fact that she was being raped-that she was held in this humiliating position being fucked half to death by one stranger while another, who had already raped her himself, gleefully watched-seemed to heighten the intensity of the unbidden thrills trembling out from her ravished loins. Mona Olson, the fiery, tempestuous redhead who had never yet found the man strong enough to tame her, was getting turned on by the crude assault of two hoodlum rapists she had never seen!
As Sam's powerful hips splatted against her splayed-open buttocks with demonic fury and the obscene suck and squelch of his massively thickened cock tunneling up into her pussy drowned the panting breath of the two men, she began mewling and groaning in ecstatic time with his pistoning thrusts.
"Oooohhh...Ahhh...Ohhhhhh...Yessssss!
"Ooooooooooooooooo...Aaaaggghhh!" she chanted-on and on as the drubbing staff plowed faster and faster into her wetly throbbing pussy.
Her orgasm took her by surprise. It was the sheer monotony of the pile-driving lunges searing machine-like up into the heated depths of her belly that started it off. She felt a delirious sensation building deep in the center of her. She fought with every shred of concentration to suppress it. But the hypnotic rhythm of the muscled cock fucking in and out of her love-starved cunt was too much for her. The fleshy orbs of her buttocks trembled convulsively under Dan's hands; spasmodic shudders quivered the muscles of her belly and thighs; her hips threshed frenziedly from side to side on the grass. And then, like a tidal wave roaring outwards in all directions from her punished loins, it was on her . . .
Even then she tried desperately to hide it. She couldn't let these two brutal and despicable bums witness the betrayal of her body! She couldn't! Biting her lips until the blood came, she strove to conceal the cries of anguished ecstasy bursting from her contorting mouth. But it was no use. Her head and shoulders reared galvanically up behind Dan's imprisoning ass and her lips flew open.
And as the big man remorselessly fucked into her hotly trembling cunt, he sensed his complete conquest and subjugation of the lustfully writhing girl, his own climax seethed outwards from his balls and exploded devastatingly within him. Throwing back his head with a strangled cry of triumph, he seized her nakedly flaring hips and slammed his pelvis savagely against her ass-cheeks as his burgeoning cock began a wild staccato jerking that spewed gust after gust of heated sperm far up into the walls of her lewdly sucking pussy.
For awhile there was no sound in the darkness but the labored panting of three pairs of lungs. Dan clambered slowly off Mona's back and zipped up the fly of his pants. Sam withdrew his now deflating cock from the wet hairy lips of the ravished girl's cunt and slowly straightened up. "Jeez' Christ!" he mumbled thickly. "Holy shit!" Mona lay motionless on the ground, the summer winds whipping at her flimsy nylon nightgown, tickling her naked loins. Her mind was a maelstrom of shame and revulsion and self-disgust and...yes! of carnal delight!
She was brought back to reality when rough hands seized her wrists and rougher hands dragged her to a tree where they strapped her hands tightly together around the trunk, with the rough tree bark scraping her tender skin. They left her there with her legs spread to either side of the tree and her arms hugging it.
Mona screamed, but it did no good.
CHAPTER THREE
"I'd like to report a...a rape, stammered Mona Olson, clutching the telephone receiver in her white-knuckled hand.
"Name...location of crime," came the un-harried officer's voice on the other end.
"Mona Olson." She swallowed hard. "...At my farm." The tired and depressed girl hesitated before asking the gruff sounding man on the other end of the line how soon it would be until they could send out the sheriff to investigate.
"Ma'am, it's not our normal policy to investigate rape, if indeed it really is a case of rape. But if you insist, I'll give Sheriff Dunwall the message, but I can't make any promises."
Mona set the receiver back down on the cradle and fell into the nearest chair. Her head was buzzing with vertiginous pain and her wrists were red and raw from the belt that had sawed into her wrists for six hellish hours before one of the truckers found his employer belted to a tree. Any attempts at sleep were useless and she'd sat up all morning drinking coffee, trying to clear her head. And now the sheriffs office wasn't even certain they considered the rape of her body a significant enough crime to investigate! . . .
She was sitting in the same chair when De Grey's sheriff knocked on the screen door of the kitchen. Sheriff Dunwall looked about the house appraisingly as he passed through the kitchen, then helped himself to a cup of coffee and sat down on the sofa adjacent to the depressed girl. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that tilted forward over his eyes and he sat with his ankles crossed resting on the coffee table. The top button to his shirt was open, exposing a hairy chest. He slurped at his coffee twice, then asked for sugar. Compliantly, the young redhead dragged herself from the padded rocking chair and went to the kitchen to bring him back two lumps. Grinning, he took them from her delicate hand and, dunking them in the steaming black liquid, lifted the dripping cube to his mouth and sucked the sweet coffee from it. He did it three times with each cube until each had dissolved in his mouth.
Then he lifted his eyes and said: "Okay, what's this I hear 'bout you bein' attacked?"
"That's what happened, sir," she began, remembering how ten years ago her father had opposed the re-election of Sheriff Dunwall, claiming he had been accepting bribery money from the police captain who'd been selling alcohol illegally to the unfortunates on the Crow Indian Reservation nearby. That thought stirred an instant disgust in the voluptuous redhead's emotionally distraught mind, like too much salt in the potatoes.
"Tell me 'bout what happened. The facts...I gotta know the facts, lady." He took out a half-chewed cigar from his breast pocket and plugged it into his beefy lips.
"Well, they had turned on the light out in the machine shed. I had been in bed and I got up to get a drink of sherry and-"
Sheriff Dunwall sat up straight. "Sherry, huh?" he snickered. "So you'd been drinkin'! "
Mona shook her head. "No, I couldn't sleep and so I got up to pour myself a drink of sherry and it's then I saw the light on out in the machine shed."
"But how do you know you hadn't left it on?" he asked, taking out his ballpoint pen from the plastic clip case in his other breast pocket.
Mona uncrossed her legs and crossed her hands in her lap-a look of pure innocence, demure and prim. "Well...I always make the rounds before I call it a day. You know Daddy had a small fire once because of the fuse box and since then I've been very careful not to . . . "
"But still you have no proof that you didn't leave that light on." Sheriff Dunwall gestured broadly with his pudgy right hand that held the pen which, so far, had written down nothing. "So you might have left the light on."
"Sheriff . . . " interrupted Mona. "I don't see the significance of who left the light on in the machine shed. The fact is I was lured to the spot then attacked and raped by two men."
"Lured, you say." He smacked his lips and chewed on the ragged butt of the cigar. "Did anyone drag you out to the machine shed, or did you go on your own volition?"
Mona stiffened. "Of course I went on my own volition. I have a lot of property out here to protect, Sheriff, and I'm doing my damnedest!"
He snickered. "Now wait a minute, honey. Have they damaged any property in any way?...cut any fences?...cut off your electricity?" He shook his head as if to answer his own question, then he grinned.
"So they've committed no felony."
Mona compressed her lips. "What about the assault and rape?" she demanded.
"Well, now you claim that you were assaulted and raped, but you know, honey, we get calls every day from women who claim to have been raped. Most of 'em were willin' at the start and then feel guilty later. That ain't rape, that's chickenin' out."
"Do you mean?" started Mona stormily, "that you think I willingly made love to two men who came onto my land illegally and terrorized me?"
The sheriff held up his hand to halt her accusations. "I'm just tryin' to get this story straight. Now can you give me a description? You said somethin' about them using a flashlight to get a look at you." He posed his pen, ready to write.
Mona shook her head. "They were wearing ski masks. I didn't see any of their faces . . . "
"What about size? Were they dark? Light? Anything that would help you recognize them? Were they Indians? We been having one hell of a time with those bastards lately."
"No, they were not Indians, and I'd appreciate it if you would stop racial slurs, Sheriff." She looked away to control her anger, then continued, softly this time. "All I can say is that they were...ah, big men. Very powerful men. Their voices were kind of...well, coarse. One laughed a lot and the other one seemed more in control of himself." She sat back in the chair and looked at the sheriff expectantly.
He pushed his hat to the back of his head and passed his hand over his forehead. "That's not much help, Miss. Christ, where the hell do you think we're goin' to come up with suspects under that description? I ain't Jack Webb, you know. Sounds of voices ain't enough. We gotta have a physical description. Could you identify them if they walked by you right now?"
Mona had to shake her head.
Sheriff Dunwall sat up and drew in a deep hissing breath. "Don't look good, Miss. Don't look good at all. So far we got no descriptions, and we got no evidence."
"But I have evidence," whined Mona, sitting forward in her chair, her eyes narrowing. "I've got bruises all over my body."
The sheriff studied the girl's flawless face and shook his head. "Don't see none."
Mona blushed. She was damned if she was going to show this small-town Hitler the purplish bruises mottling the soft flesh of her buttocks, the inflamed and swollen lips of her ravished cunt. "Look, here are the marks of the belts they used to tie me up," she said uncertainly, pushing up the loose sleeves of her shirt. "And the bruises on my arm and shoulder where they carried me from the machine shed to the tree."
"Oh, come on, Miss Olson," he said after a cursory glance. "That ain't evidence-not the way I mean! You could have got them bumpin' into anything, with fair skin like yours. You been doin' a lot of physical work around here, ain't ya?"
She nodded.
"See?" he leered, tucking his ball point pen back into his plastic clip case and sitting back on the sofa. "Only one thing we could go on, Mona." He smacked his lips and feigned a look of embarrassment.
"What's that?" she asked hopefully.
"A search . . . " He allowed himself a wintry smile.
"Go ahead, sheriff. There are plenty of scuff marks in the machine shed. The dust leaves plenty of footprints and
The sheriff held up his hand. "That ain't the kind of search I was thinking about, Miss. I'm talking about something a bit more personal than dust and footprints; I'm talking about a personal search...your body. That's the only way I can tell if you been raped."
Mona was suddenly silent.
"It's the only way," he said, chewing on his cigar.
"Well, I certainly have no intention of allowing myself to be pawed over by you or anybody else. I've suffered humiliation enough to last me a life time," the girl snapped.
"It's the law. Of course, we could drop the investigation."
"No you won't!" rebuked the redhead. "Nobody's gonna come onto my property and treat me like a piece of meat and get away with it!" She pursed her lips.
"Then let's get on with it," sighed the sheriff, pretending humiliation.
Mona bit her lip. This was sheer madness. Breathing hard, she turned to look out of the window at the sunlight slanting through the trees and playing over the wheat fields beyond, and suddenly she knew she must submit. "Very well," she said distantly. "You can search me for evidence. Let's get it over with."
Grunting with satisfaction, the policeman walked over to Mona, gestured for her to stand up. He motioned for her to unbutton her shirt, which she did, staring out the window. As she stared woodenly at the wall above his head, he ran his fingers perfunctorily over her flesh, pulling her shirt far away from her body. She was wearing no bra, having dressed hurriedly. Sheriff Dunwall smirked when he saw that. She sucked in her breath with a hiss, but the touch was brief and impersonal.
"I said the bruises were on my wrists and thighs, sheriff. Don't you want to look between my legs?" she asked sarcastically.
"Sure do," Dunwall replied calmly. "But first you better take off your shorts and panties."
"What!"
"How the hell can I see your bruises if you got clothes on?"
"This is getting more ridiculous every minute," protested Mona. "I've had just about enough of this damned town!"
"Look, lady," cut in the sheriff with his first show of anger and irritation. "...I'm doin' you a favor by tryin' to make a case out of nothing. For all I know, you might'a let one of them Indians come in here...you said you was drinkin', didn't 'ya?...and let 'im get a little fresh. That's been known to happen before with single women livin' alone in the country, you know. You ain't the first woman to farm."
Striving to hold back the tears of rage and humiliation, Mona turned her back on him and stripped off her shorts and panties without removing the tennis shoes she wore. Dunwall placed a hand on her arm and spun her around to face him.
"Okay," Dunwall said. "Now bend down and let me see the area around your hips." Mona said nothing.
Scarlet with mortification, the speechless redhead spread her legs and leaned forward, so that, for the second time in two days, her genitals had been shamefully exposed to a stranger.
Dunwall left her in that undignified position while he produced a small cardboard box from his pocket, placed it on the table, extracted a tube from a small black box and then smearing vaseline over the tube he approached her with the greased tube held upright. He probed among the silky hairs covering the cleft between her lushly rounded buttocks until he found the entrance to her vagina, and then shoved the tube in.
"This is so we can do a sperm count on you, Miss," he said conversationally as he rummaged around in the ridged and trembling passage. "To tell if the man actually penetrated." He removed the tube with a slight squelch and put it back in the box. "Now stay in that position for a second longer, Miss. We gotta take some quick photos here."
Mona rocked on her heels. She bit her lips and caught her breath to stop from crying aloud as the shudder of the camera closed and clicked, imprinting an image of the undignified stance that would stay in Mona Olson's file for all of posterity to see. She was almost fainting from the abject humiliation and shame of this degrading examination. She had never felt so humiliated in her whole life, not even under the brutal manipulations of Sam and Dan.
"Good, now turn around please," he ordered. Motioning with his hand, he directed her to lean back, both hands on the arm of the chair so that she was standing with her knees slightly apart and bent, lewdly exposing her genitals from a front view. "This is so I can get a good shot of those bruises around 'yer vagina, Miss." He raised the lens to his eye and aimed it at the nakedly exposed area of her genitals, trying to capture on film the swollen flanges of her cuntal lips, the bruises of her inner thighs where the men had taken their turns with her. The shutter clicked again. Mona stared at the wall behind Sheriff Dunwall; she was white with rage.
"Okay, Miss Olson," he said with a smirk. "Now we've got some evidence." He picked up the kit and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
"What was that tube for?" she blurted, her back to the sheriff as she hastily pulled on her panties and shorts.
"For a sperm count. . . . "
"But...but, surely you don't think that I would have taken no precautions after two men raped me!" she snapped. "I doubt you'll find any sperm, sheriff. I cleaned myself thoroughly after those bastards were through with me!"
"Shouldn't have done that, Miss. Could screw up your case," he said with a smirk. "But I'll see what I can do. As I say," he droned, writing her name on a slip of self-adhesive paper and stroking it over the tube box, "we ain't got much to go on. Probably was a couple of Indians from the reservation, that's all."
"That's all?V Mona screamed, turning on her heel and stalking past him, fastening the last button of her blouse as she stomped toward the door and holding it open ajar.
"I'll let you know if I come up with anything," offered the sheriff, tipping his hat toward her and clomping out the door. He was opening the door of the Chevy II black and white car when he said, "And Miss, I suggest you don't take up with no more Indians. They been causin' a lot of trouble with their uprisin's lately and we don't take kindly to that. I know you're sweet to their cause, but I suggest you take care."
He slammed his car door shut, accelerated, and spun gravel as he left a dusty cloud of powder spiraling down the driveway after him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mona's green eyes were still glittering with anger as she trod down the cement steps of De Grey National Trust Bank to the sunny main street of De Grey. Sheriff Dunwall's slashing accusation still stung her mind with white rage although she'd expected little from the small town police department. She'd made her complaint as a matter of form, for the record. She hadn't really expected them to find her violators; they could have been passing migrant workers from the West coast. But she hadn't bargained either for quite such obstructive tactics on the part of the sheriff. Not only had Dunwall openly doubted her story, implying that she'd all but lured her violators to her doorstep to satisfy her prurient needs, but he'd humiliated her with the photographs and examination. She doubted if he'd even filed a police report. The only report he made, she guessed, was at the local bar where he was known to frequent all too often.
She walked along the rows of parked vehicles, many loaded with farm supplies during this busiest of seasons-the harvest-ignoring the nudged elbows and whispers among the overalled farmers. No doubt Dunwall had entertained them all with his cheap gossip. The tongues were wagging already with tales of the Olson girl who let Indians come on her property and make love to her and called it rape. They already thought her too headstrong for wanting to take over her father's business when her able step-brother could have accomplished it more efficiently. But Mona didn't give a damn! She'd show them they were wrong.
She slipped the receipt for the bank note into her wallet and unlocked her car door and headed back to the wheat farm, taking the Johnson turn-off that led to the dirt road, running parallel to the wind break. She wanted to check up on the status of the production. The truckers, ever since the uprising issue of dividends, had been showing up late for work and taking extra long lunch breaks which, in the end, could cost her at least two full days of labor time. That meant money out of her pocket, something she couldn't afford.
When Mona left the fields forty-five minutes later, a four-wheel drive jeep that had been waiting at the side of the road directly across from the turn-off pulled out behind her and kept stationed right behind her all the way to her drive. On the highway, she'd accelerated. The jeep gained speed too. When she slowed, so did he. It was obvious she was being followed.
The driver-he was alone, she saw with a sigh of relief after a glance in her rear-view mirror-followed her all the way to the gravel driveway leading to her property. As she made the abrupt turn, he braked to a halt, nearly slamming into the back of her car. She shook her fist at him, and stared him eyeball to eyeball before she disappeared in a cloud of dust down her drive. Later, when she walked to the mailbox with her German shepherd, Willie, at her side, she heard a low growl emanate from his throat and his shackles stand on end. He'd sniffed out a man in the bushes.
The next day a similar incident happened. A mud-covered truck with Florida license plates was waiting for her when she turned out of her driveway to head for the wheat fields. This man was younger than the first intruder, but his routine was the same. Evidently she was being placed under continual surveillance by somebody who didn't care if she knew it or not! Who and why?
The answer to the first question was obviously Dunwall. He'd already accused her of being an Indian sympathizer. But why? It was untrue. During the latest South Dakota uprising she'd been at school. Sure, she'd participated in a few American Indian Movement meetings, but had never had the time to devote herself to the cause. It had been her political affair...everyone in college had one. Being followed, on the other hand, was serious...deadly serious, and Mona's anger at being spied upon began to be tinged with alarm.
And then, early the following morning, just as she was tying her boots to head for the wheat fields to see how production was going, she heard a rustle of tires on gravel and came to the kitchen window to see two squad cars pull up next to the front porch. Sheriff Dunwall climbed out of the first car and strutted to the steps followed by two policemen from the other car.
"Mona Olson," the sheriff said stiffly when she opened the door. "I'm afraid I have to ask you to allow my men to search your house."
"W-what?" Mona was stupefied. "What for? The rape didn't take place in here, I already told you it happened out in the machine shed...."
"We aren't looking for evidence of rape, Miss. We're lookin' for something more serious. Looks as if you're in a shit load of trouble, honey." He brushed past her. "Word has it you've been smugglin' ammunition into the reservation, aidin' the Indians in their revolts
"Reservation?"
"Yeah...ever since Wounded Knee we been havin' problems with the Indians on the Crow Reservation...first it was stealin' liquor and hi-jackin' cars. Now it's gotten more serious, Miss, and we think you've got something to do with it. Now if you'll be kind enough to let my men
"I will do nothing of the sort!" blurted the redheaded wheat farmer. "I'm not lettin' anybody in my house. I've had about enough of stupid small town politics."
Dunwall turned on his heel and waved a piece of paper in her face. "Might take a look at this, Miss. It's a warrant, a search warrant, and it says I can do damn well anything I please in this house. I'll tear up the floor boards if I have to to find that ammunition you been stashing here and waiting for pickups. Raped?" He snorted. "We know better'n that now. Truth was you couldn't get the price you wanted for ammo so you threatened to cut off their supply. Ain't that right, Miss? Don't you think we know how you been makin' the money to keep this joint goin'? Christ, yer credit's been cut off at the co-op, but yer still pay in' on bank notes...don't make sense, don't make no sense at all. But we got the goods on you now."
"I get raped and you accuse me of selling ammo to the Indians; is that right?" Mona couldn't help but stifle a laugh, so absurd was the charge.
"A federal offence, Miss. 'Nough to put you behind bars for the next forty years."
Mona paled. Snatching the document, she stalked into the living room seething with rage. Defiantly, she poured herself a glass of sherry from the magnum sitting half-empty on the end table, and sat furiously pulling on a cigarette while Dunwall and his men walked into the room and stood staring down at her.
"You searched the house already?" she sneered up at them. "I hope you found it worth your while."
"We didn't find anything, Miss Olson," said the sheriff without expression.
"Of course you didn't find anything," the angry redhead said without looking at him. "This is plumped up charge if I've ever heard of one. James Bond or Jack Webb couldn't have done any better. I must say you have a marvelous imagination, sheriff," she sneered, pouring herself another glass of sherry, letting her unlit cigarette dangle from her lips.
Dunwall turned to his men. "Okay, boys. Let's go." The threesome stomped out of the house, their heavy boots echoing in the empty house. It was a full hour before Mona regained her composure. Then she went to tidy up the mess the searchers had left.
In fact, she discovered, when she got down to it, they hadn't taken their search very seriously, for there were hundreds of places where ammunition could be stored on a ranch. I could have been buried, or hidden in one of the combines. It could have been stashed in the empty barn under the molding bales of hay...anywhere. Why search the house? Stranger still, the search had been conducted basically in the basement amongst the rows of canning jars and old kitchen chairs, and in the attic. Even the rotting porch boards had been pulled up, leaving a gaping hole in the creaking structure.
Obviously, the search had been a perfunctory one. Why, then if they knew perfectly well there was no ammunition stored, why had they subjected her to more humiliation? It had to be a put-up job. She had never had any close association with the Indian movement...didn't even know who the self-proclaimed leaders were. The search had been another reason to annoy and pester her.
And if again she asked why, the answer was becoming more lucid. Whoever was trying-and failing-to persuade her to sell was switching the attack. The murky pool of doubt was clearing crystal clear. Obviously it had something to do with her step-brother, for he was the one who had asked her to sell in the first place. But he'd had investors behind him, he'd claimed. That, the redhead knew, had to be true; Sylvester never had a business head nor did he have the wherewithal to participate successfully in small-town politics whose growing concern during these years of rising inflation, due to too-high standards of living and a crumbling government, was turning more and more to agro-business. No, she shook her head, it couldn't be all Sylvester. He wouldn't have the intelligence to carry through a plan as entangled and barbed as the one jarring her life. But he played a role, she knew.
Looking at it this way, everything fitted-Sylvester was probably a patsy. The threatened farm laborers strike, the Farmer's Cooperative's refusal to grant her credit, Ben's accident-not to mention Jasper's death, had all happened after her refusals to sell. And the rape! My God, the rape too!
If it was true, it was small wonder she had received no cooperation from the local sheriff. The 'investors' were willing to risk bribery, rape and murder in their attempts to get their hands on her business. The inexplicable posting of men to watch her, the searching of her house and accusations of aiding and abetting the Indian movement, all were put-ons to shame and discourage her and run her out of town. If she ran, she would sell...or so they thought!
The Olson farm was worth money, a lot of money. It had water, a forest area, and some of the richest soil in the area being close to the Oahe River whose floods brought in the rich minerals of highland run-off.
She poured herself another glass of sherry to bolster her confidence, muttering to herself as she tipped the glass to her lips. The redheaded farmer smacked her lips, forced a smile, and toasted to herself. Nobody was going to run her off the land she'd called home for the past twenty-two years.
Suddenly, she felt more confident than she had for days. It was the fear and uncertainty and the aura of mystery that had sapped her courage to the root; now she knew-or thought she knew-what she had to face; the obstacles she had to overcome at once reduced themselves to their proper perspective. The only thing left was to find out who she had to fight.
Sylvester, she'd already reasoned, was just a patsy, the most logical person to try to convince her to sell. Dunwall had probably been bribed. The thing was to find out who was doing the hiring and the telling.
Attack, she had always been told, was the best method of defense. Very well, instead of weakly defending herself against the attacks of others, she would go out and stir up the murky waters and find out who was behind the irksome plan.
SHe didn't know whether it was the stimulating effect of the liquor she had drunk or merely the relief from tension that knowledge brings, but she felt so confident that she decided to put her plans into action right away. She would go into town and act her role. She was a wheat farmer, she thought with a defiant nod of her perky head, and she would act like one. That's why they were after her, wasn't it?
She glanced at her wristwatch. Lunch time. She smiled. Lunch time was the high point of the day for the farm laborers who drove into De Grey for a heavy lunch of mashed potatoes and roast beef, washed down by a couple of beers. Time for socializing-discussing politics, local gossip, and the price of grain. That would give them something to talk about-a female farmer wearing farmer's clothes, acting like a man. The George Sand of South Dakota!
Mona dressed in a pair of levis and put on a faded blue work shirt-one that had belonged to her father-and rolled up the sleeves. Instead of driving the car, she rolled the motorcycle out of the garage and revved up the motor. At the cross in the road she eyed a Chevy convertible with a Citizen Band aerial spiking up into the sky. A man was slumped over the seat asleep. She noted the number of the CB station that was imprinted in decals on the windshield, and mentally jotted it down, thinking it might come in handy one of these days. The man, she noted with a grin, was not pudgy and middle-aged like the others had been. In fact, were he not her adversary she might like to get to know the blonde handsome man.
Miss Muffet's Bar and Grill was lined with lunchtime regulars. The bar area was crowded, a long, low-ceilinged room with a bar along one side, and tables covered with red and white checkered cloths filled the remainder of the room. Every table was filled with overalled farmers, their faces streaked with dusty sweat making the room thick with the odor of hard labor. No women were in the-room except for the three middle-aged waitresses who slithered through the crowded room carrying trays laden with food. The smell of roast beef and gravy mingled with the other, more manly scents, making Mona rock on her heels. The clatter of plates and animated conversation filled the room.
With an assurance she was far from feeling, Mona pushed through the door, walked up to the bar and hitched herself on to one of the stools. For a heart-stopping moment all conversation ceased. Heads turned towards her, elbows nudged, eyebrows were raised. And then there was a low murmur, a sudden bark of laughter from one of the tables, and the talk crashed out as before-only this time she was sure most of it was about her.
The bartender was standing on the far side of the counter, filling two mugs with beer from the tap. "Howdy," he said, squinting at the farm lady. "Are you drinking?"
"Yes. Give me a glass of beer."
There was a buzz of conversation around her. No women had ever stepped foot in Miss Muffet's at lunch time. It was a tradition reserved only for menfolk. Dressed like a farmer, acting like a farmer, coming in unescorted and drinking in the middle of the afternoon, Mona knew they'd be talking about her already. Well, that's why she came here, wasn't it?
Sipping the frosty beer, she swiveled on the stool and looked around her. Sure enough, she was the only woman in the place. There were the local authorities in one corner, the men from the co-op at another table, and several groups of farm laborers at other tables. As she watched, the door opened and the blond young man she'd spied asleep in the convertible came in and slid onto one of the few empty stools in the restaurant's bar. He was better looking than she had thought-tall and muscular with a wide mouth, large gray eyes and a tanned, clean-lined face.
Turning her back on him with a grimace, she picked up her beer mug and drained it, before motioning to the bartender to fill it. He complied, staring at her askance.
After her third beer, she began to feel impatient. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to her. The one o'clock whistle blew, indicating the end of the lunch hour break, and the crowd thinned. Nothing had happened. Nothing had changed. The tension Mona felt hadn't spread. Damn it! she thought. Somehow she had to get things moving and out of control; that was the only way to bring everything out into the open. But how? She paid for her beer, and slipped off the stool, her heavy boots clomping on the creaking wooden floor. Feeling slightly tipsy, she made for the door.
Before she got there, her eyes met those of the young man following her. He was sitting at the far end of the bar near the window where "Miss
Muffet's Bar and Grill" was painted in faded red lettering. The sunlight played golden over his hair. Feeling bold, she approached him and said, "You might be more careful next time. Your boss would be mighty angry if he knew you'd fallen asleep on the job." Then she turned on her heel and stomped out of the restaurant in an atmosphere heavy with animosity. Others had heard her comment and it started the tongues wagging once again.
Before returning home, she decided to stop at the filling station to have the tires checked on the Honda 350. On the ride into town she'd noticed they may be in need of air. She roared into Sylvester's gas station and turned off the motor. A pimply faced teenager asked if she needed help.
"Is Sylvester in?" she demanded imperiously.
He shook his head, pointing to the hand written sign that hung on the door knob of the office door: "Proprietor out to Lunch." But what she did see through that glass pane brought her ire back to life. There stood Jack Jordan, the lawyer who'd handled Guy Olson's estate. A wry grin spread over Mona's face as she watched the slick lawyer peek out surreptitiously from behind the door and then retreat again, like a bird pecking at a Sand Dollar.
Ah, ha! What was Jack Jordan doing in Sylvester's scuzzy office? The will had been settled, hadn't it? Was there something she should know about? Mona waved her hand at him and headed for the door, her shoulders back and squared.
"Well, hello, Mr. Jordan. Long time no see."
She pushed her way through the door to see the tall man with the build of a wrestler stuffing some papers in an attach' case. His cheeks flushed crimson and she played on his embarrassment.
"Mr. Jordan, I want you to help me. I'm being followed by somebody who's trying to run me off my father's farm. I've had ridiculous offers to buy the place, but I won't sell. I've been persecuted by the sheriff of this town and I demand something be done."
Mr. Jordan zipped up the case. "Look, Mona, I've done all I can for you. The estate has been settled and you got your fair share, didn't you' I have to admit I heard about you selling ammunition to the Indians, and I'd say you were damned lucky to get away. That's a federal offense, you know." Nodding briefly, he picked up his attach' case and brushed past her out of the door. Before she had time to organize a thought, he'd jumped in his car and sped away.
"I don't know what you have to do with Sylvester, you punk lawyer," she screamed furiously; "but all of you can go to hell!"
Jordan, his massive back receding down the highway, gave no indication that he had heard.
Trembling with rage, Mona climbed onto her motorcycle and revved it to life. The motor burst into life, and she headed out towards her home. She was about a mile out of town when the convertible pulled up behind her. She turned her head to see the young blond man from the bar...but this time, instead of keeping station with her, he pulled up and blocked her path.
Mona took to the ditch and ignored the road block. The warm afternoon sunshine was sending the liquor she had taken to her head, and she was feeling decidedly muzzy. She would have to use all her concentration to keep the bike on a straight path and get herself home.
The dirt swirled in the air as the bike took to the gravel road. Once home, she turned off the motor and stood panting, trying to collect her thoughts and straighten out her head.
A grinding of gravel told her she was not alone. She turned her head to see the convertible crunching down the drive. The blonde headed man got out of the car, leaving the motor on, and walked towards her brazenly. Mona jumped with anger and gestured heatedly towards him. "What's the idea following me home, trying to run me off the road like this? There are laws about trespassing, you know!"
The young man held up his hand. "Okay, okay, I know." He was smiling. "I apologize for running you into the ditch, and I know that I'm trespassing, Mona. If I could have, I would have bought you a drink at Miss Muffet's but I didn't think it proper. It would have drawn attention to both of us, and neither of us need that."
The enraged redhead shuddered. "What do you mean?" She stood with her hands on her hips. "You're from the police department aren't you? Seems everybody I come into contact with these days is employed by them. Didn't know this town could afford such tight security."
"I don't work for the police department, Miss Olson, I'm a lawyer for the American Indian Brigade. I'm sure you heard of it."
Mona paled.
CHAPTER FIVE
After a cursory glance, Mona invited the stranger into her house. Sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, he told her that since he'd passed the bar exam last August, he'd been living on the Crow Indian Reservation south of De Grey helping the Indians fight for their rights. The government had been offering to buy their land from them and, the Indians being destitute for money, had accepted the offer, selling their precious land for precious little, only to be taxed outrageously by the federal government. That was his reason for following her, he said. One of his fellow volunteer lawyers who served as an elected official of De Grey (whose name he refused to divulge), had heard of the accusations being leveled against Miss Mona Olson and so he'd come to investigate. For if it had been true, he should know about it. And so he'd followed her, watching her every movement and concluding, in the final analysis, that Mona Olson was not selling ammunition to the Indians who'd decided to take up the gun. For those few militants on the reservation were causing problems with the peaceful negotiations Jay had been striving for.
"That's an awful big job you've selected for yourself. And you say you don't get paid. You must have a generous father," she managed a smile.
"As I say," spoke the blonde-haired lawyer, "the reason I came was to find out if you were the hardnosed black marketer you were reported to be. Glad to find out they were all wrong."
Mona sat back in her chair and stiffened. "You mean to tell me that people in this town-the town was born and raised in-really thought I had anything to do with the militancy out on the reservation?" Her coffee cup clattered on the saucer. Insults piled upon insults were getting to her calm core.
Jay sipped his coffee and shook his head. "No, they don't, Mona. It's only a couple of people who are trying to plump up charges against you."
Mona found herself smiling. "Now tell me the real reason you've taken me on as another volunteer case. Obviously you're trying to help me or you wouldn't have come here," she said. Her voice, she realized with dismay, was thick and blurred from the effects of the beer...and somehow it seemed terribly important that she should speak clearly and articulately at this moment.
Jay was staring at her, wide gray eyes under the curly blond hair shining with admiration as he took in the proud thrust of her breasts under the gaping work shirt, the subtly sculptured contours of her perfect face hollowed with the shadow of the bright sunshine that danced across her milky skin. "Do you really have to ask?" Jay said softly. "It gets awfully lonesome out there on the reservation. A man needs some companionship once in a while. Can't give it all away for nothing."
The next moment-Mona never quite knew how it happened-his arms were around her and her hands were clasped to the back of his head, pulling his face down towards her. It could have been because she had moved for so long in a world where every man's hand seemed against her that the discovery of an unexpected friend was overwhelming; maybe it was simply a natural woman's reaction to male approval that had been denied to her for too long, but all of her generous and passionate nature welled up inside of her and overflowed the artificial dam she had built and sheltered behind for so many weeks. She opened her mouth and kissed her blonde Adonis ardently, lasciviously, invitingly; their hotly muscled tongues lacing together in the wet winy caverns of their mouths as Jay's arms tightened convulsively about her, and Mona's fingers scrabbled at the stuff of his jacket.
Then she was crying helplessly, her head on his broad shoulder and the hot salt tears spilling out of her eyes and running down her cheeks. He crushed her to him, squashing her full breasts against his chest, his knee firm between her trembling thighs. With one hand, he stroked the cascade of fiery hair burnished by the bright sunlight. "Baby," he murmured, "it's all right...Relax...it's all right."
And as she heard the quiet, reassuring tones above her head, Mona felt suddenly as though an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The fears and problems and rages of a few minutes ago. dwindled to insignificance beside the surge of gratitude and tenderness and sudden desire she experienced for the man in whose arms she stood. She wasn't alone anymore; she had a friend-and he said it would be all right!
She could feel the hard bulge of his cock through the stuff of his pants against her thigh. She could feel the warmth of his breath playing on her hair. She shivered with awareness at the touch of his big hand on her back. And all at once she knew that she wanted this Jay...she didn't even know his last name...she wanted his warmly pulsating cock inside her, she wanted to feel its clean male hardness boring up into her belly...more than she had ever wanted anything in her life!
Raising her tear-stained face, she stared up into his eyes. "Kiss me!" she cried fiercely. "Kiss me and hold me tight!"
Jay caught his breath. He thought the pale features in their frame of tawny hair, the luminous green eyes bright with pleading and the voluptuously parted lips the most beautiful he had ever seen. Their mouths clasped hungrily together. For a delirious moment they stood there kissing while his hands roved the supple curve of her back, sculpted the hollows of her waist and then insinuated themselves under the shirt to cup the swelling weight of her breasts in their palms. And then Jay's arms tightened around her shoulders, his other arm dived behind her knees, and he had swept her off her feet and was carrying her to the bedroom.
There he lowered her gently to the bed and cast himself down beside her. He panted hoarsely. "Mona?" he croaked, almost as if he were asking her if she were sure.
She gazed mistily up at him in the faint light percolating through the drawn curtains, the storm of erotic desire shaking her stifling the power of speech. Her mouth opened and her head moved hypnotically from side to side on the bed.
With an inarticulate cry, Jay tore open the buttons of her shirt and forced the nylon bra beneath it up and over the tautly up-thrust mounds of her breasts. His fingers lightly traced the swelling outlines of naked flesh, rolling and tweaking her rubbery nipples until they spiked out into lustful hardness. Then with a groan of delight he dropped his head between them and hungrily kissed the soft slopes of satiny flesh under which the excited redhead's heart was fluttering wildly. His tongue trailed wetly along the warm valley separating her breasts, flickered up the incline nearest to him, and then circled lasciviously around the areola centered on one erect nipple.
Mona mewled softly with pleasure, arching her hips off the bed as his fingers tightened on her tender flesh, forcing the nipple up into his mouth while he sucked and nibbled teasingly at the rubbery little bud. Her hand crawled down the length of his body, groping for the rigid bulge of his lustfully throbbing cock where it thrust out the material of his pants, already moist and sticky with seminal fluid seeping from the glans. He jerked convulsively and moaned deep in his throat as her fingers tightened around the stiffly outlined shaft, thrusting his pelvis towards the tantalizing grasp as his lips and tongue alternated frantically between the squirming girl's nipples.
In a state of mindless passion, Mona reached for the zipper at the top of his fly and yanked it down. Worming her hand into the opening, she hauled aside his shirt and jockey shorts and hauled out his hotly throbbing shaft of male flesh.
As her cool fingers closed around the muscled staff, the young man groaned again. His aching cock jerked and trembled at her feather-light touch sending unbearable ripples of erotic delight coursing through his loins.
Jay's cock was long and thick and webbed with veins on the underside, the lust-bloated head already bursting through the distended foreskin to nose wetly into the girl's excited palm. Her naked breasts rising and falling agitatedly with the violence of her emotions. Mona shifted her position so that she could reach him with her other hand. Gently, she pulled his testicles free of the garments sheathing his hips, kneading and caressing the sperm-swollen balls in their hairy sac as she milked the rigidly quivering cock and watched his plum-colored cock head appear, then disappear, then reappear.
And then suddenly, drawing his foreskin hard back with her forefinger and thumb so that the blood-engorged instrument throbbed and expanded to even greater hardness, she snatched her other hand away and tore open the middle zipper of her own levis, arching her pelvis off the bed as she dragged the garment, the nylon panties under them, down over her hips and kicked them off to lie naked on the carpet beside her bed.
"Oh God!" she groaned, flailing her copper head from side to side on the coverlet in wild abandon. "I want you so much! Give it to me! Give it to me now!"
Gasping with excitement, Jay scrambled to his knees, his eagerly pulsing cock still firmly grasped in the aroused young redhead's hand. For a moment in the dimly lit room he saw her beneath him-she was lying shamelessly on the bed, her blouse wide open, her bra pushed up under her arms, the tautly erect nipples pointing proudly up at the ceiling. Down the long sunlight covered stretch of her naked body he saw from a fugitive gleam of moisture among the damp scythe of hairs between her trembling thighs that her quivering cuntal furrow was already wet with excitement. And then her legs had snaked wide on either side of him and he was sinking down between them, her urgent fingers lustfully guiding his pulsating hardness toward her cock-hungry pussy.
He gasped and shivered as the hard rubbery tip nosed damply against the hair-fringed, feverishly swollen lips of her cunt, moaning with desire as she stirred the sensitive throbbing glans into her warm wet folds of pussy flesh. Then he could stand it no longer: supporting himself on the palms of his hands on either side of her softly trembling body, he flexed his hips and thrust.
The huge throbbing cudgel slid through Mona's wetly gaping cuntal lips and up into the liquid heat of her belly. The scalding elastic sheath swallowed the whole length of his rock hard shaft as easily as a vaseline-smoothed rubber glove. Never before had he felt a vagina so warm, so buttery, so clasping. Her deeper cuntal muscles milked and massaged his pulsating hardness until he wanted to yell his delight. Jay clenched his teeth and groaned deep in his throat with sensual delight.
Mona had crowed with ecstasy as the muscled rod of flesh fucked up into her belly. Now she released her grasp on Jay's hotly throbbing cock and tore open the buttons of his shirt, writhing her naked breasts lasciviously against the pale hairs matting his chest. Her legs twined themselves around his thighs, her heels locked themselves behind his knees, and she raked her fingers passionately down his back as she thrust her cock-stuffed pussy convulsively up and down to meet the downward plunges of his powerful hips.
"Ooooooooh!" she gurgled deliriously, punctuating his words with thrusts and withdrawals of his long hard cock. "I'm going...to screw that beautiful ass...of you...you gorgeous...sexy bitch! I going to...fuck you...until you scream!"
"Yesss! Yesss!...Give it to me, honey!...Say it again!"
"I'm going to...fuck you...and fuck you and...fuck you...until you cum...you lovely...beautiful...woman!"
"Aaaaaah!" Mona chanted in a delirium of abandoned desire. "Oh, darling! Oooooohhh!"
Together, they started a slow undulating rhythm, their naked hips smacking lewdly together in the stillness of the house as the wildly aroused young man's rigidly throbbing cock pistoned relentlessly in and out of her hungrily clasping, cock-milking cunt.
Mona's arms clamped fiercely around his shoulders, drawing him down to her so that the taut buds of her lust-hardened nipples continued to grind furiously against the bared flesh of his chest. Jay's face was drowned in the red tide of her hair, his tongue slavering at the smooth skin of her neck as her wetly open mouth crooned obscenities into his ear. His hands forced themselves under her undulating ass-cheeks, cupping the cool weight of her buttocks against his palms, pulling her up tighter still against the jack-hammering trunks of his cock.
For minutes they fucked in a silence broken only by the slap and squelch of naked flesh on flesh and the rasping of excited breath punctuated by murmured endearments and small cries of delight. The roar and crackle of a wheat-laden truck approaching the house swelled to a crescendo and then died as it ground its way from the fields past the house, and finally to the storage bins miles away. Somewhere in the apple orchard a bird gave a single discordant cry, and a cat responded to that call, scurrying up the tree in hunt.
Arching her strong young hips ferociously upwards to meet the plunging thrusts of the man whose rock hard cock was fucking in and out of her belly, Mona was in a transport of erotic rapture. Nothing existed in her alcohol-dimmed, passion-crazed mind but the reality of the hands clenched into the sensitive flesh of her buttocks, the warm mouth at her neck, me hard male weight pressing down on her arching nipples, and the thrilling assault of the wonderfully hardened cock skewering into her loins.
For some time now they had been gradually accelerating the tempo of their pounding hips. Their nakedly entwined bodies were working together like a perfectly designed machine...and the graph of the machine's progress was mounting inexorably towards a climax! Over the hammering of his heart and the thunder of blood in his ears, Jay realized in the sweet anguish of approaching orgasm that the moment was almost there. The graph had begun to climb unbearably upward; already he could feel the familiar tension building deep in his cum-filled balls...building, building, clamoring for release.
"Oh God!" he groaned. "Oh, Mona, baby...I can't...I'm almost...Are you
Drawing up her knees in answer, she wound her legs around the humping Jay's waist, her heels drumming frantically on the pumping cheeks of his naked ass. He moaned in ecstasy, easing one hand out from under her buttocks to squeeze the fleshy hair-covered lips of her cunt more tightly around the iron-hard stump of his cock as it sawed savagely in and out of her hotly seething pussy.
Jay's forefinger wormed its way among her sensitive folds ot cuntal flesh to find the erect little bud of her clitoris and pushed forward causing her sensitive, passion-swollen nerve ending to scrape against his thickly swollen male hardness.
Mona's breath exploded shrilly from her lungs in a convulsion of delight. "Oh God!" she exclaimed in a whispered scream, her whole naked body shuddering in uncontrollable spasms. "Oh God!...Oh no!...I'm going to...Yes, I'm going to ....I'm going to cum . . . "
"Go on, baby!" Jay groaned, ramming his wildly jerking cock furiously up into her heated cuntal hole for the final shattering strokes. "Go on...cum!...Cum, cum, cum!"
Mona's hips writhed and threshed galvanically beneath him as he felt the irresistible surge of his own orgasm steam the spasming length of his cock and erupt into the hotly sucking depths of her womb in scalding, pulsating spurts. Their bodies slammed together in mutual ecstasy. Their arms tightened convulsively around one another. And then as Mona, open mouthed, rolled her head in speechless delight, Jay arched his back and leaned up off her to utter a strangled cry of triumph and fulfillment.
CHAPTER SIX
Jay could not stay the night; he had to get back to the reservation and it was a forty-five minute drive from De Grey. Business awaited him there, he informed his redheaded lover; important business that could not wait. That night he was to meet with his anonymous friend who worked in De Grey's county court house. Hopefully he would have dug up information that would shed light on the strange goings-on in the town of De Grey where the little Hitlers and Ceasars had gathered to each claim his own piece of the pie.
Mona was up at dawn the next morning, full of enthusiasm and hope. The redheaded wheat farmer went about her morning chores singing a tune, her heart lightened by the amorous display the handsome lawyer had spurt into her. She had found a friend, and she had trusted him with her own body. She'd washed the dishes and made the bed before calling her dog to join her in a morning jog to the mailbox. The week's correspondence-most letters of apology and explanations to creditors-should go out that day if the mail was to be delivered by the first of the month. She skipped along, feeling the sensual warmth of the morning sunshine caress her skin. It felt good to be alive. Life was rich and rewarding, and all would be well despite the small town kangaroo court that wanted to hang her by the thumbs.
She opened the door of the metal box to slip in the letters for the mailman to pick up, and left the exact change for the cost of the stamps in an envelope with the mailman's name on it. Mona kissed the letters for good luck and was about to slam the door shut when she saw a large manila envelope nearly folded in half. Muzzed, she stared at it for a silent second and bit into her lower lip. Strange, she thought. I know I picked up the mail yesterday. She pulled out the envelope and worked at the metal clasp that held it shut, noticing as she opened the flap that it had no postmark on it.
She realized with an inward chill of despair that they were photographs. Her heart pounded as she pulled out the well-focused black and white shots...her pale body with its nakedly jutting breasts writhing in lustful abandon on the bed; the shamelessly widespread legs gripping Jay's convulsed hips; her contorted face, instantly recognizable, even in open-mouthed ecstasy. And rearing up above her half-clothed, obscenely spread-eagled form, the lawyer himself, fully dressed except for the wetly glistening white stump of his cock disappearing into the triangle of hair at her loins, his head thrown back just enough to hide his features but reveal hers to the lens. Even the crumpled ball of her discarded pants was visible in the lower left-hand corner of the picture. To anyone who didn't know the facts, the story looked clear-a drunken nymphomaniac unable to control her sexual urges, wantonly seducing some man to assuage her burning lust! She had evidently thrown off her clothes to entice him to pander to her animal desire!
Mona flushed scarlet as she slammed the incriminating print back into the envelope and ripped up the package, her teeth grating with the adrenalin flow of her working muscles. She swore, stomped her feet, and tore at her hair. Damn! Who could have snuck into the house to take those photographs? Obviously it had to be one of the men forcing her to sell. Of course...she snapped her fingers, calmed now by her perfervid attempt to solve the mystery. One of the henchmen had followed her home and seeing a strange car parked in the drive had come in to investigate and got his eyes full.
Her presumptions were not long in debate, for as soon as she'd reached the house and closed the door behind her, there was the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway. Peering out the kitchen window she saw a car rocking to a standstill in front of the porch. The wide door opened and Jack Jordan extricated himself from the white convertible and marched heavily toward her door.
He didn't need to knock; the door was open. What did the uncooperative perfidious lawyer want of her anyway? He'd washed his hands of her father's estate and will; he'd told her so himself. Just one more chessman in a disagreeable game of chess.
It didn't take long for him to announce his purpose for coming. In his hand he held a similar envelope to the one she'd found in her mailbox, not more than ten minutes prior.
"Miss Olson," Jordan said, clearing his throat. "I have something I'd like to show you. I found this on my desk this morning when I arrived at the office. Now don't think I'm trying to pry into your private affairs-I know you must be damned lonely out here all by yourself-but having been a close friend of your father's, I think you should know about this." He reached out to hand her the package.
Mona's cheeks reddened as she accepted the envelope and put it face down on the kitchen table. "I know. I just got a package myself. Seems Kodak is making a killing these days." A rising tide of anger began to submerge the girl's embarrassment. "Cute, aren't they?" she sneered.
"I wouldn't take it so lightly, Miss. If these photos should get in the wrong hands, we might have a scandal in our nice little quiet town, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?"
"Quiet little town? What a bunch of crap! This town is run by a bunch of cheap Al Capones. And that includes you and your peace loving sheriff," she said wearily. "I've been followed, harassed, photographed all because somebody wants to buy this farm from me. I don't know why you small town idiots can't accept the fact that women can run a business as well as a man. And as for those photographs, they were taken to embarrass me-once more. Already I can't walk into town without tongues wagging. It's getting to be a bore, Mr. Jordan and I wish you'd call your honky men off."
"Miss Olson," Jordan interrupted, holding up his ham-like hand. "I can assure you that I'm here in the best of your interest. I'm not a preacher. Do you think I give a damn about who this man is you're making love to?" He shook his head violently, his beefy jowls jouncing with the movement. "No. That's not my concern. I come here as a friend of your father's. What do you think Guy would think if he knew his daughter was?
"Was what? Enjoying herself? Christ, I haven't had a day's peace in the last two months and you're thinking of my father's response to that?" she spat, pointing an angry finger at the envelope.
Jordan walked to the window and stood looking out of it, his huge silhouette cutting off half the light in the room. "I believe, Miss Olson, you should stop and consider who you're talking to. Should these photos fall into the wrong hands, you would be in a tight squeeze. But . . . " he grinned, swinging around to face her, his sneer suddenly showing through the careful veneer of respectability he had adopted for the occasion. "I am in a position of authority in this town, don't you forget and should I want to, I could have those photos on the morning edition of the De Grey Gazette. But...as I say, if you were to be nice to me...."
"What do you mean by that?" Mona was quickly losing her patience. "You can't mean that if I...I go to bed with you...you'll protect me."
Jordan's livery lips stretched into an obscene smile and he plunged his hands into his suit pants pockets. "That's right, Mona. I've got everything you need: money, a good reputation, influence." I could get you out of your money bind in two days flat...."
"Ah ha!" Mona cut in triumphantly. "Now I understand! You want to get your fat hands on this land, too, huh? What's so damned special about this land that everybody in town is trying to get their hands on it?"
"I don't know, and I've got nothing to do with what they're trying to . . . " He stopped to catch his breath and retrace his thoughts. He'd said too much already.
Mona was breathing hard, her lips compressed into a thin red line and her green eyes flashing. "The answer is no. N-O! NO! Is that clear?"
"You slut!" Jordan's phony pomposity was shed now, leaving the tough country bully to show through his cheap facade. "You'll fuck this goddamn Indian lawyer but you won't make love to me to save your reputation and your farm . . . "
"Yeah, Daddy would be real proud if he knew I'd gone to bed with a two hundred pound cheat!"
"If you don't shuddup, Mona, you're gonna be in a hell of a lot more trouble than you are now," Jordan snarled. Moving astonishingly quickly for a man of his size, he shot out his arms and grabbed her by the shoulders.
"Get your hands off of me...let me go!" the frightened girl screamed, beating at his barrel chest with her fists and wrestling her shoulders in a vain attempt to break his grasp. But the incensed lawyer crushed her to him in a powerful hug, pinioning her arms to her sides as his cruel, loose-lipped mouth smashed wetly down on hers. Mona's protests were smothered in his slobbering kiss as his thick tongue crushed through her lips and invaded the tender cavern of her mouth. She twisted her head violently from side to side, desperately endeavoring to escape the odious embrace as hot breath from his nostrils jetted over her face. Finally she clamped her jaws and bit fiercely into the shaft of flesh skewering into her ravished mouth.
Jordan sprang back with a cry of pain, slashing her backhanded across the face with a blow that sent her reeling across the room. There was a wolfish smile on his face and his teeth were flecked with blood. "You bitch!" he snarled. "You'll regret that." Advancing again to where the terrified redhead was backed up against a table, he added softly: "Now I'm going to show you what it's like to be fucked by a real man!"
Mona screamed. "Get away from me or I'll have my dog tear you to bits!" she cried hysterically. "Leave me alone...you pig!" Dodging under his outstretched arms, she made frantically for the door. He caught her in two strides, seizing her by the shirt collar and ripping the garment from her back in a single savage jerk. Then he spun her around to face him and hooked his fingers into the elastic joining the two tautly filled cups of her bra. Another brutal tug, and the flimsy foundation tore in two and hung loosely from her shoulders as her full, pink-nippled breasts sprang nakedly free. "You're so pretty," he panted. "I gotta make you see what a...good...lay I am."
Screaming again, the fear-crazed girl ran for the other door-but Jordan shot out his foot and tripped her so that she fell heavily onto a davenport beneath the window. In an instant he was towering over her, his bloodied mouth grinning and his lust hardened cock thrusting immensely at the tight-stretched material of his pants. With a sadistic laugh, he threw himself onto her furiously squirming body, rammed the fingers of one hand into the waistband of her pants, and hauled upward. The thick denim split from waistband to crotch, revealing her softly trembling belly and a triangle of silkily curling pubic hair framed in the tatters of her nylon panties.
Sobbing with despair, Mona beat frantically at his vast body with fists and feet, kicking and gouging and scratching in a desperate attempt to keep him off. Jordan paid no more attention than if the blows had been drops of sea-mist falling on his pasty skin. Dragging the torn garments down to her ankles in one powerful thrust so that the whole length of her writhing body was revealed to his lecherous gaze, he seized her ankles and bent her legs back over her head. Then, leaning brutally on the backs of Mona's thighs, doubling her up in a humiliating jack-knife position on the cushions, he stared gloatingly at her nakedly exposed cuntal furrow before reaching forward to caress the red-gold pubic hairs mantling her cunt. The terrified young girl shrieked anew and jerked convulsively at the rough touch of his fingers on her sensitive pussy flesh.
There was a deep throated animal snarl and footsteps. "All right, you fat bastard. Get up off that girl or I'll turn this dog loose on you...."
The voice came from the entrance to the door-a voice dry as a whiplash, tight with suppressed rage and nervous tension.
Sprawling around, the sadistic lawyer let go of Mona's legs and stared up open-mouthed from his crouched position by the sofa. The naked girl struggled up onto her elbows and gave a cry of astonishment.
Jay was standing with her pet German shepherd, Willie, at his side the only thing restraining the dog from tearing the throat of his mistress' violator was the strong grip on his collar. Jay's knuckles had turned white under the strain of the restraining hold. The dog's teeth showed pearly white as his incisors, threatening and sharp, were partially covered by the rippling upper lip of the snarling, protective animal.
"I said get up, you big bastard, or I turn this dog loose. Come on-you fat ass. Move!"
Highlighted by a gleam of sunlight filtering through the window, the dog's toothed jaws worked up and down. Jordan scrambled hastily to his feet, scowling, and circled around the dog who lunged at him with a hungry look in his eye.
"What the hell are you doin' here? I thought you were down at the reservation trying to make decent citizens out of those Indians?" he said menacingly.
"I've got business to take care of here, and I think you know what I'm talking about." The two men glared at each other before Jay finally gave him the ultimatum. "Get out of here or your face will be in ribbons."
Jordan was breathing heavily, his lingers clenching and unclenching. A dark stain of seminal fluid marked the pale gabardine of his pants at one side of his fly. "You're gonna be sorry you ever set foot off that reservation. We got your number in tins town. We know what you're after." The big man's eyes were glittering malevolently. His jaws were working clinchingly. "Some Indian lover and a cheap farm girl who can't control her own cunt. You two make a great couple."
"Get out!"
Jay loosened his hold on the dog's collar, just enough to let the dog make one threatening lunge; his paws hit the floor and his snapping mouth missed Jordan's leg by three inches. The bulbous man jumped back, his eyes in saucers. "Just you wait," were his parting words. His voice died away as the front door slammed. A moment later they heard the car crunch down the driveway, the tires squealing as the lawyer made the tight turn onto the main highway.
Sitting up on the davenport naked except for the two halves of the brassiere hanging over her shoulders and the fucked-up pants shackling her ankles, Mona was laughing hysterically.
"What's so funny?" Jay was pale faced with anger.
"Did...did you see the look on his face?" Mona gasped. "I doubt he'll come back here for an encore."
Jay smiled. "Jeez, I'm glad he didn't get you, honey. I hate sloppy seconds."
"Wait a minute," said Mona sitting stiffly. "Were you watching through the window or what? I must say, Jay, your sense of timing is truly a sixth sense with you."
"Funny thing," he admitted. "I left my glasses back here in the bedroom. I stopped off for breakfast and came back to get 'em. Can't see a damned thing without 'em. My eyes are too sensitive to sunlight."
Mona's smile melted. "Did you see the photographs of us? Actually they're pretty good. Can't see much of you though. Who do you suppose was our photographer?"
Jay shook his head. "Don't know, but give me a couple of days and I'll answer it. He walked to the table and opened the package, then drew out the photographs. "Hmmm, not bad of you. You ever think of modeling?" he laughed. "Don't think I approve of the world seeing that beautiful body of yours though."
"But what about the photographs? Do you think he'd be so low as to show them around town?" Mona asked wincingly.
Jay grinned. "I wouldn't worry about it, Mona. I've got a friend who's on your side, believe it or not." Dropping the photographs on the table, he shot them one last appreciative stare before dropping to the floor next to the davenport and stroking the girl's hand. "I'll take care of it, baby. I'm a lawyer, remember? And a damned good one, if I must say so myself."
Mona sighed, her fingers automatically returning the pressure of his hand. "I guess so. I just don't want my father's name dragged through the mud in this rotten town. He worked too hard to deserve such a post mortem disgrace."
"Don't worry," Jay insisted. "I'll take care of you. In fact, I've got a case of my own that I'm working on in De Grey. Means I have to drive down here everyday. Maybe...maybe I could rent a room from you for the next couple of weeks? You know, you could put me up and I could be your personal body guard. I know I'm not built like Sheriff Dunwall or Jordan, but I'm pretty damned mean with a gun. Didn't spend two years in the army for nothing." He grinned. "Is it a deal?"
She squeezed his hand. "Is an hour of loving too high a price for one room? I could reduce it to thirty minutes if you think that would be more fair." Mona giggled.
"You got yourself a deal, ma'am," Jay said with mock severity. He gazed pointedly at her lushly ripened curves of her belly and hips, at the tautly swelling breasts with their pink buds of nipples, at the smooth slopes of her shoulders and the ivory column of her neck above. "If it's not an impertinence for a renter," he said craftily. "I'd like to find out how you can cook before I pay my rent."
The naked redhead looked into his eyes...and blushed. Abruptly she reached out her arms and pulled him down so that his head was cradled on her belly. "Oh, Jay, you're so insistent."
As the young man's mouth touched the cool surface of her softly quivering flesh, he tensed and sucked in his breath-and then, almost of their own volition, his lips began gently nibbling at the satiny skin, his tongue trailing wetly along the scarcely visible arrow of tiny gold hairs linking her navel with the tawny vee shadowing the top of her thighs. Mona held her breath. This was ridiculous! She mustn't let him...not again . . . !
Jay's breath was quickening. As his mouth lingered among the silkily curling pussy hairs, his hands stole down to her sculptured thighs and tenderly pressed them apart. "No!" the trembling redhead whispered. "Jay, no...you can't! Stop!"
But the muscles involuntarily relaxed, her knees fell outwards and she found herself surreptitiously freeing one foot from the constricting tangle of trousers and panties so that her legs could spread even further.
The lustfully aroused young man stroked his hands upwards until his fingers touched the moistly heated coral flanges of her cuntal slit nestling up between her widespread thighs. And then, as she jerked and caught her breath at the sudden thrilling contact, he gently pried apart the fleshy, hair-covered lips and eased himself along her body so that his mouth could close over the gaping wet entrance to her cunt.
"Darling, don't," Mona breathed ecstatically. "Please don't. Oooooohh!" Her shoulders slipped further down among the cushions and her hips squirmed lasciviously as his tongue suddenly laced snake-like into the hotly throbbing tunnel of her cunt.
Delicious flickers of unbelievable lewd excitement flamed through her loins as Jay's lips sucked teasingly at her quivering pussy and the tip of his hot probing tongue found, and then swirled around, the sensually tautened bud of her clitoris. The naked young redhead felt her own cuntal secretions begin to flood warmly around his lapping mouth as he drew the sensitive, tautly throbbing shaft of flesh between his teeth, rolling it from side to side to send insane tremors of desire shuddering through her veins.
"Aaaaaahhh!" she moaned. "Oh, darling! Ooohhh! Oh, what are you doing to me?"
Her hips writhing in slow hypnotic motions, Mona reached her hands out blindly for his loins and, for the second time in twenty-four hours, tore open the zipper of his pants and dragged out his stiffly upstanding cock.
For a moment she gazed in fascination at the bloated, purplish head protruding from the distended foreskin at the top of the rigidly muscled shaft. A pearl of seminal fluid glistened like dew on a rosebud at the slit of its tip. Then, twisting the top half of her body towards him, she pulled the lust-thickened pole of flesh towards her face and poised her wetly ovaled lips above the blood-engorged glans.
Feeling the warmth of her breath playing over the passion-drenched cock head, Jay groaned deep in his chest. A moment later, as the desire-inflamed redhead's hot mouth closed wetly over the aching tip of his cock, he was levering Mona's quivering thighs even further apart as his tongue slavered wildly into the scalding depths of her writhing young cunt.
The excitement, the sensations of a moistly heated mouth against their genitals, was too much for both of them. Almost before Mona knew what was happening she felt Jay's warmly throbbing cock growing larger and larger in her mouth. Knowing he was about to cum, she began sucking hungrily and mewled with an obscene delight as she felt the first heated splash of his cum spurt like liquid fire down her throat.
And that triggered her own orgasm, causing her to spread her legs even wider-to get more and more of his wonderfully fucking tongue up inside her convulsing cunt. . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
After Jay's suggestion to move in with Mona, life seemed to run a smoother course. For an unexplainable reason the threats ceased: no more incriminating photographs, no more outrageous offers to buy her land, and no more assaults on the redheaded wheat farmer's body. Seldom did she go into town during those relaxed days. As for the production end of her business, it had become her main concern, and she spent the major part of her time in the fields overseeing the combining and trucking. Errands were left to Jay who made a scheduled drive to the reservation every two days, bringing back groceries and any necessary spare parts for the farm's machinery. Mona was looking more relaxed, less strained, and less harried with each day. And her confidence was growing, above all.
The harvest season was half over now, and if wheat prices continued to rise as the state Republicans promised, it would be a bumper crop for Mona Olson. That meant money, big money-perhaps enough to pay off a few of the outstanding bank notes and, hopefully, to pay this year's taxes and buy another combine.
The week wore on, but enthusiasm and hard labor heightened to new levels of productivity. On Sunday, Jay drove back from the reservation in a new jeep, a four-wheel drive equipped with a Citizen's Band radio, a convertible top, and leather bucket seats. Mona simply looked at him askance, wondering where a volunteer lawyer for an Indian reservation could get the money to pay for the new utility, but didn't ask.
"Come on, baby," he blurted enthusiastically, showing off the amenities of their new vehicle, "Let's test it out. What you say we pack a picnic basket and head on out into those hills." He pointed to the forested ridges beyond. "I never have seen all of this valuable land everybody's in such a fuss about. Come on." He pulled her close and kissed her on the cool forehead.
They drove the jeep westwards, down the Johnson turn-off where the ungraveled dusty road led them past the north quarter wheat fields towards the further boundaries of Mona's land, where an arm of the river curved in and made a natural harbor among the woods, but it ended in a clearing heaped with freshly turned soil, and after that the going was more difficult. The jeep lurched like a charging lion and bumped along weed-grown forest trails, grinding through plowed ground still unraked.
"I've always wanted to build a house back here," explained Mona. "In fact, if I were forced to sell this land I would keep this area here and plant a garden over there." She pointed to a small alluvial plane where the flooded river had deposited rich minerals from the highlands further up north where the easternern-most section of the Badlands began.
When the jeep ran out suddenly into an open glen, Mona exclaimed with delight. "Here!" she gestured, her red hair flaming in the Sunday sunlight. "Stop here!" Jay smiled in agreement. There was underbrush for firewood and a clearing large enough to build a fire pit and safely, too. Willow trees lined the river bank, at this, the widest part of the river. A few scrub pine attested to new growth further away from the river where the soil was more sandy and less fertile.
Jay braked the jeep in the shade of the trees and unpacked the picnic lunch from the back of the utility. Mona spread out a checkered table cloth, letting it flap in the wind and iron out the wrinkled surface. A country girl at heart, she found four rocks and placed one on each corner of the cloth to keep it from blowing in the wind, then set the picnic basket in the middle Jay hauled out the two six packs of beer and, tying a strong cord around the plastic carrying utility, dunked it in the river secured to a willow tree that lined the river bank.
"My family used to come up here for Sunday afternoon picnics," called out Mona now on her knees unpacking the picnic basket. She looked up at Jay's tall lean, muscular back bending over the river's edge, and her voice, sounding somewhat melancholic made the handsome blonde-haired man turn his head. She was one hell of a woman, he thought. Damned if she wasn't enough to make him want to get involved all over again, even though he'd sworn on a stack of bibles after his divorce to never, but never get involved with a female again. But Mona's rare qualities of country naturalness, mixed with a redheaded obdurate streak that accepted no compromises and made no apologies was enough to make the resolved lawyer think twice.
Jay picked up a sandstone near his right foot where he sat on his haunches watching the beer cans bob up and down in the gently flowing river, and tossed the stone into the middle of the pool of glistening dark water. It plunked with a deep gurgling sound, telling him the river was deep. He tossed another for good luck and to keep his mind off the tempting daydreams flitting through his lazy Sunday afternoon mind. Jay tutted and sighed, then raised his head to appreciate the forested land in this precious quarter of Mona Olson's land. Damned right, but it would be a fine place to build a house, maybe...maybe raise some kids out here in the country where nature was the educator. Give his son and daughter something he never had: a relaxed introduction to what life can give you, rather than what you can wring from it. Sapping, as his family had done. . . .
Oh, but it was useless thinking of the past. The future was what mattered. And he, Jay Gentry, had all the ingredients to make life a dazzling, natural experience, away from the snobbish Boston high society he'd been born into. Mona's voice interrupted his daydream. He turned, then stood up and walked lightheartedly back to the picnic grounds, snapping open a beer as he walked.
"Nice river, huh?" Mona pointed to a bend further up the willow lined glistening pool of water that ran as slow as Jay's daydreams. "See that bunch of fallen trees up there? I remember when I was a little girl a tornado tore through this part of Daddy's land and uprooted every tree in its path. That's why that natural dam makes the water here so slow moving and deep. Good fishing spot, too. We used to catch trout out of there, and they weren't planted either. We'd come up here for picnics and Daddy and Sylvester," she stopped and swallowed hard, as if her step-brother's name made her choke with disgust. "...would catch trout and Momma and I would fry them over an open fire." She giggled shyly and shrugged her shoulders. "You ever had an affair with a country girl before?" she teased, wrinkling up her perky nose and squinting against the harsh sunlight.
Standing at her feet, as she sat with her levied legs spread apart, her weight resting on her arms that she'd propped slightly behind her, Jay took a desperate gulp of his cold beer and sank to her side.
"Anybody ever tell you, you're beautiful?"
Mona blinked her eyes in modest humility, a rare gesture for a redheaded tempestuous woman, and grinned. "Yes, but not the same way you do."
"I love you, Mona," he returned with equal . shyness and a tinge of sentimentality. "I haven't said that to a woman for hell of a long time, so don't think it hasn't taken some courage to get it out, You're a hell of a woman, all right." He turned his can of beer into the ground, boring it into the sandy earth to keep it from spilling over, and took Mona in his arms with such a force and strength that made her shudder with unexpected delight. "All we need is the photographer," she whispered hurriedly, before he kissed her hard on the mouth, running his tongue between her teeth as she fought to get her breath. Then, her own tongue shot hot and wet back into his mouth.
He pulled her down on the picnic cloth and was on top of her in an instant, his strong body crushing hers as he kissed her mouth with a tenderness he'd forgotten existed. It explored her face and neck and his hand massaged her breasts. He jumped up and seemed suddenly casual as he started to undress. He looked down at her with a little grin on one corner of his mouth. "Better get those levis off."
Mona stood up, grinning at him, unzipped her levis and pulled them down over her ankles, then stepped out of them. She unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it off her milk-white shoulders and stood before him in her bra and panties. Jay's eyes glimmered as he took in her voluptuous form.
She stood facing him again and, smiling, reached behind and snapped the clasp of her brassiere and her breasts leaped free, the brassiere falling to the sandy ground.
Jay took off his shirt, revealing his muscular torso to his lady love and stepped forward, placing his hands on her breasts. "Not bad," he murmured teasingly, "Not bad at all." Playfully, his hands pinched at her nipples and she felt them leap into life, sending a bolt of warmth and wetness down into her pussy.
With a grin, she unzipped his pants and undid his belt and watched as his pants fell to the ground with a clink of change and keys. Jay stood in his underwear, his cock growing underneath, and looked down. His easy laughter filled the wide open spaces. "Ever notice how ridiculous a man looks with his pants down around his ankles?" he asked.
Mona put her hand to her mouth and giggled, her fire red hair flaming in the sunlight. It was true, there was something absurd about it. He stepped out of his pants and pulled off his underwear and stood before her naked, his cock swelling as she watched it. It was worth admiring, that cock was. With a little pleased sound she took it in her hands and lovingly caressed it and stroked the skin back so that the red mushroom head bulged out.
With a happy cry, she sank to her knees in front of him, the cock still in her hands and rubbed it all over her naked breasts and neck and face. Then, settling into position, she held it straight out in front of her and let the tip of her tongue slide slowly out and lick the head of his cock. She closed her eyes and tasted the cum-one little drop-that was glistening in the tiny end-slit. It tasted so good. Her lips formed a perfect oval and she pushed her head forward, feeling his desire-swollen rod pushing against her lips, feeling him pump his hips slowly forward as his hand tangled his fingers in her thick hair. With a rush, her lips gave and she opened her mouth wide and took all of the thick hot cock she could. It filled her mouth and slid easily back into her throat, and she fought against choking as she began to gently suck, her lips stroking the tender flesh slowly back and forth. Jay didn't have to move as she worked her lips, tongue and jaw to slip his foreskin back and forth in her mouth, his blood-filled cock head popping in and out. Above her, she heard him catch his breath and mutter, "Jesus, Mona."
Freeing her hands, she cradled his balls with one hand while the other slowly reached behind him, felt his hard-muscled thigh, and slowly started up until she found his buttocks clenched tight together. Slowly, with one finger extended, she began boring in, trying to find and touch his anus while she increased the rhythm and intensity of her sucking. She felt his cock swelling even bigger in her mouth, forcing her jaw open wider and her lips clamped around the shaft like two taut rubber bands.
Her finger found his anus and she heard him groan as she flicked lightly over it. With another, deeper groan, he pushed her head away and, lifting her up by the armpits, raised her high and then eased her back on the ground.
Mona, sprawled with her red hair tossed across the checkered cloth, one knee up. Jay, his face taut with passion, was hovering over her, pulling off her panties with a jerk and falling on top of her.
She opened her legs wide enough to feel his cock nestle between them, and then she squeezed her thighs shut and felt his wetly throbbing hardness caught in her warm soft pussy flesh. As he caressed her breasts, cupping one so that he could bend his head and gently bite and suck on the nipple, she began undulating, moving her thighs and hips, teasing his tortured cock even more. The heat, the old lewd feeling was engulfing her again and she gyrated more, feeling his body hard and heavy on her. Then, opening her thighs just a little and forcing her hands down underneath her so that they cupped the cheeks of her buttocks, she slid them under until her fingertips could feel the swollen lips of her cunt. God, she thought, I'm so wet! I'm so excited!
Slowly, she pulled her swollen cuntal lips apart, allowing her cherry-red cunt to roll out and feel the shaft of his cock burying itself lengthwise along the hungering slit of her pussy. Then she let go and squeezed her thighs shut tight again with all her might.
She exulted in the feeling of having his cock caught in her slippery cunt and she pumped her hips and shimmied her thighs as she heard his breathing coming heavy and hard. He slipped one arm under her waist and pulled her tight toward him, curving her back and forcing her breasts to jut out even further. Then she felt his other hand creeping down her back, feeling its way down her spine and then forcing, wedging down in between her firm full buttocks and the ground. His middle finger felt the deep crack between her ass cheeks and slid downward.
With a moan, she let her thighs relax and slowly spread her legs wide. She wanted him, she wanted his prick fucking inside of her. She spread her legs as wide as they would go and bent her knees, feeling a trickle of the secretions of her cunt seeping down between the bunched cheeks of her buttocks and felt it, warm and exciting, flowing over her tightly puckered anus. A little cry of delight bubbled out of her throat as, she felt his finger slide up and press on her anal entrance, and she squirmed her buttocks and bent her knees even more, pulling them back so that her cunt and anus were exposed as much as possible to him.
Again, she felt the delicious experience of giving in, of being submissive. Thank God, it wasn't the same as with those two rapists, though. This time she wanted to give in and she would not fight her body's wishes. God, she thought, I want to fuck this man! I want to make love to him for the rest of my life.
"Oh, Jay," she crooned. "Fuck me, darling. Fuck me as hard as you can!"
Jay responded by putting the head of his cock against her cunt and rubbing it massively up and down, tossing her clitoris around in a maddening way. She began pumping her hips, eager to get that huge lust-engorged cock inside her, hoping it would fill her and fuck her all day. "I love you, Jay," she whispered in his ear.
In answer, he pushed his hips down and forward and the huge head of his cock easily spread the lips of her cunt. She was ready and willing and begging. Mona felt her breath leaving her body exactly as if she were falling in a high speed elevator and she made a breathy sound as she felt his huge cock sliding and swelling inside of her cunt, stretching her cuntal walls in a deliciously sensual way. And still it slid in, its passage made easy by her lubrication and desire to be fucked.
It seemed like it could go no farther and still it came, making her feel giddy and hot as the top of a cast iron stove. No cock in the whole world could be as long as her lover's! Still it came, bludgeoning at last against her cervix, and bringing a spasm of pain that delighted and excited her and made her nostrils flare and moan, "Oh, Jay, fuck me, fuck me with all you've got!"
And Jay, his face aroused and alight with passion, began fucking his long thick cock in and out, and Mona closed her eyes and felt as if she were a kid again and on a roller coaster going down one dip to climb to the next then, holding her breath, she felt the hurtling wild plunge downward and she screamed with a wild abandon and delight. "Fuuuuuuck Meeeeee!"
Jay started slowly, gradually building the tempo, getting her hips and torso moving in rhythm to his, taking her along on a ride, building her to where she was wailing constantly while her fingernails clawed at his back and her body undulated and rippled in sensuous abandon.
Timing his move to just the right second, he sank his thick cock all the way home as she threw her head back and moaned wildly and thrust her hips up to take it all. The thick shaft of his cock had spread her cunt wide and she used all her strength to contract her cuntal lips around the glistening wet shaft and they trembled in place, each of them using all their strength to hold that pose.
Then, with a quick movement, he plunged his middle finger home into the soft tender tissue of her rectum and Mona's mouth fell open and a long throaty cry came from her lips. "Aaahhhaaa!" It filled the forest and somewhere up the river a fish jumped.
And then, his finger lodged and squirming, he began fucking her savagely, his balls slapping against her exposed buttocks as he lifted her off the ground and fucked her down deep into the earth and her natural resilience forced her up again to meet his cock fucking deep up into her again. Mona saw stars and his face seemed a blur in front of her eyes as she felt herself coming with a rush, cumming with an orgasm that would be impossible to resist.
Her mouth flew open and her head thrashed wildly back and forth as her eyes rolled white in her head and she felt her body tensing, arching up as the orgasm came and twisted her body convulsively like a stick thrown into a roaring fire. "I...I'm...I'm cummmmmming!" she moaned then screamed with delight as she felt every nerve in her body tingle and her flesh turn to cream as her cunt jerked and twitched around his great cock and she came and kept cumming as he fucked her harder, hurting her now with his savage lustful strength. It had never been like this before with Jay, never. And she hoped it would keep getting better every time they made love from now on.
And she kept cumming, again and again as he seemed inexhaustible. He fucked her until she felt his cock growing even bigger, swelling, torturing the wet inflamed walls of her cunt, and the pain increased her orgasm, sending it off in a second rocket burst of cum and she moaned and saliva caught and rattled in her throat as his prick kept swelling until she was sure it would explode inside of her.
And it did, with Jay giving out a low bellow. It seemed to burst and shoot streams of hot thick sperm inside her, filling her up, engulfing her and seeping out of her cunt around the taut cuntal lips.
One final wild lunge by Jay deep inside of her and one final spurt of hot cum and he collapsed moaning and rolling off her onto his back.
Mona, feeling her bones like warm taffy, rolled over and kissed him then let her tongue slide down over his face, his neck, chest, and stomach. She licked his body all down to where she buried her face in his tangled pubic hair. She was on her knees now, the winds blowing her red hair like a waterfall over his body, tickling his loins and inner thighs. Her head held his erect cock, and she could feel his hands caressing her buttocks and she spread her knees so his fingers could play with her cunt. Opening her eyes, she saw his cock in front of her, licked the cum from the tip, and then put it in her mouth and sucked, her tongue swirling wildly around.
She wanted more. Despite her totally fulfilled feeling, lewdness and the thrill of having his cock in her again came surging up. She wanted him to fuck her again and she sucked with all her might and guile, using every trick she could think of to make his cock grow hard and erect again.
She manipulated his foreskin with her tongue and lips, making it slide back and forth on the mushroom head and felt it grow as his hands grew more excited and his fingers began sawing in and out of her cunt, making a soft wet exciting sound that mingled with the wind in the willow trees and the ever-flowing gurgle of the river. She wiggled her buttocks and sucked as she felt the cock growing, swelling in her mouth and felt his hips beginning to pump.
The tempo increased and, as her head bobbed up and down, she took as much of his thick shaft as she could in her mouth, fighting the impulse to gag. She sucked harder and faster as his hips pumped and soon it was hard for her to tell if she were sucking him or he was fucking her in the mouth.
She sucked, feeling the head and shaft growing rock hard again, feeling his massive hardness swell, and she knew he was going to cum in her mouth. She heard him moan with delight and thrilled at the way his strong loins pumped up and down, in and out of her mouth. She felt his hands circling her hips, pulling her over him. She lifted one leg and lay flat on top of him, her shapely thighs split wide and her cunt right in front of his face. His hands cupped her buttocks and pulled her loins down and she felt his tongue licking maddeningly at her cunt, burying itself deep inside of her and then darting out to lick at her tiny rigid clitoris.
The two of them lay with their hips pumping wildly and they sucked and licked as they clung together, undulating and writhing in sensuous abandon. And she felt Jay's body tensing, his cock swelling bigger, forcing her mouth open wide as he came, pumping more hot viscous sperm into her mouth. Her cheeks bulged and the cords in her neck stood out as she swallowed the pungent liquid, her body twisting with delight as Jay darted his tongue in and out of her cunt and she came for what seemed like hours.
Then, the two of them spent, she rolled off him and cuddled beside him, feeling the sensuous sunshine paying tribute to her creamy tingling skin. They lay there, listening to the birds chirp in the trees near the river bank, and watched a butterfly flit dreamily from one flowered weed to another. . . .
Later they enjoyed a picnic lunch of fried chicken and coleslaw washed down by river-cooled beer. Chocolate cake for desert, topped with long, loving kisses..
As the sun was slipping toward the west, and the sky was turning pink, they picked up their empty beer cans, folded the checkered table cloth, and buried the chicken bones. Mona insisted on driving on the way home to allow Jay the pleasure of surveying her land. Proud of that fertile acreage, she wanted him to appreciate it, too. Jay sat next to her in the jeep, whistling as the utility humped its way over mounds of plowed earth and lurched over rocks, leaving the trail behind a cloud of dust.
A mile down the road, where the wind break separated one wheat field from another, watered by the irrigation ditches that webbed off from the river, he sat up erect. There, just feet from the unplowed field, half buried in the black earth, something red caught his eye. Turning to Mona, he gently placed his hand on her arm and cautioned, "Slow down a little, lady. Give me time to look over this land of yours." What he didn't want to tell her was that it was gasoline drums he spied buried in the earth next to the uncombined field of ripened wheat...dry and ready for picking.
Mentally, he made a note of the exact location of the gasoline drum. There may be more, he knew, and if his hunch served him right, he could find the rest-if there were more-by coming back to this exact spot later-about forty yards from the middle of the wind break .
"You look tired," said Mona, glancing over at her blonde Adonis while she shifted into lower gear. "What's the matter? You look concerned."
Jay forced a grin, reaching over to peck her on the cheek. He stroked her hand. "Nothing, baby. Just thinking about the case I have to work on tomorrow. It's going to be a busy day. Think you can make it without me?" he teased, watching the sun catch the red paint of the explosive gas drums, then darken again as the jeep passed the flashing angle of the sun.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Early the next morning, after pushing aside his egg-yellowed breakfast plate, Jay gurgled down the last drops of his now cold black coffee, kissed his redheaded sweetheart adieu with promises to be back by mid-afternoon, and jumped in the jeep, revving it to life.
Following the same trail he and Mona had paved the day prior, he slowed the little utility to second gear, keeping as close as possible to the same tire-worn path. Forty-ish yards from the middle of the wind break, he ground to first gear and braked long enough to spy the red gasoline drum half buried in the black earth. His senses acute, Jay let his intuition lead him to the second, and finally the third drum. No question in his mind now that these drums had been buried by arsonists, he continued on, determined to find all of the weapons. Mona certainly wouldn't have planted those drums there; no wheat farmer would deliberately threaten their own crop, for if one of them should explode, if only from the piercing hot sun, it could destroy an entire crop. With prairie winds driving the flames it would take only minutes for the wheat to be popping on the stalks.
A mile further down the path, not far from where he and Mona had picnicked by the river the day before, he saw a truck, rusted and muddy, parked under the scrub pine trees. He cut the motor and coasted the jeep in behind a thicket of willows where it was safely out of sight. Had he stumbled upon the mysterious investors who were trying to force his Mona out of business?
Treading warily, he began circling through the low-hanging willow trees growing at the river's edge, his ears cocked for any sign of the intruders. But it was not until he had approached the clearing that he heard the voices. A moment later, his nostrils flared at the sight of them.
There they were: Sheriff Dunwall, Jack Jordan, Sylvester, and a pimply-faced youth whom Jay instantly recognized as Sylvester's part-time employee. They were sitting on a log in the clearing, Jack Jordan had a map spread out on the ground; he was tracing his finger along mapped trails. "Now we've dug all along this line, so we know it's not buried there...and it sure as hell isn't anywhere in this quarter of his land, because Guy Olson didn't buy that sector until fifteen years before he died. That leaves two possibilities," he grunted, his face reddening from the strain of leaning over, his belly like bread dough above his invisible belt.
"Yeah, you're right," said the sheriff, taking off his straw hat and scratching his perspiration matted head. "That leaves the house, for one." He squatted down by Jordan, put his hat back on his head and pushed it back. "I say we try for the house. We get rid of that and she ain't gonna stay around no more. Shit, once that house is gone so is our trouble. What you say, boys?"
Sylvester, who until this moment resumed silence, chimed in at that moment. "I don't know if I like the sound a that. Burning down a house don't seem logical to me somehow," he rebuked, a wave of unexpected sentimentality overriding his greed. He crossed his arms across his chest and blushed as the two men stared at him disapprovingly. Sheriff Dunwall rose to his feet.
"Listen here, Sylvester. If it wasn't for us, you wuldn't be gettin' a fuckin' dime of this money. Christ, old man Olson didn't even like you, if I recall. He put you in the will just to make De Grey think he was a god-fearin' man. Ain't no god-fearin' man alive who'd leave his step-son outta 'is will no matter how he felt 'bout 'em."
Jack Jordan leered up at the step-son. "That's right, Sylvester. Weren't out of love you got what you did."
Sylvester stepped back, paled, and clenched and unclenched his fists. In the end he'd get what was coming to him. He stuck out his lower lip and stomped away into the bushes. A moment later the other three heard a whine of a zipper and a low, steady hissing sound. "Feel better?" chided Dunwall, when Sylvester came out of the bushes.
" 'Nough of these interruptions," spat Jordan, all greed now. "We gotta find this money before somebody gets smart and brings in the authorities. Shit, all we need is to have the state men on our backs. Christ, we made some dumb moves forgin' those tax papers that came in from the reservation. Way I see it, we need this money to get our asses outta town." He shook his head and sighed heavily. "That smart ass lawyer from the reservation's been pokin' his nose too damned deep."
"I say burn the house," repeated Dunwall.
"Burn that goddamned house so we can get under that foundation. If it's buried in milk cans they ain't gonna burn. 'Sides, it'll be a fast fire. Won't take long with all the gasoline we got stashed out here," he guffawed awkwardly.
"Says in the will there's damned near five hundred grand stashed down in them cans. 'Magine that," Jordan snickered, shaking his head.
Sylvester's eyes lit up, and for the first time that day, the pimply-faced garage assistant showed a sign of life: he whistled through his teeth.
The four men in the clearing had their backs to Jay. They were all watching the lawyer make the latest series of drawings on the map. Jay thrust a finger into the neckband of his shirt to ease his collar-the day had been sultry and heavy, and there was a hint of thunder in the air-and flitted silently from behind the willow to another willow only yards away from where the four were gathered.
None of them seemed to have noticed. He stole soft-footed across the carpet of soft river edged grass and peered out from behind a tree so that he could see the map from a diagonal. He could see the x's were the gasoline drums were buried, the farmhouse, the dates of purchase of the four quarters in red ink, and the barn, machine shed, and wind break. Written at the bottom of the map, in some figures he could not read, were arrows pointing in the four directions...directions of wind, Jay guessed.
So there was money buried on the property! That's why they were trying to run Mona off her own land. A bumper crop maybe? A family inheritance? Jay was excited by the discovery. He leaned forward trying to focus on the map. Somehow, he'd have to get out of there and back to the house to call the police (not that it would do any good) and the fire department to report an arson was about to take place.
He had stolen as far as the second tree near the clearing when a loud buzz of static whirred through the still summer air, stinging the ears of all five men. A moment later, Mona's voice, clear and precise, blurted through the air. "Jay, come home quick! One of the workers spied some gasoline drums buried out in the fields...Jay...JAY? Can you hear me? Please, Jay!"
Jay groaned. Shit! He hadn't turned off the CB transmitter!
The four men leaped to their feet, swearing. Jay shot one terrified glance through the trees to see Dunwall with his revolver in his hand. "Don't try it, Indian lover," he warned. "I got a special medal in 'Nam for killin' men sneakin' into camp, and I got no special love for you!"
Panting, the young man raised his arms. He was furious with himself for making such a stupid mistake. He shouldn't have underestimated Mona's courage or foresight.
"So the lawyer off the reservation. Lookin' for some pussy, Jay?" Jordan sneered.
Jay said nothing. With any luck they might not realize that he had been able to interpret the map. Even if they knew he had overheard the conversation, the man had said nothing about the forgery papers and for what reason they'd forged them. He'd let them think he was wise to only half the story. In any case, the less he said the better.
"I asked you a question, punk!" Jordan shouted, slapping Jay backhanded across the face. "What the fuck are you doin' here, snoopin' around like some half-assed creep?"
The force of the vicious blow sent the young man staggering back a pace. There were stars in front of his eyes and his head was ringing. He licked the blood from his split lip and said evenly: "I've been helping Miss Olson. I saw tire tracks and I followed them. It's part of my job." He saw no harm in revealing that he had been hired by Mona; if they thought she knew he was here, at least they would hardly shoot him and bury his body in the river.
"So you're helpin' out our Miss Olson, are you?" repeated the lawyer with a coarse laugh. "I'll bet you work real hard for her, don't ya?" It'd take more man than you are to keep that farmyard bitch's cunt from itching!"
Jay flushed and clenched his hands. "I came out here to investigate, just like I told you," he said thickly.
"Don't give me that cock-suckin' bullshit, you bastard!" Jordan yelled. Striding forward, beside himself with rage, he raised his huge arm and smashed a devastating blow to Jay's solar plexus.
Jay went over backwards as if he had been poleaxed, landing six feet away on the rock with the blood thundering in his ears and breath groaning from his tortured lungs. Dunwall and Sylvester hauled him to his feet, retching and wheezing. The stop-brother's eyes were glistening and his mean little mouth was wet with saliva.
As they held the young man's arms, Jordan drew back his ham-like fist again and slammed another savage punch into the pit of Jay's stomach.
Jay rocketed back with the force of the blow, his arms torn out of the men's grasp, and cannoned sickeningly against the bank beneath the tree. He slid limply to the ground, rolled over on his hand and knees, and vomited onto the rock-studded river bank, his chest heaving in convulsive spasms as animal sounds whined from his gaping mouth.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared up at the bullies. He'd get even, God help him he would! It didn't matter if it took all his money and his time. He had a double score to settle with them now to pay them back for the hurt he'd caused the two people he loved most in the world: the poor unfortunate Indians on the reservation and Mona. Yes, Mona. He's spare his life for her, he realized.
Dunwall was looking uneasy. The barrel of his gun, which had been covering Jay, had begun to waver. "Hold it, Jordan," he said as Jordan was about to approach the fallen man. "We don't want no murder charge on top of everything else."
"Shuddup, you goddamn pussy!" the lawyer interrupted. "We got a personal matter to settle here."
"I don't care what you got to settle, Jack. I ain't gettin' involved in no murder!" He pointed the gun at the ground.
"Then get your ass outta here, but don't come pawing the ashes lookin' for no money. If you don't want to see no blood shed, I suggest you get your ass back up to the truck. And take these stupid bastards with ya!" He motioned his head toward Sylvester and the pimply faced youth.
Dunwall hesitated, glanced around and finally shrugged his shoulders. "Okay, Jordan, but don't take too much time. You heard that bitch's voice on the radio. She knows we're out here," he mumbled. Slamming the revolver back into its holster, he walked quickly away through the trees.
Jordan was standing over Jay, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. The young man's breath was beginning at last to whistle in agonized shudder back into his lungs. The lawyer jerked his head at the pimply faced youth named Orrin who'd said nothing since Jay's unexpected visit. "You, Orrin," he grunted. "Get the gun outta his holster in case I bruise my knuckles hitting the bastard."
Orrin grunted and reached in the open front of the kneeling man's lumber jacket and twitched the gun out.
"Now give me the gun...then you go see if you can do anything to get that Sylvester off his ass and help him tie this creep's hands behind his back."
By the time Jay was breathing fairly normally again, he had been dragged to his feet and his wrists bound tightly together. He stood swaying slightly, his head spinning and his diaphragm and chest on fire, staring up at Jordan through pain-dimmed eyes. "Hardly think it's fair, Jordan. A man with his hands tied behind his back and an insane idiot with a gun."
The bulbous man stretched out his gun arm and pistol-whipped him savagely twice across the face. Jay cried out in pain as the steel barrel laid open his cheek to the bone and then smashed sickeningly against the end of his nose. A curtain of blood flowed from the split cheek and mingled with the twin stream pouring from his nostrils and spattering the front of his jacket. He sank down on one knee and dazedly shook his head.
"This is the minute I been waitin' for, ever since you brought that goddamned dog in on me," Jordan spat. "Okay, I ay. I warned you then, but you two little snots couldn't leave well enough alone, and now I'm gonna beat the shit out of you just to teach you a lesson I" He nodded to Sylvester and Orrin, who pulled the half-stunned man to his feet for the third time and propped him up again.
Jordan balanced on the balls of his feet, judging his distance. Then he drew back his right arm and piled a murderous blow to Jay's heart, following it with a vicious left hook to the chin that sent his helpless victim reeling sideways. Jay felt as though the world had exploded in his face. From an infinite distance, he heard the thud and crack of the terrible punches landing over the anguished grunts of his own breath. The big man's strength, despite his out-of-shape pudginess, was unbelievable.
He would have fallen again if Sylvester and Orrin had not caught his arms and held him. Jordan was grinning sadistically. Stepping closer, he looped in a swinging roundhouse right that started down near the ground and landed on Jay's temple. It was followed by a tattoo of hammering blows to the body and another left to the jaw. Jay's knees buckled. At a sign from the lawyer, Sylvester and Orrin released his arms and he stood teetering on rubber legs while the brutal giant measured his distance again and then jerked up a tremendous uppercut that snapped his head back and burst inside his brain with a crimson roar.
This time Jay went down and stayed down.
They dragged him up the incline and untied his hands. Then Jordan went back to the truck and fetched two lengths of cord which he flung over the lowest branch of the willow. They lashed one end of each cord around one of the unconscious man's wrists, and then they hauled on the other ends until his limp body rose into the air and hung with the feet about six inches from the ground. The lawyer hitched the loose ends around the trunk of another tree and stood back to admire his work.
Jay was suspended by the wrists from the branch, his arms spread wide so that neither hand could reach the rope around the other, his head sunk on his bloodied chest and his battered face hidden.
"Okay, boys," the lawyer said. "Me and Jay have some unfinished business to take care of here." He sauntered over to the fuck-sack and pulled out a whip. "I suggest you get this young kid outta here. Might see something he don't wanna see."
As they left, Jordan was pinching his forefinger and thumb on Jay's chin, raising the lolling head so that he could slap the cheeks with his other hand. "Wake up, you bastard," he said genially. "Wake up for the encore!"
The step-brother looked back over his shoulder. Jordan had stripped off his jacket and was swishing the short, thick bullwhip experimentally. He drew back his arm and brought the hide and sinew quirt whistling down across Jay's back with a crack like a pistol shot.
The body suspended from the branch leaped and twisted as Jay's breath hissed out through his teeth. Jordan struck again, the viscous lash laying open the denim jacket his victim wore as though it had been cut with a knife. The man's head slapped back between his splayed arms and a deep groan burst from his throat.
Dunwall leaned against the truck, shaking his head. He was having doubts. Didn't seem right somehow Jordan should be beating the young man as he was. Christ! It was only taking up time.
Returning for the fuck-sack, they could hear Jay screaming and the repeated cracks of the bullwhip, long before they reached the clearing.
The young man's clothes were in tatters, his gory face contorted and his mouth open as he bucked and jerked and twisted at the end of the cords suspending him cruelly from the branch. His feet brushed the ground with each crack of the whip. Through the rents in his jacket, shirt and pants, blue-red weals flecked with blood scarred his flesh. His wrists were raw and bleeding from the chafing of the cords. Dunwall called out from the truck, wanting to get back to the Olson's farm house. They had more important business to take care of than beating to death some punk lawyer from an Indian reservation. "Sonofabitch don't even make a livin', " the De Grey sheriff snickered.
Jordan stopped again and glanced up at the blood-spattered scarecrow hanging from the weeping willow tree. "Guess you're right, sheriff."
When Jay regained consciousness he awoke to an inferno of pain that lanced agonizingly through every nerve in his body. Hanging there in the sunlight, he listened dully to the revving up of the truck's engine as the foursome headed for Mona's house. It would not be long, he knew in his pain-wracked contortions, before Mona would fall victim to arson, the last of the insults the little Hitlers of De Grey, South Dakota were to level on her.
CHAPTER NINE
The two employed henchmen laboriously rolled the drums along the soft earth carpet and left one by each deadwood stack. When the last one was in place they unscrewed the bung and tilted the drum on its side so that the inflammable liquid gurgled out and flowed down a slight slope to saturate the brush and soak into the ground around the neighboring wheat field. They repeated the process with the remaining two drums, and then they carried all three back to their truck.
The two men were truckers from Pierre, friends of Jack Jordan's. When they had finished, they retraced their steps carrying two ordinary two-gallon gasoline cans from which they splashed a trail of liquid leading from the three gas-soaked stacks of brushwood back to the truck. The air surrounding the wheat fields was pungent with the stink of the fuel.
Driving away, the older of the two men produced a book of matches from his pocket. "I sure as hell can't understand why anybody would want to have their own goddamned land burned." He shook his head and tutted. "Seems a downright shame to let a choice crop of wheat like this go up in smoke."
"Ain't none of our business," said the other. "Jack Jordan, he's the one settled old man Olson's estate and if he says she wants it burned, we sure as hell ain't in no position to say no. Anyways," he added with a smirk. "Two hundred bucks ain't a a bad price for strikin' a match." He took a match from the box and struck it, shielding the small flame with his hand until the sliver of wood was well alight.
The tiny flame guttered and almost died. And then, as the gas-drenched dry wheat flared suddenly alight, the flame snaked away into the field, streaming along the inflammable trail like a powder train. They lost sight of it before it reached the brushwood stacking near the second major splash of fuel. Then there was a hissing roar and the impregnated wheat caught fire all at once and blazed with the intensity of a grass fire.
"She's okay now. Let's haul ass outta here!" the older trucker hissed.
When they were half way down the dirt path adjoining the Johnson turn-off they stopped for a minute to look over their shoulders. Crimson and scarlet tongues of fire were shooting up through the golden wheat field to cast a ruddy glow on the underside of the smoke cloud rolling above the blaze. As they watched the sinister smell of burning wheat drifted across the field with the angry crackling roar of the fire.
"Still can't understand why she'd want to burn her own crop," sighed one of the henchmen.
"Insurance," slurred the other. "Folks'll do any thin' to get insurance money these days."
* * *
Jay was in a terrible state, weak from exhaustion and exposure, his face and body a mass of bruises and cuts and welts from the savage beating he had received, his clothes in rags and every nerve raw with pain. When he had gasped out his story to the combine operator who'd heard his cries and seen the jeep parked in the willows with the CB transistor crackling cries of alarm from Mona Olson who saw the fire in the fields, he said, "Don't you worry. That jeep'll get you back in no time flat."
But remembering with a chill the sadistic words of Dunwall, and Jordan, Jay had a suspicion they might try to kidnap Mona or do worse harm. He jumped into the jeep, and raced down the rutted dirt road with flames streaking to the sides of them. Instead of taking the tire-worn path, Jay headed out insanely through the middle of the burning wheat fields. Mona needed help.
* * *
Mona Olson screamed. Lying naked on the hay with her hands bound behind her and her full breasts mottled purple and blue by the clawing touch of brutal fingers, she watched with terror-struck eyes as the huge shadow of Jack Jordan fell across the floor of the barn. The nightmare was just beginning.
They had arrived in the truck four hours before. She had seen the smoke rising from the west quarter and had rushed to the garage near the barn to get on her motorcycle to make an emergency trip to town. The telephone was dead, the wires, she guessed, having been cut by the arsonists. In despair, finding the tires on the motorcycle flat, she'd run to the truck and called on the Citizen Band radio to Jay with no success. She was about to jump in the car and head for De Grey when they arrived, blocking her path with their truck. There had been three of them-Jordan, Dunwall and a lanky youth she recognized as Orrin. She'd seen him at Sylvester's station pumping gas. Apparently Sylvester had gone home. She could smell the liquor on their breath as she tried to struggle away from them, but they had forced her to the barn and held her a prisoner on her own property while they drank more and more of the whiskey that Orrin carried in his hip pocket.
Mona had tried not to show her fear, crossing her fingers and praying for Jay to return. He would probably be at the reservation about now, she guessed, rifling through papers and preparing his case. And the fire! My God, the fire! The crop was destroyed, and that was financial suicide for her.
Jordan had raped her first, his monstrous cock battering up into the tender depths of her cunt as Dunwall and the boy Orrin held her down spread-eagled on the hay, their eyes bright with lust and their lips wet, as they leered gloatingly at the pounding body of their evil boss. The sheriff and the boy fucked her after that, and by the time the lawyer was ready to fuck her again, she was too exhausted to resist anymore; she lay limp and stunned under his brutal assault, feeling more used and spent and humiliated than she ever had in her life.
He was naked over her, his belly and ape-like chest matted with black hair, his huge thick cock hanging obscenely in front of his bull-sized sac of his testicles. Even as Mona recoiled involuntarily on the hay with a shudder of revulsion the grotesque rod of limp flesh stiffened and expanded in lewdly accelerating jerks, stretching the wrinkled skin until the shaft was gleaming with tautness and the bulbous mauve head burst out of the foreskin to point rigidly at the ceiling.
The terrified captive girl bit her lip to choke back the cry of fear that sprang to her lips. She cringed back among the loose hay, her green eyes wide with foreboding. What further horrors lay in store for her at the hands of these men?
The ruthless lawyer, her father's prior friend and trusted associate, was leering down at her as he seized his long thick cock in one meaty hand and began skimming the loose foreskin up and down the lustfully expanding shaft. A large drop of seminal fluid welled from the slit in the blood-engorged cock head and splashed wetly to the hay. "Veery nice," he said approvingly, his bloodshot eyes feasting lasciviously on the trembling curves of the naked girl's body. "I guess if s time you find out how it feels to be fucked by a real man."
"You bastard," snapped Mona. "Wait 'til Jay comes back...and he will. HE WILL! He'll cut your balls off, you big ugly ape!"
Jordan smiled. "Your lover is hanging from a tree, honey. Dead. D-E-A-D. Dead, you hear me?"
Mona screamed, this time out of emotional pain. "I hope you die in that fire, you fat bastard!"
Jordan answered by scratching his armpit with his pudgy fingers. He swung towards the hay, the sperm-bloated pouch of his testicles swinging heavily beneath the pumping hand on his cock. "Come on, you two," he shouted. "Come on, I got work for you to do."
Orrin and Dunwall strolled over. They were both naked, too. The boy's long thin cock speared lewdly out from his mouse-colored pubic thatch and one of his hands plucked nervously at his wetly drooping lower lip. He'd never participated in anything like this, and he wasn't sure what to do. That was the only reason he'd consented to coming along on this joy ride of Jordan's-for a good piece of ass.
The sheriffs stance was even more exaggerated without clothes, his round head thrust forward between his fat shoulders, his arms flapping as he massaged the stubby tube of his thick cock into hardness below his hairless belly. Mona thought with a shudder of horror that she found the two henchmen even more repulsive that Jordan himself. At least he acted like a man.
Before she had time to take the thought further, the lawyer's two cohorts, at a signal from the black-chested ape, threw themselves on her nakedly defenseless body, seized her ankles, and hauled her legs savagely apart. The screaming redhead lay obscenely spread-eagled in abject humiliation before her sadistic captors, the whole red-curled length of her cuntal furrow, with its pinkly glistening pussy lips, still swollen and inflamed from the previous night's excesses with Jay, spread open to their lewd gaze.
Trembling with terror, she stared wild-eyed from face to pitiless face as Jordan and his cronies leered salaciously at the quivering white mounds of her breasts, the softly trembling bulge of her young belly, and the russet triangle of curling pussy hair nestled between her obscenely splayed legs. Dear God, there was nothing she could do against throe of them...not even against one of them! She had no idea whether someone would see the fire in time to save the fields, or if all was lost. And Jay...my God, dear Jay! Dead? Somehow she couldn't, refused to believe it. Somehow he would save her. He had to!
For the moment, imprisoned in her own barn, she was utterly alone and at the mercy of Jordan and his cohorts. The only victory she could hope for was a mental one; they could conquer her body again as she knew they must; but it would be an empty triumph if her spirit remained unbroken.
But the fact that troubled her most-a fact that she strove unsuccessfully to put from her conscious mind-was the realization that she had responded with climax after climax to the cruelness of Jordan's hand only hours before.
* * *
Jay shifted into first gear, wincing with pain as the lever of the bucking jeep shook his damaged wrist, and the seatbelt intensified the pain in his whip-lacerated shoulders. Beyond the rampant red-tinged smoke to his left, the sky was overcast with sulfurous haze. The heat and stench of burning wheat, like the pungent smell of freshly baked bread, was all around him.
The jeep's wheels were bouncing over the uneven floor of the wheat field, the motor laboring as he pressed the tough jeep to its limit in his desperate efforts to regain the farm buildings before the fire consumed it all. His rescuer had since headed back around the other route to alert the fire department.
The jeep ran suddenly into an open space where an arm of fire had already reached into the last ten acres of wheat this side of the chicken coop. Jay drove past blackened earth; what once waved ripely in the wind over the prairie now was only a dirty, smoky useless piece of ground. The spinning wheels raising clouds of choking dust from the still-smoking ground.
Jay could feel the blast of hot air on his sweating face. The fire was making a noise like a storm. Enormous and fierce and red, it swept over the prairie, all consuming. Swearing, Jay wrenched the wheel of the jeep tight and drove like a pilot committing hara-kiri. Sparks and embers floated through the air like butterflies on the wing, crusting his face with their carbon ashes. Birds, prairie dogs, and everything living and subsisting off the wheat fields scattered in his path in terror.
* * *
Mona gasped aloud as Jordan leaned over her, pawing at the soft flesh of her belly with his hard hands. "Okay, bitch," he warned. "It's up to you now. We're all gonna fuck'ya no matter what. If you want to let yourself go and have a good time, it might be easier on 'ya." His hands moved lewdly upwards, caressing the fullness of her firmly swelling breasts, rolling the tight rubbery nipples between his fingers.
The captive redhead felt her skin crawl with horror as she strove desperately to find words that might appeal to whatever sense of honor or decency one or the other of her captors might possess. She found none: the three men gloating above her were a-like in their brutish concentration on the satisfaction of their animal lust. She froze in terror as Jordan's fingers raked teasingly down the trembling contours of her body to linger with dreadful familiarity among the silky hairs sparsely mantling her pubic mound. "Come on, boys," gestured Jordan. "Get her ready."
The two men released her legs and leaped into action. Dunwall clambered down into the molding hay and straddled the helpless girl's naked chest, his bony thighs gripping her bound arms, her heaving breasts squashed beneath his buttocks and the sperm-packed pouch of his balls resting in the deep cleft between her straining mounds. Orrin sat astride her belly, forcing her knees cruelly apart with his hands as he leaned acrobatically downwards to lace his slobbering tongue snake-like into the moistly quivering slit of her cunt.
Mona jerked convulsively under their constricting weight, a whimpering moan escaping from deep in her throat. Her buttocks ground down hard into the hay, seeking to escape the maddening oral assault of the pimply faced boy. She shivered uncontrollably as Orrin drew the tiny bud of her clitoris wetly up into his hot mouth with a liquid suck and began gently nibbling at the sensitive little shaft.
"Ah! aaagghhh! no . . , . please...please...ahhh!"
This can't be happening to me! It can't! the cruelly pinioned girl groaned to herself as the youth's face rocked in greedy feast between her legs and his swollen tongue fucked in and out of her involuntarily dilating cunt. Yet in spite of her terror and revulsion at the depraved attack on her loin., tiny wisps of forbidden pleasure were already beginning to purl deep in the violated redhead's belly...and on her firm young breasts, crushed as they were beneath Dunwall's ass cheeks, the nipples had already spiked out taut and erect!
She gasped aloud as the flames of sensation tearing out of control through her loins blazed higher and higher...dear God, she must fight this enemy from within with all her strength! She must not succumb to the betrayal of her own body!
But suddenly the slavering pimply-faced boy's experienced tongue arrowed forward, burrowing far up into her now wetly straining cunt to send waves of carnal fire spiraling crazily up into her spine to the base of her skull. like Fourth of July rockets, they burst there into showers of stars, scattering pinpoints of desire all over her cruelly stretched body. Fire was replacing fear as the practiced lips and tongue of her ravisher, young and experimental though they might be, plundered her erotically quivering pussy. Her mind reeled with shock. What was happening to her? Oh God! She had never felt so wantonly abandoned in her life!
Spontaneously, under the teasing ministrations of the lapping tongue in her cunt, she had come erotically alive! Her nakedly rounded ass cheeks arched convulsively up off the hay, frantically trying to squelch the searing lashes of lustful flame destroying all her reservations and all her inhibitions!
She opened her mouth to groan aloud...and choked back a gasp of alarm. Dunwall, who had been watching her contorted features with a grimace of lustful glee, had nosed the huge rubbery tip of his thick, hotly throbbing cock in between her wetly parted lips!
Almost without realizing it, without wanting too-but not being able to help herself-Mona began automatically to suck and nibble on the iron hard shaft whose moistly seeping tip was invading the scalding cavern of her mouth. God Almighty-her desire-crazed mind moaned-instead of recoiling in disgust at the debased and unnatural intrusion of the sheriffs thick veined rod of flesh between her trembling lips, she was actually welcoming it! The flickers of lust were dancing with ever-increasing fury about the shuddering pink edges of her seething cunt! A tongue in her cunt and a cock in her mouth were no longer enough; she wanted something more; she had to have it!
The wish was granted almost as soon as it had formed in her mind.
Orrin withdrew his tongue from her cunt and sprang aside with youthful agility. Grasping her flailing legs, he bent them savagely back towards her head so that the man whose cock was filling her gagging mouth could clamp them under his arms. She was bent double on the hay, jack-knifed in abject humiliation, her arms bound and her legs pinioned by the odious sheriff whose hotly throbbing cock was fucking in and out of her distended lips, the whole stretched plane of her genitals defenselessly upturned beneath the leering gaze of Orrin and the fat lawyer.
"All right, boy, we ain't got much time. That fire's gonna be sweepin' the side of the house in ten minutes, so get in there and fuck!"
The lewdly excited boy jumped astride the helpless redhead's bent-back thighs. Then, guiding the plank-stiff shaft of his long thin cock downwards with his forefinger and thumb, he plunged the lust-swollen head straight in between the inflamed and desire-moistened lips of Mona's cunt.
"Ummmmm . . . " Mona muttered through her cock-stuffed mouth.
The nakedly doubled girl bucked and squirmed in unwanted ecstasy as the raping rod of flesh speared up into the tight hot passage of her hungrily clasping pussy. Her ovaled lips opened around the thick shaft of Dunwall's cock plowing rigidly into her mouth as she mewled again and again in wanton delight.
And then she felt herself being manhandled sideways so that her naked buttocks faced outward from the flesh piercing hay that poked into her tender flesh like a million needles.
Suddenly she screeched...half in agony half in lustful passion, for the giant Jordan had kneeled up on the hay facing the youth on the other side of her loins. Now, with the steely shaft of his massively pulsating cock clutched in one huge hand, he was fucking the hard acorned head brutally up against the tight hairless opening of Mona's puckering little anus . . . .
* * *
Jay wrenched the wheel of the jeep to avoid the ditch in the field, created by the irrigation run-off. A dull thud jarred him for a moment until he realized he'd run over a small animal. He winced, hating the sensation of killing anything, then continued on. Mona needed him.
The fire was terrible in intensity-a wall of orange and crimson clawing across the field insatiably with an appetite not to be denied. Jay could see its pulsating red glow through the trunks of the trees on this side of the barn. He squinted his eyes and looked. My God! The arsonists had missed their mark! The fire would reach the barn before the house, so perhaps he still had a chance to save it if the fire department got there in time.
The heat was insupportable-a lung-choking assault that tightened like an iron band around his chest and drew the sweat streaming from every pore in his body. The metal bodywork of the new jeep seared his lacerated skin and the wheel scorched his hands. He drove grimly on, hoping the flat hood provided enough protection to stop the gasoline vaporizing in the carburetor and bringing him to a standstill.
Despite the suffocating heat that was blistering his throat and lungs, a cold chill ran the length of Jay's spine.
Gritting his teeth, he sent the jeep bouncing and careening along the self-made path. As the fire closed relentlessly in on either side, the trembling smoke-filled air darkened. He was blinded by the furnace glare on either side of the jeep. The heat hammered him into the scorching leather scat that smelled like a burning animal, stopping his heart in his chest...and then, he saw something that made him accelerate. Through the haze of smoke and butterfly embers, he spied a truck in the drive. The same truck he'd seen near the clearing! Jordan and his boys had Mona!
* * *
With the whole of her loins exposed nakedly, shamelessly distended and pulled back towards her chest, Mona's tightly clenched anus could not for long withstand the flesh-splitting pressure of Jordan's rock hard cock. The clasping rubbery folds suddenly gave way, and she screamed again as the sperm-bloated head of the lawyer's sodomizing cock speared far up into the scalding buttery depths of her vise-like rectum.
Grunting with lustful fury, the giant men began fucking viciously in and out of her painfully stretched anus while Dunwall undulated his hips so that the rigidly glistening shaft stuffing her mouth fucked in and out between the violated redhead's widely ovaled lips. Saliva and pre-ejaculate ran in a cloudy rivulet from both corners of her hungrily sucking mouth. At the same time, Orrin, rising and falling in invisible stirrups, plowed the long hard length of his ferociously up and down into the greedily clasping passage of her cunt.
The helplessly pinioned girl was being mercilessly fucked from three different directions at once! Every opening in her wantonly squirming body was filled with cock! There was cock in her mouth, cock in her anus, and cock in her seething cunt! The whole world was stuffed with hotly throbbing, rigidly expanding, wetly seeping, beautiful cock! BEAUTIFUL COCK! And she loved it...hated the monsters doing this to her and making her respond against her will...but loving their cocks. She moaned and mewled in lewd delight as her wantonly squirming body was buffeted by them.
As the three men bucked and plunged and sawed and thrust, gasping hoarsely with animal lust as they bounced her nakedly contorted body between them like a rag doll. Mona sensed the quivering muscles of Jordan and his two brutal companions tense and shudder. Thrashing wildly under the weight of their laboring, sweating bodies, she groaned her wanton ecstasy past the gagging bulk of the raping cock invading her mouth as her orgasm suddenly-and overwhelmingly seized her-sweeping her up off the hay in a storm of quaking, shuddering erotic fury that sent her spinning among the stars. She was cumming...cumming. CCCUUUMMMIIINNNGGG! Oh God! Never let it stop!
At the same time, the expanding cock in her lewdly sucking mouth bulged and heaved, squirting a hot and acrid stream of semen far back into her gasping throat...and the two cocks pistoning into her plundered loins shuddered, jerked, and then spewed their white-hot loads of heated jism in powerful jetting spurts against the obscenely milking walls of her rectum and cunt.
For a long time as the three men lay collapsed and satiated over her, Mona drifted in a sensual, erotic daze, wondering why, despite her horror and revulsion at the unspeakable and degrading ravishments she had suffered, despite the shame and humiliation and distress, her body had nevertheless responded in a way that both astonished and dismayed her. Why should she so wantonly react to the brutal assaults of Jack Jordan whom she loathed and detested?...the very man who'd been one of her father's most trusted friends! Why should she have welcomed even his repulsive cronies once the fires of her carnal lust had been kindled? Could it be simply that her own tempestuous, autocratic nature demanded a partner strong enough to subjugate that nature to his own demands? And was that why even at the extremity of her humiliation, it was Jay's face she had longed to see above her violated body?
It was only when Jordan hauled her roughly to her feet and untied her aching wrists that she realized the barn was filled with the stench of burning wood and hay.
* * *
The jeep gave one final lurch before a snapping pop brought it to a halt. The insatiable fire had pierced the tire. Without touching the burning hot iron of the jeep's body, he stood on the seat and painfully jumped out, twisting his head to make certain the wall of flames would not beat him in the match towards the farm buildings, for the prairie winds had struck another match. The fire now had a partner.
The original fire had headed directly toward the house, as planned, but with the stormy winds rising from the east, it had split the flames in half, creating a clear path like the eye of a tornado.
Jay's legs, the victim's of Jordan's whip, stung with pain as limped toward the barn. His blistered hand supported his lacerated right leg, like a wooden cane. Dragging, half running, he felt a burst inside his chest and then all was black. Somewhere in the back of his consciousness he heard a loud wailing sound; he judged it to be another lash of Jordan's whip. Had he known it was .the fire department's truck grinding to a whistled halt, his tortured mind might have rested more peacefully.
CHAPTER TEN
"Everything's going to be all right," whispered Mona, tears blurring her green eyes that under the hellish stress of the past twenty four hours had dulled from their luminous hue to a deeper, more serious gray. Stroking Jay's hand, she rested her swollen cheek on his arm.
With a wince, he reached down to stroke her baby-soft red tresses. "Yeah, it is," he struggled to whisper through the bandages mummying his head. "Ya know, baby. I've been think," he hoarsely managed. "You're a pretty well off young...lady."
The white capped nurse smiled down as she adjusted the flow of the intravenous feeding tube, then quietly left the room, after asking him if he needed another pain shot.
Jay shook his head, then turned his attention back to Mona. "You've got five hundred grand stashed in the basement of your house, plus insurance money.. . . "
"But the crop," sighed Mona. "It's gone, and it had promises of being a bumper one, too. Daddy would have been proud. Haven't had a crop like that since grandpa. . . . "
Jay smiled and nodded. "Where do you think that money came from?"
Her eyes lit up. "You mean that's where that money came from? Gosh, I guess there is a future in farming after all!"
With a kleenex, Mona dabbed at a trickle of blood that spotted Jay's blistered lips.
He caught her hand. "Now like I was saying, you're pretty well off. You know that piece of land you always wanted for a house? Well...I'm gonna call in the contractors soon as I'm back in shape."
"But Jay . . . " Mona tutted. "Where is a volunteer lawyer for an Indian reservation going to get that kind of money? Don't let those pain shots go to your head, darling." She snickered, then looked up at him with curious eyes. "You never did tell me your last name. . . . "
"Reason for that. Had too many women try to soak me for my money, honey," he managed. "Want to know what your last name is going to be?"
The redheaded wheat farmer sat up erect, slack-jawed. "You mean...you're . . . "
"That's right, honey. Time we got married. We've been livin' in sin too long. Gentry. That sound good to you? Mona Gentry. . . . "
Mona's mind clicked. Gentry...Boston...high society. Stifling a giggle, she shook her head. "No, you can't be...the Jay Gentry? Heir to the airline industry that. . . . "
"That's right. Now if you don't like the name, we can always let you keep yours. I know you're no easy woman to domesticate...fern lib and all that. . . . "
"Mmmmmm," Mona leaned on her elbow, toying with a loose thread on his hospital gown. "Maybe I'll do that. I think it would fit my nature."
Jay pulled her close with his bandaged hand and kissed her on the forehead, trying not to wince with pain. "Damned redheads."
Mona stayed at his side that night and in the morning she drove to the police department in
Pierre to make a written statement.
The unlucky threesome had been arrested and thrown in jail in Pierre. Orrin, being a minor, was released under his parents' auspices, and Sylvester was never arrested, having committed no crime. But Dunwall and Jordan faced prison terms on several counts: rape, arson, assault, trespassing-not to mention forging government documents from the Indian reservation.
